Five Children and It by E. Nesbit
Three brothers, two sisters, and a ... Hairy Bat?
If you knew nothing about E. Nesbit or her writings, and I mean nothing at all, and you pulled this book off the shelf for a blind read, you would (fairly quickly, I think) form some of the following impressions about both.
E. Nesbit has a real handle on the thoughts and motivations of children, and really understands the siblings dynamic.
E. Nesbit has a wonderfully dry and wicked sense of humor, as well as imagination.
E. Nesbit was British, and her writing reflected some of her own life experiences, from a comfortably middle-class perspective, somewhere in the late 19th/early 20th century.
E. Nesbit's writing reflects on the social issues of her time, and she had opinions.
Also, if you are an American, as I am, you would be well-served to have a dictionary handy, because Five Children and It is a thoroughly British book, and contains words and expressions unfamiliar to those of us on this side of the pond.
Full disclosure. While I have never read any of E. Nesbit's books before, I was familiar with her name through a long ago university class on British history. I remembered that hers was a name associated with the Fabian Society, but that was about it. Anyway, I'll delve into Nesbit later on in this review. For now, let's focus on the Five Children and It.
Five Children and It is the story of the five brothers and sisters: Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and the Lamb, who at about two years of age was the youngest of the bunch.
The family had just relocated to the country after living the past two years in London, to an isolated house they called the White House. No other houses were close by, but they were close to a gravel pit and a chalk quarry.
One day, while Father was away on business for a time, Mother also had to leave the family home to care for Granny. The five children were left in the care of the maid, Martha, and the family cook.
This leaves the children free to basically roam at will the day long, as long as they get home in time for supper. One day, they go to the gravel pit, and begin to dig a hole in the sand all the way to the other side of the Earth, in their minds, Australia. It is through this endeavor that they uncover the Psammead, a sand fairy, a hairy little creature thousands of years old with a bat's ears, a snail's eyes, and a spider's body.
Since the book is written in the style of a third person, constructed as a mother telling a story to her child (Nesbit dedicates Five Children and It to Robert Bland, the youngest of her own five children), there are many interesting side observations exhibiting a dry wit.
The Psammead, or the Sammyadd, as the children call him, explains to the children that he is a sand fairy, and obligated to grant them one wish a day. This is not information offered graciously, the Psammead is a grumpy fellow, and I suppose you would be too if you find yourself constantly woken up and asked for ridiculous wishes, as the children are wont to do. It's a tiring business overall, and, as the Psammead repeats throughout the story, made all the worse by the fact that none of the wishers ever takes the Psammead's advice.
That advice? Be careful what you wish for.
Predictably, the children's wishes almost always lead to catastrophe, but there is a saving grace. The wishes only last until the sun goes down. After that, everything reverts back to normal.
This is a very good thing. The first thing the children wish for is to be as beautiful as the day. Voilá, they are, but then nobody recognizes them, and they can't get into their own house at suppertime. After that, it is a parade of perhaps we should have thought this through a bit better misadventures. Fabulous wealth? You got it, but then no one will accept their golden coins for payment, and the police make an appearance. A desire to fly? Here's a set of wings, but be careful after you raid the vicar's larder and then fall asleep atop the church tower. There's no way down but a locked staircase, and you didn't wake up until after sundown. (A good unintended consequence this time is that Martha meets a man she later marries.)
The children, who do think, but are still human, try to come up with work-arounds to keep the Psammead from granting unintentional (you try to erase the phrase I wish from your vocabulary; it's not so easy as it sounds) or far from unanimous wishes, which happen with unhappy frequency despite their best efforts.
There is the incident of a castle under siege, the transformation of Robert into a giant, and a suddenly grown-up Lamb whose adult personality is less than beguiling, where again, the children are saved from bad consequences by a setting sun.
The tale of two wishes rule out - to me - the use of this book as a read aloud because they reflect the views of the time completely out of step with the current day. The completely out of hand wish is of Cyril, under the influence of the book The Last of the Mohicans - wishing that there were 'Red Indians in England ... the right size for us to fight.' Put yourself in the mindset of when this was published, 1902, and I'll leave the reasons to your imagination.
The second wish involves one of the siblings - saddled with babysitting their youngest brother - wishing that the Lamb would be wanted by everyone who sees him. Everyone does, including a company of gipsies the siblings encounter on their way back home. The children are afraid, everyone knows that gipsies are dangerous, want nothing to do with their nasty food when offered dinner, even though, after they ate, acknowledged that it wasn't so bad. Saved from having to surrender the Lamb to them by sunset, they take the baby and make to leave.
