BN Review

The Serious Make-Believe of E. Nesbit

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Not all of E. Nesbit’s children’s books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do. Again and again, Nesbit’s fiction celebrates the power of reading, coupled with the power of the imagination, as the best way for young people to transform and enchant everyday life.

Between 1899 and the outbreak of World War I, Nesbit scribbled one juvenile masterpiece after another. Everyone has his or her own favorite: Mine is The Story of the Amulet (1906), but other readers would opt for Five Children and It (1902) or The Railway Children (1906) or The Enchanted Castle (1907). In the United States, however, Nesbit isn’t anywhere near as well known as she deserves to be, given her delightful humor, sprightly, conversational style, and all-around irresistibility. Just listen to Oswald Bastable near the opening of The Treasure Seekers:

There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, “Alas!” said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, “we must look our last on this ancestral home” — and then some one else says something — and you don’t know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is or anything about it. Our ancestral home is in the Lewisham Road. It is semi-detached and has a garden, not a large one. We are the Bastables. There are six of us besides Father. Our mother is dead…

The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Complete and Unabridged

The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Complete and Unabridged

Paperback $7.99

The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Complete and Unabridged

By E. Nesbit
Illustrator Cecil Leslie

In Stock Online

Paperback $7.99

That last shocking sentence is important. The siblings in Nesbit’s novels usually run around pretty much free of adult supervision. In The Treasure Seekers not only has the mother died, but the father also can’t focus on the household because he is overwhelmed by debt and facing bankruptcy. In The Railway Children the missing father is actually in prison (for selling secrets to the Russians, a crime he didn’t commit) while the mother can only hold the family together by scribbling articles, stories, and romantic novelettes.. Constantly working, she’s unable to keep close tabs on the daily activities of her three lively and curious children. Despite their sunny surfaces, then, Nesbit’s books never quite hide the serious realities of adult life — sudden poverty, loneliness, the loss of love, the loss of a beloved parent, social inequities. Several of the novels proffer, for all their comedy, surprisingly severe critiques of contemporary English society. They might almost be subtitled “Fabianism for tots.”
Fabianism? Before turning to some of Nesbit’s books, it’s worth taking a quick look at Edith Nesbit Bland herself. Born to a middle-class family, Nesbit (1858-1924) was left somewhat adrift in the world after the death of her father. At the age of 18 she met Hubert Bland, a dashing young bank clerk whom she married just two months before their first child was born. Shortly afterward, the attractive young couple became founding members of the Fabian Society, a socialist action group whose members included George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. While the charismatic Bland gradually established himself as a prominent journalist, his wife took up a genteel Grub Street career, cranking out romantic novels and short stories, retelling Shakespeare for younger readers, and producing reams of saccharine verse.
As if to undercut the family name, the Blands’ homelife quickly grew bohemian. First, Edith’s live-in friend Alice Hoatson, who helped run the household, was discovered to be pregnant. Second, Edith agreed to raise the child as her own. Third, and you could probably see this coming, she then discovered that the baby’s father was her own husband. Most astonishing of all, despite some stormy scenes, the extended family remained together and continued on its merry way. Weekends at the Nesbit house were given over to wild parties, amateur theatricals, treasure hunts, and children’s games. Hubert philandered while Edith engaged in extramarital dalliances of her own. Their friends were comparably unconventional, ranging from the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of “The Yellow Wall Paper,” to Frederick Rolfe. the notorious “Baron Corvo.“
Apart from a few classic horror stories such as the cruel “Man-Size in Marble” and “John Charrington’s Wedding,” Nesbit’s writing before she turned forty is negligible. But when she was asked for a memoir of her school days, the floodgates opened. Soon she was writing two or three children’s books a year, often simultaneously. Like her contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle, Nesbit could apparently produce publishable copy straight off, usually on deadline, all the while smoking furiously.
According to Julia Briggs’s biography A Woman of Passion, Nesbit would first plan out an episode for a novel in advance, “either in her head or else in summary. Then she would simply write sheet after sheet of manuscript, on cheap colored paper; she wrote virtually without correction, throwing the pages on the floor as they were completed. She worked mainly in the mornings and late afternoons. She could polish off five thousand words by the early afternoon, and then play a game of badminton and spend the evening in animated conversation with friends.”

