Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (61 page)

7
(p. 319)
We must excuse her. She had been very brave, and I have no doubt that all heroines, from Joan of Arc to Grace Darling, have had their sobbing moments:
Grace Darling (1815-1842) was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper in Northumberland, England, who became a national heroine after September 1838, when she and her father rescued survivors of a ship, the Forfarshire, that had run aground on a nearby island.

8
(p. 330)
“Anyway,” said Gerald, “we’ll try to get him back, and shut the door. That’s the most we can hope for. And then apples, and
Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss
Family, or any book you like that’s got no magic in it”:
The popular adventure
novel Robinson Crusoe
(1719), by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), inspired similar castaway narratives, perhaps the most famous of which is
The Swiss Family Robinson
(1814), by Johann David Wyss (1743-1818). As Gerald indicates, these tales of shipwrecked individuals and families, known for their realistic adventures, are devoid of magic and enchantment.

9
(p. 348)
she looked like a little girl reflected in one of those long bent mirrors at Rosherville Gardens that make stout people look so happily slender, and slender people so sadly scraggy:
Rosherville Gardens, a riverside resort in Northfleet, England, opened in the early 1840s. For a time a popular destination for Londoners, who reached it by steamboat, the resort featured a bear pit, zoo, aviary, botanical gardens, maze, open-air theaters, and tea rooms.

10
(p. 369)
“Come, we must get the feast ready.
Eros—Psyche—Hebe—Ganymede—
all you young people can arrange the fruit”:
In classical mythology, Psyche (which means “soul” in Greek) is the princess who married Cupid, the god of love. As a result of her failure of trust, she is compelled to leave her husband’s castle, but after enduring many trials and a long separation, she is reunited with the god and made immortal. The myth of Psyche and Cupid can be seen as an allegory of the soul transfigured by love. In chapter 6, the children act out a fairy-tale version of this myth in the story of
Beauty and the Beast.
See the introduction for an account of the increasingly significant, if never explicitly stated, role of the myth and the fairy tale in the second half of
The Enchanted Castle.

11
(p. 379)
perhaps Mr. Millar will draw the different kinds of arches for you:
H. R. Millar (1869-1942) worked as an illustrator for
The Strand Magazine
as well as other publications. His collaboration with Nesbit began in 1899 with the illustrations for
The Book of Dragons,
which originally appeared in
The Strand,
and they continued to work together until her relationship with the magazine ended in 1913.

British author J. K. Rowling frequently identifies Edith Nesbit as a major inspiration for her immensely popular Harry Potter novels. Therefore, it may be no coincidence that in the wave of excitement surrounding the Harry Potter phenomenon, a major film adaptation of Nesbit’s
Five Children and It
has also appeared. Surprisingly, John Stephenson’s
Five Children and It
(2004) is only the third Nesbit novel to appear on the large screen, following
The Railway Children
(1970) and
The Phoenix and the Magic Carpet
(1995). The film stars Kenneth Branagh as Uncle Albert, Zoe Wannamaker as Martha the housekeeper (Wannamaker also appeared in the second Harry Potter film) , Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead, Freddie Highmore as Robert, the narrator, and four other child actors. Produced in conjunction with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the film uses a combination of computer-generated special effects, animatronics, and live action to bring Nesbit’s story to life.

Works by Nesbit have appeared more often on television, at least in the United Kingdom. In addition to TV movies and serial adaptations of
The Story of the Treasure Seekers
(released as
Treasure Seekers
in 1996),
The Phoenix and the Carpet
(1976 and 1997), and
The Railway Children
(1951, 1957, and 2000), a six-episode miniseries
of The Enchanted
Castle aired on British television in 1979, and a similar serialization of
Five Children and It
(retitled The
Sand Fairy
for U.S. distribution) was broadcast in 1991. Nesbit herself was the subject of a television play that was shown on BBC television in 1972 as part of the series
The Edwardians.

For a discussion of authors inspired by Nesbit, see part VI of the introduction to this volume.

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Edith Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

E. Nesbit and W. W. Jacobs are the two contributors who have given a certain cheap magazine some circulation among a constituency at whom, to judge by the rest of its matter, it was not aimed. E. Nesbit is, one may almost say, the only person now telling fairy stories in public for love of the game. “The Enchanted Castle” is a very good example of her craft. Its humor consists in the continual jumbling of the realities of English child life, and the unrealities (or deeper realities) of the land of fancy. The wits of these young Britons are, when they choose, mazed with fairy-lore, and they have the dialect of romance at their tongue’s end. Probably no such deep philosophy could be read into their adventures as ingenuity has connected with the exploits of their great progenitor Alice; but the absurdity of the things they do is made delightful by the whimsical air of the writer. In short, the book illustrates once more the English faculty of amusing children without boring one’s self.

-August 13, 1908

 

There is great charm in E. Nesbit’s book, “The Enchanted Castle.” In its general character it is decidedly above the average run of so-called juvenile literature, and should prove vastly entertaining to the imaginative children to whom it is primarily addressed, as well as to grown-up folk who have a liking for books that are quaint, fanciful, and delicately humorous.

