Author: Fionaa Thawani, Dr. Hina Mohnot

Abstract: This paper undertakes a Marxist literary analysis of Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry series, with a specific focus on the short stories Horrid Henry Robs the Bank (2003), Horrid Henry’s Christmas (1994) and Horrid Henry and the Scary Sitter (1997). It studies the construction of class struggle, alienation and superstructure through the lens of comedy. This is done by positioning Henry as the subaltern figure, whose humorous behavioural transgressions expose and are simultaneously contained by prevailing parental, i.e. capitalist state, ideologies. The study is structured around three comic modalities: farce, lexico-semantics and satirical characterisation. The farcical narrative foregrounds the grotesque inequalities embedded in the superstructure; lexical humour is deployed to represent resistance to conformity to bourgeois norms linguistically; authority figures, like parents, teachers, and even babysitters, are portrayed satirically to expose the arbitrariness of ‘disciplinary’ mechanisms (which mirror marginalisation and propaganda to maintain false consciousness) at the heart of the capitalist state’s apparatus. The Horrid Henry series operates as a discursive site wherein the ideological tensions of capitalism are encoded, negotiated, and pedagogically transmitted through the comic form. Stories from three distinct quinquenniums have been selected for this study to explore the consistency in Simon’s political messages across time. Ultimately, by situating Simon’s series within broader debates on the political function of children’s literature, this research underscores the genre’s consequential role in constructing youth perspectives on class, power and justice.

Keywords: Marxist literary theory, children’s literature, class struggle, alienation, superstructure, capitalism, ideology, subversion, comedy, satire, Horrid Henry series

Article Info: Received: 27 May 2025; Received in revised form: 23 Jun 2025; Accepted: 25 Jun 2025; Available online: 30 Jun 2025

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.103.106