That last shocking sentence is important. The siblings in Nesbit’s novels usually run around pretty much free of adult supervision. In The Treasure Seekers not only has the mother died, but the father also can’t focus on the household because he is overwhelmed by debt and facing bankruptcy. In The Railway Children the missing father is actually in prison (for selling secrets to the Russians, a crime he didn’t commit) while the mother can only hold the family together by scribbling articles, stories, and romantic novelettes.. Constantly working, she’s unable to keep close tabs on the daily activities of her three lively and curious children. Despite their sunny surfaces, then, Nesbit’s books never quite hide the serious realities of adult life — sudden poverty, loneliness, the loss of love, the loss of a beloved parent, social inequities. Several of the novels proffer, for all their comedy, surprisingly severe critiques of contemporary English society. They might almost be subtitled “Fabianism for tots.”
Fabianism? Before turning to some of Nesbit’s books, it’s worth taking a quick look at Edith Nesbit Bland herself. Born to a middle-class family, Nesbit (1858-1924) was left somewhat adrift in the world after the death of her father. At the age of 18 she met Hubert Bland, a dashing young bank clerk whom she married just two months before their first child was born. Shortly afterward, the attractive young couple became founding members of the Fabian Society, a socialist action group whose members included George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. While the charismatic Bland gradually established himself as a prominent journalist, his wife took up a genteel Grub Street career, cranking out romantic novels and short stories, retelling Shakespeare for younger readers, and producing reams of saccharine verse.
As if to undercut the family name, the Blands’ homelife quickly grew bohemian. First, Edith’s live-in friend Alice Hoatson, who helped run the household, was discovered to be pregnant. Second, Edith agreed to raise the child as her own. Third, and you could probably see this coming, she then discovered that the baby’s father was her own husband. Most astonishing of all, despite some stormy scenes, the extended family remained together and continued on its merry way. Weekends at the Nesbit house were given over to wild parties, amateur theatricals, treasure hunts, and children’s games. Hubert philandered while Edith engaged in extramarital dalliances of her own. Their friends were comparably unconventional, ranging from the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of “The Yellow Wall Paper,” to Frederick Rolfe. the notorious “Baron Corvo.“
Apart from a few classic horror stories such as the cruel “Man-Size in Marble” and “John Charrington’s Wedding,” Nesbit’s writing before she turned forty is negligible. But when she was asked for a memoir of her school days, the floodgates opened. Soon she was writing two or three children’s books a year, often simultaneously. Like her contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle, Nesbit could apparently produce publishable copy straight off, usually on deadline, all the while smoking furiously.
According to Julia Briggs’s biography A Woman of Passion, Nesbit would first plan out an episode for a novel in advance, “either in her head or else in summary. Then she would simply write sheet after sheet of manuscript, on cheap colored paper; she wrote virtually without correction, throwing the pages on the floor as they were completed. She worked mainly in the mornings and late afternoons. She could polish off five thousand words by the early afternoon, and then play a game of badminton and spend the evening in animated conversation with friends.”

Five Children and It

Five Children and It

Paperback $4.00

Five Children and It

By E. Nesbit

Paperback $4.00

In The Story of the Treasure Seekers six children decide “to restore the fortunes of the ancient house of Bastable.” The siblings dig for pirate loot in their garden, because, as little Alice tells a neighbor, “an ancient parchment revealed to us the place of concealment.” They later start a penny newspaper, The Lewisham Recorder, chockablock with faits divers, such as this piece of useful knowledge from Horace Octavius, the youngest member of the family: “It is a mistake to think that cats are playful. I often try to get a cat to play with me, and she never seems to care about the game, no matter how little it hurts. H.O.” Naturally, there’s a classified section too: “Legal answer wanted: A quantity of excellent string is offered if you know whether there really is a law passed about not buying gunpowder under thirteen. —Dicky.”
Critically savvy readers will recognize that the Bastables, like Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, regularly perceive the quotidian world around them through the distorting lens of favorite books. As a consequence, even the most common activities take on an air of romance. Thus, the poetic Noel — author of “Lines on a Dead Black Beetle That Was Poisoned” — refers to the tin cup at a public water fountain as “a golden goblet, wrought by enchanted gnomes.” When Alice employs a divining rod to locate hidden treasure, she wholeheartedly acts out her part as a pagan priestess: “The magic rod has spoken. . . Dig here, and that with courage and dispatch. . . Dig as you value your lives, for ere sundown the dragon who guards this spoil will return in his fiery fury and make you his unresisting prey.” In my favorite episode, the siblings decide to play bandit and quickly capture the obnoxious neighbor boy Albert for ransom:
“There will be no violence,” said Oswald — he was now Captain of the Bandits, because we all know H.O. likes to be Chaplain when we play prisoners — “no violence. But you will be confined in a dark, subterranean dungeon where toads and snakes crawl, and but little of the day filters through the heavily mullioned windows. You will be loaded with chains. Now don’t begin again, Baby, there’s nothing to cry about; straw will be your pallet; beside you the jailer will set a ewer — a ewer is only a jug, stupid; it won’t eat you — a ewer with water; and a mouldering crust will be your food.”
Oswald also addresses the imagined reader — a narrative technique that runs throughout Nesbit’s work — to correct any possible misunderstandings: “You may think we had no chains, but you are wrong, because we used to keep two other dogs once, besides Pincher, before the fall of the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable. And they were quite big dogs.”
This being a children’s book, the six boys and girls actually do bring about the restoration of the fortunes of their ancient house — and of the house of Bland, as well. Following the success of The Treasure Seekers, Nesbit would go on to publish further adventures of the Bastables in The Wouldbegoods (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). The narrator of the series — though he initially tries to hide the fact — is the innocently vain, deliciously self-congratulatory Oswald Bastable, by far the most memorable human character in all of Nesbit.

