CAUTIONARY TALES

In the Victorian Era, the cautionary tale emerged as a genre to teach children the difference between right and wrong, usually in a gruesome way: such stories featured naughty children whose faux pas were punished with either death, disability, or ostracism.

The most renowned Anglophone author of such cautionary tales about middle-class and upper-class children hoist by their own petards is the nowadays hardly known Hilaire Belloc.
His most horrible stories for misbehaving children include:

1. The story of Jim, who ran away from his nanny at the zoo and was eaten alive by a lion.
Self-explanatory. This one teaches that well-behaved children never leave their governesses in a crowd: even worse things than Jim's fate may happen to those who run away from their nannies.
2. The story of Matilda, the girl who cried fire. This one is a modern update of an age-old fable. The risk of fire makes up for the lack of wild wolves in Victorian London, where our orphaned anti-heroine lives with her aunt. Matilda can't find any better pastime than calling the Fire Brigade every night her aunt goes to the theatre. Of course, she perishes in a real fire.
3. The story of Rebecca Offendort, who slammed doors for fun and perished miserably.  Poor Becky died an untimely death when one of her door slams knocked a marble bust from a nearby shelf. The sculpture fell, in less than a second, on the little girl's head.