E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy: A Children's Classic at 100 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s Classic at 100 Elizabeth Gargano (bio) E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s Classic at 100. Edited by Raymond E. Jones. Lanham, MD, Toronto, and Oxford: Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006. In E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet, the child-protagonists travel into the future and are horrified to learn that they have grown up. Gazing at a photograph of their adult selves with "loathing," they resist the "horrid" idea of "changing" into adults (Amulet 243). One hundred years after the publication of Amulet, Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane might be pleased to learn that their childhood adventures continue to haunt, enchant, and disturb readers, sparking critical debates and controversies. The third entry in the Children's Literature Association's Centennial Series, published in conjunction with Scarecrow Press, is E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy: A Children's Classic at 100, edited by Raymond E. Jones. The volume takes its place beside previous anthologies exploring such classics as Beatrix Potter's Tale of Peter Rabbit and L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz series. The anthology's thirteen essays explore a range of seminal issues in the critical literature on Nesbit's work: her often conflicted portrayals of gender, class, and the imperial enterprise; her Fabianism and its influence on her work; and her generic and stylistic innovations. In addition, a number of provocative essays examine Nesbit's habit of borrowing liberally from previous texts and her wide-ranging and enduring literary influence on later writers. [End Page 183] Emphasizing the Psammead trilogy's creative engagement with contemporary assumptions about gender, Claudia Nelson's strong lead essay argues that Nesbit's "narratives first embrace contemporaneous understandings of manliness and then back away from them" (2). Thus, in Five Children and It, Cyril's plucky individualism at first seems to offer the best chance for controlling the disruptive magical interludes that result from the children's irresponsible wishes. Ultimately, however, Cyril's initial "authority. . . yields to that of" the more maternal "Anthea" (9), who deftly resolves dangerous situations involving Indian attacks as well as stolen jewels found in her mother's bedroom. Yet Nelson sees more than a simple shift from male to female authority at work in Nesbit's trilogy. As Cyril recognizes in Anthea the qualities of a "'born general'" (10), and as the aggressive, individualistic boys learn to become "loving and patient baby-minders," gender distinctions blur, and the novels increasingly valorize a flexible and shifting "androgyny" (12). Like Nelson's subtle and layered analysis of gender, Suzanne Rahn's "News from E. Nesbit: The Story of the Amulet and the Socialist Utopia" suggests that Nesbit's work was more subversive of late Victorian norms than many critics have acknowledged. Already widely influential, Rahn's previously published essay argues that the last novel in Nesbit's trilogy is "unified by a visionary theme—the quest for a socialist utopia" (187). While numerous critics emphasize the dichotomy between Nesbit's Fabianism and the middle-class ethos of her children's fiction, Rahn traces a series of narrative contrasts between the ugliness and sadness of modern-day London and more beautiful cities from other times and places, including the "arcadian" and "tribal society" of the ancient Britons, a pre-capitalist green world (196), and the future incarnation of socialist London, where the Thames runs "clear and crystal" and school is "the loveliest place there is" (199). Along with Rahn's seminal article, two other essays provocatively examine issues of class, Fabianism, and empire. Monica Flegel's "Fabianism and Didacticism in E. Nesbit's Writing for Children" contends that Nesbit's fiction did indeed embody the teachings of Fabianism. Yet Flegel finds important limitations in both Nesbit's fiction and political philosophy, since both aim to erase class differences not by embracing diverse perspectives but instead by establishing a hegemony of middle-class values, centering on the "comforts and security of the middle-class home" (35). Like Flegel, Mavis Rheimer locates political content in the often episodic narrative structures of Nesbit's tales; her essay, "Writing Empire in E. Nesbit's Psammead Books," documents Nesbit...