In The Story of the Treasure Seekers six children decide “to restore the fortunes of the ancient house of Bastable.” The siblings dig for pirate loot in their garden, because, as little Alice tells a neighbor, “an ancient parchment revealed to us the place of concealment.” They later start a penny newspaper, The Lewisham Recorder, chockablock with faits divers, such as this piece of useful knowledge from Horace Octavius, the youngest member of the family: “It is a mistake to think that cats are playful. I often try to get a cat to play with me, and she never seems to care about the game, no matter how little it hurts. H.O.” Naturally, there’s a classified section too: “Legal answer wanted: A quantity of excellent string is offered if you know whether there really is a law passed about not buying gunpowder under thirteen. —Dicky.”
Critically savvy readers will recognize that the Bastables, like Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, regularly perceive the quotidian world around them through the distorting lens of favorite books. As a consequence, even the most common activities take on an air of romance. Thus, the poetic Noel — author of “Lines on a Dead Black Beetle That Was Poisoned” — refers to the tin cup at a public water fountain as “a golden goblet, wrought by enchanted gnomes.” When Alice employs a divining rod to locate hidden treasure, she wholeheartedly acts out her part as a pagan priestess: “The magic rod has spoken. . . Dig here, and that with courage and dispatch. . . Dig as you value your lives, for ere sundown the dragon who guards this spoil will return in his fiery fury and make you his unresisting prey.” In my favorite episode, the siblings decide to play bandit and quickly capture the obnoxious neighbor boy Albert for ransom:
“There will be no violence,” said Oswald — he was now Captain of the Bandits, because we all know H.O. likes to be Chaplain when we play prisoners — “no violence. But you will be confined in a dark, subterranean dungeon where toads and snakes crawl, and but little of the day filters through the heavily mullioned windows. You will be loaded with chains. Now don’t begin again, Baby, there’s nothing to cry about; straw will be your pallet; beside you the jailer will set a ewer — a ewer is only a jug, stupid; it won’t eat you — a ewer with water; and a mouldering crust will be your food.”
Oswald also addresses the imagined reader — a narrative technique that runs throughout Nesbit’s work — to correct any possible misunderstandings: “You may think we had no chains, but you are wrong, because we used to keep two other dogs once, besides Pincher, before the fall of the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable. And they were quite big dogs.”
This being a children’s book, the six boys and girls actually do bring about the restoration of the fortunes of their ancient house — and of the house of Bland, as well. Following the success of The Treasure Seekers, Nesbit would go on to publish further adventures of the Bastables in The Wouldbegoods (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). The narrator of the series — though he initially tries to hide the fact — is the innocently vain, deliciously self-congratulatory Oswald Bastable, by far the most memorable human character in all of Nesbit.

