by Edith Nesbit
OLD AGE.
ON THE MEDWAY.
OUT OF THE FULNESS OF THE HEART THE MOUTH SPEAKETH.
OVER AND DONE
OVER AND UNDONE
PARTING
PESSIMISM
PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON.
PHILOSOPHY
POSSESSION.
PRAYER IN TIME OF WAR
PRAYER UNDER GRAY SKIES.
QUAND MÊME
QUESTIONS
QUIETA NE MOVETE
RAISON D’ETRE.
RENUNCIATION.
RESURGAM.
RETRO SATHANAS.
RICHBOROUGH CASTLE
ROCHESTER CASTLE.
RONDEAU TO AUSTIN DOBSON.
RONDEAU TO W. E. HENLEY.
RONDEAU.
RUCKINGE CHURCH.
RYE.
SATURDAY SONG
SEA-SHELLS
SECOND NATURE.
SILENCE.
SONG. A MONTH OF GREEN AND TENDER MAY
SONG. DAY IS FAIR, AND SO IS SHE
SONG. GOOD-BYE, MY LOVE, MY ONLY DEAR
SONG. I HAD A SOUL
SONG. I HEAR THE WAVES TO-NIGHT
SONG. LOVE ME LITTLE, LOVE ME LONG
SONG. NOW THE SPRING IS WAKING
SONG. OH, BABY, BABY, BABY DEAR
SONG. OH, LOVE, I LEAVE
SONG. SOFT IS THE GROUND UNDERFOOT
SONG. THE SUMMER DOWN THE GARDEN WALKS
SONG. THE SUNSHINE OF YOUR PRESENCE LIES
SONG. WE LOVED, MY LOVE, AND NOW IT SEEMS
SONG: MY SWEET, MY SWEET
SPLENDIDE MENDAX.
SPRING IN WAR-TIME
SPRING SONG
ST. VALENTINE’S DAY.
SUMMER SONG.
SURRENDER
TEKEL
THE BALLAD OF SIR HUGH.
THE BALLAD OF THE TWO SPELLS.
THE BEATIFIC VISION.
THE BEECH TREE.
THE BETROTHAL.
THE CHAMPION
THE CONFESSION.
THE DAISIES
THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
THE DEAD TO THE LIVING
THE DEATH OF AGNES
THE DECEMBER ROSE
THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA
THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH FOR THE STAR.
THE DESPOT
THE DESTROYER.
THE DEVIL’S DUE.
THE EGOISTS.
THE ENCHANTED GARDEN.
THE ETERNAL
THE FERRY
THE FIELDS OF FLANDERS
THE FIRE
THE GARDEN REFUSED
THE GARDEN.
THE GHOST.
THE GIFT OF LIFE
THE HOME-COMING
THE HUSBAND OF TO-DAY
THE ISLAND.
THE JILTED LOVER TO HIS MOTHER.
THE LAST BETRAYAL.
THE LAST DEFEAT
THE LAST ENVOY
THE LAST THOUGHT.
THE LEAST POSSIBLE.
THE LIGHTHOUSE.
THE LOST SOUL AND THE SAVED.
THE LOVER TO HIS LASS.
THE LOWER ROOM.
THE MAGIC FLOWER.
THE MAGIC RING
THE MAIDEN’S PRAYER.
THE MILL.
THE MOAT HOUSE
THE MODERN JUDAS.
THE MOORS
THE MOTHER’S PRAYER
THE NEST
THE NEW DISPENSATION.
THE OLD DISPENSATION.
THE OLD MAGIC
THE ONLOOKER.
THE POET TO HIS LOVE.
THE POINT OF VIEW: I.
THE POINT OF VIEW: II.
THE POOR MAN’S GUEST.
THE PRAYER.
THE PRODIGAL SON.
THE PRODIGAL’S RETURN
THE QUARREL.
THE RETURN
THE RIVER MAIDENS.
THE SICK JOURNALIST.
THE SINGING OF THE MAGNIFICAT
THE SKYLARK
THE SOUL TO THE IDEAL.
THE SPHINX
THE STAR.
THE STOLEN GOD.
THE TEMPTATION.
THE TEMPTATION.
THE THINGS THAT MATTER.
THE THREE KINGS.
THE TOUCHSTONE
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.
THE VAULT
THE VEIL OF MAYA.
THE WAY OF LOVE.
THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME
THE WIFE OF ALL AGES
THE WILL TO LIVE.
THE WOMAN’S WORLD.
THESE LITTLE ONES
TO A YOUNG POET.
TO HER: IN TIME OF WAR
TO HIS LADY, IMPLORING HER TO BE TRUE
TO IRIS.
TO ONE WHO PLEADED FOR CANDOUR IN LOVE.
TO ROSAMUND.
TO TWO WOMEN.
TO VERA, WHO ASKED A SONG.
TO WALTER SICKERT.
TRUE LOVE AND NEW LOVE.
TWO CHRISTMAS EVES
TWO LULLABIES.
TWO VOICES
UNOFFICIAL
UNTIL THE DAWN
VALUES
VIA AMORIS.
VIES MANQUÉES
WEDDING DAY
WHEN!
WHITE MAGIC
WINDFLOWERS
WINTER
WORK.
WORSHIP.
Non-Fiction
Nesbit and her second husband Tucker bought two former army huts at Jesson, St Mary’s Bay, on Romney Marsh, close to Dymchurch. The huts were immediately christened the Long Boat and the Jolly Boat. Edith, a heavy smoker all her life, soon fell ill. The ‘Duchess of Dymchurch’, as she was called by the locals, lay in her four-poster bed, looking across the marsh towards the hills of Kent that she had always loved. She died on 4 May 1924 and was buried in the quiet churchyard of St Mary’s in the Marsh.
WINGS AND THE CHILD
OR, THE BUILDING OF MAGIC CITIES
Nesbit’s last major achievement as a children’s novelist was The Magic City (1910), a utopian fantasy in which Philip enters the miniature city he has made and becomes its saviour, with the assistance of Lucy. The book begins with a miniature city built on a table top from a variety of everyday objects, including upturned bowls, nursery bricks, chess pieces, cigarette papers. In 1912 Nesbit was invited to build such a city for the Children’s Welfare exhibition at Olympia, London. Out of that invitation, Nesbit was inspired to write Wings and the Child, which was to form her reflections on the role of imagination in children’s play. The non-fiction book is unique in its approach and scope, teaching adults how to work with children, playing and imagining with a child’s mind. Published in 1913 by Hodder and Stoughton in London, Wings and the Child is a passionate argument for the need to encourage simple and creative play in children. Nesbit provides concrete suggestions and fresh ways to engage children’s imaginations so that they can exercise this important skill, preparing fully for the rest of their lives.
The first edition
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER I. Of Understanding
CHAPTER II. New Ways
CHAPTER III. Playthings
CHAPTER IV. Imagination
CHAPTER V. Of Taking Root
CHAPTER VI. Beauty and Knowledge
CHAPTER VII. Of Building and Other Matters
CHAPTER VIII. The Moral Code
CHAPTER IX. Praise and Punishment
CHAPTER X. The One Thing Needful
PART II
CHAPTER I. Romance in Games
CHAPTER II. Building Cities
CHAPTER III. Bricks — and Other Things
CHAPTER IV. The Magic City
CHAPTER V. Materials
CHAPTER VI. Collections
CHAPTER VII. The Poor Child’s City
CHAPTER VIII. The End
TO THE READER
When this book first came to my mind it came as a history and theory of the building of Magic Cities on tables, with bricks and toys and little things such as a c
hild may find and use. But as I kept the thought by me it grew and changed, as thoughts will do, until at last it took shape as an attempt to contribute something, however small and unworthy, to the science of building a magic city in the soul of a child, a city built of all things pure and fine and beautiful. As you read, it will, I hope, seem to you that something of what I say is true — in much, no doubt, it will seem to you that I am mistaken; but however you may disagree with me, you will, I trust, at least have faith in the honesty of my purpose. If I seem to you to be too dogmatic, to lay down the law too much as though I were the teacher and you the learner, I beg you to believe that it is in no such spirit that I have written. Rather it is as though you and I, spending a quiet evening by your fire, talked together of the things that matter, and as though I laid before you all the things that were in my heart — not stopping at every turn to say “Do you not think so too?” and “I hope you agree with me?” but telling you, straight from the heart, what I have felt and thought and, I humbly say, known about children and the needs of children. I have talked to you as to a friend, without the reservations and apologies which we use with strangers. And if, in anything, I shall have offended you, I entreat you to extend to me the forgiveness and the forbearance which you would exercise towards a friend who had offended you, not meaning to offend, and to believe that I have spoken to you as frankly and plainly as I would wish you to speak to me, were you the writer and I the reader.
