The chief defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of string.

These lines open Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary poem about “Henry King,” one of the mock-moral verses written in the style of children’s nursery rhymes but aimed at satirizing didactic Victorian/Edwardian attitudes toward childrearing. Belloc (1870–1953) became famous for such comic “moral” poems—often featuring a child’s small vice leading to an absurdly outsized consequence—published in collections intended for family reading. The Henry King poem belongs to this tradition: a seemingly trivial habit (chewing string) is treated as a defining “defect,” setting up the poem’s escalating, darkly humorous moral lesson.

Belloc frames a minor, slightly absurd habit—chewing bits of string—as a “chief defect,” immediately signaling the poem’s satirical logic: petty faults are treated with solemn seriousness. The humor comes from the disproportion between the offense and the moral weight assigned to it, a send‑up of cautionary tales that promise dire outcomes for childish misbehavior. At the same time, the couplet’s crisp rhyme and plain diction mimic traditional nursery verse, making the moral tone feel familiar even as Belloc undercuts it. The lines set up a broader joke about how societies (and parents) can inflate trivial eccentricities into defining moral failures.