The Enchanted Castle

The Enchanted Castle

Paperback $6.99

The Enchanted Castle

By E. Nesbit
Illustrator H. R. Millar

Paperback $6.99

I say human because her other great character is the Psammead, the “it” of Five Children and It. When Robert, Anthea, James, Cyril, and the Lamb (as the baby is nicknamed) are playing one afternoon in some gravel-pits near a chalk quarry, they uncover something buried in the sand:
The children stood round the hole in a ring, looking at the creature they had found. It was worth looking at. Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s.
The Psammead turns out to be a surly, irritable sand-fairy who agrees to grant one wish a day. At sunset, though, the magic stops. As one might guess, the children’s wishes never quite work out as they expect. For instance, when Anthea requests that she and her brothers and sisters become “as beautiful as the day,” they are rendered instantly unrecognizable to one another. In fact, ‘their faces were so radiantly beautiful as to be quite irritating to look at.” By the end of Five Children and It, and after many hilarious and some dangerous misadventures, the siblings begin to recognize the vanity of human wishes and the value of foresight and good judgment.
The Five Children soon returned in the Christmastime tale, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), but the Psammead himself only reappears in The Story of the Amulet. Anthea, Cyril, and the others rescue the unhappy creature from a pet shop where he is thought to be a particularly mangy species of monkey. Eventually, the Psammead leads the kids to an antiques store — operated by an unfortunate Jewish stereotype — where they acquire one half of an ancient Egyptian amulet. To find the other half the five must travel back in time, to Atlantis, Egypt and Babylon. Nothing to it, really. “There was a moment of suspense; then came that curious upside-down, inside-out sensation which one almost always feels when transported from one place to another by magic.”
In Babylon the Queen chatters like the Edwardian equivalent of a Valley girl: “ ‘Just make yourselves comfortable there,’ ” she said. “ ‘I’m simply dying to talk to you, and to hear all about your wonderful country and how you got here . . .’ ”
Before long, though, she is confiding all sorts of secrets about the king and his other, minor consorts:
“But oh, my dears,” the Queen went on, “such a to-do as there’s been about this last wife! You never did! It really was too funny. We wanted an Egyptian princess. The King may-he-live-for-ever has got a wife from most of the important nations, and he had set his heart on an Egyptian one to complete his collection.”
When the children finally return to the early twentieth entury, the Queen tags along — and is appalled by London. Why, just see how badly the slaves are treated: “How wretched and poor and neglected they seem.” Jane insists that these are just ordinary working-people. The Queen replies, “Don’t you tell me. Do you suppose I don’t know a slave’s face when I see it? Why don’t their masters see that they’re better fed and better clothed? Tell me in three words.”
When nobody answers her, she issues a warning:
“You’ll have a revolt of your slaves if you’re not careful,” said the Queen.
“Oh, no” said Cyril; “you see they have votes — that makes them safe not to revolt. It makes all the difference. Father told me so.”
“‘What is this vote?” asked the Queen. “Is it a charm? What do they do with it?”
“‘I don’t know,” said the harassed Cyril; “it’s just a vote, that’s all. They don’t do anything particular with it.”
“‘I see,’”said the Queen; “a sort of plaything…”
To further underline her critique of Edwardian society Nesbit next transports her famous five into the distant future. There, in a Fabian Utopia, they encounter the little boy Wells, named after the ancient prophet who foresaw the glorious shape of things to come. As the kids further zigzag through time, they are regularly helped by a Learned Gentleman from the British Museum — based on Egyptologist E. Wallis Budge — and soon discover that an Egyptian sorcerer named Rekh-Mara is after their half of the amulet. The finale of this wonderful book raises the concept of restoration — of bringing together missing halves, of making that which is broken whole — to an almost Jungian level. To become fully mature we must honor and accept our shadows, our darker, secret selves.
