It’s the end of Lent as I write this and I’ve almost entirely failed to give up X, which is what I said I’d do. The webpage just seems to materialise in front of me, and I find I’ve been slapping little hearts on Peter Hitchens’s posts for 20 minutes before I realise what I’m up to. Then that deceitful little mental voice pipes up, the internal chatbot which specialises in justifying bad behaviour: ‘Keep scrolling! How else will you know what’s happening in the world?’

Yesterday, as I found myself ogling X again, the little voice really scraped the bottom of the barrel: ‘Now that you’re here,’ it told me, ‘you really may as well get stuck in. Have a long session, go on. It’ll still only count as one Lent infraction.’

For years now ‘temptation’ has been simply a synonym for ‘delicious’

That woke me up. What sort of credulous dolt does my own mind think I am?

And as I closed X, a memory came back to me, of the only book (save Matthew, Mark and Luke in the sections on Christ’s Temptations) where I’ve ever found that weasel voice properly described.

Down the Snow Stairs by Alice Corkran is a now entirely forgotten children’s story from the late 19th century. My mother used to read it to me at bedtime, just as her mother read it to her, and now that I’ve dug it out again, maybe I’ll read it to my poor son too.

The protagonist, Kitty, is a girl of eight and the book describes her dreamlike quest through a fantastical landscape populated by strange creatures. Corkran was a near contemporary of Lewis Carroll and Down the Snow Stairs contains definite echoes of Alice in Wonderland, though it’s less off-putting. Am I the only one who can’t stick Alice? That poor dormouse.

On the night the action takes place, Kitty’s brother, Johnnie, is seriously ill partly as a result of her foolishness. His life hangs in the balance and to save him Kitty must pass through a land of temptations without being waylaid. She’s given for the journey two small creatures: an angel who hovers on her right shoulder, reminding her not to weaken, and a sprite on her left, who urges her to succumb. That’s the weasel voice. Kitty is led to her path down the snow stairs by a ghoulish, melting snowman, who waved a ‘white formless hand and gazed at Kitty with his blank, eyeless sockets’. Yes, I know, but it’s not meant to be cosy. This is serious stuff. Souls are on the line. ‘You have a little soul,’ Kitty is told. ‘Every child has a little soul and here you will see what happens to that soul when it grows sinful.’

I’d forgotten the language of souls, and I’d half-forgotten the language of temptation too, because for years now ‘temptation’ has been simply a synonym for ‘delicious’. Cadbury has a high-end ‘Temptations’ range, aimed at midlife ladies. There are even ‘Whiskas Temptations’ cat treats. Who does Whiskas imagine succumbing to temptation? The cats?

Down the Snow Stairs was just as popular as Alice in its day. ‘It is quite as enthralling as Alice in Wonderland but much more human and real,’ said the Sheffield Independent. I reckon it may well have been the inspiration for both Charlie and the Chocolate Factoryand The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. At one point Kitty comes across what sounds very like Wonka’s chocolate paradise. ‘She passed by a brown pool of chocolate-cream, in which ladies’ fingers stood up like reeds. She ran across a field where barley-sugar grew, and crystallised wild flowers.’ At another, she’s lulled to sleep, like Dorothy, by a field of soporific flowers. But Charlie and Dorothy survive the centuries, whereas Kitty has sunk out of sight. The framing of her adventure is wrong for a post-Christian age, I suppose. Good and evil are so last century.

Except that to my mind Corkran’s book speaks to the 21st century far better than either of the other two. There’s the voice of the sprite: insistent, flattering – you deserve a rest, Kitty, you deserve a treat. It took me a while before I recognised this as the emollient voice of ChatGPT.

Then there are the vain girls, huddled around mirrors and pools staring only at their own reflections: trapped in an eternal selfie. And a very 21st-century horror – a nihilist boy driven to destroy: ‘The sparks flew, golden and beautiful. As they flew up he laughed. “Listen, I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, winking one yellow eye at Kitty. “I’m practising to set the world on fire… How the people will run, scamper and tumble!… How their hair will catch fire!”’

And presiding over this ultra-modern scene is Daddy Coax, the very model of a ‘Gentle Parent’ today. Daddy Coax soothes the children instead of scolding them. ‘Little children are always good. They are little angels,’ he says. Daddy Coax ends up beaten half to death by his angels, which is how Gentle Parenting usually goes.

Towards the end of the book, Kitty strays from her path into Punishment Land, where naughty children get their come-uppance. The children who told lies find themselves wrapped in terrible cobwebs. The vain girls are condemned to see only their own faces wherever they look. ‘“I wish I could see something else than my face,” sobbed the child. Then there rose a chorus of airy unhappy voices repeating the same words: “Something else than my face; something else than my face.’’’

Kitty also meets a group of lazy children and asks them why they can’t ‘set to and put things straight’. ‘Can’t,’ the children sigh, and Kitty sees that their legs have ‘turned to stumps’ and ‘their fingers were joined like hands in boxing-gloves’. ‘That is because we would not use them,’ explains one boy.

‘To read aloud to ages four and up,’ says the 19th-century blurb cheerily. It’s possible you’d be reported for reading this to any modern four-year-old. But the curious thing is that, as I remember, I didn’t find it traumatising at all. I was with the Sheffield Independent. For all the fused fingers and spiders’ webs, something about Kitty’s predicament, about the angel and the sprite, felt real – and that made it oddly reassuring.