by Edith Nesbit
IV
After completing her first two Bastable novels, Nesbit began a new serial publication, The Psammead (later changed to Five Children and It), which ran in The Strand Magazine from April to December 1902 with illustrations by her long-term collaborator, H. R. Millar (see endnote 11 to The Enchanted Castle). For this venture she created a new set of siblings—Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their infant brother “The Lamb”—based loosely on her own five children. (“The Lamb,” to whom the book is dedicated, is John Bland, born in 1899, the second child of the affair between Hubert and Alice Hoatson; Edith raised him as her own, though her other four children were already in their teens.) The new fictional family (we never learn their surname) is less hard-pressed than the Bastables, but as soon as they arrive at their remote country house, the parents are called away to attend to other matters, and the children, left in the care of servants, begin to explore the surrounding area on their own. Nesbit’s distinctive mixture of realism and fantasy is apparent from the start. To the children, who have been bottled up in London for two years, the somewhat shabby house seems “a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise” (p. 10), and the chimney smoke from the local limekilns makes the valley beneath them glimmer “till they were like an enchanted city out of the Arabian Nights” (p. 12). In her casual conversation style, the narrator also gets in on the act. After informing her ostensibly juvenile audience that she will skip over the mundane events—to which adults might respond “How like life!” (p. 12)—she cleverly leads her readers (children and adults alike) into the realm of the marvelous by suggesting that when we think about it, the accepted facts of modern science, such as the roundness of the earth and its rotation around the sun, are no less astonishing than the events she’s about to relate, and they require a similar leap beyond the everyday world we can see and feel. Once we accept this demonstration of the marvelous character of the factual, we’re ready for the narrator’s almost matter-of-fact introduction of the marvelous: “Yet I daresay you believe all that about the earth and the sun, and if so you will find it quite easy to believe that before Anthea and Cyril and the others had been a week in the country they had found a fairy. At least they called it that, because that was what it called itself; and of course it knew best, but it was not at all like any fairy you ever saw or heard of or read about” (p. 13).
The narrator’s playful blending of the magical and the real sets the stage for what’s to come. As the children begin digging toward Australia in the local gravel-pit, they hear a sound that resolves itself into the words “You let me alone” (p. 16), and out of the sand emerges one of Nesbit’s most celebrated inventions—the Psammead, or “Sand-fairy,” derived from the Greek psammos (sand) and the names naiad (water nymph) and dryad (wood nymph) of Greek mythology. Like the name itself, this imaginary being, in contrast to the twittering tinkerbells of Victorian fairylands, is a lumpy composite assembled out of the body parts of more familiar creatures: “Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s” (p. 17). (See Millar’s illustrations on pp. 6, 58, 76, 111, and 147.) The Psammead’s character reveals a similar amalgamation of the real and the marvelous: Grumpy, mercurial, and ever concerned with the hair on its upper left whisker that was once exposed to water, the Psammead is also obliged to fulfill human wishes, though his normal limit is one wish per day, and his magic terminates at sunset. The Psammead’s recollection of the prehistoric past, when the shell-filled gravel-pit was still by the seaside and the children of our remotest ancestors asked him for practical things like dinosaur dinners, also combines the ordinary and the magical, awakening the imagination to the presence of a distant past whose traces may still be present in the very ground we stand on.
Nesbit’s fantasy novels often hark back to traditional fairy tales, and behind Five Children and It lies the well-known tale of “the three wishes,” which appears in many versions around the world. Once the children realize that the Psammead will grant their wishes, they consider the implications of one of the variants of the traditional tale—the “black pudding story” (p. 20), in which a man who dislikes his wife’s cooking wishes for a helping of black pudding, to which she reacts by wishing the pudding on his nose; he then must use the third and final wish to undo the effects of the second. (Coincidentally, a darker and instantly famous version of the tale, W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” appeared in 1902.) While expressing our desire to transcend the limits of ordinary existence, the fairy tale of “the three wishes” warns us to beware of our own wishes, dreams, and fantasies by revealing the consequences of their literal fulfillment. As Bruno Bettelheim points out, however, the self-canceling circularity of these tales is also reassuring and enhances our willingness to accept the reality of things as they are.3 In Nesbit’s case, the children witness the adverse effects of their wishes and welcome the return to normality at the end of each day, but their recurrent desire to return to the magical, compounded by the sheer excitement of some of their madcap adventures, suggests that the pleasures of the imagination are enticing enough to offset the risks and dangers that its exercise entails.
