The Princess and Curdie
The story, which is a sequel to the princess and the goblin, tells how Curdie the miner's son is sent, by the more than half-magical great-great-grandmother of the little Princess Irene, to the city of Gwyntystorm, where stands the palace of Irene and her father the king. Evil councillors have taken control of the city, and indeed virtually the entire population of Gwyntystorm is corrupt. Thanks to the help of his companion, a grotesque but loving animal named Lina, Curdie gets into the king's private chamber and discovers that the old man is being kept in a stupor of nightmares by means of poison. Curdie rouses the king to his senses, much to the gratitude of Irene. With the aid of a whole troop of beasts who are as grotesque as Lina – 'the Uglies', Irene calls them – the evil courtiers and the dishonest servants are chased from the palace, and when war is made on Gwyntystorm by a neighbouring power, the king's small force is victorious. Gwyntystorm is set to rights, and Irene and Curdie marry and in due time become queen and king. But they have no children, and after their day the city goes to the bad again, eventually crashing in ruins in a destruction brought about by its own occupants.
EDITH NESBIT (1858-1924),
NESBIT, author of stories and novels for children, creator of the Bastable family, and, in a vein of comic fantasy, of five children and it, the phoenix and the carpet, the story of the amulet, and other books.
Edith Nesbit, known to the family as Daisy, was the youngest of the four surviving children of John Collis Nesbit, an agricultural chemist of distinction and an early promoter of natural science as a school subject. He died in 1862 when Edith was only three. For several years his widow ran the college herself, but when Edith was about nine her mother decided to go abroad for the health of Edith's elder sister Mary. Edith hated most of her numerous schools, and she apparently made several attempts to run away from one in Germany. More successful was a period spent learning French with a family in France. Meanwhile she read voraciously, and her own writings reflect a wide knowledge of 19th-cent. children's books, to which she and her heroes and heroines constantly refer, either mockingly or with approval.
After a happy time in one house in Brittany the family came back to England, and settled in a large country house in Kent, which she loved. Her two brothers were of an age to join her in exploiting its shrubberies, its pond, its secret place on the roof to store books, its nearby railway cutting, and its reputation for ghosts (in which Edith always believed). She drew on both the setting and-the way of life in later writings.
When Edith was about 15 she began to have verse accepted by a magazine. She dreamt 'of the days when I should be a great poet like Shakespeare, or Christina Rossetti!'
Around 1877 Edith married Hubert Bland, a handsome young bank employee. Edith became, like her husband, a Socialist Edith was on the Pamphlet Committee, and showed other signs of being an advanced woman. She cut her hair short, wore all-wool 'aesthetic' clothes, and smoked in public; she worked for the poor of Deptford, organizing Christmas parties and pantomimes for them with great energy. She fell in love with another Fabian, George Bernard Shaw, and wrote verses to him, though to make money she needed to publish these, with his identity disguised.
The celebrated books for children by 'E. Nesbit" emerged almost without warning when she was 40, out of a mass of more or less hack-writing in almost every genre. In the words of her biographer, 'she took the best part of twenty years to find her level, and even then did not realise she had found it.' Stories for children were among her magazine contributions, and in 1892 the firm of Raphael tuck, for whom she also designed Christmas cards, brought out her first complete book for children, The Voyage of Columbus, a verse narrative. These she followed with such things as a birthday book made up of her own poetry, Pussy Tales and Doggy Tales, and Shakespeare retold for children. She planned a new magazine for children, but it came to nothing. Then, apparently unaware that she was engaged in anything different from her usual breadwinning, she produced, in 1898, a series of stories for the Pall Mall and Windsor magazines concerning Oswald Bastable and his family. These were published as a book, the story of the treasure seekers, the following year. It was immediately successful, and introduced a period of prosperity in the Bland household.
The second Bastable book, The Wouldbegoods, appeared in 1901, and a series of stories entitled 'The Psammead' began to be published in the strand magazine the same year. The Psammead stories formed the basis of Five Children and It (1902); The Phoenix and the Carpet began to appear in the Strand in 1903, and The New Treasure Seekers (a collection of Bastable stories) in the London Magazine the same year; both were published as books in 1904. This was all at the same time as Edith was personally answering innumerable letters from child and adult admirers.
