Poem of the Day: ‘George, Who Played With a Dangerous Toy’ 

We have already run, as Poem of the Day, two “Cautionary Tales for Children” by Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953). As you have no doubt surmised, having met both Jim and Lord Lundy, we here at The New York Sun greatly appreciate Belloc’s clever inversions of a particular Victorian genre of texts given to children. Oswald Bastable, adolescent narrator of E. Nesbit’s “The Story of the Treasure-Seekers,” deprecates this genre as the “goody-good book.” In such “goody-good” stories, long-suffering child saints endure trials and emerge victorious with all their treacle-coated virtue intact. But in Belloc’s “Cautionary Tales,” misbehaving children (and occasionally adults) meet wildly catastrophic ends, to the delight of the non-treacly child reader with a sense of justice.

In today’s Poem of the Day, however, the joke is a little more subtle. George suffers, as the title says, “a Catastrophe of Considerable Dimensions,” but what has George done to deserve it? Reader, George has been good. That’s what he’s done. He’s been good, and now the balloon which his grandmamma gave him for being good has blundered into a candle and burned the house down with the staff in it, while George himself has incurred “a nasty lump behind the ear.” Just as George has been a completely passive wreaker of havoc, so the story’s moral, too, is passive. Little boys simply should not be given dangerous toys. Let that be a lesson to us all.