Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

The children stood round the hole in a ring, looking at the creature they had found. It was worth looking at. 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.

(from Five Children and It, page 17)

I daresay you have often thought what you would do if you had three wishes given you, and have despised the old man and his wife in the black-pudding story, and felt certain that if you had the chance you could think of three really useful wishes without a moment’s hesitation. These children had often talked this matter over, but, now the chance had suddenly come to them, they could not make up their minds.

(from Five Children and It, pages 20-21)

“I was always generous from a child,” said the Sand-fairy. “I’ve spent the whole of my waking hours in giving. But one thing I won’t give—that’s advice.” (from Five Children and It, page 77)

 

“Friends, Romans, countrymen—and women—we found a Sammyadd. We have had wishes. We’ve had wings, and being beautiful as the day—ugh!—that was pretty jolly beastly if you like—and wealth and castles, and that rotten gipsy business with the Lamb. But we’re no forrader. We haven’t really got anything worth having for our wishes.”

(from Five Children and It, page 126)

“Why, don’t you see, if you told grown-ups I should have no peace of my life. They’d get hold of me, and they wouldn’t wish silly things like you do, but real earnest things; and the scientific people would hit on some way of making things last after sunset, as likely as not; and they’d ask for 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.”

(from Five Children and It, page 182)

And they were at school in a little town in the West of England—the boys at one school, of course, and the girl at another, because the sensible habit of having boys and girls at the same school is not yet as common as I hope it will be some day.

(from The Enchanted Castle, page 191)

“Well, don’t let’s spoil the show with any silly old not believing,” said Gerald with decision. “I’m going to believe in magic as hard as I can. This is an enchanted garden, and that’s an enchanted castle, and I’m jolly well going to explore.” (from The Enchanted Castle, page 204)

 

There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything may happen.

(from The Enchanted Castle, page 345)

The moonbeam slants more and more; now it touches the far end of the stone, now it draws nearer and nearer to the middle of it, now at last it touches the very heart and centre of that central stone. And then it is as though a spring were touched, a fountain of light released. Everything changes. Or, rather, everything is revealed. There are no more secrets. The plan of the world seems plain, like an easy sum that one writes in big figures on a child’s slate.

(from The Enchanted Castle, page 409)

It is all very well for all of them to pretend that the whole of this story is my own invention: facts are facts, and you can’t explain them away.

(from The Enchanted Castle, page 412)

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Five Children and It was first published in 1902.
The Enchanted Castle was first published in 1907.

 

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new
Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By,
Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright © 2005 by Sanford Schwartz.

 

Note on Edith Nesbit, The World of Edith Nesbit,
Inspired by The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It,
and Comments & Questions
Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

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The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-274-1 ISBN-10: 1-59308-274-6

eISBN : 978-1-411-43211-6

LC Control Number 2005926182

 

Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

 

Printed in the United States of America
QM
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Edith Nesbit, a pioneer of twentieth-century children’s fiction, was one of the major authors of the “Golden Age” of children’s literature, which included Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Louisa May Alcott, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. She was born in 1858, the youngest of six children. Her childhood was disrupted in 1862 by the sudden death of her father, the head of a small agricultural college in South London. For several years, Edith’s mother ran the college on her own, but when Edith’s sister Mary contracted tuberculosis, Mrs. Nesbit began moving the family to various locations in England and France in an ultimately futile effort to find a suitable climate. The energetic and sometimes mischievous Edith was sent off intermittently to boarding schools, where she was often unhappy. At other times, she was allowed to roam freely through the countryside around the homes the family rented. She began publishing poetry in her teens, and though her lasting reputation is based on her children’s books, she aspired to become a major poet throughout her life.

In 1880 Edith married the dashing and politically active Hubert Bland and soon afterward gave birth to their first child. Four years later the couple joined Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and several others as founding members of the Fabian Society, an influential circle of progressive intellectuals who would play a major role in the formation of social policy over the coming decades; Bland edited the society’s journal. Since he was an uncertain breadwinner, Edith began to support the family by her writing. For nearly two decades she composed (in addition to her verse) a multitude of essays, short stories, adult novels, and tales for children, often working at top speed to keep the family afloat. At the same time, she adopted the image of the so-called New Woman, cutting her hair short, wearing loose-fitting “aesthetic” clothing, and assuming what was then the exclusively male prerogative of smoking cigarettes. Tall, athletic, and by all accounts highly attractive, she also responded to her husband’s incessant womanizing by conducting affairs of her own, including a short-lived romance with George Bernard Shaw.

After twenty years of prolific publication and modest critical success, Nesbit finally achieved acclaim with the release of her first children’s novel, The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), a family adventure story. It was the start of a remarkable period of creative activity. The Wouldbegoods, a sequel to her first novel, appeared in 1901, followed by The New Treasure Seekers (1904). During this time, she also wrote her first fantasy novel, Five Children and It (1902) and employed the same “five children” in two sequels, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). In 1906 she published one of her most enduring family adventure tales, The Railway Children, and in the following year The Enchanted Castle (1907), which many regard as her most mature work of children’s fiction. Inspired by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), she then produced two time-travel romances for children, The House of Arden (1908) and its sequel, Harding’s Luck (1909), and several other works of fantasy—The Magic City (1910), The Wonderful Garden (1911), The Magic World (1912), and Wet Magic (1913). Her output declined dramatically after Hubert’s death in 1914. At the time of Edith Nesbit’s death, on May 4, 1924, her literary reputation had ebbed, but it recovered in the 1930s, and ever since she has been regarded as one of the seminal voices of modern children’s literature.