Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

This week a topic that has struck me as interesting is the concept of borrowing and/or being inspired by other authors.   In Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It we see lots of references to other stories as well as general plot lines that she borrows from other authors.  The Last of the Mohicans is used to inspire the children to wish for Indians to exist.  Even though Nesbit’s works are filled with borrowed ideas and she is referred to as “the great borrower” does that make her work any less original.  Nesbit herself is said to have been a source of inspiration for many authors, including C.S. Lewis.  J.K. Rowling herself has been quoted as saying that she pulled inspiration for others authors and Greek mythology.  Most fantasy authors will say that J.R.R Tolkien was there primary source of inspiration and that without his land of Middle Earth they would not have been able to do what they do.  Having seen all these examples I think it is pretty acceptable to say that it is all right for authors to borrow or look towards these pioneers in their fields since without these precursors in their particular genre they would not have written their own works.

Having said this though I would like to examine the world of Fanfiction.  Fanfic is when writers… aspiring writers? … use others movies, books, video games, etc. to further the story that has been created.  For this blog I explored some Fanfiction sites and there is an enormous amount of stories ranging from topics about an alternate ending to The Hunger Games to stories about the children of the Golden Trio in Harry Potter.  Some of the stories are lackluster continuations or alterations while others seem to have nothing to do with the original text except for the character names and world.  Since I am not a Fanfiction reader I can only assume the spectrum that truly exists on these sites.  However, I do feel I can make an opinion about how I feel towards the idea of Fanfiction, which would be to let them do it.  These sites are huge and have such a large fan base that perhaps it is not a bad thing to let these people continue on a little longer in these fictional worlds they love.  On the other hand though I do think that it is important to consider how the author’s feel about Fanfiction.  George R.R. Martin the author of the series A Song of Fire and Ice has said how much he detests Fanfic and how he feels it is plagiarism to an extent.  I would normally think he is overreacting but with recent events that have gone on I think perhaps he may have a point.  Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight Saga was the inspiration for one Fanfic writer’s stories.  E.L. James’ has recently gained the spotlight for her trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, which is a novel version of a Fanfic story she has based off of Meyer’s Twilight series.  This seems to be a little to close to copying someone else’s works for me.  Which raises the question, where is the line between inspiration and direct imitation?

Five Children and It: An Overlooked Classic

The term classic evokes a certain feeling; it carries with it an air of prestige, as well as a sense of nostalgia. In order to be a classic, a book must be able to stand the test of time. Often, this requires a timeless quality. However, a book can be rooted in its own time but still endure as a classic if it possesses that often intangible “it” factor which captures the heart of the reader. Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It is very distinct, specifically in terms of its setting and time period. The world she creates is incredibly real, with the exception of the mythical Psammead and the wishes it grants. As a result of it’s realistic nature, her world is one that does not transcend borders as well as those explored in other classics. For example, Wonderland and Oz are imaginary places where any child, from anywhere, may imagine themselves exploring. In a world that is entirely imaginary, there are still of course going to be nods to the author’s culture and home, but overall there is a lack of identification with any real place. This makes anything possible; anyone can venture to Wonderland. Not everyone can venture to the sand quarry near their quaint home in the English countryside. The poor, caged-in children of London to whom Nesbit refers in her opening pages are cut off from this specific kind of country living. And while they, of course, can use their imaginations, it can be more difficult to place oneself in a place that is so distinctly real. The reality of it all serves as a barrier, the kind that does not exist in getting to Oz. There are also a number of allusions to the time in which Nesbit was living and writing.  The most common form of transportation was a horse and buggy, people started their mornings using wash basins, and any half decent family had servants to look after their children.  However, its specificity, while perhaps off-putting to some, has not stopped Five Children and It from gaining status as a classic, specifically in England. Yet that popularity did not carry over so much into America.