There are other shadows in The Railway Children. This is perhaps the best known of Nesbit’s books — a beloved classic in England — but it’s hardly the Shirley Temple-ish pabulum it might initially appear. A happy London household is upended when the father suddenly disappears for reasons never explained to the three children. (Adult readers soon deduce that he has been arrested.) As a result, Roberta (also known as Bobbie), Peter, and Phyllis must move with their mother to a cottage deep in the country, close by a railway line. In the course of the novel, one near-disaster follows another: Peter is caught stealing coal, the mother falls gravely ill, a train crash is narrowly averted, a baby must be rescued from a fire on a canal boat.
In fact, only in its tone is The Railway Children light and breezy. At one point, the children are given a pram by an old woman, who tells them, “It was got for my Emmie’s first that didn’t live but six months, and she never had but that one.” They help a former prisoner of the Czar search for his lost family; a proud workingman rebuffs their charity. When a kindly doctor explains to young Peter that girls are “poor, soft, weak, frightened things like rabbits, so us men have just got to put up with them,” the modern reader may be tempted to throw the book aside Don’t. Nesbit completely undercuts this conventional sexism by making Roberta braver and tougher than anyone else. To prevent a horrible railroad crash, the girl stands resolutely on the tracks waving her torn-up red petticoat to stop the 11:29 express train, and even when the locomotive finally comes to a halt less than twenty yards in front of her, she keeps on shaking her flags until she falls down in an unconscious heap.
That said, the Railway Children are by no means plaster saints. “ ‘Don’t you do it if it’s wrong, Peter,’ ” said Bobbie; ” ‘let me do it.’ ” Phyllis rightly complains of that same brother: “I didn’t never call him unladylike, not even when he tied my Clorinda to the firewood bundle and burned her at the stake for a martyr.” And it’s worth reading the whole novel just for this skewed biblical aphorism: “It’s quite right what it says in the poetry-book about sharper than a serpent it is to have a toothless child.”
At one point in The Railway Children, Peter muses to his mother, “Wouldn’t it be jolly if we all were in a book and you were writing it?” Besides the pervasive bookishness, Nesbit’s work regularly plays with what we would now call the metafictional. In The Story of the Amulet the children can’t quite recall the name of the all-powerful servant of the Great Ones: “Nisbeth — Nesbit — something?” And in the early short story “The Town in the Library in the Town in the Library,” the plot quickly spins into Escher or Borges territory: “You see the curious thing was that the children had built a town and got into it, and in it they had found their own house with the very town they had built — or one exactly like it — still on the library floor. . . . And you see that they might have walked into that town also, but they saw that it was no good, and that they couldn’t get out that way, but would only get deeper and deeper into a nest of towns in libraries in houses in towns in libraries in houses in towns in . . . and so on for always — something like Chinese puzzle-boxes multiplied by millions and millions for ever and ever.”
In this light, the most intricate, and deepest, of her works must be The Enchanted Castle, half P. G. Wodehouse, half philosophical romance. Because of illness in the family home, Gerald and Jimmy are compelled to spend their vacation with their sister Kathleen at her deserted boarding school, under the guardianship of her French teacher. Almost immediately they discover a cave that leads them into a magical-seeming realm, dominated by an Italianate villa surrounded by gardens dotted with marble statues of the ancient gods. There’s even a life-size model of a dinosaur, apparently a remnant of some exhibition.
When the siblings spot a red thread on the ground, they follow it all the way “up two stone steps to a round grass plot. There was a sundial in the middle, and all round against the yew hedge a low, wide marble seat. The red clue ran straight across the grass and by the sundial, and ended in a small brown hand with jeweled rings on every finger. The hand was, naturally, attached to an arm…” And that arm is attached to a sleeping beauty named… Mabel, who isn’t quite what she initially seems to be.
Before long, the children and their new friend Mabel discover a ring that grants its wearer invisibility. This is not altogether a boon. “Those of my readers who have gone about much with an invisible companion will not need to be told how awkward the whole business is.” The children also learn that the statues in the garden come alive at night and that the owner of the villa is an impoverished young nobleman named Lord Yalding. He still pines for his lost beloved, reportedly spirited away to a French convent. Will the parted couple ever find each other again?
“Oh, he’ll find her all right,” said Mabel, “when he’s old and broken down, you know — and dying; and then a gentle Sister of Charity will soothe his pillow, and just when he’s dying she’ll reveal herself and say: ‘My own lost love!’ and his face will light up with a wonderful joy and he’ll expire with her beloved name on his parched lips.”
There the Wodehousean aspect of The Enchanted Castle is evident, even without the addition of bumbling crooks, Keystone-style cops, and a background love story worthy of a novelette by Rosie M. Banks. Above all, though, the writing is understatedly witty throughout, as when an invisible Mabel must compose a note to explain her “absence”:
Dear Aunt, I am afraid you will not see me again for some time. A lady in a motor-car has adopted me, and we are going straight to the coast and then in a ship. It is useless to try to follow me. Farewell, and may you be happy. I hope you enjoyed the fair. Mabel.
The Enchanted Castle, however, goes far beyond mere comedy. Throughout, Nesbit raises metaphysical questions about appearance and reality, the relationship of the soul to the body, the place of the numinous in ordinary life, indeed the very nature of things. Matters start to grow distinctly metaphysical once the children decide to put on a play. “You know pretty well what Beauty and the Beast would be like acted by four children who had spent the afternoon in arranging their costumes and so had left no time for rehearsing.” That’s a typical bit of Nesbitian humor. But the kids also decide to create an actual audience for their show out of coats and hats and old shoes held together by string and given vaguely human shape by coatracks and hangers.
And then Mabel accidentally says, “I wish these creatures we made were alive. We should get something like applause then.” At which point, all these scarecrows and mannequins begin to clap.
The Ugly-Wuglies, as they are dubbed, are deeply unnerving, for they don’t realize that they are just agglomerations of household items shaped to look like human beings. One has even managed “by just being alive, to become perfectly respectable, apparently, about fifty years old, and obviously well off, known and respected in his own suburb — the kind of man who travels first class and smokes expensive cigars.” He politely asks to be directed to a good hotel.
Eventually, Gerald follows this creature to London, where it is recognized as a successful and well-established businessman: Mr. U. W. Ugli, Stock and Share Broker. But how could this just-cobbled-together Frankensteinian clotheshorse have a history? If Gerald were to turn it back into a coat and hat, would all memory of the Ugly-Wugly disappear? “Would the mahogany-and-clerk-furnished offices fade away?” A philosophical abyss soon opens before the boy: “Were the clerks real? Was the mahogany? Was he himself real?”
Elsewhere, The Enchanted Castle hints that the true world, something like a Platonic ideal world, is actually hidden behind the veil of illusion: “By day those gardens were like dreams, at night they were like visions. . . He had the extraordinary feeling so difficult to describe, and yet so real and so unforgettable — the feeling that he was in another world, that had covered up and hidden the old world as a carpet covers a floor. The floor was there all right, underneath, but what he walked on was the carpet that covered it — and that carpet was drenched in magic, as the turf was drenched in dew.”
At the novel’s climax, the children, Mabel, Lord Yalding, and the French governess come together as the harvest moon rises over a circle of ancient ringstones. Nesbit switches to the present tense to describe a transcendental moment that recalls the last canto of Dante’s Paradiso. When the moonlight shines through a curious round hole in one stone:
Everything changes. Or, rather, everything is revealed. There are no more secrets.… 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 center of the universe and it is the universe itself. The eternal light rests on and illuminates the eternal heart of things.
In this moment, mere magic has been swept aside by the love that moves the sun and all the stars. Half the summer still lies before you and your children. There’s still plenty of time to discover a Psammead in the sand, dig for buried treasure,  or explore an enchanted castle. Above all, though, be ready for surprises. To quote E. Nesbit one last time: “There are some days when you seem to have got to the end of all the things that could ever possibly happen to you, and you feel you will spend all the rest of your life doing dull things just the same way. Days like this are generally wet days. But, as I said, you never know.”