The children squander their first few wishes on conventional vanities. No sooner does the Psammead fulfill their initial request—to be “as beautiful as the day” (p. 21)—than they long for a return to their flawed natural selves, especially after the Lamb, who fails to recognize them, starts to cry inconsolably, and the nursemaid Martha, assuming they are strangers, denies them entry into the house. The setting sun rescues the children from their plight, but despite some precautionary deliberations on the following day, their next wish—“to be rich beyond the dreams of something or other” (p. 33)—is as formulaic as their first. It also yields similarly disappointing results when they discover that the ancient coins with which the Psammead has filled the gravel-pit are refused by the local villagers, who are suspicious enough to summon the police. Nesbit spices up the episode with the children’s supplementary wish that the servants won’t notice the Psammead’s magic, which leads to mayhem when Martha appears on the scene and is unable to see the allegedly incriminating coins with which the children have filled their pockets. Once again, the dusk brings a return to normal, and when the children wake up the next morning, their squabbles over the logic of wish-fulfillment indicates that they’ve grown somewhat wary of the Psammead and more discriminating in their wishes.
At the opposite end from these stock desires are the impulsive wishes that proceed from anger or insecurity. Annoyed that the Lamb has knocked over his ginger-beer, Robert expresses his anger by wishing that others would want the child so that “we might get some peace in our lives” (p. 56). Unfortunately, one of the rules of the Psammead’s magic is that wishes cannot be annulled, and as a result, from then until sunset the Lamb must be rescued from the affectionate clutches of one stranger after another, including the haughty Lady Chittenden, who otherwise has no love for children. In a similar episode later on, Cyril blurts out that he wishes the Lamb would grow up, and consequently the children must spend an entire day with an insufferable prig who disavows his pet name as “a relic of foolish and far-off childhood” (p. 152) and insists that his brothers and sisters address him by one of his baptismal names, Hilary, St. Maur, or Devereux. (See Millar’s illustration on p. 159, which depicts Martha holding the grown-up Lamb in her arms as if her were an infant, which within her spatial frame of reference he still is.) Also based on hotheaded desire is the episode in which the children accost the rather imposing “baker’s boy” (p. 128), who is in no mood to play the victim in a game of bandits, and in the aftermath of the ensuing skirmish, Robert seeks to avenge his defeat by wishing he was bigger than his rival. His wish is immediately granted, but the now gargantuan Robert must exercise some restraint in giving the ba
ker’s boy his comeuppance; and then, compelled to wait until sundown for the restoration of his normal proportions, he ends up as a sideshow spectacle at the local fair. Each of these incidents portrays the consequences of impetuous desire, but in their common concern with the vulnerability of children, they explore the conflict between the desire to secure the power that presumably comes with adult size and stature, and the grown-up recognition that we bear some responsibility for those who are even less secure than ourselves.
A third class of wishes is associated directly with art and the power of imagination. After the initial wishes for beauty and wealth go awry, the kind and thoughtful Anthea consults the Psammead, and while its only advice is “think before you speak” (p. 77), her wish for wings (that time-honored symbol of creative imagination) results not only in the literal gift of flight but in an experience more “wonderful and more like real magic than any wish the children had had yet” (p. 80). To be sure, when the day is done they are asleep in the turret of a church tower and must be rescued by the local vicar, but in the end the joy of their magical journey seems to outweigh the humiliations of their descent into ordinary reality and the punishment meted out by the angry Martha upon their arrival home. Moreover, as a result of this escapade Martha also meets the gamekeeper of the vicarage; therefore, as the narrator intimates, the magic of this episode may have some enduring effects, though at this point in the novel “that is another story” (p. 100), and we must wait for the final chapter to learn the outcome.
