New Nesbit and Another Nesbit News Bit

The Guardian reports that Jacqueline Wilson, one of the UK’s most respected and popular writers for children, has signed a contract to “write a new version of E Nesbit’s classic Five Children and It.”

That seemed like such a wasted effort that I went looking for more detail, but even the original report in The Bookseller adds little—only that Wilson will write a “contemporary version.”

Does this mean retelling the same Psammead adventures in contemporary England, where children don’t have to worry so much about evading the household help? Or will a new set of children discover the grumpy little wish-provider and make new wishes?

Is Wilson writing The Psammead Comes Back: And This Times It’s Personal? Should we look forward to more Nesbit revamps that reflect modern lifestyles, like The Airline Children? The Enchanted McMansion? The Would-Be-Above-Averages?

Most of Nesbit’s novels are set in England a century ago, of course, and some display the racism and class attitudes of their times. But the children—almost always a gender mix of siblings, not vastly distinguishable—treat each other in easily relatable ways. The narrative style and voice in many of Nesbit’s fantasies is delightfully fresh. So I’m not sure what about Five Children and It is so dated as to demand a contemporary rewrite, which would therefore be driven by the new copyright claim and exclusive sales.

There are other ways to regain that old magical realism, of course. Edward Eager unabashedly updated Nesbit for the postwar suburban American child, and Laurel Snyder has updated Eager with Any Which Wall. In 1999 Books of Wonder commissioned new illustrations for Five Children and It from Paul O. Zelinsky, as shown above. All those editions and additions share a certain old-fashioned and nostalgic tone, but surely that’s what people seeking “a new version of E Nesbit” would be looking for. Perhaps Wilson will simply produce her own “inspired by Nesbit” adventure.

The other Nesbit news story for this week was the revelation that some beloved details of The Railway Children—particularly flagging down a train to prevent an accident and receiving an engraved watch as a reward—also appear in a novel published just a few years before: The House by the Railway, by Ada J. Graves. Since I dislike The Railway Children, this news didn’t derail me in the least.

Correction: When Edward Met Edith

Months back, I wrote an analysis of how Edward Eager’s 1954 fantasy Half Magic addressed history—in its setting in the past, in its depiction of change over time, and in its explicit allusions to E. Nesbit’s novels from decades earlier. I wrote that Eager set Half Magic around the period when he had first read Nesbit.

Fellow Oz fan and scholar Dee Michel recommended that I read Eager’s thoughts on the Oz series in his 1948 Horn Book essay “A Minority Report,” and in doing so I came across evidence that my supposition about Eager’s childhood reading was wrong.

Eager didn’t read Nesbit’s books as a child. He discovered them as a young father in the 1940s, and in this essay he thanked the “learned ladies” of the American children’s book establishment for cluing him in. Those ladies included Anne Eaton, Anne Carroll Moore, “Mrs. Becker, Miss [Bertha E.] Mahony and the rest.”

Their praise for Nesbit’s books sent Eager “vainly chasing through New York’s thrift shops and secondhand bookstores.” The books had gone out of print in America, and their owners apparently still treasured their old copies. By great pre-Amazonian effort Eager found enough to declare Nesbit’s “magnificent works” to be “the best children’s books, I am quite sure, in the world!”

An editorial note with Eager’s essay in the 1959 Horn Book Sampler says that Coward-McCann had reprinted Nesbit’s novels in the US only the year before. By then, Eager had made his own name in children’s books.

So my original argument stands: that Eager set Half Magic in the period of his own childhood, and that the book comments in part on that period and historic change. But Eager didn’t choose that setting because it reminded him of first reading Nesbit.

Half Magic and History

On Friday, in an ongoing discussion of how the fantastic elements of The Storm in the Barn affect its status as historical fiction, I compared the book to another fantasy set in a historic period, Edward Eager’s Half Magic.

