Gentleman Jim

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We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. They are by turns sad and funny, full of a quiet sorrow, all lifted by a pervading optimism through their main characters who are unable to cope with reality, which will give you a rueful smile. The characters anchor this story, and it's well worth reading "Gentleman Jim" to get acquainted with them.

He yearns for a different career, and the initial pages are rather amusing as he fantasizes about possibilities (possibilities that are themselves no more than fantasies, since he has no idea of the realities involved in any of them), before deciding to become a highwayman. His walls are lined with books like Out in the Silver West, the Boys' Book of Pirates and Executive Opportunities, which provide fodder for his ruminations on career change. His imagining of being a cowboy then a highway man were just too simple-minded to be believable, not funny to me but rather I thought he was a sad man to think he might understand more about the world if he could get a modern education.

Inspired by the superhero comics he reads, and with the help of his dedicated wife Hilda, he nonetheless tries to accomplish his dreams. It led to the much-loved animated short film, which is still broadcast on television every Christmas, and a musical adaptation which is staged almost as often.

And the supreme example of this inhumanity is the judge, terrifyingly obscured, with glimpses of harsh, sharp features. It's a surprisingly dark comic for something that has the veneer of a childrens tale, but that is what makes this a unique comic. Jim's various run-ins with authority are amusing, but the humour gets progressively black as he ends up before a magistrate and ends up in jail, still cleaning the toilets (he's an expert, after all) and apparently oblivious to the fact that being literally imprisoned isn't much worse than the metaphorical prison he was in at the beginning of the book. If you know the name Raymond Briggs, it is likely to be the 1978 book, “The Snowman” which first springs to mind. Briggs won the 1966 and 1973 Kate Greenaway Medals from the British Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject.

As a tale of thwarted ambition, it is heartbreaking, but Briggs never succumbs to a dark kind of despair.