In two later episodes of a similar kind, the books the children read inspire their flights of imagination. In the first instance, the charm of popular “historical romances for the young” (p. 105) produces the transformation of their house into a castle under siege (though the servants, who remain blind to the magic, continue to go about their business as usual). Nesbit seems to enjoy poking at the stilted language of the besiegers, as well as the historical mishmash of their equipment, with shields from the Middle Ages, swords from the Napoleonic era, and tents “of the latest brand” (p. 105). But despite Robert’s effort to persuade them that they’re merely fictive beings, these storybook soldiers pose a real threat to the “castle,” at least as long as daylight lasts, and once the sunset puts an end to the encounter, the children not only breathe a sigh of relief but also find themselves exhilarated by the episode. While engaging in a parody that showcases the absurdity of these historical romances, Nesbit also pays homage to their power to delight and to stimulate the imagination of the juvenile reader.
The last of these literary episodes materializes from a reading of The Last of the Mohicans, and it generates considerable suspense as the children wait apprehensively for the Indians—“ ‘not big ones, you know, but little ones, just about the right size for us to fight’ ” (p. 161)—to exhibit their legendary stealth and suddenly emerge out of nowhere. Once the savages appear and the children realize that their scalps are really on the line, they make a desperate run for the gravel-pit, but before they can find the Psammead, they are surrounded by their miniature assailants and prepare themselves for the scalping-knife and the flames. Fortunately, the Indians can’t find any firewood to burn their enemies, and the peril comes to an end when their chief bewails this “strange unnatural country” and wishes that “we were but in our native forest once more” (p. 171). Like the story of the besieged castle, the comic undercurrent of this episode, which turns on the disparity between the fictive and the real, is offset by the emphasis upon the capacity of imagination to enchant the world that ordinary mortals inhabit. But while the parodic element of the castle episode puts limits on the sense of real danger, Nesbit’s transposition of Indian warriors to modern Britain goes further in producing some of the same thrilling emotions that keep us riveted to a well-wrought romance of high adventure.
The heightened intensity of the Indian affair paves the way for the final drama, in which the children eagerly await the return of their parents. But the distinctive magic inherent in the reunion between parents and children is complicated by a final impulsive wish to grace their mother’s return with a special gift. When the children hear that Lady Chittenden’s valuable jewelry has been stolen, Jane casually wishes that her mother might own such wonderful things. As readers we might well sympathize with the transfer of riches from the child-hating ogress to the loving mother, but the wish turns their mother into a receiver of stolen goods, and the suspicion that wrongly falls on the vicarage gamekeeper threatens to foil Martha’s plans for marriage. In desperation the children strike a final deal with the Psammead, who undoes the effects of their folly in exchange for a reprieve from “silly” gift-giving and a promise not to reveal his identity to adults, who might ask for “earnest things” such as “a graduated income-tax, and old-age-pensions and manhood suffrage, and free secondary education, and dull things like that; and get them, and keep them, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy” (p. 182). As in the fairy tale of “the three wishes,” the Psammead’s circular and self-negating magic may help to reconcile us to things as they are, and its final disappearance into the sand represents a return from the enticing world of wishes to the more secure if less enthralling routines of everyday life. But there is more to this story than a lesson on “the vanity of human wishes.” At the conclusion of the novel, the return of absent parents, along with the prospective union of Martha and her fiance, possesses a certain magic of its own. Moreover, Nesbit conveys the sense that as double-edged and dangerous as many of our wishes may be, they also express an enduring impulse to transcend the limited and sometimes painful and unjust conditions of life as it is. And perhaps most of all, the Psammead’s magic invites us to engage in flights of imagination that restrictively “realistic” fiction often fails to provide. In this respect, Nesbit carefully balances the moral of “the three wishes” with the seemingly ineradicable desires that give rise not only to traditional fairy tales but also to her own distinctive union of the magical and the mundane.
