Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

As the ceremony continues, all of the statues come alive—ancient creatures both real and imaginary, followed by a vast array of gods and goddesses—and the lovers proceed to the Hall of Granted Wishes (a.k.a. the Hall of Psyche), where the history of the ring is revealed and Mademoiselle makes a final wish “that all the magic this ring has wrought may be undone, and that the ring itself may be no more and no less than a charm to bind thee and me together for evermore” (p. 411). In the ensuing transformation, which echoes Prospero’s renunciation of magic at the end of The Tempest, the mystical light dies away, the windows of granted wishes disappear, and the statue of Psyche turns into a mere grave. At the same time, in the spirit of Keats and the Romantics, the very process of demythologizing the myth of Cupid and Psyche reveals its full significance, as the imaginary god and his lover are replaced by a real man and woman who are bound together in a climactic vision of the soul uplifted and transfigured by the power of love. Nesbit concludes the novel on a humorous note, but the return to the more impish manner of her “funny” magic dramatically underscores the turn to the more “serious” magic that gathers force over the second half of the novel. Many readers prefer the vitality of the former to the gravity of the latter, and many of those who admire her later works favor the social critique of The Story of the Amulet, The House of Arden, and Harding’s Luck over the Romantic Platonism of The Enchanted Castle. But never again would Nesbit undertake such an ambitious work of children’s fiction, and none of her other books possesses either the coherence or the complexity of her architectonic masterpiece.

It is easy to underestimate Nesbit’s influence on modern children’s fiction, especially in North America, where she has never enjoyed the same level of popularity as she has in the British Isles. Historians continue to debate the degree of her originality, but they seem to agree that however much she was indebted to her Victorian predecessors, Nesbit brought a new and more modern voice to children’s fiction, and in certain respect, her distinctive fusion of magic and realism, which cast a spell on later generations of children’s authors, endures to this day. According to Colin Manlove, “After Nesbit, children’s fantasy was never quite the same again. She showed just how much fun could be made of bringing magic into the ordinary domestic lives of children: And she introduced to children’s fantasy the idea of the group of different children, rather than the frequently solitary child of earlier books. Her books demonstrated that fantasy could be wildly inventive and yet follow its own peculiar laws.”
⁵
All of these Nesbit trademarks—the family ensemble, the mixture of the magic and the realism, the rites of passage between worlds—are prominent features of C. S. Lewis’s classic cycle The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). With good reason Lewis’s admirers emphasize the influence of George MacDonald and members of his own literary circle, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. But as several Lewis scholars have pointed out, the Narnia series is in some ways far more closely related to Nesbit’s fiction, which informs the narrative voice, the basic elements of character and plot, and a surprising number of specific details, particularly in The Magician’s Nephew, which is set in Nesbit’s turn-of-the-century London and draws liberally on her works.
⁶
On the other side of the Atlantic, Lewis’s American contemporary, Edward Eager, author of the popular “Half Magic” series (1954-1958), openly identifies Nesbit as the source of his inspiration. At the outset of the first volume, Half Magic, a family of four book-loving children forbids oral recitation after suffering through Evangeline, but “this summer the rule had changed. This summer the children had found some books by a writer named E. Nesbit, surely the most wonderful books in the world.... And now yesterday The Enchanted Castle had come in, and they took it out, and Jane, because she could read fastest and loudest, read it out loud all the way home, and when they got home she went on reading, and when their mother came home they hardly said a word to her, and when dinner was served they didn’t notice a thing they ate.”
⁷
It is arguable that Nesbit’s influence has ebbed since the days of these mid-century testimonials, and that children’s fantasy itself has shifted terrain in the last few decades. But Nesbit’s imprint is still apparent in some of the genre’s most popular practitioners, including Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling, and even in cinematic productions such as Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), a direct descendant of The Magic City (1910). Admittedly, a century after their appearance her novels seem embedded in a bygone society and reflect some of its now outmoded values. Moreover, as a writer who seems to have one foot planted in Victorian society and the other in the twentieth century, Nesbit has sparked debate over the extent to which she departs from the heavy-handed didacticism of her literary predecessors, and it is often difficult to decide whether she is subverting or affirming the norms of her notably class-conscious and patriarchal society. But what seems to have endured beyond the cultural trappings of her transitional era is the freshness of her narrative voice, the vivacity and playful humor that in the right circumstances might modulate into high seriousness, and, perhaps above all, the perpetual fusion and confusion between the imaginary and the real, the books we read and the lives we live, the magical lure of our wishes, dreams, and desires, and the inevitably limited conditions of existence that they ceaselessly enchant.

