INTRODUCTION
In “The Book of Beasts,” the first story in her popular collection The Book of Dragons (1900), E. (for Edith) Nesbit tells the tale of a boy who unexpectedly inherits the throne of his country. Like his somewhat eccentric predecessor, the new king is soon drawn to the treasures of the royal library. Ignoring the advice of his counselors, the boy approaches a particularly handsome volume, The Book of Beasts, but as he gazes at the beautiful butterfly painted on the front page, the creature begins to flutter its wings and proceeds to fly out the library window. Unfortunately, the same thing occurs with the great dragon who appears on a subsequent page, and soon the beast starts to wreak havoc (though only on Saturdays) throughout the land. After the dragon carries off his rocking horse, the young king sets free a hippogriff from the The Book of Beasts, and together the boy and his white-winged companion lure the dragon to the Pebbly Waste, where the fiery creature, now deprived of the shade that keeps it from overheating, wriggles back into the book from which it came. The rocking horse is recovered but asks to live in the hippogriff’s page of the book, while the hippogriff, for its efforts, assumes the position of King’s Own Rocking Horse.
The release of fantastic creatures into the real world, at once serious and playful, exemplifies the most distinctive feature of Nesbit’s fantasies: the ceaseless interplay between the imaginary and the actual, the fluctuation between the magical world that her children enter through their books, games, and adventures, and the limiting conditions of everyday life. Unlike most of her predecessors, who situate the action of their books entirely in an imaginary realm or swiftly transport their protagonists into it, Nesbit’s fantasies are perpetually shuffling back and forth between the marvelous and the real, and much of their fascination lies in the interaction and confusion between them. In Five Children and It (1902), her first fantasy novel, the children’s exercise of imagination comes simply from the opportunity to have their wishes granted, and the results, however amusing to us, are sufficiently troublesome or embarrassing to make them welcome (at least temporarily) the return to the ordinary. In The Enchanted Castle (1907), the magic is more elusive and complex, and it leads to a serious meditation on the gift of imagination—its multi-form capacity to produce butterflies as well as dragons, and above all its power to redeem and transfigure, as the hippogriff does, the distress, insecurity, and inevitable sorrows of life in this world.
I
The life of Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) spanned the period that is now regarded as the golden age of children’s literature in the English-speaking world. The major precondition for this development lies in the emergence of modern industrial society, which produced not only an increasingly literate middle-class population but also a sharp division between home and workplace that effectively created the concept and condition of “childhood” as we now know it. Books for children have a long history, but there is little precedent for the boom in children’s fiction that began in the mid-nineteenth century. This new literature appeared in a variety of forms, including, among others, the boys’ adventure tale, the family story (a specialty of women writers), and the fantasy novel, which was often cross-written for children and adults. The adventure story, which descends from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its many imitators, was pioneered in the mid-nineteenth century by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792—1848), R. M. Ballantyne (1825-1894), and Mayne Reid (1818-1883), and somewhat later by the prolific G. A. Henty (1832-1902), “the boys’ own historian,” who wrote more than one hundred novels featuring young male heroes caught up in significant historical conflicts. (Nesbit parodies Henty in Five Children and It, chapters 6 and 7; see endnote 4.) Among the finest fruits of this genre are the classics by Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, 1883; Kidnapped, 1886) and Mark Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884). The family story, which also rose to prominence in this period, is associated primarily with women writers such as Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901), Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-1885), Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839-1921), and, in America, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), whose Little Women (1868) is widely regarded as the first masterpiece of this tradition, which paved the way for later classics such as Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and its sequels. In retrospect, perhaps the most remarkable children’s genre to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century is the cross-generational fantasy novel. Inspired by the immensely popular fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (translated 1823-1826) and Hans Christian Andersen (translated in 1846), the fantasy tradition was built on the firm foundation established by three Victorian authors—George MacDonald (1824-1905), Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), and Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)—who produced a series of masterpieces over the course of little more than a decade. These include MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), At the Back of the North Wind (1871), and The Princess and the Goblin (1872); Kingsley’s singular classic The Water-Babies (1863); and Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). In the first decade of the twentieth century, this tradition produced an especially rich harvest, often in the form of animal fantasies that Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936) popularized in his Jungle Books (1894, 1895); Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit series (begun in 1900); Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900) and its sequels; Kipling’s own Just So Stories (1902) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906); J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” (first staged in 1904); Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908); and Walter de la Mare’s The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910). It is no coincidence that in this same brief and remarkable period, which came to an end around World War I, E. Nesbit also produced nearly all of the children’s fantasy novels for which she is now remembered.
