The Vinegar Works: Three Volumes of Moral Instruction

The Gashlycrumb Tinies (possibly Gorey's most famous work) is an abecedarium, or inscription of the English alphabet. It is stylised as a poem describing the deaths of 26 children, the initials of their first names corresponding with the letters of the alphabet. (For instance, "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.") The book's instructive quality is in teaching the alphabet with a mnemonic device.

The Insect God is the only book in the collection with a clear-cut narrative. It follows a little girl who's lured away from her nanny by anthropomorphic insects. The book's instructive quality is in teaching stranger danger: the little girl would not have met with catastrophe from the predatory insects had she not wandered away from her nanny.

The West Wing is harder than its predecessors in the collection to explain. It contains no clear "instruction" for anything. Besides an inscription of the name "the west wing" above a door, the book has no words. It is a numbered sequence of images from a possibly haunted building. Some of the images are mundane, like doors opening onto a hallway, and others ghostlier. These images create a moody, unsettled atmosphere.

It has been said that The West Wing was written in response to literary critic Edmund Wilson, to whom it is dedicated. Wilson wrote letters to Gorey complaining that his pictures were a lot more impressive than his text. Hence, Gorey gave him a book to review that had no text.[2][3]

"The Vinegar Works" was first introduced in The Willowdale Handcar: Or, the Return of the Black Doll, published the previous year, in which the three main characters, travelling by handcar, come across the institution in their travels, after it has been ruined by an unexplained disaster.

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