 

Sanford Schwartz
teaches English literature at Pennsylvania State University (University Park). He is the author of The Matrix of Modernism and various essays on modern literary, cultural, and intellectual history. He is currently writing a book on C. S. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy.

 

Acknowledgments: I wish to thank several friends and colleagues who provided encouragement and indispensable support along the way: Julia Briggs, for clarifying some baffling allusions in these century-old novels; Elizabeth Jenkins, for assistance with the dialects, slang, and semantic subtleties of what I once considered my native tongue; John Poritsky, for direction on recent work in children’s literature; and my incomparable research assistant, Jeff Pruchnic, for just about everything.

1
Quoted in Dorothy Langley Moore, E. Nesbit: A Biography (1933; revised edition, London: Benn, 1967), p. 197.

2
From Shaw’s interview with Dorothy Langley Moore, quoted in Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. xvi.

3
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 71-72.

4
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis recalls his childhood reading of Nesbit’s novels: “Much better than either of these [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and 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 Carpet [sic], 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.” C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Diego: Harcourt, 1970), p. 14.

5
Colin Manlove, From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England (Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2003), p. 47.

6
Mervyn Nicholson, “What C. S. Lewis Took from E. Nesbit,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 16 (1991), pp. 16-22.

7
Edward Eager, Half Magic (1954; San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), pp. 4-5 .

 

BEAUTIFUL AS THE DAY

T
he house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty hired fly
^a
had rattled along for five minutes the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and to say, “Aren’t we nearly there?” And every time they passed a house, which was not very often, they all said, “Oh, is this it?” But it never was, till they reached the very top of the hill, just past the chalk-quarry and before you come to the gravel-pit. And then there was a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond, and mother said, “Here we are!”

“How white the house is,” said Robert.

“And look at the roses,” said Anthea.

“And the plums,” said Jane.

“It is rather decent,” Cyril admitted.

The Baby said, “Wanty go walky”; and the fly stopped with a last rattle and jolt.

Everyone got its legs kicked or its feet trodden on in the scramble to get out of the carriage that very minute, but no one seemed to mind. Mother, curiously enough, was in no hurry to get out; and even when she had come down slowly and by the step, and with no jump at all, she seemed to wish to see the boxes carried in, and even to pay the driver, instead of joining in that first glorious rush round the garden and the orchard and the thorny, thistly, briery, brambly wilderness beyond the broken gate and the dry fountain at the side of the house. But the children were wiser, for once. It was not really a pretty house at all; it was quite ordinary, and mother thought it was rather inconvenient, and was quite annoyed at there being no shelves, to speak of, and hardly a cupboard in the place. Father used to say that the ironwork on the roof and coping was like an architect’s nightmare. But the house was deep in the country, with no other house in sight, and the children had been in London for two years, without so much as once going to the seaside even for a day by an excursion train, and so the White House seemed to them a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise. For London is like prison for children, especially if their relations are not rich.

 

That first glorious rush round the garden

Of course there are the shops and the theatres, and Maskelyne and Cook’s,
^b
and things, but if your people are rather poor you don’t get taken to the theatres, and you can’t buy things out of the shops; and London has none of those nice things that children may play with without hurting the things or themselves—such as trees and sand and woods and waters. And nearly everything in London is the wrong sort of shape—all straight lines and flat streets, instead of being all sorts of odd shapes, like things are in the country. Trees are all different, as you know, and I am sure some tiresome person must have told you that there are no two blades of grass exactly alike. But in streets, where the blades of grass don’t grow, everything is like everything else. This is why so many children who live in towns are so extremely naughty. They do not know what is the matter with them, and no more do their fathers and mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, tutors, governesses, and nurses; but I know. And so do you now. Children in the country are naughty sometimes, too, but that is for quite different reasons.