As a child I loved stories which had wishes in them. They allowed me to imagine so many possibilities even though I knew really that they couldn’t happen. It was a way of making me think that the best could always happen and I think it made me more hopeful as a child. Are stories with wishes in them still popular? Or does the whole idea seem too incredible nowadays?

Wishes are still popular! As you discovered in your childhood, they allow you to hope for something even if in reality you know it is never likely to happen. It is a kind of dreaming but with a bit of extra power behind it.



Stories have long been a perfect place to explore the possibilities – good and bad – of wishes. However, the luxury of having them always comes with the attendant risks of making a terrible mistake in how you use them.



Stories about wishes and how they can be used go far back into storytelling. They provide storytellers with wonderful opportunities to invent and imagine. “If only…” can be turned into a reality that can appear to be very attractive; the land can be full of plenty and human nature can always be kind. More interestingly, they are also a way of characters exposing their innermost thoughts and feelings so they betray psychological truths without storytellers having to give any justification or explanation.



But, once a wish has been made, how it is granted can also show that what can seem perfect in the imagination may not be so wonderful after all. And many stories about wishing carry a cautionary note. They remind readers that wanting something beyond what they already have may not make them happier.

In many of the most popular stories about wishing, three wishes are granted. This allows for the chance to make a rash or “greedy” wish which may reflect a less than good side of a character’s nature; the chance to try to put that right by being more modest (which usually ends in something even worse) and a final wish in things go back to the beginning – more or less.



The process leaves the wish-maker wiser and apparently happier; they have had a chance to experience their dream and found it has just as many downsides as the reality they know so well.



Wishes are complicated; they do not always behave as they are expected to. King Midas’s wish was so evidently based on a horrible greed that it is no surprise that he suffered a terrible fate through it. Once King Midas had experienced a few examples of what happens when everything really is turned into gold he realised the error of his ways. But, by then it was too late.



Even in an uncontentious story such as The Magic Porridge Pot what starts out as a simple and attractive idea of plentiful food soon gets out of hand. Images of porridge running all through the town are always entertaining and they easily show the mismatch between an apparently harmless wish and the way it is fulfilled.



The idea of conjuring up someone who can grant wishes as Aladdin does with his magical lamp in the traditional Tales from the Arabian Nights has been adapted for every time and any place.

That idea that the wish comes from another person adds a touch of almost-reality and also gives the opportunity for quasi-human error to confuse matters further. Magic has always surrounded Jeff Brown’s Flat Stanley but things get especially unpredictable in Stanley and the Magic Lamp. When Stanley rubs this mum’s teapot,a genie duly appears. Among other things, Stanley wishes to be famous. And, unsurprisingly, he soon finds that being famous it not as much fun as he had thought it would be. But can Stanley put the wish back?

In Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s attractive picture book version of the traditional tale A Squash and a Squeeze, the little old woman who wants more space is advised by a Wise Old Man who, unlike a genie, doesn’t play tricks. However, his “wise advice” which is that the little old woman should take more and more animals into her house is, in itself a kind of a trick. And strangely, it is one that works! Wishes can also brought into something that is more credible to the modern reader by making them appear as dreams.



In Philippa Pearce’s Amy’s Three Best Things, stunningly illustrated by Helen Craig, Amy conjures up what she so desperately wants while she is asleep. In her dreams the three special things that she has taken with her when she goes and stays with her granny transform into magical transport that enable her to see that all is well at home. Her dreams become a place where the magic can be acted out and, when what she has longed for happens, there is a similar feeling of wish fulfillment.

But, if magic does seem too incredible for the twenty first century, imaginative alternatives to reality can be explored without it as in John Burningham’s Would You Rather…? which offers reader a choice of scenarios which reveal some of the same kinds of inner desires and fears that wishes might have done in the past.

More books classics with wishes are Enid Blyton’s Wishing Chair series and of course E Nesbit’s classic Five Children and It.



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