E. Nesbit.
PART I
CHAPTER I. Of Understanding
It is not with any pretension to special knowledge of my subject that I set out to write down what I know about children. I have no special means of knowing anything: I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience. And by experience I do not mean scientific experience, that is the recorded results of experiments, the tabulated knowledge wrung from observation; I mean personal experience, that is to say, memory. You may observe the actions of children and chronicle their sayings, and produce from these, perhaps, a lifelike sketch of a child, as it appears to the grown-up observer; but observation is no key to the inner mysteries of a child’s soul. The only key to those mysteries is in knowledge, the knowledge of what you yourself felt when you were good and little and a child. You can remember how things looked to you, and how things looked to the other children who were your intimates. Our own childhood, besides furnishing us with an exhaustless store of enlightening memories, furnishes us with the one opportunity of our lives for the observation of children — other children. There is a freemasonry between children, a spontaneous confidence and give-and-take which is and must be for ever impossible between children and grown-ups, no matter how sympathetic the grown-up, how confiding the child. Between the child and the grown-up there is a great gulf fixed — and this gulf, the gulf between one generation and another, can never be really bridged. You may learn to see across it, a little, or sometimes in rare cases to lean very far across it so that you can just touch the tips of the little fingers held out from the other side. But if your dealings with those on the other side of the gulf are to be just, generous, noble, and helpful, they must be motived and coloured by your memories of the time when you yourself were on the other side — when you were a child full of your own hopes, dreams, aims, interests, instincts, and imaginings, and over against you, kindly perhaps, tenderly loving, often tenderly loved, but still in some mysterious way antagonistic and counting as “Them,” were the grown-ups. I might say elders, parents, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters, but the word which the child himself uses seems to me, for all reasons, to be the best word for my use, because it expresses fully and finally the nature of the gulf between. The grown-ups are the people who once were children and who have forgotten what it felt like to be a child. And Time marks with the same outward brand those who have forgotten and those who do not forget. So that even the few who have managed to slip past the Customs-house with their bundle of memories intact can never fully display them. These are a sort of contraband, and neither the children nor the grown-ups will ever believe that that which we have brought with us from the land of childhood is genuine. The grown-ups accuse us of invention, sometimes praise us for it, when all we have is memory; and the children imagine that we must have been watching them, and thus surprised a few of their secrets, when all that we have is the secrets which were our own when we were children — secrets which were so bound up with the fibre of our nature that we could never lose them, and so go through life with them, our dearest treasures. Such people feel to the end that they are children in a grown-up world. For a middle-aged gentleman with a beard or a stout elderly lady with spectacles to move among other elderly and spectacled persons feeling that they are still children, and that the other elderly and spectacled ones are really grown-ups, seems thoroughly unreasonable, and therefore those who have never forgotten do not, as a rule, say anything about it. They just mingle with the other people, looking as grown-up as any one — but in their hearts they are only pretending to be grown-up: it is like acting in a charade. Time with his make-up box of lines and wrinkles, his skilful brush that paints out the tints and the contours of youth, his supply of grey wigs and rounded shoulders and pillows for the waist, disguises the actors well enough, and they go through life altogether unsuspected. The tired eyes close on a world which to them has always been the child’s world, the tired hands loose the earthly possessions which have, to them, been ever the toys of the child. And deep in their hearts is the faith and the hope that in the life to come it may not be necessary to pretend to be grown-up.
