I have written previously about the burlesque witch archetype. This theme song for Eloise tells you a lot about the character. sunglasses on the dog (this is readily understood by child readers) Though she lives in the most expensive accommodations known to humankind, her room looks like this. Hilary Knight uses a different colour line drawing (mostly red) to show us when characters exist only in Eloise’s imagination.

Related to that, the gap between reality and fantasy, which the reader understands but Eloise doesn’t (tortoises don’t wear sneakers, though Eloise tells us hers does).The gap between how the adult reader understands a situation (Eloise is unwelcome) compared to how Eloise perceives a situation (she is entitled to do what she wants, whenever she wants).The spectacle of a little girl living the life of a Dorothy Parker character.In Eloise, irony comes at us in many forms: Looks like Eloise had a bit of a revival in the 1990s, with the publication of the complete collection: IRONY The documentary is called It’s Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise. Dunham subsequently made a short documentary about the life of Eloise illustrator Hilary Kay after the illustrator heard about the tattoo and got in touch. Lena grew up in New York herself, and identifies with the experience of living as a child in that very specific, very privileged social milieu. Eloise was her favourite childhood character. In the early 2010s Lena Dunham became a prominent spokesperson for an Eloise revival. She sneaks into weddings and eats the food, opens packages not meant for her and has great fun ordering bizarre things via room service, instructing staff to ‘charge it’.Įloise is much longer than a typical contemporary picture book, more suited to an adult’s attention span than a child’s, though I’m sure there are kids who love Eloise. Eloise also inserts herself into the high-end experiences of paying customers, who look side-eyed at her. So the care of Eloise is shared across the staff who work at the hotel and its environs. The nanny is an older woman who shows genuine affection for her charge, but she no longer has the energy to run around after a hyperactive child such as Eloise. The main character is a six-year-old girl who lives in the top floor of an expensive New York hotel, cared for by her English nanny, called Nurse. Since there is no such thing as a ‘precocious grown up’, this also prepares readers for irony. Eloise tips over into the ‘more for adults than for children’ category, telegraphed in the subtitle: A Book For Precocious Grown Ups. Most popular picture books endure because they appeal to a dual audience of children and also to the adults who read it aloud, night after night after night.

The ultimate eloise kay thompson