children's book
Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. In addition to conventional literary genres, modern children's literature is classified by the intended age of the reade ...
written by
Hilaire Belloc
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc ( ; ; 27 July 187016 July 1953) was a French-English writer, politician, and historian. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. His Catholic fait ...
. Illustrated by
Basil Temple Blackwood
Lord Ian Basil Gawaine Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (4 November 18703 July 1917), known as Lord Basil Temple Blackwood, was a British lawyer, civil servant and book illustrator.
Early life
Temple Blackwood was the third son and fifth child of Fre ...
, the superficially naive verses give tongue-in-cheek advice to children. In the book, the animals tend to be sage-like, and the humans dull and self-satisfied. Within the first three months of its publication, ''The Bad Child's Book of Beasts'' sold 4,000 copies.
Lord Alfred Douglas
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (22 October 1870 – 20 March 1945), also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford University he edited an undergraduate journal, ''The Spirit Lamp'', that carr ...
accused Belloc of plagiarizing his work ''Tales with a Twist'', which, although published two years after ''The Bad Child's Book of Beasts'', was, according to Douglas, written before Belloc's work.
Belloc's friend
Donald Tovey
Sir Donald Francis Tovey (17 July 187510 July 1940) was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer, conductor and pianist. He had been best known for his '' Essays in Musical Analysis'' and his editions of works by Bac ...
had composed musical settings of some of the verses by 1899 and played them in public. In 1911 Belloc expressed an interest in seeing them published. However, Tovey never got around to producing a final score, and the settings are now lost.
The illustrations have also drawn comparison to the works seen in
Dr. Seuss
Theodor Seuss Geisel ( ;"Seuss" '' The Dodo
The Dodo used to walk around,
And take the sun and air.
The sun yet warms his native ground –
The Dodo is not there!
The voice which used to squawk and squeak
Is now for ever dumb –
Yet may you see his bones and beak
All in the Mu-se-um.