Abstract
In this study of Kipling's Puck books, I attempt to clarify the enduring characteristics of the time-slip story as he and E. Nesbit invented it and also to determine his own distinctive contribution to the genre. Although his formal procedures were not influential, his genius lies in showing us ‘the mere uncounted folk’ of history, not the big players of E. Nesbit's stories. As a conservative democrat, he shows what treasures are hid on one's own hearth and doorstep, so to speak, so that you do not have to venture far to find magic. For Kipling, that magic resides in the common culture of England, the surviving traditional ways, which catastrophic changes over two thousand years had not greatly altered. The magic is traced to the nature of the land itself, a place deeply enchanted and manifest in the ‘merry supernaturalism’ that G. K. Chesterton saw in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
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