Today’s Poem: Rebecca, Who Slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably

Hilaire Belloc offers for children’s delight his tales of children coming to terrible ends

Harold Gilman, Edwardian Interior, 1907 (Wikimedia Commons)

Appearing in 1907, Cautionary Tales for Children — subtitlted Designed for the Admonition of Children between the Ages of Eight and Fourteen Years — was the contribution of Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) to a golden age of children’s books that ran more or less from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to The Wind in the Willows (1908).

Of the popular figures of his day, Belloc seems to have slipped from much popular memory — just as, among the public intellectual figures of the time, George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton remain, while Belloc (and H.G. Wells, as public figure) have faded. Partly that’s because Belloc was something of an anti-Semite, wrote faster (author of 150 books) than his mind could move, and opined loudly on far more topics than he understood. But even his Cautionary Tales has fallen away — to our loss, since, in addition to his faults, Belloc was also a genuine talent, if talented people are allowed to be eccentric, grumpy, prejudiced, and wicked-tongued.

Hilaire Belloc in 1910 (Wikimedia Commons)

Besides, Cautionary Tales is the single best entry in a class that continues to our own day: books about children coming to horrible ends, offered for the pleasure of children. (See, for example the 1999–2015 A Series of Unfortunate Events.) Belloc gives us “Matilda, Who told lies and was burned to death.” And “Henry King, Who chewed bits of string and was early cut off in dreadful agonies.” And “Jim, Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion.”

In these verses Belloc is somehow both the stuffy narrating adult, moralizing windily, and the mischievously irritating child whose adventures come to disaster — a difficult literary feat to pull off.

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Rebecca, Who slammed doors for fun and perished miserably

by Hilaire Belloc

A trick that everyone abhors
In little girls is slamming doors.
A wealthy banker’s little daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this furious sport.

She would deliberately go
And slam the door like billy-o!
To make her Uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild;
She was an aggravating child . . .

It happened that a marble bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the door this little lamb
Had carefully prepared to slam,
And down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.

Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too,
And showed the dreadful end of one
Who goes and slams the door for fun.

The children who were brought to hear
The awful tale from far and near
Were much impressed, and inly swore
They never more would slam the door,
— As often they had done before.