English author E. Nesbit’s works are real oldies, written before World War I. In addition to writing a huge number of children’s books, she and her first husband Hubert Bland (whose name apparently did not suit him) led a rather Bohemian life. She was one of the co-founders of the Fabian Society of socialists. Her admirers included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (one of the inspirations for her famous book The Railway Children)

Nesbit was an original in children’s fantasy, featuring realistic (albeit upper-class) children who encounter magical objects or beings. Her books evoke a bygone era and move at a leisurely pace but are still fun to read. Gore Vidal wrote that after Lewis Carroll she was “the best of the English fabulists who wrote about children (neither wrote for children).” She has influenced fantasy writers from  C.  S. Lewis to Diana Wynne Jones to J. K. Rowling.

My favorites are the fantasies in the series that starts with the Psammead  (a bad-tempered sand fairy who lives on the beach and grants wishes–more or less)  and The Enchanted Castle. Nesbit often deals with the unexpected and funny effects of not wishing carefully enough. In Five Children and It the children’s wish to be “more beautiful than the day” results in not being recognized and getting shut out of the house. A flying carpet is central in the second book of the series, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet is based on time travel.

Although the princess that the three siblings in The Enchanted Castle encounter turns out to be Mabel, the housekeeper’s niece, some of the magic is real. Mabel becomes invisible when she puts on a ring. As they pass the ring around, the children have a variety of entertaining and cleverly told adventures. In my favorite part they make an audience of stuffed clothes and hats with painted paper faces to watch their play. When Mabel unthinkingly wishes that the audience would be alive, the Uglie-Wuglies awkwardly make their way out. They can’t pronounce consonants well because they have only painted mouths, so it’s hard to tell that that they are asking to be directed to a good hotel (“a oo ho el”). One of them even makes it to London.

The theme of being careful what you wish for is an ancient one. Ovid “grabbed a pile of dust” and “foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust,” adding: “I forgot to ask that they be years of youth”  (Metamorphoses). In the 1950s Edward Eager, heavily influenced by Nesbit,  played with the required exactitude of wishes: the children in Half Magic find a magical coin that grants only half of their wish (their cat can half-talk, for example), so that they have to double each wish. Having read so many fantasies, I am rather careful about this  in real life.

Many of the best light/humorous  fantasies (including the ones reviewed here) examine the peculiar and exacting rules of magic and fairy tale/fantasy expectations, often influenced by Nesbit’s works.

E. Nesbit websites:

http://www.booksandwriters.co.uk/N/edith-nesbit.html (a list of her works)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1964/dec/03/the-writing-of-e-nesbit (Gore Vidal)

The Enchanted Castle (1907): Fantasies of E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit

1858-1924