(no subject)

[skygiants]

As mentioned, I had a strong urge to reread some E. Nesbit thanks to Everfair, so I took The Enchanted Castle with me on vacation.

The Enchanted Castle is quite possibly the ur-Nesbit. It has everything:

- a group of squabbling but affectionate siblings
- a ring of invisibility! (or is it a wishing ring?) (or is it a TOKEN OF THE GODS THAT EXACTS A TERRIBLE PRICE FOR ITS USAGE?) (or is it just going to make you repeatedly and unfortunately late for tea?)
- SECRET TREASURE
- a background tragic long-lost romance
- people turning into statues! statues turning into living statues! (quite useful, as it turns out that "all statues that come to life are proficient in all athletic exercises")
- implausibly friendly Greek myths come to life; see also 'living statues' (Eros is "a really nice boy, as the girls instantly agreed" and Psyche is "a darling, as any one could see")
- A DINOSAUR; see once again 'living statues'
- an unsubtle critique of capitalism
- a fair bit of probably accidental period classism
- a brief unfortunate incident of blackface
- a collection of construct puppets that come horribly alive and demand, in the most Uncanny Valley fashion possible, to be shown to a really good hotel!

The bit with the puppets that come alive is probably the most memorable set piece of The Enchanted Castle, a book that contains a number of extremely memorable set pieces; they are simultaneously so disturbing and so hilariously banal, requiring Our Plucky Heroes to screw their courage to the sticking point and NOT ONLY cunningly walk them to the tunnel where they plan to imprison them, but ALSO at the same time answer polite questions about their schoolwork and whether they play sports. The worst of all possible things!

Really, nowhere does E. Nesbit show how much she knows her way around writing kids more than in The Enchanted Castle. The magical adventures are wonderful, and occasionally rise up into the numinous and almost haunting -- I'm fascinated by the dropped remark at the end that this book would have absolutely been an epic tragedy, were it not for the convenient fact that the people who found the magical ring were children and not yet adults -- but the parts that are just kids hanging out complaining at each other without any magic at all are just as compelling, and also hilarious.

More Nesbit rereads are almost certainly in my future, though I don't remember loving any of her books quite as much as The Enchanted Castle. (Edward Eager rereads, too, since every single thing he ever wrote is an ardent love letter to E. Nesbit, which is how I discovered her in the first place.)

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I read this when I was around 10, and it was such a magical experience I haven't wanted to reread it. All I remember is:
-a dinosaur statue coming to life, child!me being surprised olden days people knew what dinosaurs were, also that they could be ironic and funny
-being reminded of the ring when I discovered Tolkein a few years later
-tragic Frenchness
-girls in bed kissing, unless child!me invented it which is not entirely impossible

I don't remember the bit with the puppets but have a vague sense that this is because I went to some effort to forget it.

[skygiants]

All of these things DEFINITELY happen, including girls in bed kissing. Some days you adopt invisible fake princesses who come home and get in bed with your sister and that's just how it goes.

(There is also a great conversation about future husbands that's like:

GIRL A: I want to marry a bandit so I can sneak around behind his back and help all his prisoners escape!
GIRL B: I want to marry a sailor so he can die at sea and I can wander around being a gloriously tragic widow, it'll be wonderful!
BOY: .............)

[alias_sqbr]

Hee. No wonder 10 year old me loved it :)

[larryhammer]

My vote is for skipping Nesbit and jumping straight to All The Eager, but I recognize that this is a minority opinion. To which I can only say, "Foos! Ijwits!"

"How much is twice as much as never having to learn fractions?"

[skygiants]

"We have to go rescue our brother from ... his own self-insert fanfic!" is still just about my favorite plot denouement of all time.

[larryhammer]

That is the absolute best way of putting it I've heard. Heh.

[rachelmanija]

The puppets! That was the classic E. Nesbit scene: hilarious yet terrifying.

I re-read her Psammead series recently. It has some hardcore of-the-time issues (I would just skip the "Red Indians" chapter, I did) but also an enormous amount of charm and some very moving bits.

The final book, which unfortunately has a lot of other cultures in it depicted in a range from "I can see that you meant well" to "skip with great speed" also has a chapter that is a genuine tragic-heroic last stand that was just as amazing as I recalled as a kid, and still made me tear up. In fact it may have given me my thing for heroic last stands. "We go down for our city as brave men should. Tyre, Tyre forever! Tyre rules the waves!"

