The Vege-Men’s Revenge

My mother came across this amazing book, The Vege-Men’s Revenge (pictures by Florence K. Upton, verses by Bertha Upton – a mother/daughter team – and originally published in 1897) and was nice enough to pass it on to me. This isn’t really a full-fledged Girls Underground example, as it’s missing most of the salient features, but it is a literal girl-goes-underground story, and it’s also awesomely weird and gruesome, so I just had to add it here.

It tells the story (entirely in rhyming verse!) of Poppy, who is out walking one day, planning to harvest some veggies from the garden, when she is accosted by a couple of anthropomorphic vegetables. They sweet talk her into following them down underground to their kingdom….

…then surprise her with a condemnation of her previous vegetable-eating habits, and begin their revenge. They plant her in the ground (one of the most beautiful pictures in the book):

…and tend her, and she grows into many different types of vegetable, all of which look like her (clothes and all).

Then they pick the Poppy-veggies, cook them, and eat them! After the feast (portrayed in the cover painting, above), they have a wild dance that flies around faster and faster until they all sort of explode in a bang – and it turns out to be all Poppy’s dream (which kind of says something about the strangeness of Poppy’s mind).

I’ll forgive the all-too-common “it was all a dream” ending, but I do love how Poppy’s reaction to this is to gleefully go ahead with her plans to harvest her vegetables, completely unfazed by the dream’s message.