I say human because her other great character is the Psammead, the “it” of Five Children and It. When Robert, Anthea, James, Cyril, and the Lamb (as the baby is nicknamed) are playing one afternoon in some gravel-pits near a chalk quarry, they uncover something buried in the sand:
The children stood round the hole in a ring, looking at the creature they had found. It was worth looking at. Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s.
The Psammead turns out to be a surly, irritable sand-fairy who agrees to grant one wish a day. At sunset, though, the magic stops. As one might guess, the children’s wishes never quite work out as they expect. For instance, when Anthea requests that she and her brothers and sisters become “as beautiful as the day,” they are rendered instantly unrecognizable to one another. In fact, ‘their faces were so radiantly beautiful as to be quite irritating to look at.” By the end of Five Children and It, and after many hilarious and some dangerous misadventures, the siblings begin to recognize the vanity of human wishes and the value of foresight and good judgment.
The Five Children soon returned in the Christmastime tale, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), but the Psammead himself only reappears in The Story of the Amulet. Anthea, Cyril, and the others rescue the unhappy creature from a pet shop where he is thought to be a particularly mangy species of monkey. Eventually, the Psammead leads the kids to an antiques store — operated by an unfortunate Jewish stereotype — where they acquire one half of an ancient Egyptian amulet. To find the other half the five must travel back in time, to Atlantis, Egypt and Babylon. Nothing to it, really. “There was a moment of suspense; then came that curious upside-down, inside-out sensation which one almost always feels when transported from one place to another by magic.”
In Babylon the Queen chatters like the Edwardian equivalent of a Valley girl: “ ‘Just make yourselves comfortable there,’ ” she said. “ ‘I’m simply dying to talk to you, and to hear all about your wonderful country and how you got here . . .’ ”
Before long, though, she is confiding all sorts of secrets about the king and his other, minor consorts:
“But oh, my dears,” the Queen went on, “such a to-do as there’s been about this last wife! You never did! It really was too funny. We wanted an Egyptian princess. The King may-he-live-for-ever has got a wife from most of the important nations, and he had set his heart on an Egyptian one to complete his collection.”
When the children finally return to the early twentieth entury, the Queen tags along — and is appalled by London. Why, just see how badly the slaves are treated: “How wretched and poor and neglected they seem.” Jane insists that these are just ordinary working-people. The Queen replies, “Don’t you tell me. Do you suppose I don’t know a slave’s face when I see it? Why don’t their masters see that they’re better fed and better clothed? Tell me in three words.”
When nobody answers her, she issues a warning:
“You’ll have a revolt of your slaves if you’re not careful,” said the Queen.
“Oh, no” said Cyril; “you see they have votes — that makes them safe not to revolt. It makes all the difference. Father told me so.”
“‘What is this vote?” asked the Queen. “Is it a charm? What do they do with it?”
“‘I don’t know,” said the harassed Cyril; “it’s just a vote, that’s all. They don’t do anything particular with it.”
“‘I see,’”said the Queen; “a sort of plaything…”
To further underline her critique of Edwardian society Nesbit next transports her famous five into the distant future. There, in a Fabian Utopia, they encounter the little boy Wells, named after the ancient prophet who foresaw the glorious shape of things to come. As the kids further zigzag through time, they are regularly helped by a Learned Gentleman from the British Museum — based on Egyptologist E. Wallis Budge — and soon discover that an Egyptian sorcerer named Rekh-Mara is after their half of the amulet. The finale of this wonderful book raises the concept of restoration — of bringing together missing halves, of making that which is broken whole — to an almost Jungian level. To become fully mature we must honor and accept our shadows, our darker, secret selves.
There are other shadows in The Railway Children. This is perhaps the best known of Nesbit’s books — a beloved classic in England — but it’s hardly the Shirley Temple-ish pabulum it might initially appear. A happy London household is upended when the father suddenly disappears for reasons never explained to the three children. (Adult readers soon deduce that he has been arrested.) As a result, Roberta (also known as Bobbie), Peter, and Phyllis must move with their mother to a cottage deep in the country, close by a railway line. In the course of the novel, one near-disaster follows another: Peter is caught stealing coal, the mother falls gravely ill, a train crash is narrowly averted, a baby must be rescued from a fire on a canal boat.
In fact, only in its tone is The Railway Children light and breezy. At one point, the children are given a pram by an old woman, who tells them, “It was got for my Emmie’s first that didn’t live but six months, and she never had but that one.” They help a former prisoner of the Czar search for his lost family; a proud workingman rebuffs their charity. When a kindly doctor explains to young Peter that girls are “poor, soft, weak, frightened things like rabbits, so us men have just got to put up with them,” the modern reader may be tempted to throw the book aside Don’t. Nesbit completely undercuts this conventional sexism by making Roberta braver and tougher than anyone else. To prevent a horrible railroad crash, the girl stands resolutely on the tracks waving her torn-up red petticoat to stop the 11:29 express train, and even when the locomotive finally comes to a halt less than twenty yards in front of her, she keeps on shaking her flags until she falls down in an unconscious heap.
That said, the Railway Children are by no means plaster saints. “ ‘Don’t you do it if it’s wrong, Peter,’ ” said Bobbie; ” ‘let me do it.’ ” Phyllis rightly complains of that same brother: “I didn’t never call him unladylike, not even when he tied my Clorinda to the firewood bundle and burned her at the stake for a martyr.” And it’s worth reading the whole novel just for this skewed biblical aphorism: “It’s quite right what it says in the poetry-book about sharper than a serpent it is to have a toothless child.”