Such people as these are never pessimists, though they may be sinners; and they will be trusting, to the verge of what a real grown-up would call imbecility. To them the world will be, from first to last, a beautiful place, and every unbeautiful thing will be a surprise, hurting them like a sudden blow. They will never learn prudence, or parsimony, nor know, with the unerring instinct of the really grown-up, the things that are or are not done by the best people. All their lives they will love, and expect love — and be sad, wondering helplessly when they do not get it. They will expect beautiful quixotic impulsive generosities and splendours from a grown-up world which has forgotten what impulse was: and to the very end they will not leave off expecting. They will be easily pleased and easily hurt, and the grown-ups in grain will contemplate their pains and their pleasures with an uncomprehending irritation.
If these children, disguised by grown-up bodies, are ever recognised for what they are, it is when they happen to have the use of their pens — when they write for and about children. Then grown-up people will call them intelligent and observant, and children will write to them and ask the heart-warm, heart-warming question, “How did you know?” For if they can become articulate they will speak the language that children understand, and children will love, not them, for their identity is cloaked with grey grown-up-ness, but what they say. There are some of these in whom the fire of genius burns up and licks away the trappings under which Time seeks to disguise them — Andersen, Stevenson, Juliana Ewing were such as these — and the world knows them for what they were, and adores in them what in the uninspired it would decry and despise.
To these others who have the memories of childhood untainted and yet have not the gift and relief of words, to these I address myself in the first instance, because they will understand without any involved explanation on my part what it is that I am driving at, and it is these who, alone, can teach the real grown-ups the things which they have forgotten. For these things can be taught, these things can be re-learned. I would have every man and woman in whom the heart of childhood still lives, protest, however feebly and haltingly, yet with all the power of the heart, against machine-made education — against the instruction which crams a child with facts and starves it of dreams, which forces the free foot into heavy boots and bids it walk on narrow pavement, which crushes with heavy hand the wings of the soul, and presses th
e flower of imagination flat between the pages of a lexicon.
THE KING’S SUMMER-HOUSE.
CHAPTER II. New Ways
“What,” we ask with anxious gravity, “what is the best sort of teaching for children?” One might as sanely ask what is the best sort of spectacles for men, or the best size in gloves for women. And the blind coarse generalisation which underlies that question is the very heart and core of the muddled, musty maze we call education. We talk of the best sort of education for children, as we might talk of the best sort of polish for stoves, the best sort of nourishment for mice. Stoves are all alike, they vary in ugliness perhaps, but the iron soul of one is as the iron soul of the other. The polish that is good for one is good for all. Mice may, and do, vary in size and colour; their mousehood does not vary, nor their taste for cheese. In the inner nature, in the soul and self of it, each child is different from any other child, and the education that treats children as a class and not as individual human beings is the education whose failure is bringing our civilisation about our ears even as we speak.
Each child is an explorer in a new country — an explorer with its own special needs and curiosities. We put up iron railings to keep the explorers to our own sordidly asphalted paths. The little free wild creatures would seek their meat from God: we round them into herds, pen them in folds, and feed them with artificial foods — drab flat oil cakes all alike, not considering that for some brown nuts and red berries, and for some the new clean green grass, may be the bread of life.
Or, if you take the mind of a child to be a garden wherein flowers grow that might be trained to beauty, you bring along your steam-roller, and crush everything to a flat field where you may grow cabbages. It is so good for the field, you say — because you like cabbages.
Liberty is one of the rights we claim for ourselves, though God knows we get little enough of it and use still less; and Liberty is one of the rights that a child above all needs — every possible liberty, of thought, of word, of deed. The old systems of education seem to have found it good to coerce a child for the simple sake of coercion — to make it do what the master chose, to make it leave undone those things which it wished to do and to do those things which it did not wish to do — nay, more, wished violently and conclusively not to do. To force the choice of the teacher on the child, to override the timid natural impulses of the child with the hard hoofs of the teacher’s individuality, to crush out all initiative, to force the young supple mind into a mould, to lop the budding branches, nip off the sensitive seeking tendrils, to batter down the child’s will by the brute force of the grown-up will, to “break the child’s spirit,” as the cursed phrase used to run — this was, in effect, what education meant. There was a picture in Punch, I remember — at least I have forgotten the picture, but I remember the legend: “Cissy, go and see what Bobbie’s doing, and tell him not to.”