Possibly it was spurred by his school’s plan to initiate the Smith Academy Record that spring; or by Tom’s brother Henry’s involvement with Student Life magazine at Washington University; or by the imminent publication of his mother’s booklet Easter Songs.

Whatever its origins, with the Fireside, written in the dark days of winter, Tom became T. S. Eliot. Its front page announces it not only as ‘Edited by T. S. Eliot’ but also as a production of ‘The T. S. Eliot Co., St Louis’. Like his father, working for ‘The Hydraulic-Press Brick Co., St Louis’, Tom, asking for subscriptions, was businessman as well as writer. The ‘Printer’ was also ‘T. S. Eliot’, and chapter one of the railroad adventure ‘Bill’s Escape’ was announced as ‘by T. S. Eliot’. Tom was signalling what he would become in adult life: author, editor and publisher, a poet with a business brain. The Fireside offers by far the most detailed window on the small boy’s imaginative life and aspects of his St Louis milieu.

The first issue, a ‘sample copy’ of this new ‘Weekly Magazine’ featuring ‘Fiction, Gossip, Theatre, Jokes’ and other interesting material, is dated ‘January 28, 1899’. It describes itself as both a magazine and ‘A Little Papre’ – Tom’s spelling was not always assured. Borrowing from material in St Louis newspapers of the time, as well as imitating writers and genres that he liked, the Fireside is a lively melange. Its ‘Gossip’ section announces the engagement of ‘Miss End and Mr Front’; a later issue mentions the elopement of ‘Mr. Up and Miss Down’; the familiar advertisement ‘EAT QUAKER OATS’ becomes in Tom’s version ‘EAT QUAKER CATS’, complete with a feline sketch.22 Teleologically-minded readers can spot anticipations of the poet who, decades later, would pen Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; who would link ‘beginning’ to ‘end’ in Four Quartets; and who would put at the head of ‘Burnt Norton’ a Greek epigraph from Heraclitus which means in English ‘the way up and the way down are one’.23 Certainly the little paper contains in its ‘Poet’s Corner’ Tom’s earliest surviving verses. Clearly imitative, the first of these mentions a family emblem, the elephant, cherished by Eliots since at least the seventeenth century; while it may have been a misleading ‘family tradition’ that ‘“Eliot” is merely a corruption of “Elephant”’, Tom always liked the link, and in adult life chose for his bookplate an elephant emblem designed by David Jones.24

At ten he was haunted by verbal cadences. He could not get out of his head the Mad Gardener’s song from Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, published just nine years earlier. Carroll’s poem begins:

He thought he saw an Elephant,

That practised on a fife:

He looked again, and found it was

A letter from his wife.

‘At length I realise,’ he said,

‘The bitterness of Life!’25

Not yet ready for the bitterness of life, and perhaps feeling that writing poetry called for the invention of a slightly different self, Tom signed his poem ‘Eliot S. Thomas’:

I thought I saw an elephant

A-riding on a ’bus

I looked again and found

Alas! ’twas only us.26

From the very start, in such ludic childish efforts, he seems to have liked poetry’s power to cross between mundanity and the wildly imaginative. Several times in the Fireside he imitates Carroll’s poem, taking from it both ‘a banker’s clerk’ and ‘a hippopotamus’, not to mention a ‘kangaroo’. Judging from how often he followed its form, this was the ten-year-old’s favourite poem, a completely mischievous one based on striking discrepancies between appearance and reality. Sometimes awkwardly, Tom made it his own, earthing it in the Mound City he knew:

I thought I saw a kangaroo,

A-jumping on the ground,

I looked again and lo!

It was an earthen mound!27

Poetry and prose in the Fireside suggest, too, an early love of the writings of Edward Lear, a lifelong favourite who had died in the year of Tom’s birth. When he presents Fireside recipes, Tom often ends with energetic advice on how to get rid of the food: ‘Burn up as fast as possible’ or (in the case of ‘broiled fritters’) ‘Put out of the window as fast as possible.’28 In imitative phrasing and inclination these follow Lear’s nonsense cookery in ‘To Make an Amblongus Pie’, which ends, ‘Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.’29

Lear’s genius for odd, memorable names – Quangle-Wangle, Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, Scroobius Pip – is something Tom would develop. From ‘The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World’ he took the name ‘Slingsby’, used in one of his early mature poems, ‘Aunt Helen’. Cat-loving Lear’s self-portrait in ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’ would beget, decades later, ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr.