National Regeneration Through Childhood in Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet

Abstract

This article is concerned with Edith Nesbit’s literary representation of national regeneration through a very early stage of life, childhood, in The Story of the Amulet (1906). For the purpose of scrutinizing how children’s literature imagines regeneration in Edwardian England, I discuss the cult of nostalgia and childhood in Edwardian texts and take a closer look at how Nesbit’s Amulet, the first children’s text to use time travel, highlights the ways in which children create a nonlinear temporality that connects past, present, and future. The novel uses childhood as a counterbalance to the adult’s world because its child time travelers reinvent the history of the British Empire and look in on the future in such a way as to question the ideal of linear progress, which has long governed England. I ultimately argue that Nesbit’s child characters, as autonomous subjects of their time travel, establish their own perspective on the history of the British Empire, which differs from the older generation’s.