II
As a writer of children’s fiction, Nesbit often drew upon her own early life and her experience as the mother of five children. It is no accident that the absence of one or both parents looms large in her fiction: Her father, a well-known agronomist who ran a small agricultural college in London, died when she was three. For the next few years, his widow managed the college on her own, but when Edith’s older sister was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the family began moving from place to place in an ultimately futile effort to find a hospitable climate. Edith herself was dispatched to one unpleasant boarding school after another, but as she recalls in her later memoir, these nomadic years also provided her with a rich quarry of adventures to which she repeatedly returned in her juvenile fiction. (The memoir, “My School-Days,” originally a series of vignettes in a children’s periodical, was later reprinted under the title Long Ago When I Was Young; see “For Further Reading.”)
In 1877 Edith met the dashing, intelligent, and politically active Hubert Bland, and two months after their marriage in 1880 she gave birth to the first of their children. Despite his many gifts, Bland was an uncertain breadwinner, and for many years Edith divided her time between caring for the children and writing (sometimes in collaboration with her husband) to support the family. In 1884 the Blands became founding members of the Fabian Society, the socialist think tank that under the guidance of Sidney Webb, its most outstanding theoretician, and his wife, Beatrice, would play a major role in the formation of progressive social policy over the coming decades. Hubert was not an intellectual on the order of Sidney Webb, but he became a respected newspaper columnist and remained a prominent member of the organization for many years. Edith’s position was less well defined, but as an active participant in the society she became acquainted with many prominent artists and intellectuals of the era, including George Bernard Shaw (with whom she had a brief affair in 1886); the exiled Russian philosopher Prince Peter Kropotkin; Annie Besant, the socialist firebrand who went on to lead the influential Theosophical Society; the renowned sexologist Edward Carpenter; and, some years later, H. G. Wells (whose ill-fated adulterous affair with the Blands’ daughter complicated his already strained relations with the Fabian leadership and led to his departure from the society). The agenda of the Fabian Soc
iety surfaces occasionally in Edith’s fiction, especially when she turns her attention to the extreme inequalities of Edwardian society, which were strikingly evident in the dismal conditions of the vast London slums. Nevertheless, scholars have raised questions about the degree and depth of her political commitments. During the height of her fame, she surprised her contemporaries by opposing the drive for women’s suffrage (which succeeded by 1918), and the typically good-hearted middle-class children of her most famous novels often amuse themselves by deceiving their bewildered servants.
Similar inconsistencies appear in Nesbit’s marriage and in other aspects of her personal life. On the one hand, she was known for her independent spirit. She adopted the trappings of the turn-of-the-century emancipated woman, cutting her hair short, wearing loose-fitting “aesthetic” clothing, and assuming what was then the exclusively male prerogative of smoking cigarettes. She also responded to her husband’s incessant womanizing by conducting affairs of her own, including the fling with George Bernard Shaw that she later turned into a romantic novel, Daphne in Fitzroy Street (1909). Many men courted the lively, athletic, and by all accounts highly attractive woman, and in later years she would hold court in her large rented home, Well Hall, surrounded by younger male admirers with whom she occasionally became involved. (Noel Coward, whom she met in her old age, called her “the most genuine Bohemian I ever met.”)1
On the other hand, the volatile and often hot-tempered Edith remained a devoted wife to her philandering husband. She raised two of his children by another woman—her friend Alice Hoatson—as if they were her own, and even allowed Alice to live with the family as a housekeeper. She also acquiesced to Hubert’s less palatable political views, including his opposition to women’s suffrage, and despite the occasional flare-ups that led Shaw to declare that “no two people were ever married who were better calculated to make the worst of each other,” she remained closely tied and dependent upon Hubert until his death in 1914.2 Three years later she surprised her family and friends by marrying a placid former tugboat operator, known as “the Skipper,” and settled into a happy if increasingly penurious old age until her own death in 1924.
