IF YOU ARE HAVING a bad child day - and most of us do from time to time - the idea of an exhibition devoted to Naughty Children at the Seven Stories Centre, New-castle upon Tyne, might seem the last straw.

Loss of respect for authority is one of the biggest problems of our time, so celebrating the rebellious, intransigent and rude child in fiction might strike harassed parents and teachers (not to mention the police and magistrates) as a red rag to a bull.

Long before kids could be told off by bogus television nannies or given ASBOs, the Victorians grappled with dis-obedient children in a variety of unpleasant ways, as the opening of Jane Eyre testifies. Yet at the same time, trickster characters, such as Loki and Anansi the Spider, are often more entertaining and creative than “good” ones.

That's certainly the case with Francesca Simon's best-selling Horrid Henry series, which last week celebrated three million sales and is at the centre of the exhibition.

Henry's horridness appeals to almost every country in the world apart from the author's native America, possibly because, like many miniature monsters, he rebels against something pretty normal - unimaginative parents and sibling rivalry.

Pippi Longstocking (who makes an appearance in Newcastle with Lauren Childs's superb new illustrations) and Mary Lennox, of The Secret Garden, learn to survive neglect using a resourcefulness that strikes adults as dangerous. Similarly, Henry grapples with powerful emotions that have no approved outlet. (The irony is that if you put him together with his nauseating brother Perfect Peter you get, as Simon has said, “one perfectly normal child”. )

Alison Lurie, the Pulitzer-winning novelist and professor of English at Cornell, writes in her collection Don't Tell the Grown-Ups, that great children's books “recommended - even celebrated - daydreaming, disobedience, answering back, running away from home, and concealing one's private thoughts and feelings from unsympathetic grown-ups”. Like great adult literature, these stories imply that what matters is art, imagination, and truth.

Even when naughty heroes such as Horrid Henry, Just William or E. Nesbit's family the Bastables are preoccupied with money, they don't want economic survival or instant gratification but family happiness. Naughty children, from Max in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, to Tally in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy, have the imagination and energy to go beyond convention.

They don't intend to do more than “make mischief”, and have adventures, and encountering them in fiction can be a safety valve for modern children, when childhood increasingly resembles the lofe of a battery chicken.

The physical space to roam, celebrated in books by the likes of E. Nesbit, Enid Blyton, John Masefield, Richmal Crompton and Alan Garner has shrunk to the size of the living room and the television screen. Like Bilbo Baggins at the start of The Hobbit, today's child is more like a sedentary scholar than a fairytale hero - cars, school testing and paedophiles have replaced dragons and witches as the things to fear “outside”. Without naughty children to challenge accepted norms, their lives would be even duller.

Edwardian children's literature was full of good children, few of whom have lasted, and characters such as Philip Pullman's Lyra remain rare beasts, because the point is not to be merely contra mundum but contra the mundane.

Such characters are loved not just because they demand more but because they are more. They could be forced to sit on the “naughty step” and remain free as a bird inside

(although you suspect that Pippi Longstocking would send a Nanny McPhee packing).

When children come across a heroine such as William Nicolson's Kestrel in The Wind Singer, who shouts her loathing of exams from the tallest tower, they know that, far from being naughty, they are standing up for what a civilised world should embrace.

Horrid Henry is a far less positive a model than Richmal Crompton's Just William, of course. Where William does his best to be chivalrous, helpful, kind and obedient, but can't help being led astray, Henry belongs to a more brutal age. His parents are fools.

Right from the first book, Don't Be Horrid, Henry! they take Peter's side, making it plain that they prefer the goody-goody younger brother (an oleaginous creep) to the problematic elder. Unlike William and Pippi Longstocking, he isn't a role model but a guerrilla in the battle against grown-ups. While he is not deliberately vile, he never has a kind impulse in his quest to make life less unfair.

Naughtiness is unacceptable when it shades into violence and cruelty but the special condition of childhood is innocence. We are all born with impulses that society has to control, but which it needs if it is to be rejuvenated. Mary Lennox's recreation of the Secret Garden begins as an act of boredom and rebellion, but changes her cousin's life and her own; when the childlike Bilbo leaves Hobbiton he earns great wealth as well as disapproval. It will be fascinating to see if the drawing and writing competition at the Seven Stories exhibition to find a new mischievous character taps into this creative tension.

The Up to Mischief with Horrid Henry exhibition runs from February 9 to January 2009 at Seven Stories, 30 Lime Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, sevenstories.org.uk

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