It’s Never Too Late
Mr. Hoppy is described in the first paragraph as a retiree who has always been lonely. On the second page, Mrs. Silver is situated as middle-aged. This is a story about finding love late in life. Not just a story of two older-than-usual stars of a romance coming together, but a story in which their romance is arrived through the kind of effort usually reserved for much younger characters. In this way, the book explores a theme rarely if ever covered in children’s literature: it is never too late to fall in love.
Hard Work Pays Off
The course of winning the true love of Mrs. Silver is not an easy one for Mr. Hoppy. He spends a great deal of time fantasizing about ways in which he do something great to catch her eye. Once he stumbles into just such an opportunity, he does not wait for everything to just work out. He puts in the hard labor to make his great idea work, proving that even when it comes to falling in love, hard work can be the difference between failure and success.
Relationships are Built on Deceit
One way of interpreting the story is that it is a satire of how adult relationships work. Namely, that the only reason any of them work at all is due to deceit, game-playing, unseen maneuvering and other false facades put forward by one or the other or, probably, both. There is no denying whatever that the plan Mr. Hoppy devises to win the love of Mrs. Silver is devious. Which would be okay in and of itself if the story ended with his confessing the lengths he went to and with Mrs. Silver being so impressed that she overlooked the fundamental deception. But the book notably ends with a peek far into the future and without any hint or suggestion that in all that time Mr. Hoppy ever comes clean.
Relationships are Perverse
That the two characters come together at the end is based on deceit has been covered, but that is only the most thoroughly examined aspect of its perversity. At the start of the story, Mr. Hoppy’s rival for the attention of Mrs. Silver is a tortoise. Even though he recognizes the absurdity of such an emotion, Mr. Hoppy admits to being jealous of that elationship. The words that trigger Mr. Hoppy to enact his devious plan is Mrs. Silver’s assertion that she would be “your slave for life.” This is a case of dual perversity: her expression is way more than over the top considering what she is asking him to do and his excitement over her becoming a “slave for life” speaks for itself. Considering that this is a story by a writer famous for including perverse adult characters in his stories which actually feature children, it should not be surprising to find this theme covered so thoroughly in this story notable lacking child characters.
