It may be instructive to concentrate here on three episodes, one from each of the three books in the set. In Five Children and It, the episode recounts the result of the wish to live in a castle, made between the time Robert arranged for the Psammead to grant a wish made by the others not in his presence, and the time Robert got back to the house to tell them he had made the arrangement. In The Phoenix and The Carpet, the episode recounts the visit of the Phoenix to the Phoenix Fire Office. In The Story of the Amulet, the episode recounts the merging of Rekh-mara with Jimmy—though it is tempting to take instead the visit of the Babylonian Queen to London, on which Jadis’s visit in The Magician’s Nephew was so evidently based. These have in common at least three things, apart from such obvious matters as their involving the same five children, and their appearing in a series of books by the same author. First, they are all in the realm of fantasy. Wishing for a castle does not commonly provide one. The phoenix is a fabulous bird that does not ordinarily visit London insurance companies, even those bearing his name. And ancient Egyptian priests are not frequently transported by magic amulets through time and merged with learned gentlemen who study at the British Museum. Second, all three (though the third the least) have their comic aspects. Of course, being besieged in the castle, like all the other ill-considered things the children wish for, turns out to be far different in experience from what it was in imagination. The Phoenix, coming to the Insurance offices in the belief they are his temple, and the employees his priests and acolytes, in fact converts the employees to his belief, and the pleasant fantasy is worked out with good humor and skill (better humor, perhaps, than with the Queen of Babylon, though the skill there is no less). But the merging of the Priest Rekh-mara and Jimmy? That is, at least partly, another story.
That there has been a good deal of humor in the building up of the character of Jimmy, and episodes of the comic in the story of Rekh-mara, is undoubted (‘“For there is no secret sacred name under the altar of Amen-Ra.’ ‘Oh yes there is!’ said a voice from under the bed.”—the Psammead, of course. [p. 613 in the Octopus one-volume ed., 1979]). But when Rekh-mara’s soul and Jimmy’s soul become one, each gaining his heart’s desire, and the evil in Rekh-mara’s soul becomes the scorpion that Robert kills, we have moved from the comic or even the humorous into the mythopoetic (even if the mythopoeisis is a little too much like Rider Haggard’s for some tastes).
The Story of the Amulet, unlike the first two books of E. Nesbit’s “trilogy” (if that word may be used here), is pretty much serious adventuring, though the Queen’s coming to London and the sailors’ singing about Tyre that rules the waves are at least comic interludes. It is here, in this story, that the great overarching wave breaks over Atlantis, here that there is a true granting of Heart’s Desire, and here that the process of growing up (as when they see the pictures of themselves as adults while they are visiting Jimmy and the Amulet in the future) is given a serious treatment for the children—though the point is much the same as with the sudden growing-up of “the lamb” in the earlier volume. Neither is welcome—and that is not quite a throw-away line. They are not welcome because they have not come well—that is, in the natural order of things.
It may be that the children who read Five Children and It in 1902 were prepared for this greater seriousness in 1906. But it may also be (and it is well to remember) that the Englishness of English art (in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s phrase) consists in the detailed observation of life around one, and in using this detailed observation to point a moral as well as to adorn a tale. It is possible that E. Nesbit’s recovery of this particularly English sense and sensibility of humor has something to do with her association with William Morris and the Fabians. Be that as it may, there is a change in her creations between 1902 and 1906, as well as—and on top of—the obvious change between Lang’s Ricardo (1893) and the first of the “Psammead” books. Part of what sets E. Nesbit apart from Thackeray and Lang, in these books, lies in the replacement of the comic and fantastical by a genuine fantasy that is humorous, though with some comic scenes. Lewis mentions the Bastables in The Magician’s Nephew, but he does not emulate Nesbit’s Bastable stories, which are (as he says) character studies of children written the only way children will read character studies.
Lang has “Englished” Thackeray’s breakfast-table jeu d’ésprit—Prigio is recognizably an English schoolboy, of a particularly repellent type, and Ricardo is Prigio’s son and the son of the British Ambassador’s daughter. In Thackeray, the fantastic is the comic, and though there are shrewd touches (on occasion betraying something of Pevsner’s Englishness), these are generally unreal estates. In Lang, less so. Here, once again, it may be time to use critics as specimens. I disagree with Lewis that Lang achieved true fantasy with the death of the Yellow Dwarf, but here Lewis may be used as a specimen. The Remora terrified me as a child, and here I may be used as a specimen. The fact is, Lewis felt something with the Yellow Dwarf, as I with the Remora. Something of Lang’s wide reading in the English medieval must have rubbed off on him. The Giant Who Does Not Know When He Has Had Enough, though scarcely a portrait drawn from life, is a lifelike portrait.
Just as Lewis, writing the Narnia books after the manner of E. Nesbit, created something quite different from Nesbit, so Lang, writing children’s books after the manner of Thackeray, created something quite different from Thackeray. It was thirty-five years from Betsinda to Prigio, nearly fifty from “the lamb” to The Lion, but in both cases, in changing the original, the personality of the imitator was more important than the lapse of time. (For those adding up years, there were about ten years from Ricardo to Robert and Anthea and the rest.) In any case, by the time of E. Nesbit, the comic / fantastic of Thackeray and the comic / humorous fantasticality of Lang have been replaced by that strange creature, the humorous fantasy. The phrase “strange creature” is used advisedly. Grahame essayed something of the sort in The Wind in the Willows (1908), humorous in precisely that English sense, though occasionally comic, as with Toad and the Washerwoman, but it has generally not been widely done or well (though Alan Garner may be an exception, and even early Harry Potter). This brings us to Ratty and Moley and Toad and Badger in The Wind in the Willows.
“The Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms” (The Wind in the Willows in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, p. 181). Here, at the very beginning of Grahame’s great achievement, we come upon a paradox. This is quintessential Arcady, but Moley’s house, Ratty’s house with its bright fire in the parlour, the picnic basket with the comforts of home (“coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefPickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssad widgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater”), Toad’s caravan (less so Toad Hall), and above all, Badger’s house, all speak to the comforts of home.
There are dangers in the Wild Wood, dangers from which Ratty and Moley are rescued by Badger’s House. I cannot forbear further quotation here (Penguin Kenneth Grahame, pp. 209–210): “He shuffled on in front of them, carrying the light, and they followed him, nudging each other in an anticipating sort of way, down a long, gloomy, and, to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage, into a sort of a central hall, out of which they could dimly see other long tunnel-like passages branching, passages mysterious and without apparent end. But there were doors in the hall as well—stout oaken comfortable-looking doors. One of these the Badger flung open, and at once they found themselves all in the glow and warmth of a large fire-lit kitchen.
The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burnt a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney-corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draught. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodation for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of Badger’s