The enduring appeal of the writer Hilaire Belloc’s “Cautionary Tales for Children” defies explanation. First published in London, in 1907, with pen-and-ink illustrations by Belloc’s friend Basil Blackwood, they have never been out of print. According to Belloc, the rhyming verses were “designed for the admonition of children between the ages of eight and fourteen years,” but their slyly satiric assaults on upper-class Victorian society have always appealed primarily to adults. They went right by me when I heard them for the first time, read aloud, in the summer of 1934, by my parents’ friend Harry Holmes, who had brought the first American edition of the book when he came to visit us at our rented house in the Adirondacks. The occasion and the reader are somewhat dim in my memory—I was nine at the time—but I recall hearing gales of laughter from the assembled grownups over the tale of Jim, “Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion.” The poem’s closing lines were:
Belloc had the bad luck to mistake himself for a serious writer. In his long and frantically busy life, he published more than a hundred and forty books and pamphlets—histories, biographies, novels, poetry collections, economic tracts, fervent defenses of the Catholic faith—few of which were widely read during his lifetime, and almost none of which are in print today. But, the “Cautionary Tales,” in a collected edition that includes his earlier “Bad Child’s Book of Beasts” and “More Beasts for Worse Children,” sails along from one generation to the next, read by enthralled parents to young children who are often perplexed and sometimes bored by their verses, but rarely as amused as we hope that they will be. What my own children mostly remember is how much I enjoyed reciting them aloud. Belloc’s “Henry King, Who chewed bits of String, and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies,” for instance, is short, and easily delivered whole.
Note the concision with which our poet skewers children’s annoying habits, the practice of medicine, aloof parents (“stood about his Bed”), and British alimentation. At nine, I didn’t get it. Satire, to children, is uncool—they much prefer the macabre cruelties of the Brothers Grimm, where witches are pushed into ovens and Cinderella’s mean sisters (in the original version) cut off their own toes to get into the golden slipper. What I remember most clearly about Harry Holmes’s reading of Belloc is that it was interrupted by Ivan, our highly moral black Lab. Dinner had been frankfurters roasted on long forks in the vast stone fireplace—my parents had planned a picnic, but it was raining—and at some point my Uncle Cotty, a natural humorist from the deep South, directed our attention to Ivan. The dog was standing stock-still in the doorway, facing us, an uncooked frank sited so perfectly in his mouth that it stuck out evenly on both sides. He knew that he’d done wrong, and his conscience-stricken expression upstaged the reading.
Belloc had five children of his own, whom he doted on when he was at home, which was seldom. He travelled extensively, served two terms in Parliament, spent his evenings drinking with friends at clubs and taverns, and did a backbreaking amount of what he called “hack-work” to support his family. His light verse, which was often compared favorably to that of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, may have seemed like hack-work to him; he certainly never imagined it would eclipse his prose writings. For a man of his mixed background and unique gifts, however, light verse proved the perfect outlet. Belloc was half French. His British mother had married a French solicitor named Louis Belloc, and both Hilaire and his older sister, Marie, spent their first years in the Belloc family house in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, twelve miles from Paris. Louis Belloc lost his modest fortune in the stock market, and died when Hilaire was two. His widow took the children back to London, and Belloc went to English schools and had five very happy years at Balliol College, in Oxford, where, according to his classmate E. C. Bentley, “His personal magnetism, his cascade of ideas, of talk, of fervid oratory, his exuberant and irreverent humor, his love of bodily activity and adventure, carried all before them.” Every summer, though, Belloc and Marie went to stay in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, and he remained a French citizen all his life, assuming dual nationality after becoming a naturalized British subject, in 1902.
From Oxford onward, Bellow viewed British life through the double lens of Gallic irony and Catholic disapproval. His political views embraced immense contradictions: he was anti-imperialist, but skeptical of parliamentary democracy; opposed in equal measure to capitalism and socialism; anti-Semitic, but violently scornful of Hitler. He infuriated his enemies (H. G. Wells among them) but so charmed his admirers (Gilbert Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, and George Bernard Shaw, among others) that they forgave him every excess. “He made his friends laugh until they ached,” his biographer, A. N. Wilson, writes. “He was ebulliently well-informed, spontaneously hilarious, mischievous and, at the same time, tough.” Just the man, in other words, to mock the crumbling pillars of the British Empire.
Peers of the realm were his chosen victims. Belloc’s Lord Lundy had every advantage and one major flaw—a tendency to shed tears at the slightest provocation. His family “shoved him into politics,” where he sank from one inconsequential Cabinet post to another, shedding copious tears at every turn, until the Duke, “his aging grand-sire,”
The bad things that happen to Belloc’s bad children don’t teach us lessons; they make us laugh. Take the unfortunate Jim, who slipped away from his nurse at the zoo:
In place of fearsome gore, the wonderfully inappropriate “detested” gives deep satisfaction.
A similar sangfroid attends the misfortune of several other miscreants. Young Algernon, “The Doctor’s son, / Was playing with a Loaded gun. / He pointed it toward his sister, Aimed very carefully, but / Missed her.” George’s generous Grandmama buys him an “Immense BALLOON,” which explodes, killing or maiming most of the household staff, “While George, who was in part to blame / Received, you will regret to hear / A nasty lump behind the ear.” John Vavassour de Quentin Jones, who stands to inherit his uncle Bill’s great fortune, is undone by his love for throwing stones. (“Like many of the Upper Class / He liked the sound of Broken Glass.”) When he accidentally launches one that hits his benefactor in the eye, Uncle Bill disinherits him on the spot, and wills his estate to his young nurse-companion, the lovely Miss Charming, “Who now resides in Portman Square / And is accepted everywhere.”
Matilda, a compulsive liar, amuses herself when her parents are out by summoning “London’s Noble Fire Brigade.”
Inevitably, when the house does catch fire and Matilda screams for help, no one believes her.
The verses in Belloc’s “Bad Child’s Book of Beasts” and “More Beasts for Worse Children” are clever, but, to me, they lack the inspired nonsense of the “Cautionary Tales,” and the only one I still quote with irritating frequency is “The Crocodile,” whose closing six-line crescendo spreads over five illustrated pages. Its subject is a Missionary in “some far Coptic town” who sits down to breakfast by the Nile.
Kids do giggle a bit at this one, especially if they’re looking at Basil Blackwood’s antic illustrations.
Belloc’s life, one feels, was more happy than not. He adored his American wife, an Irish Catholic girl from California named Elodie Hogan, and her death, in 1914, of influenza, was a cruel blow. He mourned her with Victorian rigor, closing the door to her bedroom in their West Sussex house and never reopening it during his lifetime. He did not remarry, and in time he was able to resume his hyperactive schedule—writing three or four books a year, sailing his boat, travelling, and lecturing in the United States whenever his funds ran short. A series of strokes in his last decade took the edge off his effervescence, but until the end he was still capable of self-mockery. He often entertained his visiting children and grandchildren after dinner by shouting old English drinking songs and reciting the “Cautionary Tales.”
His death, in 1953, just a few days short of his eighty-third birthday, was peaceful. He had escaped the fate of Mary Lunn, a lady in one of his later poems, who
