by Edith Nesbit
3 (p. 84) “What was it Sir Philip Sidney said when the soldier wouldn’t stand him a drink?”: Like those of Shakespeare, the sonnets of soldier and statesman Philip Sidney (1554-1586) are considered among the finest of the Elizabethan age. In this passage, Cyril inverts a line attributed to Sidney: Wounded and dying on the battlefield, Sidney supposedly handed his water bottle to another wounded soldier with the words “Thy need is greater than mine.”
4 (p. 107) he began boldly enough, with a sentence straight out of Ralph de Courcy; or, The Boy Crusader: Ralph de Courcy is a character in A March on London: Being a Story of Wat Tyler’s Insurrection (1897), by the prolific G.A. (GeorgeAlfred) Henty (1832-1902). Known as “the boys’ own historian,” he wrote more than one hundred historical novels featuring young men who learn manly virtues in the heat of significant historical conflicts. The Boy Crusader may be a reference to his Winning His Spurs: A Tale of the Crusades (1882), which was republished the following year as The Boy Knight, Who Won His Spurs Fighting with King Richard of England: A Tale of the Crusaders.
5 (p. 142) One gentleman ... offered Robert, in an obliging whisper, ten pounds a week to appear at the Crystal Palace: A huge iron and glass building, the Crystal Palace, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton (1801-1865), originally housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was subsequently moved to Sydenham Hill, overlooking London, and expanded; over the years its spectacular exhibits drew many thousands of visitors, including Nesbit and her family. It was destroyed by fire in 1936.
6 (p. 144) “Robert and I are dressed the same. We’ll manage somehow, like Sydney Carton did”: At the end of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Sydney Carton contrives an elaborate self-sacrificial plan to rescue his condemned look-alike, Charles Darnay, from a French prison by switching places with him.
7 (p. 182) “I wish Martha to forget about the diamond ring, and mother to forget about the keeper cleaning the windows.” “It’s like ‘Brass Bottle’,” said Jane: Nesbit is acknowledging the influence of The Brass Bottle (1900), a fantasy novel by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), who wrote under the pseudonym F. Anstey. In this novel, a modern architect buys an antique brass bottle and discovers that it contains a genie. The latter’s beneficence is so excessive that it backfires at every turn, and the exasperated architect ends up wishing it to “kindly obliterate all recollection of yourself and the brass bottle from the minds of every human being who has had anything to do with you or it” (see The Brass Bottle, London: Penguin, 1946, p. 218).
The Enchanted Castle
1 (p. 193) assuming a gentle, pleading expression, resembling that of the late little Lord Fauntleroy—who must, by the way, be quite old now, and an awful prig: A novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) was immensely popular in its time. The book’s title character later came to epitomize (somewhat unfairly) a certain type of overdressed and insufferably polite young man.
2 (p. 205) Beyond the rose garden was a yew hedge with an arch cut in it, and it was the beginning of a maze like the one in Hampton Court: The renowned hedge maze at Hampton Court, a former royal palace in an outer borough of London, was planted for William of Orange between 1689 and 1695.
3 (p. 225) “I was playing at Fair Rosamond first, and then I heard you talking in the maze”: Rosamond, or Rosamund, Clifford (c.1140-c.1176) was a mistress of Henry II (1133-1189). According to one legend, she was hidden in the labyrinthine bower of a secret garden, but was tracked down and killed by Henry’s jealous wife, Eleanor of Aquitane (c.1 122-1204). In one version of the story, it is the equivalent of Ariadne’s thread that enables the Queen and her henchman to penetrate the maze.
4 (p. 240) “Like La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and he does not want to be found in future ages alone and palely loitering in the middle of sedge and things”: John Keats’s 1819 ballad describes an encounter between a man and an enchanted beauty who has left him, like others before him, in a forlorn state. Gerald’s reference to being found alone in the sedge recalls the last lines of the first and final stanzas: “Alone and palely loitering? / The sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing.”
5 (p. 265) “The melancholy Mabel will await the tryst without success, as far as this one is concerned. ‘Fish, fish, other fish—other fish I fry!’ ” he warbled to the tune of “Cherry Ripe”: Gerald is parodying a love poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674); its first line is “Cherry-ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry.”The rest of Gerald’s song echoes the finale: “Where my Julia’s lips do smile; / There’s the land, or cherry-isle, / Whose plantations fully show / All the year where cherries grow.”
6 (pp. 313, 315) They met no one, except one man, who murmured, “Guy Fawkes, swelp me!” and crossed the road hurriedly: Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) was the best-known member of a group of Catholic conspirators who attempted to blow up England’s Houses of Parliament and kill the king in 1605. The plot was uncovered, and Fawkes and the others were tried and executed. Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated annually on November 5 with fireworks and the burning of Fawkes in effigy.
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.
INSPIRED BY THE ENCHANTED CASTLE AND FIVE CHILDREN AND IT
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 nov
el 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.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
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.
Comments
THE NATION
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
NEW YORK TIMES
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
THE NATION
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
C. S. LEWIS
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)
GORE VIDAL
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)
J. B. PRIESTLEY
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)
ALISON LURIE
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)
COLIN MANLOVE
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)
NATASHA WALTER
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)
Questions
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. Nata
sha 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.
FOR FURTHER READING
Other Children’s Books by Edith Nesbit
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.