Nesbit retained the same juvenile ensemble in her two subsequent fantasies, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet. In the first, the scene shifts to London, and the Psammead is replaced by another wishing creature, the Phoenix, the legendary bird known for its beauty and its singular capacity for rebirth from its own ashes. Out of commission for two millennia, Nesbit’s high-toned patrician bird returns to life in the family parlor and takes the children on a loosely organized series of romps through London and beyond, all the while exhibiting its somewhat haughty but engagingly comic dignity—proud, poetic, and disdainful of the prosaic character of modern life. The Psammead reappears in The Story of the Amulet, but it plays a relatively minor role in the quest for the missing half of a magic charm that has the capacity to confer “our hearts’ desire” (p. 281). The clue to the missing half-amulet is buried in the past. The search takes the children on a series of voyages in time, first to a prehistoric village along the Nile (c.6000 B.C.) and then to ancient Babylon at the height of its glory. After that, they voyage to the seafaring civilization of ancient Tyre, the glorious mythical continent of Atlantis just before it sinks into the sea, ancient Britain at the time of Caesar’s conquest (55 B.C.), again to ancient Egypt (this time during the reign of the Pharoah), and finally forward in time, first to a utopian London free of the ills of the Edwardian city, and then to the near future, where they encounter their own adult selves. Nesbit has nearly as much fun with overlapping times as she did with overlapping spaces in Five Children and It, when, for instance, the Queen of Babylon is transported from her own time to the children’s London and is not only appalled by the shabbiness of the modern metropolis but also insists on the return of her jewels from the British Museum. (C. S. Lewis, who admired the novel, recreates this episode in The Magician’s Nephew [1955], where the much more treacherous Queen Jadis escapes from her own world and stirs up trouble in Edwardian London.)4 Despite such touches of humor, each of these time-travel adventures invites reflection on the nature of so
ciety and the state, and taken together they reflect the increasingly serious mood of Nesbit’s later fantasies. So does the joining together of the two halves of the amulet, which produces a vision of a higher domain that transcends the injurious divisions and contradictions of everyday life and allows us to pass “through the perfect charm to the perfect union, which is not of time or space.” Nesbit would never abandon the kind of “funny” magic that prevails in Five Children and It, but the resolution of The Story of the Amulet points to the more “serious” magic that would come to the fore in her next major fantasy, The Enchanted Castle.
V
Nesbit’s most ambitious work of fiction starts off as most of her previous novels. Once again, we meet a group of middle-class siblings who set forth on a series of adventures. In this instance, we begin with a threesome—Gerald, Kathleen, and Jimmy—who are compelled to remain at school for the holidays in the charge of a young schoolmistress, the good-natured “Mademoiselle.” Like the Bastables and the “five children,” these siblings are reasonably well differentiated and inclined to incessant squabbling. Gerald, the oldest and most resourceful, bears a certain resemblance to Oswald Bastable. Unlike the latter, he is not the narrator of the novel, but he possesses the habit of narrating his own actions in a self-conscious literary manner (annoying to the other children, if amusing to us) that inevitably grants him pride of place: “ ‘The young explorers, ... dazzled at first by the darkness of the cave, could see nothing.... But their dauntless leader, whose eyes had grown used to the dark while the clumsy forms of the others were bunging up the entrance, had made a discovery’ ” (p. 198). Jimmy, by contrast, is the resident skeptic who not only punctures the pretensions of others but also plays an important role as the doubting Thomas of this mischievously magical universe. Kathleen, the middle child, is less well marked, but as with Anthea and some of Nesbit’s other young girls, her common sense and compassion offset some of the eccentricities of her male companions and provide some ballast to the group. Like the “five children” before them, Nesbit’s new team wanders into a magical world, but we soon discover that in this novel it is often difficult to distinguish the enchanted and the real, and questions of truth and belief play a more prominent role than in the earlier novels. Over time we also discover that the plot of this novel, which seems to begin as another loosely organized sequence of episodes, is more unified and considerably more complex than its predecessors. Nesbit offers no explicit structural signposts, but if nothing else, the twelve untitled chapters seem to fall into two discrete sets of six, and as we shall see, the symmetries established by the apparent subdivision of each half of the book into three two-chapter sets indicates that she took considerable pains to construct a carefully integrated work of art.