[skygiants]

THEY HAVE NO ROOFS TO THEIR MOUTHS.

I've been trying to decide if I'm going to hit up the Psammeads or the Bastables next, for re-reading. I was thinking the Psammead books originally on the general principle that magic >>> not magic but rereading The Enchanted Castle has also made me remember how much I love her sibling interactions, in general, and I think the Bastables were possibly the best of those (not that the Psammead books did not also have great sibling elements.)

[rachelmanija]

The Psammead books do, but I think it's not quite as prominent. One of my favorite hilarious/nightmarish bits is when one of them gets exasperated with their toddler brother and wishes he'd grow up now... and he transforms into an insufferable adult twit, to their immense horror.

They have a very serious discussion over whether this is something they should worry about, and if so, was it because they spoiled him or were too rough with him. "Should we bully him?" one brother asks doubtfully. "Just a little bit? I mean, if it would stop him from growing up into that...?"
They eventually figure out that normally people grow up over time and not to worry about it.

[skygiants]

I forgot that happens in the Psammead books too! (There's the equally-nightmare bit in The Enchanted Castle when the youngest brother wishes to be rich, and immediately grows into a capitalist oppressor boring old businessman, to everybody's likewise immense horror.)

[qian]

I've never heard of Edward Eager! Maybe I should check his stuff out. I LOVE Nesbit.

- a ring of invisibility! (or is it a wishing ring?) (or is it a TOKEN OF THE GODS THAT EXACTS A TERRIBLE PRICE FOR ITS USAGE?) (or is it just going to make you repeatedly and unfortunately late for tea?)

*_* She doesn't do it with all her books, but I really love her fantasies where it starts out mundane and adorable and then just opens out in this unexpected way and you get a glimpse into deep history, deep magic. She's so good at that -- flipping from one register to the other in the space of a sentence or two.

Do the Bastables! I love the Bastables.

[skygiants]

I definitely think Eager is worth checking out if you love Nesbit -- at the very least, just to appreciate how very much he loves Nesbit! Pretty much everyone of his books begins with the protagonists sitting around talking about how much they love Nesbit, or complaining because there's a library limit on how many Nesbit books they can check out at once, or exclaiming because the magic they've discovered is JUST LIKE that one Nesbit book they read that one time. (There's an entire book of his that's just the protagonists self-inserting themselves into Ivanhoe by way of The Magic City and settling in to fix their OTP so it comes out right. It is one of my favorite books.)

I love that too! I had almost entirely forgotten about how completely she can flip you, so when The Enchanted Castle suddenly showed its underbelly I was like :O!!!!!

[sovay]

The Enchanted Castle is quite possibly the ur-Nesbit.

I didn't read The Enchanted Castle until I was an adult—by which I mean within the last five years—and it was as wonderful as I had been promised.

The most recent Nesbit I've re-read is The Story of the Amulet (1906), which I found a tremendous mixed bag. Three and a half of its chapters are really goood!

[skygiants]

Your post is another part of the reason I was suddenly like, 'oh, time to reread a bunch of Nesbit then!' I'm not sure I ever did read The Story of the Amulet, or if I did, it was only once; The Phoenix and the Carpet was the one we owned, so that's the Psammead book that sticks best in my memory. But it still doesn't stick as well as The Enchanted Castle, which I did not own, just loved very, very much.

[sovay]

Your post is another part of the reason I was suddenly like, 'oh, time to reread a bunch of Nesbit then!'

Oh, well, I'm happy to have contributed!

But it still doesn't stick as well as The Enchanted Castle, which I did not own, just loved very, very much.

Understandably.

[heresluck]

How have I not read these? Clearly I made terrible choices as a young person!

[jamethiel]

A lot of her books are available on Project Gutenberg if you wish to fix this!

[heresluck]

Ooh, thank you!

[skygiants]

Many of them I think are very much still worth reading as a less-young person!

[jamethiel]

Oh man, I love The Enchanted Castle. Clearly I need to re-read!

[skygiants]

It definitely held up for me!

[aamcnamara]

Hmm, clearly I should read The Enchanted Castle. I read all the Eager ever when I was a kid, on the strength of that went off and got the first Psammead book but did not find it half as charming or readable, so there stopped. (I did read The Railway Children, which I adored. Who knows the ways of child brains...) I always sort of assumed that Eager just loved Nesbit because he had nothing better to read, again in that arrogant way of children. Admittedly I was like 8 at the time which is a good age for arrogance.