That's when one of the women, Amelia, tell the children that she would like to kiss the baby goodbye, and they're not to be afraid, that "..us gipsies don't steal babies, whatever they may tell you when you're naughty." She thens confides that she's lost all of hers. Lamb then reaches up and strokes her face. Amelia then touches the baby's head, chest, hands and feet and says, 'May he be brave, and have a strong head to think with, and always come safe home to his own.' After that, she said something in a language the children did not understand, and left. The children, in this instance, realized that assumptions about others are not necessarily true.
The day the wishes end comes about by the actions of Anthea. At breakfast, the children learn not only of their mother's imminent return that afternoon, but of the theft of a wealthy woman's jewels the previous night. Jane, without thinking, wishes that her mother could find all those lovely things in her room when she returns that day.
Catastrophe!
Anthea's quick thinking and determination saves the day. Initially, the children want to tell their mother the whole truth about the Sammyadd, but Cyril says she won't believe it and will think they're pretending. When Jane protests that it's true, Anthea answers, "...of course it is, but it's not true enough for grown-up people to believe it...'
All is well in the end. Anthea, exhibiting empathy of the Psammead plight, negotiates multiple wishes that day to fix the situation, with the promise that they will never ask for another after that day. Also, the Psammead make her promise that she will never tell anyone about them. When Anthea asks why, the answer is that if the grown-ups knew, they would wish for real earnest things, like a graduated income tax, or old-age pensions, or free secondary education, things that would make the world topsy-turvy. In this, Anthea grants the Psammead their wish, and all's well that end's well.
As I said before, this is not a book that I would consider a viable read aloud, but I will never support removing a book because it does what the written word always does: reflect the worldview of the writer at the time it was written, which Five Children and It most definitely does, both the good and the bad. Nesbit is a delightful writer, with a fantastic imagination, but this is the only book of hers that I've read. Does the book reflect the prejudices of the times? Most definitely, which can be a real point of discussion, and one I wish (there's that phrase again) was more in evidence where vintage books are concerned. If you have a student who enjoys magical realism and fantasy, this book is an option, with a lending caveat that it is a product of a different time and a different world. That's not an excuse. It's an explanation.
Five Children and It is the first book of The Psammead Trilogy, and after reading this one, I will be reading the the rest: The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Why? Because I think her writing is wonderful, for all the reasons mentioned above.
Normally, when I do a blind review, I read the book first, then I research the author and any of their other works. Because my public library subscribes to the Gale databases, I generally start with Something About the Author, and then look up articles in Gale Literature to get a wider picture. In this instance, I went a bit further.
But first, some basic facts.
Edith Nesbit was born in London in 1858, and died at Jesson St. Mary's, New Romney, Kent, England in 1924, after several years of poor health. She and her first husband, Hubert Bland, were founding members of the Fabian Society, and between them they raised five children. Nesbit was the main breadwinner, supporting her family through her writing. She wrote poems, articles, books, and plays for both adults and children. She viewed herself primarily as a poet, and was well regarded in her lifetime as such, but her enduring legacy is as a children's author.
Nesbit was dedicated to the work of the Fabian society, and her beliefs are evident in her writings. (See above for the reasons the Psammead doesn't want to grant adult wishes. The explanation is an excellent summary of some of the major goals of the Fabians, and Nesbit not only advanced those goals in her writing, she lived them. She was generous with time and money, even when she had, at different periods in her life, little of either to give.
Nesbit's household was unconventional. Her two youngest children were adopted. Their father was Hubert, and their mother was Alice Houston, Nesbit's friend who lived with the family and functioned at times as both housekeeper and secretary. Their home was a literary and artistic center, figures like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells were frequent visitors, and Nesbit served as a patron of sorts to many up and coming literary figures.
Nesbit influenced generations of writers who came after her, including J.K. Rowling, Edward Eager, Neil Gaiman, C.S. Lewis, Noël Coward, Antonia Fraser, and Joan Aiken. The list goes on and on.
After I wrote the first part of this review, I checked out a biography of Edith Nesbit: The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons. It is a well-researched, heavily annotated account of her life and times. I highly recommend it, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Some interesting links:
The website of The Fabian Society.
The Edith Nesbit Archive at the University of Tulsa Special Collections and University Archives.
Edith Nesbit writes on writing for children in her book Wings and the Child; Or, The Building of Magic Cities
Coming up next: The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren.
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