by Edith Nesbit
In the opening section of the novel (chapters 1 and 2), the children are resting by the roadside when the chance discovery of a hidden passage transports them into a magical world, or so it seems from the extraordinary garden that opens before them, with its abundant statuary and huge stone edifice looming in the distance behind it. Nesbit draws on classical myth (the Minotaur’s labyrinth) and fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty) to enhance the magical atmosphere: The children enter a maze of hedges and notice a thread that takes them to the center, where they find the reposing form of “the enchanted Princess” (p. 208). Jimmy is doubtful—“she’s only a little girl dressed up” (p. 208)—but once he wakens her with a kiss, his irrepressible skepticism is sorely tested by her commanding manner—“you’re a very unbelieving little boy” (p. 218)—her impressive living quarters, and her display of magic in the treasure chamber, where she makes her jewelry appear and disappear at will. But things begin to change when the girl dons a ring that presumably “makes you invisible” (p. 220). After she asks the children to close their eyes and count, Jimmy debunks her so-called magic (inadvertently we’re told) by seeing her lift a secret panel. As it turns out, however, the “Princess” is less distressed by the exposure of her pranks than by the fact that the ring has actually made her invisible. In the true confession that follows, we learn that she is the very ordinary Mabel Prowse, niece of Lord Yalding’s housekeeper, and the seemingly enchanted realm into which we and the children have wandered is actually his estate. But if as readers we have shared in the deception and must acknowledge that Jimmy’s suspicions have been correct all along, we also join the children in finding ourselves face to face with the new conundrum posed by Mabel’s invisibility and the magical ring that confers it. Such oscillations and confusions between imagination and reality are harbingers of things to come.
In the following chapters, reminiscent of the “funny” magic in earlier novels, we follow the children on a set of escapades that proceed from their attempt to exploit the power of invisibility: profiting from a conjuring act at the local fair; assuming the role of detectives, which leads to the sighting of a real burglary; and sowing confusion among the unsuspecting servants. We also learn that wearing the ring produces not only invisibility but also a seemingly random assemblage of other effects, including the indifference of friends and relatives, the suppression of fear, and above all, the capacity to apprehend a higher if still enigmatic dimension of enchantment. In chapter 4, we catch a glimpse of this new dimension when the ring-bearing Gerald enters the Yalding gardens at night and, sensing that he is “in another world” (p. 257), beholds the statues of classical gods and giant dinosaurs awaken into life. The vision is ephemeral and in the short run inconsequential, but it offers the first hint of something that transcends the prosaic magic of earlier episodes; it anticipates the more sustained and momentous vision of the statuary that appears in the fourth chapter of the second half of the novel.
After the fleeting epiphany in the garden, the novel reverts to the type of adventure that preceded it, but things begin to change in chapter 6 with the theatrical pageant—a re-enactment of Beauty and the Beast—that brings the first half of the book to an end. The genial Mademoiselle (who seems mysteriously moved by the news that the impoverished Lord Yalding is about to visit his estate) is present to watch the play, but the children enlarge their audience by creating a set of grotesque figures out of sticks, broom handles, pillows, and paper masks. At the end of the pageant’s second act, the Beast (Gerald) hands the magical ring to Beauty (Mabel) and announces that it has the power to “give you anything you wish” (p. 301). Unfortunately, when Mabel wishes that the inanimate members of the audience were alive to enhance the applause, the figures suddenly come to life and soon march out the door. On a first reading of the novel, it is difficult to fathom the far-reaching implications of this scene, whose most immediate effect is to launch the pursuit of these animated inanimates (now called the Ugly-Wuglies) in the following chapters. We see that the ring is more mysterious than it seemed, but at this point the apparent transformation into a wishing ring remains an enigma. So does the import of Beauty and the Beast, which at once prefigures the stirring real-life pageant of the final chapter and, as the fairy-tale version of the story of Cupid and Psyche, offers a first taste of the myth that informs the ultimate vision of the novel (see endnote 10).
The encounter with the Ugly-Wuglies (chapters 7 and 8) hovers on the border between comedy and terror. Nesbit never abandons her sense of humor, but in this section of the novel she elicits an element of fear, confusion, and violence that marks a departure from anything we’ve seen before. At first the Ugly-Wuglies are polite to a fault in their search for “a good hotel” (p. 305), and as creatures of pure surface—clothes without bodies, voices without brains—they seem to represent a world of empty ritual and innocuous cliché. Social satire plays a significant role in this episode, especially after one of the Ugly-Wuglies mutates into a rich London stockbroker. But this aspect of the Uglies is outweighed by the terror they strike in the hearts of the children, who must summon the courage required to face them. The sudden animation of the inanimate is frightening enough, but once they are corralled into a dark chamber behind the Temple of Flora—the goddess of fertility—these initially docile creatures grow angry and turn into raging furies (who later escape and assault the adult “bailiff” who has helped to confine them). Since the children are aware that these creatures are their own invention, the significance of Flora and her subterranean chamber may lie in the association between fertility and the creative imagination, which is the source of both horrors and delights, the root of vain, violent, and monstrous pursuits as well as the fount of empathy and the enduring ideal of social and cosmic harmony. In this respect, Jimmy’s wish (instantly fulfilled) to be as rich as the Ugly-Wugly stockbroker may be regarded as a misuse of imagination, and it suggests that a society which channels its energies into a single-minded obsession with perpetual accumulation becomes at once vapid and vicious, as empty, distorted, and ultimately devoid of imagination as the Ugly-Wuglies themselves.
After this descent into the abyss of distorted imagination, Nesbit quickly prepares us for the visionary ascent of the subsequent section (chapters 9 and 10): “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” (p. 345). In contrast to the playful magic of Mabel’s wish to be twelve feet tall, the higher magic begins with a symbolic rebirth (inside the belly of a stone dinosaur) when the kind and sensitive Kathleen is transformed into one of the living statues we first encountered in the middle section of the first half (chapters 3 and 4). Surprisingly free of all fear, she is welcomed by the animate statue of the god Apollo and invited to witness “the beautiful enchantment” (p. 361) of the garden as it comes alive at night. Soon the other children are allowed to join in the “celestial picnic” (p. 370) with the marble Olympians, and Apollo’s lyre captivates them with “all the beautiful dreams of all the world ... and all the lovely thoughts that sometimes hover near, but not so near that you can catch them.... and it seemed that the whole world lay like a magic apple in the hand of each listener, and that the whole world was good and beautiful” (pp. 374-375). After the visionary moment fades with the dawn, the children must make their somewhat melancholy journey back to the everyday world. But prior to the end of this section they enter a magnificent hall (later identified as the Hall of Granted Wishes) that is surrounded by arches through which they can discern a multitude of images ranging from “a good hotel” for the Ugly-Wugly—“there are some souls that ask no higher thing of life”—to pictures that reveal “some moment when life had sprung to fire and flower—the best that the soul of man could ask or man’s destiny grant” (p. 380). Finally, at the end of the hall the children
find the statue of the winged Psyche, symbolically the source of all wishes and imaginings, wearing the magical ring. With ceremonial deference to the goddess, they remove the ring from her hand, and the sensible Kathleen, who is not only aware of the deeper truth that “ ‘the ring’s what you say it is’ ” (p. 347) but also knows when enough is enough for mere mortals, makes the wish that “we were safe in our own beds, undressed, and in our nightgowns, and asleep” (p. 381).
After they return from the visionary world, the children participate in the enchantment of the real world that takes place in the final section of the novel (chapters 11 and 12). We learn that the “bailiff” who assisted with the confinement of the Ugly-Wuglies is actually Lord Yalding himself, and that Mademoiselle is the woman he loves despite the opposition of his relatives, who have deprived him of control over the estate. One by one the obstacles to their marriage are overcome, and at the Temple of Flora we witness a ceremony—reminiscent of the production of Beauty and the Beast that concluded the first half of the novel—in which Lord Yalding places the ring on the finger of his ever more radiant bride:
The children have drawn back till they stand close to the lovers. 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. One wonders how one can ever have wondered about anything. Space is not; every place that one has seen or dreamed of is here. Time is not; into this instant is crowded all that one has ever done or dreamed of doing. It is a moment and it is eternity. It is the centre of the universe and it is the universe itself. The eternal light rests on and illuminates the eternal heart of things (p. 409).
As the ceremony continues, all of the statues come alive—ancient creatures both real and imaginary, followed by a vast array of gods and goddesses—and the lovers proceed to the Hall of Granted Wishes (a.k.a. the Hall of Psyche), where the history of the ring is revealed and Mademoiselle makes a final wish “that all the magic this ring has wrought may be undone, and that the ring itself may be no more and no less than a charm to bind thee and me together for evermore” (p. 411). In the ensuing transformation, which echoes Prospero’s renunciation of magic at the end of The Tempest, the mystical light dies away, the windows of granted wishes disappear, and the statue of Psyche turns into a mere grave. At the same time, in the spirit of Keats and the Romantics, the very process of demythologizing the myth of Cupid and Psyche reveals its full significance, as the imaginary god and his lover are replaced by a real man and woman who are bound together in a climactic vision of the soul uplifted and transfigured by the power of love. Nesbit concludes the novel on a humorous note, but the return to the more impish manner of her “funny” magic dramatically underscores the turn to the more “serious” magic that gathers force over the second half of the novel. Many readers prefer the vitality of the former to the gravity of the latter, and many of those who admire her later works favor the social critique of The Story of the Amulet, The House of Arden, and Harding’s Luck over the Romantic Platonism of The Enchanted Castle. But never again would Nesbit undertake such an ambitious work of children’s fiction, and none of her other books possesses either the coherence or the complexity of her architectonic masterpiece.
