ABSTRACT
The previous chapter’s discussion of Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo makes clear that Sambo, problematic as he was, improved upon the flat, static, objectified depiction of the Black-a-Moor in Heinrich Hoffmann’s “The Story of the Inky Boys” in Struwwelpeter. Despite this improvement, however, Little Black Sambo still sent the message to some readers that people of color should appear in children’s books only to be laughed at and ridiculed. And if Bannerman was not aware of or invested in conveying this damaging message through her stories of Sambo, Quibba, Mingo, and others, many of her writing contemporaries-both in the United States and in England-were.
