‘Dear parents, a reminder that we are dressing up for World Book Day! Don’t forget your child should come to school in costume as their favourite character tomorrow…’
It’s the email every parent dreads receiving. (Or one of them, anyway.) It tends to be opened at eight o’clock the evening before World Book Day, to be met with feelings of exasperation, desperation and guilt.
Dressing up is, in fact, the antithesis to reading for pleasure
How is it that the charity World Book Day, founded by Unesco in 1995 with the laudable mission ‘to promote reading for pleasure’, has morphed into yet another occasion for parents to buy stuff? An unscientific survey of parents I know revealed that almost all of them are too busy and/or too broke to see World Book Day costumes as anything other than the last thing they need. Mothers desperately draw Harry Potter scars on their sons’ foreheads or struggle to create Pippi Longstocking plaits. There’s a hasty purchasing of polyester Gangsta Granny or Mary Poppins costumes, and then the guilt of unnecessary waste. The only thing any of this imparts to a child is that books mean trouble.
Dressing up is, in fact, the antithesis to reading for pleasure. When your nose is in a book, your eyes are set on a new horizon. It isn’t so much that you are imagining Oliver Twist asking for more, Harry Potter seeking Horcruxes or Lyra conversing with her daemon, when you are truly reading for pleasure, you are doing these things yourself: you somehow enter the world of the book. Good books enable you to feel like their characters; looking like them is a red herring.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the protagonists of many great children’s books tend to be somewhat nondescript in appearance. Johanna Spyri tells us, of Heidi, that ‘it was difficult to see what she was like’ as she’s wearing so many clothes on her way to her grandfather; all we know on meeting C.S. Lewis’s Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy is that they’ve been sent away from wartime London because of the air raids; Chris Riddell introduces us to Ottoline by telling us what she likes (‘splashing in puddles’, ‘brushing Mr Munroe’s hair’, ‘solving tricky problems and working out clever plans’), not what she looks like.
No author wants their reader to focus on the distinguishing physical traits of a character at the expense of their personality. I think of Hermione Granger and I think of someone who is bright, bookish, patient and kind to her friends. I don’t think about her ‘bushy brown hair and rather large front teeth’. When my eight-year-old daughter was obsessed with Pippi Longstocking she would frequently collapse with giggles at Pippi’s anecdotes, admire her tomboyish adventures and even began sleeping the wrong way round in her bed à la Pippi, ‘with her feet on the pillow and her head underneath the covers’. In our many happy conversations about this new force of joy in her life, she didn’t once mention Pippi’s pigtails.
Even worse than the message of needing to imitate a character’s appearance in order to be like them is its flip side: if you go dressed as yourself, you are, well, nobody. Each year, in the run up to World Book Day, the Twitterverse resounds with the supposedly ingenious WBD trick of dressing your child in their normal clothes and telling them they’re a ‘muggle’. (A muggle, in case you’re not familiar with Harry Potter, is a generic term for anyone who isn’t a wizard.) In doing this, you are telling your kid that because they are wearing their own clothes, they exist on the fringe of a story, nameless and so boring as to not be part of the adventure. Incidentally, you are also conveying that they have a smart-arse parent. Telling your child first that they embody a character by mimicking their appearance, and then that their own potential is limited by their outfit, is such a bad message that it’s ludicrous.
Thankfully World Book Day does not begin and end with a costume. There is much more that the charity offers, not least the £1 book tokens which enable every child to choose and buy their own special book. It’s a day of revelling in the pleasure of reading – a pleasure which is expansive, magical and life-changing; it’s a world away from dressing up.
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