VI
It is easy to underestimate Nesbit’s influence on modern children’s fiction, especially in North America, where she has never enjoyed the same level of popularity as she has in the British Isles. Historians continue to debate the degree of her originality, but they seem to agree that however much she was indebted to her Victorian predecessors, Nesbit brought a new and more modern voice to children’s fiction, and in certain respect, her distinctive fusion of magic and realism, which cast a spell on later generations of children’s authors, endures to this day. According to Colin Manlove, “After Nesbit, children’s fantasy was never quite the same again. She showed just how much fun could be made of bringing magic into the ordinary domestic lives of children: And she introduced to children’s fantasy the idea of the group of different children, rather than the frequently solitary child of earlier books. Her books demonstrated that fantasy could be wildly inventive and yet follow its own peculiar laws.”5 All of these Nesbit trademarks—the family ensemble, the mixture of the magic and the realism, the rites of passage between worlds—are prominent features of C. S. Lewis’s classic cycle The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). With good reason Lewis’s admirers emphasize the influence of George MacDonald and members of his own literary circle, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. But as several Lewis scholars have pointed out, the Narnia series is in some ways far more closely related to Nesbit’s fiction, which informs the narrative voice, the basic elements of character and plot, and a surprising number of specific details, particularly in The Magician’s Nephew, which is set in Nesbit’s turn-of-the-century London and draws liberally on her works.6 On the other side of the Atlantic, Lewis’s American contemporary, Edward Eager, author of the popular “Half Magic” series (1954-1958), openly identifies Nesbit as the source of his inspiration. At the outset of the first volume, Half Magic, a family of four book-loving children forbids oral recitation after suffering through Evangeline, but “this summer the rule had changed. This summer the children had found some books by a writer named E. Nesbit, surely the most wonderful books in the world.... And now yesterday The Enchanted Castle had come in, and they took it out, and Jane, because she could read fastest and loudest, read it out loud all the way home, and when they got home she went on reading, and when their mother came home they hardly said a word to her, and when dinner was served they didn’t notice a thing they ate.”7 It is arguable that Nesbit’s influence has ebbed since the days of these mid-century testimonials, and that children’s fantasy itself has shifted terrain in the last few decades. But Nesbit’s imprint is still apparent in some of the genre’s most popular practitioners, including Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling, and even in cinematic productions such as Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), a direct descendant of The Magic City (1910). Admittedly, a century after their appearance her novels seem embedded in a bygone society and reflect some of its now outmoded values. Moreover, as a writer who seems to have one foot planted in Victorian society and the other in the twentieth century, Nesbit has sparked debate over the extent to which she departs from the heavy-handed didacticism of her literary predecessors, and it is often difficult to decide whether she is subverting or affirming the norms of her notably class-conscious and patriarchal society. But what seems to have endured beyond the cultural trappings of her transitional era is the freshness of her narrative voice, the vivacity and playful humor that in the right circumstances might modulate into high seriousness, and, perhaps above all, the perpetual fusion and confusion between the imaginary and the real, the books we read and the lives we live, the magical lure of our wishes, dreams, and desires, and the inevitably limited conditions of existence that they ceaselessly enchant.
Sanford Schwartz teaches English literature at Pennsylvania State University (University Park). He is the author of The Matrix of Modernism and various essays on modern literary, cultural, and intellectual history. He is currently writing a book on C. S. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy.
Acknowledgments: I wish to thank several friends and colleagues who provided encouragement and indispensable support along the way: Julia Briggs, for clarifying some baffling allusions in these century-old novels; Elizabeth Jenkins, for assistance with the dialects, slang, and semantic subtleties of what I once considered my native tongue; John Poritsky, for direction on recent work in children’s literature; and my incomparable research assistant, Jeff Pruchnic, for just about everything.
Notes
1 Quoted in Dorothy Langley Moor
e, E. Nesbit: A Biography (1933; revised edition, London: Benn, 1967), p. 197.
2 From Shaw’s interview with Dorothy Langley Moore, quoted in Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. xvi.