[skygiants]

I absolutely think The Enchanted Castle is worth reading, but I also liked the Psammead books better than The Railway Children as a kid (though not as much as The Enchanted Castle) so it's possible our tastes may differ on this. :D

That said, I also did not like Nesbit overall as much as Eager when I was eight, but now -- while I still love both! -- I can see really interesting things that Nesbit does that Eager does not do (and also vice versa.)

The one that Eager loved and kept talking about that I never could get into was the Green Knowe books. I think I tried once and bounced off immediately. Sorry, Edward Eager! You did your best!

[landofnowhere]

As a kid I loved the opening section where the siblings meet Mabel, but I'm not sure I actually got all the way through the book because at some point I got confused with all the plot developments. I still feel like I may prefer Nesbit at short story length?

[skygiants]

The plots do develop very fast! AND SUDDENLY, LITTLE JIMMY IS A CITY STOCKBROKER. Though it never bugged me as a kid and I was a bit startled, reading it now, by how quickly everything moved.

I don't think I ever did read Nesbit at short story length, now you mention it. I should try that sometime!

[landofnowhere]

I remember liking The Book of Dragons as a kid. Also there's Melisande, which has a gorgeous picture-book version (and was apparently originally part of a collection of Nine Unlikely Tales?)

Speaking of gorgeous picture books, who else originally read The Enchanted Castle with the Zelinsky illustrations?

[skygiants]

Oh man, those illustrations! One or two of them definitely look familiar but I feel like I've never seen the rest before in my life, which is puzzling -- but they're all kind of amazing.

[lacewood]

Oh man, this reminds me I keep meaning to fo a proper reread of Nesbit, because I love her but it's been so long since I read most of them that they've blended together into a confusingly amorphous blob in my memory. I need to get around to this.

And also, apparently, read a Nesbit biography because... fistfights and elopements and threesomes?!?!

[skygiants]

The Nesbit biography that I read was not in and of itself great, as a book, but the information contained therein was TREASURE WITHOUT PRICE. *___*

[pedanther]

The Enchanted Castle is quite possibly the ur-Nesbit.

I think perhaps you mean "definitive Nesbit" or "quintessential Nesbit"; "the ur-Nesbit" means "the earliest example of Nesbit", which is The Story of the Treasure Seekers.

(Or possibly The Prophet's Mantle, depending on whether we're using "Nesbit" to mean just the children's novels or extending it to all the other stuff she wrote that people usually forget about.)

[skygiants]

Quintessential is indeed what I mean!

[littlerhymes]

It totally does have all the key Nesbit elements! And yesss I love her children - their voices are so perfect.

[skygiants]

All the self-narrating! That is exactly what I did in my head as a child all the time, although I usually managed not to do it to my siblings. (Usually. Not always.)

[heliopausa]

The Ugly-Wuglies are truly frightening - alive and not-alive. I think they're brilliant.
I think this is the only Nesbit where the children make friends with another child across class barriers - though a respectable housekeeper in a stately home is at the very top of the working class. Gerald's an interesting character, too; a bit closer to being not quite a child any more than Nesbit's big brothers usually are.

[landofnowhere]

I was reading E. Nesbit short stories recently because of this post, and there's one ("The Mixed Mine") that has a friendship across class lines, although the lower-class boy is a bit of a stereotype. The story resolves with both boys getting a magical fortune, so that the lower-class boy will be able to go to the same boarding school as the upper-class one.

[heliopausa]

Thanks! Good to see her making the attempt anyway. I'm absolutely sure Nesbit wanted a class-free society (e.g. her vision of the future society in Amulet), but of course she was conditioned by the culture she was in, and her working-class stereotypes can be excruciating at times.

[skygiants]

I think you're right! Mabel provides a really interesting foil to the other kids, too, with her wild imagination and flexible morality. And Gerald stands out to me as having more personality even than your standard Nesbit child, who do tend to have personality as a rule; all the self-narrating, and generous pity for adults (I'd forgotten that the book begins with his masterful working-round of the French teacher.)

[katta]

I used to read a lot of Nesbit as a kid, but haven't done it since then. You've really made me want to re-read!

ETA: Saw Melisande in the comments, and that one I have re-read! I've even used it for storytime. It's amazing.

[skygiants]

You should do it! I highly recommend the experience, she is delightful.