Classic children’s poems have been given a trigger warning by a publisher because they may be “harmful” to modern readers, reports the Telegraph.
Prolific author Hilaire Belloc’s popular comic verse, including 1907’s Cautionary Tales For Children, has been republished by Pan Macmillan with a new cautionary note.
Printed in the opening pages of the Belloc collection, the publisher warns that the text has not been edited and is therefore “true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written”.
The trigger warning adds: “Readers should be aware that there may be hurtful or indeed harmful phrases and terminology that were prevalent at the time this book was written and in the context of the historical setting of this book.”
The publisher adds in the lengthy disclaimer that “Macmillan believes changing the text to reflect today’s world would undermine the authenticity of the original, so has decided to leave the text in its entirety”.
However, the publishing house states that retaining the original language of the author does not constitute an endorsement of the “characterisation, content or language” in Belloc’s poems.
Pan Macmillan have not revealed the exact proportion of profit from sales of this republished collection that will now be donated to charity, although given their obvious distaste for the worldview of the man behind the prose, one imagines it will be sizeable.
Belloc was born in 1870 to a French father but raised in Sussex. He later served as Liberal MP in Salford.
A friend of G K Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, he was an Anglo-French and Catholic outsider, whose work spanned travel writing, histories, religious essays, political tracts, and poetry.
He is also known for illustrated collections of comic poems, including Cautionary Tales For Children, spanning rhymes about characters suffering absurd consequences for mild infractions.
Other volumes include The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and More Beasts (For Worse Children), which are filled with amusing poems about animals.
These three collections have been combined into one volume by Pan Macmillan and covered by the trigger warning about “harmful” language.
Cautionary Tales includes a zoo keeper being called “fat”, while the 1896 collection Book of Beasts makes reference to “the Kurd” and “little Turk”, and More Beasts makes a rhyme of “the woeful superstitions of the East”.
A recent meta-analysis carried out by Australian academics concluded that trigger warnings in some instances actually exacerbate anxiety. Citing a number of studies that “experimentally tested emotional reactions in the anticipatory period after giving a warning but prior to exposure to the warned-about content”, the researchers wrote: “This literature consistently demonstrates that viewing a trigger warning appears to increase anticipatory anxiety prior to viewing content.”