Monica Edinger responded:

while Edgar Eager does indeed set his tale in the early years of the 20th century, I don’t see that as particularly significant as far as the story goes.

The story of children finding a token that grants wishes, getting in some mild troubles, making their lives a little better, and then giving up that magic could indeed occur in any era. Eager unabashedly borrowed from E. Nesbit’s fantasy novels, just as Laurel Snyder borrowed a lot from Eager’s for her recent contemporary fantasy Any Which Wall.

However, it was clearly important for Eager’s storytelling enterprise that he chose a historical setting. The very first line of the book tells us that its events happened “about thirty years ago,” or in the mid-1920s. (Half Magic was published in 1954.) The narrator highlights period details for us, such as a steam-puffing fire engine (“the way it used to do in those days”) and silent films (“for in those days movies did not talk”).

Though the technology in Half Magic might seem quaint to the readers of 1954, it is nonetheless on the march. Eager even intertwines a new-fangled machine and magic when one of the family’s first wishes brings on Mr. Smith in his automobile. Later the narrator reminds us: “everyone did not own a motor car in those days.”

At another point (page 98, to be exact), Eager’s narrator draws a line in the kids’ lives between the period before they found the magic coin and the period afterward:

Meanwhile today they would have a good old-fashioned day out, the kind of day that had seemed the height of excitement to them, back in the time before the charm had crossed their path. They would put all their allowances together, go downtown on the street car and spend the day, have lunch and see a movie.

This passage makes sure we see change happening in the characters’ lives.

Thus, though the plot of Half Magic has nothing to do with the historical events for which we remember the mid-1920s (which are…? Anyone? Anyone?), it nonetheless keeps reminding its readers that:

• This story takes place decades before their time.
• Time is always passing, and life is always changing.

In fact, Half Magic takes place late in Eager’s own childhood—he was born in 1911. The pleasures he describes are undoubtedly the pleasures he remembered as he wrote the novel, his first for children. And foremost among those remembered pleasures are the books he’d read as a boy, particularly Nesbit’s fantasies. [CORRECTION: Although Eager set Half Magic in the period of his childhood, he didn’t discover Nesbit’s books until he was a young father.]

Nesbit published those tales starting in 1902, so they were up to two decades old when Eager read them. He obviously enjoyed those books despite their somewhat unfamiliar setting, and his own antiquated setting assures readers that they can enjoy adventures occurring decades before their own time as well. Indeed, we might even suspect that Eager designed Half Magic to take readers about halfway back to Nesbit.

Does its historical setting and historical themes make Half Magic historical fiction? Not in the sense that reading it immerses us in the lives of Americans in the past. It couldn’t because those people never had wish-granting coins, just speculative stocks. The supernatural elements that steer Half Magic’s plot make it a fantasy set in the 1920s.

TOMORROW: Back to The Storm in the Barn.

Knights and Ladies in Knight's Castle

One of the weaknesses of E. Nesbit's fantasy books is that her children aren't very distinct. It doesn't help that there are often three or four of them, all from one family. And it doesn't help that they tend to fall into gendered types: the commanding boy, the maternal girl, the youngest, and so on, so even what sets them apart from each other doesn't make them individuals. I think her child characters have delightfully childish dialog and thinking, but they just don't stand out.

Nesbit's acolyte Edward Eager largely avoids that problem, though he, too, uses multiple children as protagonists. I think in Knight's Castle Eager exaggerates the types a bit, making each more distinct. And he reverses the usual stereotypes by depicting one girl, Eliza, as the most aggressive of the bunch, while another, Ann, is the youngest and shyest.

And here's a passage when those personalities and gender expectations come out most clearly.

"Don't!" said Ann. "Once you start moving them around you never can tell what might happen!"

"What could happen?" said Jack.

"Almost anything," said Eliza. "You don't know what that magic's like when it's roused!"

"Ah, don't pay any attention to them," said Roger suddenly and basely, full of his new manly importance as Jack's friend. "They're just a couple of crazy girls."