I had never heard of this book before this class. The only other book on the syllabus which I had never heard of was The Water Babies and, to be honest, I did not find that one to my liking. So I became skeptical of this other unknown “classic.” I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by Five Children and It. Yes, the setting was rather British, and bits of it were a tad dated. I didn’t understand all of the difficulties with the money, knowing nothing about any currency other than that of the good old USA, and I’m sure that there were other bits of the story that went over my head due to differences in cultural capital. But when it comes to the story itself, I was enchanted. The children found a sand fairy, which begrudgingly granted them wishes, and many an adventure ensued. What’s not to like? I feel that the strength of its story and narration eclipse any deficits that may have emerged over the past hundred years.  The fact remains that this book, while a classic in one culture, is very much overlooked in our own. Perhaps its endearing quality didn’t transfer to American audiences, or perhaps the librarians powers of dissuasion really did a number here. But I, for one, really enjoyed this century old book, and would place it on my classics shelf right here in America.

Origin Mythology in Children’s Stories

     I have always thought it was really interesting to read about the origin of the world or explanations of phenomena that does not match today’s scientific facts and theories.  In the Water-Babies, the reader was exposed to an alternate state of life and what life was like “under the sea.”  In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens the explanation for where babies come is that they are born first as birds on an island of birds and then fly to their future homes to become babies.  This explanation is just as valid as the stork baby story when adults make up untrue explanations for children.  I’m not sure why adults seem keen on telling children more fantastical and unreal versions of the truth, as we have learned in class through reading Golden Age literature and specific cases like Lewis Carroll entertaining children with enchanting lies, but they do.  These lies become stories, and these stories go on to be published works.

An example of one of these quite interesting stories is the explanation for fossils in Five Children and It.  The Psammead, the wish-granting sand fairy, imparts a lot of “historical” knowledge to the children who find him.  The Psammead is several thousand years old and supposedly from the time of Pterodactyls and Megatheriums, the time of dinosaurs.  Apparently he used to grant wishes for Megatheriums to be eaten, but whatever of them was not eaten by sunset would turn to stone.  This applies for any wish that produces an object.  As soon as the sun sets, it turns to stone.  Thus, this story implies that the dinosaur remains, fossils, we find today are the results of, for lack of a better term, wish leftovers.

Megatherium

I delight in this kind of pseudo-mythology in literature, and I wonder why this form of fiction is popular and frequently embedded in novels and stories.  I mentioned before that I am not sure why adults enjoy these kinds of “re-tellings,” but they do provide a source of entertainment.  Adults constantly lie to children about life—babies coming from storks, fairies, the Boogie man, and most notorious, Santa Claus.  If we think back, a lot of these fantasy elements have been used over time to protect children and direct their behavior, such as Santa Claus watching over all children in order to reward the good ones with presents on Christmas, and this helps to make children behave properly more often.  However, what benefit or advantage does this fake history of fossils told by the Psammead have?

I believe that these fake histories provide background for the story.  If the Psammead had no “concrete” history and was just a mysterious being, it lops him into a group of flat characters.  Histories, even fake ones, flesh out characters and even if the genre is fiction, make the characters seem more genuine and real, with real not necessarily meaning as from our reality.

Why We Love Five Children and It

It is safe to say that we all, at the very least, have enjoyed our reading of Nesbit’s Five Children and It. As we discussed in class, there may be an argument that Nesbit’s treasure chest of ideas were savaged from other writers’ works, and therefore may be perceived as “unoriginal.” Whether or not someone comes to this conclusion, Five Children and It remains a fun-filled children’s story structured with moral-encompassing instances and situations, all intertwined with adventure and imagination; broadly speaking, this is why we love and enjoy Nesbit’s story so much, but there are a plentiful more reasons why.

What this book does good at — if not best — is constructing one’s intolerance for wishes. Just about every wish the children make ends up putting them in troublesome circumstances in which they then must find ways of hiding or suppressing the wished items, which is necessary in preventing very real consequences such as jail time, death, starvation, etc. By the end of the story, the reader — like our heroines — is exhausted due to the children’s constant struggle to cover up the unintended results of their wishes (all while dealing with having to stay fed). In a genre of fiction where a child would dream of being submerged in a reality where some one/two/three wishes have the possibility of being granted, ‘wish granting’ in Five Children and It becomes one’s seemingly worst nightmare, thus Nesbit does well in suppressing the reader’s tendencies of wishful thinking.

