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.