After that, Ann did not take much part in the conversation.

Eliza's reaction to being called a crazy girl was different. In the process of her reaction a chair leg came off and the floor was scratched, but no one was seriously hurt.

Later Eliza also proves to be the most bloodthirsty of the children in battle: "I cut off four heads and cleaved three knights in two. How did you do?" Roger is feeling a little queasy at that moment.

As for Ann, just at the moment in the book when she's feeling most small, there's a need for a small girl. A bit neat, to be sure, but satisfying nonetheless.

The Cold War Reaches Knight's Castle

Edward Eager wrote Knight's Castle in 1956, and the anti-Communist ideology of the day even seeped into details of what otherwise seems to be a purely escapist fantasy for children.

The novel's young protagonists enjoy life in a big, upper-class house, with the best in toys and hobby equipment. Aunt Katherine and Uncle John have a cook and a "poor maid," as well as an "art collection." Knight's Castle leaves that wealth unexamined. All that might be part of Eager's homage to E. Nesbit, of course. Her families never seem to be without servants of some sort, even when Father is In Disgrace.

The root of all evil in this adventure turns out to be the novel's chief villain, Prince John, as borrowed from Ivanhoe. But here he turns into a tyrant who calls himself "the Leader." At one point he declares, "making pictures [photography] behind the iron curtain...is punishable by death."

Four pages later we learn that "Prince John had rounded up all the deer in the forest for a collective farming experiment," causing starvation. Like "iron curtain," that's an obvious reference to contemporary events. The children suspect that the prince's "terrible new ideas...leaked in from the outside world."

Usually when economic issues enter into a story with Prince John as the villain, he represents the rapacious aristocracy. Robin Hood fights him by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and all that. But in Eager's Cold War-era refashioning, this medieval hereditary monarch became a stalking-horse for the Soviets.

Eager Stands on the Shoulders of Giants

No one wore his influences more proudly on his sleeve than Edward Eager, that highly enjoyable if not deep mid-20th-century American fantasist.

Eager wrote Knight's Castle in 1956 as a sequel of sorts to his own Half Magic, providing a new story for the children of the heroes of the earlier book. It's clearly inspired by E. Nesbit's The Magic City, which gets quite a name-check in the early chapters. And it explicitly plays off Ivanhoe, both Walter Scott's novel and the 1952 movie version. What's more, this passage even starts out with an echo of Alice in Wonderland.

"I'm not afraid of you!" he [Roger] cried. "You're not even real! You wouldn't even be Bois-Guilbert, if I hadn't said you were! You're nothing but a lead soldier!"

"What?" cried Bois-Guilbert, his face deathly pale and his voice a mere whisper. "What didst thou say?"

"Lead soldier!" Roger repeated wildly. "That's all any of you are! Lead soldiers, lead soldiers, lead soldiers!"

Bois-Guilbert fell back shuddering before him, and the fighting men dropped their swords and all the people fell on their knees, and a murmur of awe ran from lip to lip among the crowd.

"The Words of Power!" cried some, and "The Elfish Charm!" cried others, and "I said 'twas no mortal boy!" cried Lionel.

And Roger jumped down from his perch and pushed his way through them, and as he did so they seemed to grow paler and dimmer, and as he ran down the stairs the walls of the castle seemed to grow fainter, the way the picture on your television set does when a tube is ailing and your mother has to send for the man.

That television metaphor shows how modern Knight's Castle was--for 1956. Like Nesbit and L. Frank Baum, he made his young heroes' shifts into fantasy all the more plausible by mentioning contemporary details. But time has moved on. What details in this passage would today's children understand without great exertion on the part of an adult?

• easy allusions to the villain in Ivanhoe?
• toys made entirely out of lead?
• television sets with tubes and repairmen who come to the house?

Nonetheless, Eager always seems effortlessly charming.