The ‘consequences associated with wishing’ is a successful lesson to be learned in Nesbit’s story, and it is the main motif that the story builds upon, thus allowing the development of the children’s many adventures (inevitably providing for a some 200-page story). But what this motif further offers us are underlying values, such as the importance of family (as seen in the instance where the Lamb is suddenly wanted by everybody, and is nearly kidnapped from his siblings on several occasions — if it had not been for their smart thinking; the children soon realize how important their brother is to them in hindsight to his ever being lost) and further the value in necessity over greed (as demonstrated when the children seek beauty, riches, and wings, among other things, and then suffer in the absence of food; nutrition being the most fundamental, vital, and important item for their well-being — rather than unnecessary items of greed).

Therefore, it is not just the adventures in Five Children and It that we love and enjoy so much, it is also the building upon (or the learning experiences surrounding) these central morals.

Nevertheless, it is the adventures that we first and foremost love, wouldn’t you agree? And how wonderful they are! Mighty appealing to any child, I might add: the unorthodox inclusion of a monster-like fur-ball-of-a-fairy that speaks perfect English and once lived in the dinosaur age; the children’s becoming as beautiful as the day, but then going unnoticed by all those closest to them; their becoming rich with money that the townspeople, as they later learn, are unlikely to accept in transaction — also arising suspicions that could put them in jail; the children’s being granted beautiful wings and flying over rooftops only to fall victim to hunger and winding up stuck atop a church after losing their wings to the sunset; their defending a home-made castle from an invasion of colorful medieval warriors brandishing an assortment of deadly sharp weapons; Robert’s becoming of a giant and joining a fair as to make a short-lived profit — then having to devise a plan with Cyril in order to escape unharmed and unnoticed due to the giant-magic diminishing at sunset; and so on and so forth.

What makes this so appealing to a children audience?

Primarily, the very ambiguity, excitement, and thrill associated with the aspect of adventure. Also, the reader’s relatability and connection with the text (in this case, a child audience).

A child is neither completely good nor completely bad, which is quite evident in the characters of our heroines who exhibit thoughts, feelings, and emotions on both sides of the spectrum. Nesbit’s perception of a child is much different to that of the Victorian ‘ideal’ child; Nesbit details a more realistic version of the child — a common literary practice in the Edwardian period that begins (roughly) in the year 1901; it so happens to be that Five Children and It was first published the year after, in 1902, thus it could be argued that Nesbit had set the stone for (or aided in the development of) the Edwardian-Era image of the child.

With that said, the child reader is more likely to relate to our heroines if the characters are, in fact, actual (rather than perceived) children, increasing the legitimacy of the story — as if the story itself was written by a child. And as I noted above, a child is at most only ‘mostly good,’ and the adventures that entail our (cunning) heroines who, like actual children, steal, lie, sugar-coat, manipulate, fight, and escape trouble, among many other things, become believable in the sense that their involvement in fantastical matters are almost overlooked because they, themselves, are not the least bit made up. As we discussed in class, Nesbit gives fantasy a realistic reality by including close-to-home places and conventions of society; this, combined with the presence of ‘actual’ children rather than the ‘ideal’, makes this story evermore believable — enjoyable — to a child audience. When fantasy is made every effort to be written as believable, we, the readers, are more likely to submerge ourselves into the framework of the story, and forget most — if not all — of our knowledge of reality. Isn’t this why we read books in the first place? For an escape of  reality with characters and places we can relate to on an emotional, relatable level? This holds true even for the child reader of a children’s book.

There are perhaps a hundred or more reasons I could formulate as to why Five Children and It is such an enjoyable read to all who come across it. Personally, and quite obviously, I have enjoyed this book very much so, and I am privileged to have been given this opportunity to discover its many morals and adventures, and to behold the most realistic portrayal of children I have seen yet. I will, most certainly, be reading this to my children one distant and delightful day.

