"He almost deserved it"

I am making slow but regular progress through The Chronicles of Narnia and have just begun reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a cousin of the Pevensies, is introduced in this book. I enjoyed Lewis's description in the first chapter:

THERE was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and his schoolmasters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his father and mother "Father" and "Mother," but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

Eustace Clarence disliked his cousins, the four Pevensies—Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. But he was quite glad when he heard that Edmund and Lucy were corning to stay. For deep down inside he liked bossing and bullying; and, though he was a puny little person who couldn't have stood up even to Lucy, let alone Edmund, in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors. ....

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952.