Nesbit retained the same juvenile ensemble in her two subsequent fantasies, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet. In the first, the scene shifts to London, and the Psammead is replaced by another wishing creature, the Phoenix, the legendary bird known for its beauty and its singular capacity for rebirth from its own ashes. Out of commission for two millennia, Nesbit’s high-toned patrician bird returns to life in the family parlor and takes the children on a loosely organized series of romps through London and beyond, all the while exhibiting its somewhat haughty but engagingly comic dignity—proud, poetic, and disdainful of the prosaic character of modern life. The Psammead reappears in The Story of the Amulet, but it plays a relatively minor role in the quest for the missing half of a magic charm that has the capacity to confer “our hearts’ desire” (p. 281). The clue to the missing half-amulet is buried in the past. The search takes the children on a series of voyages in time, first to a prehistoric village along the Nile (c.6000 B.C.) and then to ancient Babylon at the height of its glory. After that, they voyage to the seafaring civilization of ancient Tyre, the glorious mythical continent of Atlantis just before it sinks into the sea, ancient Britain at the time of Caesar’s conquest (55 B.C.), again to ancient Egypt (this time during the reign of the Pharoah), and finally forward in time, first to a utopian London free of the ills of the Edwardian city, and then to the near future, where they encounter their own adult selves. Nesbit has nearly as much fun with overlapping times as she did with overlapping spaces in Five Children and It, when, for instance, the Queen of Babylon is transported from her own time to the children’s London and is not only appalled by the shabbiness of the modern metropolis but also insists on the return of her jewels from the British Museum. (C. S. Lewis, who admired the novel, recreates this episode in The Magician’s Nephew [1955], where the much more treacherous Queen Jadis escapes from her own world and stirs up trouble in Edwardian London.)
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Despite such touches of humor, each of these time-travel adventures invites reflection on the nature of society and the state, and taken together they reflect the increasingly serious mood of Nesbit’s later fantasies. So does the joining together of the two halves of the amulet, which produces a vision of a higher domain that transcends the injurious divisions and contradictions of everyday life and allows us to pass “through the perfect charm to the perfect union, which is not of time or space.” Nesbit would never abandon the kind of “funny” magic that prevails in Five Children and It, but the resolution of The Story of the Amulet points to the more “serious” magic that would come to the fore in her next major fantasy, The Enchanted Castle.
Nesbit’s most ambitious work of fiction starts off as most of her previous novels. Once again, we meet a group of middle-class siblings who set forth on a series of adventures. In this instance, we begin with a threesome—Gerald, Kathleen, and Jimmy—who are compelled to remain at school for the holidays in the charge of a young schoolmistress, the good-natured “Mademoiselle.” Like the Bastables and the “five children,” these siblings are reasonably well differentiated and inclined to incessant squabbling. Gerald, the oldest and most resourceful, bears a certain resemblance to Oswald Bastable. Unlike the latter, he is not the narrator of the novel, but he possesses the habit of narrating his own actions in a self-conscious literary manner (annoying to the other children, if amusing to us) that inevitably grants him pride of place: “ ‘The young explorers, ... dazzled at first by the darkness of the cave, could see nothing.... But their dauntless leader, whose eyes had grown used to the dark while the clumsy forms of the others were bunging up the entrance, had made a discovery’ ” (p. 198). Jimmy, by contrast, is the resident skeptic who not only punctures the pretensions of others but also plays an important role as the doubting Thomas of this mischievously magical universe. Kathleen, the middle child, is less well marked, but as with Anthea and some of Nesbit’s other young girls, her common sense and compassion offset some of the eccentricities of her male companions and provide some ballast to the group. Like the “five children” before them, Nesbit’s new team wanders into a magical world, but we soon discover that in this novel it is often difficult to distinguish the enchanted and the real, and questions of truth and belief play a more prominent role than in the earlier novels. Over time we also discover that the plot of this novel, which seems to begin as another loosely organized sequence of episodes, is more unified and considerably more complex than its predecessors. Nesbit offers no explicit structural signposts, but if nothing else, the twelve untitled chapters seem to fall into two discrete sets of six, and as we shall see, the symmetries established by the apparent subdivision of each half of the book into three two-chapter sets indicates that she took considerable pains to construct a carefully integrated work of art.
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: