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Copywork
About This Passage
Two of the chapter's central engines collide in this passage. Lamp Wick reframes the Fairy's loving correction as scolding — a sound to wait out — and immediately follows with the social pressure of "a hundred boys." Collodi tags Lamp Wick as "the little scoundrel" precisely at the moment he tells Pinocchio to dismiss the formative voice. Copying this slowly forces the student to feel the rhetorical move underneath the casual tone, and the narrator's interjection ("the little scoundrel") names what dialogue alone might leave hidden.
"The Fairy will scold me." "Let her scold. When she has scolded enough she will stop," said the little scoundrel Lamp Wick. "And what are you going to do? Do you go alone or with company?" "Alone? Why...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell the chapter from the Fairy's permission through the carriage's midnight arrival. Trace Pinocchio's changing posture — what he says when he arrives at the shed, what he says when he tries to leave the first time, what he says after Lamp Wick's "two minutes," and what he is saying by the time the carriage's tiny trumpets are audible.
Discussion Questions
- Pinocchio answers the Fairy's caution about boys breaking promises with: "I am not like other boys. When I make a promise I always keep it." The chapter then proceeds to demonstrate, in the very next conversation, that he is exactly like other boys. What is the chapter saying about the relationship between the way we describe ourselves and the way we actually behave under pressure?
- Lamp Wick describes the Country of Playthings almost entirely as a series of negations — no schools, no teachers, no books, never study, every day a Saturday. Compare this to the way the Fairy describes what Pinocchio is becoming ("a good boy"). What does the chapter suggest is the difference between a good thing described positively and a good thing described as the absence of what is hard?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
a puppet animated by strings or rods; in this chapter the term is still applied to Pinocchio precisely because the promised transformation has not yet arrived
Item 2
given to playful, often disruptive misbehavior; the word is applied to Lamp Wick to register a habit of conduct, not a single act
Item 3
indifferent to consequences or to the well-being of others; in the narrator's hands the word indicates moral inattention rather than mere absent-mindedness
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Critical Thinking
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