But the explanation is legit cool. Way back in the 1930s as public education started to become more standard in the US, a series of English Language Primers were created starring young children named Dick and Jane, their baby sister Sally, and their dog, Spot. The series ran until 1965. In it, you’d see Dick and Jane doing various things and a story made of simple sentences.
The stories are forever embedded in the American psyche, with iconic phrases from the books like “See Spot run” or “Fun with Dick and Jane” still being well-known enough decades later to be turned into movie titles.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Ladybird imprint of the Penguin publishing house created their own version of Dick and Jane primers in 1964 called Keywords with Peter and Jane featuring a far more British family and their more British sensibilities. The series is still in print and has sold over 80 million books.
Both the US and UK books were often criticized for their not-so-hidden messaging. In the utopian vision of childhood they promoted, mothers wore high heels and stayed at home to clean clean clean, fathers went to work, people of color were invisible, poverty didn’t exist, and everyone everywhere was oh so cheerful and polite. While the US stopped printing Dick and Jane books just as the Civil Rights movement was gathering momentum, the UK has continued to create and publish these culturally out-of-touch books for decades, only occasionally updating egregiously racist or misogynistic images in response to public outcry.
Enter artist and satirist Miriam Elia. In 2014 she launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to create a satirical version of the Peter and Jane books called We Go to the Gallery (pictured above). As the book entered its second printing, Penguin sued her for copyright infringement. She promptly changed the models for Peter and Jane, renamed the characters John and Susan, created her own independent publishing house named Dung Beetle Books, and republished the book with new art to great commercial success.
She now has an entire series of satirical primers called the Dung Beetle Reading Scheme books. Her latest hilariously perfect book is We Do Lockdown, in which Mummy, John and Susan go through an indefinite period of self-isolation during lockdown. In this solitary time, the children are forcibly adapted to the ‘new normal’, where a joyless existence is heroically embraced to save humanity. The children come to have no real-life friends, no education, and are conditioned to see their peers as portable germ vessels.