At one point in The Railway Children, Peter muses to his mother, “Wouldn’t it be jolly if we all were in a book and you were writing it?” Besides the pervasive bookishness, Nesbit’s work regularly plays with what we would now call the metafictional. In The Story of the Amulet the children can’t quite recall the name of the all-powerful servant of the Great Ones: “Nisbeth — Nesbit — something?” And in the early short story “The Town in the Library in the Town in the Library,” the plot quickly spins into Escher or Borges territory: “You see the curious thing was that the children had built a town and got into it, and in it they had found their own house with the very town they had built — or one exactly like it — still on the library floor. . . . And you see that they might have walked into that town also, but they saw that it was no good, and that they couldn’t get out that way, but would only get deeper and deeper into a nest of towns in libraries in houses in towns in libraries in houses in towns in . . . and so on for always — something like Chinese puzzle-boxes multiplied by millions and millions for ever and ever.”
In this light, the most intricate, and deepest, of her works must be The Enchanted Castle, half P. G. Wodehouse, half philosophical romance. Because of illness in the family home, Gerald and Jimmy are compelled to spend their vacation with their sister Kathleen at her deserted boarding school, under the guardianship of her French teacher. Almost immediately they discover a cave that leads them into a magical-seeming realm, dominated by an Italianate villa surrounded by gardens dotted with marble statues of the ancient gods. There’s even a life-size model of a dinosaur, apparently a remnant of some exhibition.
When the siblings spot a red thread on the ground, they follow it all the way “up two stone steps to a round grass plot. There was a sundial in the middle, and all round against the yew hedge a low, wide marble seat. The red clue ran straight across the grass and by the sundial, and ended in a small brown hand with jeweled rings on every finger. The hand was, naturally, attached to an arm…” And that arm is attached to a sleeping beauty named… Mabel, who isn’t quite what she initially seems to be.
Before long, the children and their new friend Mabel discover a ring that grants its wearer invisibility. This is not altogether a boon. “Those of my readers who have gone about much with an invisible companion will not need to be told how awkward the whole business is.” The children also learn that the statues in the garden come alive at night and that the owner of the villa is an impoverished young nobleman named Lord Yalding. He still pines for his lost beloved, reportedly spirited away to a French convent. Will the parted couple ever find each other again?
“Oh, he’ll find her all right,” said Mabel, “when he’s old and broken down, you know — and dying; and then a gentle Sister of Charity will soothe his pillow, and just when he’s dying she’ll reveal herself and say: ‘My own lost love!’ and his face will light up with a wonderful joy and he’ll expire with her beloved name on his parched lips.”
There the Wodehousean aspect of The Enchanted Castle is evident, even without the addition of bumbling crooks, Keystone-style cops, and a background love story worthy of a novelette by Rosie M. Banks. Above all, though, the writing is understatedly witty throughout, as when an invisible Mabel must compose a note to explain her “absence”:
Dear Aunt, I am afraid you will not see me again for some time. A lady in a motor-car has adopted me, and we are going straight to the coast and then in a ship. It is useless to try to follow me. Farewell, and may you be happy. I hope you enjoyed the fair. Mabel.
The Enchanted Castle, however, goes far beyond mere comedy. Throughout, Nesbit raises metaphysical questions about appearance and reality, the relationship of the soul to the body, the place of the numinous in ordinary life, indeed the very nature of things. Matters start to grow distinctly metaphysical once the children decide to put on a play. “You know pretty well what Beauty and the Beast would be like acted by four children who had spent the afternoon in arranging their costumes and so had left no time for rehearsing.” That’s a typical bit of Nesbitian humor. But the kids also decide to create an actual audience for their show out of coats and hats and old shoes held together by string and given vaguely human shape by coatracks and hangers.
And then Mabel accidentally says, “I wish these creatures we made were alive. We should get something like applause then.” At which point, all these scarecrows and mannequins begin to clap.
The Ugly-Wuglies, as they are dubbed, are deeply unnerving, for they don’t realize that they are just agglomerations of household items shaped to look like human beings. One has even managed “by just being alive, to become perfectly respectable, apparently, about fifty years old, and obviously well off, known and respected in his own suburb — the kind of man who travels first class and smokes expensive cigars.” He politely asks to be directed to a good hotel.
Eventually, Gerald follows this creature to London, where it is recognized as a successful and well-established businessman: Mr. U. W. Ugli, Stock and Share Broker. But how could this just-cobbled-together Frankensteinian clotheshorse have a history? If Gerald were to turn it back into a coat and hat, would all memory of the Ugly-Wugly disappear? “Would the mahogany-and-clerk-furnished offices fade away?” A philosophical abyss soon opens before the boy: “Were the clerks real? Was the mahogany? Was he himself real?”
Elsewhere, The Enchanted Castle hints that the true world, something like a Platonic ideal world, is actually hidden behind the veil of illusion: “By day those gardens were like dreams, at night they were like visions. . . He had the extraordinary feeling so difficult to describe, and yet so real and so unforgettable — the feeling that he was in another world, that had covered up and hidden the old world as a carpet covers a floor. The floor was there all right, underneath, but what he walked on was the carpet that covered it — and that carpet was drenched in magic, as the turf was drenched in dew.”
At the novel’s climax, the children, Mabel, Lord Yalding, and the French governess come together as the harvest moon rises over a circle of ancient ringstones. Nesbit switches to the present tense to describe a transcendental moment that recalls the last canto of Dante’s Paradiso. When the moonlight shines through a curious round hole in one stone:
Everything changes. Or, rather, everything is revealed. There are no more secrets.… 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 center of the universe and it is the universe itself. The eternal light rests on and illuminates the eternal heart of things.
In this moment, mere magic has been swept aside by the love that moves the sun and all the stars. Half the summer still lies before you and your children. There’s still plenty of time to discover a Psammead in the sand, dig for buried treasure,  or explore an enchanted castle. Above all, though, be ready for surprises. To quote E. Nesbit one last time: “There are some days when you seem to have got to the end of all the things that could ever possibly happen to you, and you feel you will spend all the rest of your life doing dull things just the same way. Days like this are generally wet days. But, as I said, you never know.”