ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on resolving the apparent disjunction between the dark content of The Dangerous Alphabet and its familiar form by tracing the alphabet book genre back to its early nineteenth-century origins. Through Victorian revolutions in both national education and finely crafted illustrated books for children and adults. Modern reviewers who predict psychological damage from viewing these images are reproducing conceptions of innocent children and education that were naturalized by and inherited from the late Victorians. Gaiman has exploited it to write a parody of pedagogy that can stir both laughter and sympathy by prompting modern-day parents to literally articulate their Victorian predecessors' plight. Working in a similar fashion almost two hundred years later, The Dangerous Alphabet manipulates the formulaic genre to reconstruct a Victorian social context. In their own act of historical relocation, Gaiman's couplets and Grimly's illustrations place the book's protagonists and narrator in a time before domestic education in England was wholly replaced by institutionalized schooling.
