We Go Out

In We Go Out, Mummy takes Susan and John out for an exciting day trip in London as part of their new reeducation program. Looking, thinking and reevaluating the world around them is a crucial part of any child’s core development, and John and Susan are no exception. A simple stroll down the local high street is magically illuminated by Mummy’s insights into the nature of society, religion, art and the various other forms of hierarchal or patriarchal oppression. In this volume, John and Susan―and their readers following along at home―learn about gender, homelessness, public sculpture, luxury redevelopments and property values, among many other valuable life lessons for today. Impeccably dressed and well behaved, Mummy and her children have been ripped from their comfortable middle-class midcentury environment and deposited into the contemporary world, still speaking in the polite vocabulary that characterized the popular Ladybird series. The caricature is so pitch-perfect that the 2014 limited edition of We Go to the Gallery was threatened with a lawsuit by Penguin UK (owners of the Ladybird imprint), which was withdrawn following a change in UK copyright law allowing for parody and satire.