In 1905 she wrote The Story of the Amulet. The Railway Children began as a serial in the London Magazine in 1904, and came out as a book in 1906, the year that the enchanted castle began to appear in the Strand. Then in 1908 the house of arden came out as a book, after running in the Strand; its sequel, harding's luck, appeared in 1909. In 1908 was also published a collection of her retellings of fairy stories entitled The Old Nursery Tales, this being the first volume of a series entitled 'The Children's Bookcase', which she was editing.
Considering the nature of her literary career before she came to write for children, it is not surprising that her stories sometimes have the flavour of hack-work. And, consistently amusing as her 'Bastable' books are, her portrayal of children in them seems condescending and patronizing when compared with that achieved by her contemporary Kenneth grahame in the golden age. On the other hand, in this series, and even more in Five Children and It and its sequels, she created a form of children's book which served as a model for many later writers.
E. nesbit. Five Children and It (1902)
Robert, Anthea, Jane, Cyril, and their baby brother 'the Lamb' are left to stay in the country while their parents are away. They discover the Psammead, a sand-fairy, brown and hairy, with bat's ears and snail's eyes, and the power of granting them wishes; but it does so reluctantly, for it is a cantankerous, self-pitying creature. Each of the children's daily wishes, which are unmade at sunset, brings unforeseen trouble, whether being 'beautiful as the day', having a gravel pit full of gold, making other people want to look after the Lamb or having him grow up, flying, being in a besieged castle, being a giant, or encountering Indians. Several of the wishes are accidental, irredeemably out of the children's mouths before they can think of something more sensible, and by the end of the book they have to promise the Psammead never to ask for another wish, if only he will undo all the awful consequences of their last one.
Five Children and It was the first of E. Nesbit's fantasies (it was followed by two sequels, the phoenix and the carpet and the story of the amulet); it displays all the powers of portraying lively, bantering children that marked her earlier, realistic, children's stories. The characterization of the sand-fairy and of the infant Lamb are additional strong points. The embarrassment and comedy of mixing fairy wishes with everyday life was probably suggested by F. Anstey's the brass bottle— Anthea and Jane credit the reading of that book with their being able to clear up the mess created by their last wish.
The book was dedicated to E. Nesbit's own 'Lamb', her infant son John. It established a formula for children's fantasy-writing which has been followed by many authors in England and elsewhere.
E. nesbit.The Phoenix and the Carpet
The second fantasy novel by E. nesbit, sequel to five children and it. Robert, Anthea, Jane, and Cyril acquire a nursery carpet in which is wrapped a mysterious egg; when the egg falls into the fire, there hatches out of it the Phoenix, who has been taking 2,000 years' rest from his usual cycle of self-destruction and rebirth. He explains to the children that the carpet is a magic wishing-carpet, which he was given by a prince and princess who had no further use for it. With the carpet to convey them wherever they want, and to carry out virtually anything they wish for, the children begin a series of adventures, the Phoenix accompanying them as a benevolent guide.
As in Five Children and It, they soon discover that almost every magic journey or wish has unforeseen consequences of the most alarming kind, and often the Phoenix's own ingenuity and powers are required to get them out of a tight spot. They accidentally imprison themselves in a French castle, carry the family cook off to a desert island where she becomes queen of the savages, acquire 199 vociferous Persian cats (and a cow), and, in a memorable scene, visit the Phoenix Fire Insurance offices, which the Phoenix supposes to be the temple of his worshippers.
E. nesbit. The Enchanted Castle (1907)
Gerald, Jimmy, and Kathleen discover a magnificent castle which they decide to pretend is enchanted. In a maze in the garden they find a girl of about their own age who is pretending to be the Sleeping Beauty. She is in fact Mabel, the niece of the castle's housekeeper; but when she shows them a secret room in the castle, the enchantment becomes real. Among the jewels they find there is a ring which Mabel declares will make her invisible – whereupon to her astonishment it does. Invisibility proves to be a great nuisance, however, as does the ring's power of granting its wearer's wishes; though it does eventually manage to unite the castle's owner, Lord Yalding, with the lady he loves.
The book is more complex in structure than anything Nesbit had previously written for children. The critic Julia Briggs has pointed out that it attempts a 'sustained examination of childhood fears', and 'swings unsettlingly between the everyday world and the world of childish nightmare'. It is perhaps too ambitious to be entirely successful, but it reaches a fine pitch of grotesque comedy when the Ugli-Wuglies, a group of scarecrow-like human figures that the children have manufactured out of household objects, actually come alive, thanks to a casual wish.