—July 11, 1908

 

If Emil [in Erich Kastner’s Emil and the Detective] is a real person, the “five children” constitute an equally real family. The public of Mrs. Nesbit, so large and devoted, will rejoice in this American edition of a book which has been making friends everywhere for twenty years. The ingenuity of the author’s imagination, her humor, and her charming outlook invest the adventures of her young characters with unceasing interest.

—November 19, 1930

 

Much better than either [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sir Nigel
or Mark Twain’s
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s
Court]
was E. Nesbit’s trilogy,
Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Wishing
[sic] Carpet, and
The Amulet.
The last did most for me. It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ I can still reread it with delight.

—from
Surprised
by Joy (1955)

 

After Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit is the best of the English fabulists who wrote about children (neither wrote for children) and like Carroll she was able to create a world of magic and inverted logic that was entirely her own.

—New York
Review of Books
(December 3, 1964)

 

The Edwardian variety of literary interests and abilities can be well illustrated by some mention of the finely-written whimsical tales it has left us, the kind of work later writers have never been able to improve upon or supplant.... And I am ready to include in this class Edith Nesbit’s entrancing stories about children, which I read and enjoyed as a child and then, enjoying them all over again, praised in print when I was fully adult—but still fascinated by magic.

—from
The
Edwardians (1970)

 

Though there are foreshadowings of her characteristic manner in Charles Dickens’s
Holiday Romance
and Kenneth Grahame’s
The Golden Age,
Nesbit was the first to write at length for children as intellectual equals and in their own language. Her books were startlingly innovative in other ways: they took place in contemporary England, and recommended socialist solutions to its problems; they presented a modern view of childhood; and they used magic both as a comic device and as a serious metaphor for the power of the imagination. Every writer of children’s fantasy since Nesbit’s time is indebted to her—and so are some authors of adult fiction.

—New York
Review of Books
(October 25, 1984)

 

In
The Enchanted Castle
we are more concerned with the inner world of the spirit, than with the outer world of objects and doings.... What is solid and real in the earlier books is less certain here. A statue may come alive, a dummy may turn into a half-person, a girl into a princess: nothing is what it seems. We are partly in a world of the imagination, partly in one of magic, and who is to say which it is? Where in the earlier books the imagination became real, here the real becomes the imagination. And where the earlier books took place mainly in the day, these later ones often have nighttime settings. It is as though Nesbit had passed from a materialist to an idealist attitude towards magic.

—from
From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England
(2003)

 

In the tales of Lewis or Rowling or Pullman the children find themselves part of a grand quest, a huge cosmic battle in which they will play a destined role. In Nesbit’s work everything is much more anarchic, and the children are always unsure whether they are going to be thrown into the darkest dungeon in Egypt or be sent to bed without supper. For her, magic worlds are as chaotic as real life; there are no Voldemorts or Dumbledores, no forces of pure evil or pure good, in her fantasies. So the children have to muddle through just as they would in everyday life.

—The
Guardian
(October 9, 2004)

1. Alison Lurie praises Nesbit for writing “at length for children as intellectual equals and in their own language.” But Gore Vidal claims that for all her virtues she wasn’t really writing “for children.” Discuss the voice of the narrator in these novels and the relationship between the narrator and the audience (or audiences) she seems to be addressing.

2. How does Nesbit appropriate traditional folktales, ancient legends, and classical myths in these novels?

3. What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of the looser episodic organization of the early fantasy
Five Children and It,
as compared to the more unified plot of
The Enchanted Castle,
a later work? Which approach do you prefer?

4. Nesbit was known for focusing on a group of children rather than the single protagonist who had prevailed in earlier children’s fiction. Discuss the similarities and differences of character in the juvenile ensemble in these novels and the ways they interact with each other and respond to the challenges that come their way.

5. Natasha Walter claims that, compared to the imaginary worlds of C. S. Lewis and other more recent fantasists, Nesbit’s works are “much more anarchic” and her “magic worlds are as chaotic as real life.” On the other hand, Colin Manlove argues that in her later fantasies Nesbit shifts “from a materialist to an idealist attitude towards magic” and “in
The Enchanted Castle
we are more concerned with the inner world of the spirit, than with the outer world of objects and doings.” Compare the kind of magic that appears in
Five Children and
It with the sort that comes to the fore in the second half of
The Enchanted Castle.

The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Being the Adventures of the Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune.
1899. London: Puffin Books, 1994. Nesbit’s first full-length children’s novel.

The Book of Dragons.
1900. New York: Seastar Books, 2001. Still popular, a collection of eight dragon stories.

The Wouldbegoods:
Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers.
1901. London: Puffin Books, 1996. The second volume in the Bastable series.

The Phoenix and the Carpet.
1904. London: Puffin Books, 1994. A sequel to
Five
Children and
It.

The New Treasure Seekers.
1904. London: Puffin Books, 1996. The third volume in the Bastable series.

The Story of the Amulet.
1906. London: Puffin Books, 1996. The third and final volume of the “Five Children” series.

The Railway Children.
1906. London: Puffin Books, 1994.
After The Story of the Treasure Seekers,
her most popular family adventure novel.

The House of Arden.
1908. New York: Books of Wonder, 1997. The Arden children travel into the past in search of lost family treasure.

Harding’s
Luck.
1909. New York: Books of Wonder, 1999. A sequel to
The House of Arden.