Here, in looking at Lewis’s antecessors, it may be time for an author’s switch from literary critic to literary specimen. Unfortunately, in this context, I had only one friend of my generation who was brought up on The Rose and the Ring, from which he seemed principally to have derived an appreciation of Victorian carnival—that’s only anecdotal evidence, of course, and he is no longer alive to give us more evidence or to serve as specimen. But I was brought up on Prince Prigio (though not on Ricardo of Pantouflia, which I did not read until adulthood). At an early age, I was terrified by the fight of the Remora with the Firedrake, one of my few childhood terrors recognizably derived from a fairy-story (if that is what Prigio is). I suppose I might have been terrified by the Earthquaker, though what I would have made of his being killed by a load of stupidity is hard to guess. But in the Firedrake and the Remora, Lang brought true faerie into his conte: yet, surprisingly, they do not overbalance it. It is not entirely clear why. Perhaps a look at the structure of Prince Prigio will produce at least a suggestion on the surprising balance Lang achieved there.
It will be recalled that, owing to the Queen’s disbelief, the fairies were not invited to court for Prince Prigio’s christening: they came anyway, and the last one to give a present gave the curse of too-cleverness. So when the Firedrake was harrying the kingdom, Prigio declined to attack it; his brothers did attack it, and perished, and he was therefore forsaken and abandoned. In that condition, he prowled the palace, found the other fairy gifts from his christening (Seven League Boots, Cap of Invisibility, Sword of Sharpness, and so on), flew off and set the Remora and the Firedrake against each other—thus destroying both—claimed his reward from King Grognio (Benson’s comic interlude comes in here), restored his brothers (and various knights et alii) to life (Lewis borrowed the scene for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), married the British Ambassador’s daughter, wished to seem no cleverer than others, and they all (except the Remora and Firedrake) lived happily ever after.
It is known, from the date of the cheque for ten thousand purses that King Grognio wrote to Prince Prigio, in Falkenstein, in Pantouflia, that this adventure took place in July 1718, a date borne out by the appearance of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1722–1788) in the sequel, a generation later. It may of course be in an alternative universe, inasmuch as Manoa, the City of the Sun, has diplomatic relations with both Pantouflia and Great Britain. In one way, this is a move apart from the contemporaneity of The Rose and the Ring (or, for that matter, of Five Children and It): it is not, however, a move into the once-upon-a-time mode of the fairy-tale, but into a distancing by history. The date may be noted to suggest a connection with another great (and satiric) set of travels, unaided by Seven League Boots on Flying Carpet, that took place about this time, in Lilliputia and elsewhere (and which, as has been noted, we know Lewis read in his childhood).
Prigio’s son Ricardo, the eponymous hero of the second book, is far from being too clever: in fact, he is chiefly interested in having adventures. So King Prigio hides the various fairy gifts, but Ricardo goes on having adventures and having—in the absence of the gifts—to be rescued by the Princess Jacqueline. He had rescued her in his very first adventure, before he found the gifts. Eventually, he fights the Yellow Dwarf (borrowed from D’Aulnoy as the Remora was borrowed from Cyrano), and The Giant Who Does Not Know When He Has Had Enough, and Prince Charles Edward (before the other two), with Jacqueline in each case rescuing him by magic. However, she is herself taken captive by the Giant and turned over to the Earthquaker for safekeeping.
She is rescued from the Earthquaker by King Prigio, who flattens him with a load of pedant’s stupidity, brought for the purpose from the moon, thus incidentally rescuing the City of the Sun, Manoa. The King of Manoa—the Inca—turns out to be Princess Jacqueline’s father. The Inca becomes a Lutheran (why a Lutheran?), the High Priest an Archbishop, Ricardo marries his Jacqueline (with the Giant sending the two Gifts he had captured as a wedding present), and everyone but the Yellow Dwarf (and in our world Charles Edward) lives happily ever after. It is not so good a book as Prigio, but it is much more Langian than Prigio. It is comedic (belonging to the mythos of comedy); it is humorous; there are comic touches; it has touches of the fantastic. But it is not fantasy, not often comic, and with almost no touch of carnival.
That is not quite true of Prigio, perhaps because of Thackeray’s influence. Where Thackeray was apparently largely original, Lang is derivative—though in this case derivative from Thackeray. In 1889, there was little reason for Lang’s characters to have Italianate names, except perhaps that Thackeray’s did. The cross old fairy who curses Prigio with too-cleverness must have been a close relation of the Fairy Blackstick. Benson is Lang’s version of Thackeray’s Gruffanuffs. And there is certainly a similarity of name between the Paflagonia of King Valoroso and the rest and the Pantouflia of Grognio (Prigio’s father) and Prince Prigio and Ricardo. But it is a similarity of name only, for here is Lang at his slyest, the master of the contes, the self-mocker. Pantouflia? Draw on your pantoufles, Mr. Lang might say, and let us pantoufle together. That is to say, draw on your slippers (the kind, my dictionary tells me, with “ni tige ni talon”) and let us talk together, intimately, quietly, slippertalk, fireside talk, all in the family. For that is what the words mean. (But perhaps Lang told his slipper-kingdom stories to children: it is possible, and it might explain his achievement.)
Thackeray took advantage of the lingering aspects of carnival in the early Victorian Christmas, finding a way in which to present to the Victorian audience a work both comic and fantastic, but with the comic taking precedence. (Sometimes Christmas books may say best what’s to be said?) Forty years later, with that route apparently closed, Lang sidestepped into comedy and humor, both creatures of order; and he treated the fantastic as though it were merely the fantastical. This requires a certain realism of technique and involves the humor of observation applied to the unreal—as with Prigio’s alternately cheering on the Firedrake and the Remora, or the townee/schoolboy slanging of Ricardo by the Yellow Dwarf. And then, in a very short time, there seems to have been a fundamental change in the English attitude toward fantasy and the fantastic, at least in the line of authors we are following here.
The change in our line here is so great that, while the connection between Thackeray and Lang is obvious, the connection between Lang and E. Nesbit, is far less so, though she and Lang were in fact contemporaries and acquaintances—yet it is possible to take her three books considered here as the beginnings of a reaction against Lang or his attitudes. But to do this would be to oversimplify. In fact, the Flying Carpet got a very short rest after its use by Lang in 1889 and 1893, till its use in The Phoenix and The Carpet in 1904. The Fairy of the Desert was transmogrified from her (or its) unpleasant appearance and activity in Ricardo of Pantouflia (this Eastern influence keeps coming in) to become—or perhaps to give birth to—the Sand-Fairy, the “It” of Five Children and It (1902). The carpet, of course is the eponymous machina of The Phoenix and The Carpet (1904). Here it should be noted that E. Nesbit follows Lang in bringing these machines of the timeless fairy-story into a time specific—whether 1718 or 1902. It may be noted also that Thackeray, though contemporaneous with his story, is not time-specific in quite the same way as E. Nesbit—and, of course, he engages in a distancing by space, even if ironic, that she does not.
The analysis here is directed not at E. Nesbit generally, or even at all her stories with magic in them, but only this one set of three: Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and The Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Though Professor Lewis spoke more highly of her stories of the Bastables, it was these he emulated, and indeed these he read as a child. The five children, it will be recalled, are Robert, Anthea (“Panther”), Jane, Cyril (“Squirrel”), and “the lamb” (whose name when he is grown up will be Hilary St. Maur Devereux, but who is now fortunately only “the lamb”). They are real children, in a way that (to me) Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy are not, and certainly they are real children in a way that Bulbo and Betsinda and the rest of Thackeray’s “young adults” in The Rose and the Ring are not and are not intended to be.