Horrible Histories: The Frightful First World War

By Terry Deary & Martin Brown 

Scholastic, 2007

Commentary by Esther MacCallum-Stewart

Nonfiction books for children deal more explicitly with historical events and are often more subversive than their literary counterparts. The former are seen as having a duty to represent history accurately.  The desire to reappropriate history through the best stories spawned a revisionist history trend in children’s writing. Pioneered by Terry Deary’s Horrible History  series, these books aims to present “history with the nasty bits left in!”

Deary’s titles include The Rotten Romans, The Cut-Throat Celts, The Vicious Vikings, and, of course, The Frightful First World War. The series is immensely successful, appealing to the prurient sense of humor of young readers. The subversiveness of these texts lies in their deliberate attempt to provide alternative readings of history. In fact, the books are well-researched and carefully themed to coincide with Great Britain’s National Curriculum modules. They are informative while overemphasizing the “horrible” aspect of each book. For example, The Frightful First World War describes the army order instructing soldiers to urinate on their socks and then breathe through the material during a gas attack, but there is also an amount of more traditional detail, thinly disguised as terrible events.

Alfred Leete’s famous recruitment poster of Lord Kitchener is drawn next to the entirely prosaic information that he died by drowning when the HMS Hampshire hit a stray mine on June 5, 1915; the famous slogan has been changed to read “Your country needs YOU! But I need a lifeboat”. 

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This irreverent approach has done much to encourage the study of history in younger readers and the books are popular with schools and libraries. The Frightful First World War is particularly interesting because it presents such an uncompromising view of the war. Deary says that “the truth is pretty nasty” and this no-nonsense approach does much to provide a realistic account of the war. At the same time, the need to present interesting and unusual facts means that the book is naturally alternative in its approach.

Source:  "If they ask us why we died": Children's Literature and the First World War, 1970-2005; The Lion and the Unicorn, April 2007