Misguidedly, if not surprisingly, publishers consistently resisted Gorey’s attempts to market his books to children. Many are drawn without mouths, so that protest, should they wish to make any, is impossible. Like many of Gorey’s figures, the tinies are mostly passive and meet their fates with stoicism.

On the back cover are 26 little headstones. The tinies are gathered on the front cover as if for a school photograph while behind them stands a supervisory skeleton in mourner’s weeds, one hand outstretched, the other holding an umbrella. One of his most popular books, The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing, first published in 1963, is an Abecedary in the Victorian style: 26 children meet their deaths in different ways, from ‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs’ to ‘Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.’ The outing of the title is never disclosed. His father, to whom he wasn’t close, described the way his son divided opinion: ‘He has you either amused – or clutching the chandelier.’Ī panel from ‘The Gashlycrumb Tinies’ (1963) © The Edward Gorey Charitable TrustĬavett’s question about Gorey’s childhood was presumably prompted by the number of children who appear in his work and the regularity with which they come to terrible ends. Soon he had a Tony Award, which he gave away to a friend. His set and costume designs for a hit Broadway production of Dracula had brought him recognition and a great deal of money. When he did the Cavett interview Gorey was no longer a cult figure. The term was in circulation by the time of his death, and doubtless long before among aficionados. The only really accurate word is ‘Goreyesque’. It has been described variously as Edwardian, Jazz Age, avant-retro, surreal, picturesque and English Gorey said it had the effect of ‘Victorian novels all scrunched up’. Someone who thought of himself principally as a writer, but is now remembered chiefly as an artist and illustrator of his own and other people’s work, Gorey created a peculiar, hermetic world in which the comic and the macabre combine in proportions dependent on the reader’s temperament.

Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, did not like to talk about himself or his work, which depended, like the Japanese literature he admired, ‘very much what is left out’. ‘W hat were you like as a child?’ Dick Cavett asked Edward Gorey on his talk show in November 1977.

The ghastly tinies