Charlotte’s Web

E B White's Charlotte's Web is a farm story for 6 year olds about a girl who takes on her own father to save a piglet.

What happens

Fern is eight. Some pigs were born in the night, one of them is a runt, and her father has gone out to do away with it. Fern catches him in the wet grass, takes hold of the axe and won't let go.

"If I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me?"

Her father says a little girl is one thing and a runty pig is another. Fern says she sees no difference at all. And then something goes across his face and he gives in, and he carries the piglet back to the house in a carton and puts it on her chair at breakfast.

She calls him Wilbur. She feeds him from a baby's bottle. He follows her upstairs and waits at the bottom step until she comes down again. When she takes her doll out in the pram, Wilbur rides along beside it with his eyes shut and his very long lashes showing.

Then Wilbur is five weeks old and big enough to sell, and Fern's father sells him for six dollars to her Uncle Homer down the road.

That's the opening. You can already see what this book is going to do to a child. It's very gentle and it isn't soft at all.

The barn is worth the whole thing on its own. White goes through what it smells of, one thing after another, hay and grain and harness and rope and tired horses, until you could walk into it. He says it had a sort of peaceful smell, as though nothing bad could ever happen again.

Which is a promise the story has no intention of keeping. Wilbur is a pig on a farm, and everyone except Wilbur knows what pigs on farms are for. A large grey spider named Charlotte is the one who decides to do something about it.

Two things a parent will want to have thought about. The book begins with a man walking out to kill a newborn animal, and it's talked about plainly at the breakfast table, with a child arguing her case. And the whole plot rests on Wilbur's life being in the hands of the people who own him. A child who has never wondered where bacon comes from will wonder afterwards.

It's American, by the way. Dollars, sneakers, Papa. Nothing difficult, just a different sort of farm from the ones in most of our books.

What to read next

For another pig nobody expects much of, try The Sheep-Pig. Babe is won at a village fair and is headed for the freezer, and what he decides he'd really like is to learn to herd sheep.