The infant moralist

Here lie the lessons your mother tried to teach you, rendered in verse so wickedly funny you might actually remember them. Violet Jacob and Lady Helena Carnegie serve up moral instruction with a straight face and a hidden smile, laying out the fates that befall the selfish, the rude, and the disobedient in crisp Edwardian couplets. A greedy child finds her cake turned to ash. A liar's nose grows longer than his future prospects. These aren't gentle fables: they're cautionary tales with teeth, delivered with the theatrical gravity of a Victorian schoolmarm who secretly delighted in her own scare tactics. The poems hopscotch through domestic disasters and village scandals, each one a tiny morality play designed to instill good behavior through the delightful horror of what happens to those who stray. The humor lives in the exaggerated consequences, the comic precision of the verse, and thegap between the solemn delivery and the absurdity of the punishment. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of book that made children behave while thoroughly enjoying themselves.