Nesbit began publishing poetry in her teens, and for many years her primary aspiration was to develop into a great poet. From the time of her marriage until the end of the century she composed a multitude of verse, essays, short stories, adult novels, and stories for children, often working at top speed to keep the family afloat. Although she acquired a modest reputation as a poet and novelist, very few of these works have survived the test of time. After twenty years of prolific publication, she finally achieved acclaim with the release of her first children’s novel, The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Being the Adventures of the Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune (1899), a family adventure tale based on stories she had written for various magazines. The book sold well, and she capitalized on its success with a sequel, The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). At the same time, she wrote her first fantasy novel, Five Children and It (1902), and employed the same set of children in two sequels, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). By this time her reputation was well established, but more successes would follow. In 1906 she published one of her most enduring family stories, The Railway Children, and the following year The Enchanted Castle, which many regard as her most mature work of fiction. Inspired by the success of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), she then produced two time-travel romances, The House of Arden (1908) and its sequel, Harding’s Luck (1909), which have since lost some of their popular appeal, though a number of readers regard them as her best. A few other notable works appeared in subsequent years—The Magic City (1910), The Wonderful Garden (1911), The Magic World (1912), and Wet Magic (1913)—but in her last decade she wrote comparatively little for children and nothing to match the level of achievement in her decade-long run from The Story of the Treasure Seekers to Harding’s Luck.
III
The Story of the Treasure Seekers established the prototype for both the “realistic” family adventures and the “magical” fantasies that Nesbit composed over the next few years. At the outset of these novels, we are introduced to a middle-class family, often in distressed circumstances. Since the parents are either absent or preoccupied, the children are nominally in the care of servants, but usually left to their own devices, they embark on a series of exploits, sometimes designed to rectify the situation at home, at other times simply for the sake of adventure or sheer diversion. In The Treasure Seekers, we meet the six Bastable children (four boys and two girls), whose mother is dead and whose father is struggling with business problems. According to the eldest boy, Oswald, the novel’s delightfully bookish and vainglorious narrator, the children seek to restore “the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable,” and they launch their quest by digging for buried treasure in their own garden. The scheme collapses when the roof of their underground tunnel caves in on the hapless Albert-next-door, but thanks to Albert’s amiable uncle—the first of several sympathetic adults—the children end up “discovering” a few small coins in their pile of dirt. In successive episodes, the Bastables continue their fortune-hunting by becoming freelance detectives, selling poetry to an amused literary editor, publishing a newspaper (one copy sold), and “kidnapping” Albert-next-door to extract a ransom from his uncle. The consequences of their later exploits are more serious. Finding a newspaper ad for private loans, the children visit the office of their “Generous Benefactor,” but complications arise when it turns out that the lender is already their father’s creditor. Further embarrassments result from their attempt to secure another benefactor by setting their dog on a rich local aristocrat and pretending to come to his rescue, and from their efforts to market their own wine and Bastable’s Certain Cure for Colds. The loose episode structure that emerges from these relatively self-contained adventures is characteristic of Nesbit’s early novels, though the interaction between juvenile imagination and adult reality often grows more complex in the later episodes. In one of the final vignettes of The Treasure Seekers, the children are imagining the life of a robber when suddenly they see a stranger whom they suspect is the real thing. The stranger, who is actually a friend of their father, pretends that he has been caught in the act, but when another unknown figure appears upon the scene and turns out be a real burglar, the imaginary “robber” borrows the children’s toy gun to scare him off. The novel concludes with another reversal of expectations, when the children discover that their seemingly poor and unremarkable Indian Uncle is actually the rich benefactor for whom they’ve been searching all along. Typical of Nesbit, just as they relinquish their wishes and fantasies in favor of a more realistic point of view, the children discover that the real world may be as enchanted as the world of their dreams. Or as the artfully artless Oswald puts it at the end, “I can’t help it if it is like Dickens, because it happens this way. Real life is often something like books.”
Nesbit went on to write further adventures of the Bastables, including The Wouldbegoods, her greatest financial success, and The New Treasure Seekers. She created a new set of protagonists for her next family adventure novel, The Railway Children (1906), but the design of the story remains much the same. Once again we find a middle-class family in straitened circumstances: Recalling the famous Dreyfus affair (still unresolved at the time Nesbit was writing), the father has been sent to prison, wrongly accused of spying for a foreign power, while the mother transports the family to a country house and tries to make ends meet with her writing. The children, initially unaware of the reason for their father’s absence, are drawn to the local railway line and embark on a series of adventures that lead to unexpected consequences, ranging from embarrassment over their misguided attempt to raise charity for a poor working-class family to commendation for their heroic efforts in helping to avert a railway disaster. Their adventures also place them in contact with
a distinguished passenger, an unnamed “old gentleman” whose intervention, akin to that of the Indian Uncle in The Treasure Seekers, leads to the exoneration of their father and his return to the family. Although some readers found the novel excessively sentimental and lamented the loss of the Bastable clan, The Railway Children has remained a perennial favorite, especially in Britain, where it has been dramatized repeatedly on film and television.
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).
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