His widely sold Cautionary Tales for Children included "Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion" and "Matilda, who told lies and was burned to death".

Belloc's mother Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925) was a writer, activist and an advocate for women's equality, a co-founder of the English Woman's Journal and the Langham Place Group.

He wrote about his home in poems such as "West Sussex Drinking Song", "The South Country", and "Ha'nacker Mill"; after graduating from John Henry Newman's Oratory School in Edgbaston, Birmingham.

In September 1889, Belloc's sister Marie made the accidental acquaintance of a Catholic widow, Mrs. Ellen Hogan, who was travelling from California on a European tour with two of her children, her daughters Elizabeth and Elodie.

These acts of generosity cemented a strong friendship, further deepened when Marie and Bessie accompanied the Hogans on their tour of France, visiting Paris with them.

Hilaire was absent touring the French provinces as a correspondent for The Pall Mall Gazette, but when the Hogans stopped back in London on their return from another European trip the following year, Belloc met Elodie for the first time, and was smitten.

The impoverished Belloc, still only twenty years old, sold nearly everything he had to purchase a steamship ticket to New York, ostensibly to visit relatives in Philadelphia.

Belloc's true reason for the trek to America became apparent when, after spending a few days in Philadelphia, he began to make his way across the American continent.

An athletic man who hiked extensively in Britain and Europe, Belloc made his way on foot for a significant part of the 2870 miles from Philadelphia to San Francisco.

Hilaire's first letter on his arrival in San Francisco is effervescent, happy to see Elodie and full of hopes for their future, but his manifestly zealous courtship was to go unrewarded.

[8] When Belloc finally reached the East Coast at Montclair, New Jersey, he received a letter from Elodie on 30 April 1891, definitively rejecting him in favour of a religious vocation; the steamship trip home was tainted with despair.

Determined to fulfill the obligation of military service necessary to retain his French citizenship, Belloc served his term with an artillery regiment near Toul in 1891.

After his year of service was concluded, still pining for and writing to Elodie, he took the entrance exam to Oxford University, and matriculated to Balliol College in January 1893.

He and another undergraduate, Anthony Henley, also achieved the record-breaking and amazing athletic feat of walking from Carfax Tower in Oxford, to Marble Arch in London, a distance of some 55 miles, more than double that of a marathon, in only 11½ hours.

In March 1896, having secured financing as an Oxford Extension lecturer in Philadelphia, Germantown, Baltimore and New Orleans, Belloc took a steamship to New York, and started making his way to Elodie in California.

As the debate drew to its conclusion and the division of the house was called, he rose from his seat in the audience, and delivered a vigorous, impromptu defence of the proposition.

Belloc's review of Outline of History observed that Wells's book was a powerful and well-written volume "up until the appearance of Man, that is, somewhere around page seven".

[23] Belloc was buried at the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Consolation and St Francis at West Grinstead, where he had regularly attended Mass as a parishioner.

[31] Supposedly for children, they, like Lewis Carroll's works, are more to adult and satirical tastes: "Henry King, Who chewed bits of string and was early cut off in dreadful agonies".

What Manning meant, Belloc said, is "that all wars and revolutions, and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine.

"[35] Manning's involvement in the London Dock Strike of 1889 made a major impression on Belloc and his view of politics, according to biographer Robert Speaight.

In The Servile State, written after his party-political career, and in other works, he criticised the modern economic order and parliamentary system, advocating distributism in opposition to both capitalism and socialism.

He called for the dissolution of Parliament and its replacement with committees of representatives for the various sectors of society, similar to medieval guilds, an idea that was popular under the name of corporatism at the time.

"[41] With these linked themes in the background, he wrote a long series of contentious biographies of historical figures, including Oliver Cromwell, James II, and Napoleon.

Belloc's 1937 book The Crusades: the World's Debate, he wrote The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved – to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy.

"[49] Belloc continued: It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.

In his opinion:The most virulent attacks in the Marconi affair were launched by Hilaire Belloc and the brothers Cecil and G. K. Chesterton, whose hostility to Jews was linked to their opposition to liberalism, their backward-looking Catholicism, and the nostalgia for a medieval Catholic Europe that they imagined was ordered, harmonious, and homogeneous.

The Jew baiting at the time of the Boer War and the Marconi scandal was linked to a broader protest, mounted in the main by the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, against the growing visibility of successful businessmen in national life and their challenges to what were seen as traditional English values.[52]A.

One of his best-known works relating to Sussex is The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), in which the four characters, each aspects of Belloc's personality,[59][60] travel on a pilgrimage across the county from Robertsbridge to Harting.

His Parents stood about his Bed Lamenting his Untimely Death, When Henry, with his Latest Breath, Cried – "Oh, my Friends, be warned by me, That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch and Tea Are all the Human Frame Requires…" With that the Wretched Child expires.