Politics in Five Children and It

E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It was probably one of the most frustrating books I have read in class thus far.  I so desperately wanted Robert, Anthea, Cyril, Jane, and Lamb to get what they wanted from Psammead.  However, every wish they wished for went so wrong!  The incompetence of the “fairy” drove me crazy.  It was almost as if Psammead was exploiting the small, innocent children, which would not be too much of a stretch considering Nesbit’s political background as an active socialist.  I believe that the relationship between Psammead and the five children is representative of the type of system that she opposes.  A socialist economy is supposed to directly satisfy the peoples’ economic demands and needs.  Although Psammead was granting the wishes of the children, every wish ended up terribly wrong:  the children wish to be beautiful and they get shut out of their own home, they ask for wings and they get stuck on top of a church, they ask for a castle that becomes mobbed, and they ask to meet real Indians which ended up being a near death experience.  Psammead, who represents the economy, is the incompetent, undesirable system that Nesbit rejects; she advocates for a socialist economy where the people, like the five children, would actually get their needs met.  Also, to add to this discussion about the parallels between Psammead and the five children and politics, the fact that Psammead is not the typical beautiful, idealized fairy contributes to this reading.  Psammead, like the system Nesbit rejects, is ugly, jaded, and not polite.  Perhaps Nesbit is trying to show the ugliness of this particular type of politics as compared to the bright, innocence of the children, who stands for the people of the society who keeps getting exploited and taken advantage of by this ugly system.  Besides this parallel between the characters and the socialist system and the people, Nesbit interjects her own two bits of politics throughout the book as well.  Although Five Children and It was a frustrating read, I liked the fact that Nesbit tried to make the novel as educational as possible, even if she was indirectly, and sometimes directly, pressing upon her socialist views and opinions.

Character Analysis: The Psammead

The Psammead, in my opinion, is the most fascinating character among the texts that I’ve read thus far in LIT 4334. It is depicted as a very grotesque looking character, but through the monstrous appearance there is an amalgamation of nuances that add to the interesting nature of the Psammead. It is described to have eyes like a snail, ears like a bat, a body like a spider, hands and feet like a monkey, and whiskers like a rat. All these descriptions make me think that the Psammead has unparalleled senses, specifically sight, sound, and touch, and this unique trait adds to the unworldly persona of the Psammead. The fact that this is the only Psammead left in existence speaks to the special opportunity that the five children experience. The Psammead has distant memories of events that have long transpired, but can remember them with proficiency. This truly is a sentient beast to a high extreme. In the very beginning of the book, it is told that Psammead is used to granting wishes that are mundane and boring, but the wishes that the children ask the Psammead for are too unfamiliar and too fantastic, that the old standard of wishes being set to stone if unused after a day no longer applies.

The Psammead interacts with the children through a series of wishes, which it grants. The children ask to be beautiful, to be rich, to have wings, to be allowed in the castle, and to give a wealthy woman’s jewelry to their mother. All of these wishes are materialistic and only cause a degradation of self because they are all complacent wishes, which I believe is why they all cause something to go wrong with each wish. The Pssamead is sort of like a theological or supernatural entity that answers prayers, as it were, but for some unusual reason is portrayed as an ugly, grotesque monster instead of a seraphic being. The Psammead tires of their wishes, and tells them no longer to ask for any more wishes, but the Psammead tells Anthea that the wish she had of all the children being able to see it again will be granted. This wish will/ is granted most likely because it is selfless and is in some sense directed toward the Psammead, causing it to feel appreciated and loved.

Without the Psammead in the text, the story would be utterly nonsensical and without a cohesive plot. The Psammead is the very central character of this story. It is the nucleus of the cell that is the entire text. Without its ability to grant wishes, the children would not have had the adventures that they did, and would not have gone grown as children.

Five Children and It: A Close Reading

“Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. That is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you can see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy; and why they say that the earth goes round the sun, when you can see for yourself any day that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night like a good sun as it is, and the earth knows its place, and lies as still as a mouse” (3).

In this short passage found in Five Children and It, Edith Nesbit reveals one of the most undeniable truths about the construction of children and the basis of children’s literature. Through the omniscient voice of the narrator, Nesbit suggests that children are the only ones capable of believing the miracles contained within children’s literature and adults take advantage of this.

It is interesting to note that she speaks in second person to the child reader as someone who understands both the adult world and the children’s world wholly. Although it is obvious that Nesbit is an adult, she refuses to speak from the side of the “grown-up people.” This accomplishes two objectives.

First, Nesbit draws in the child reader and engages them personally by acknowledging that the child reader has certain knowledge that even adults lack. This is seen in the phrases “you can see perfectly well” and “you can see for yourself.” By making the child reader a “you,” Nesbit is addressing the entirety of the realm of children and gives the child reader a dimension of power over the adult realm because they can obviously see with their eyes the miracles that grown-ups fail to see. This is an interesting element of children’s literature that is not unique to Nesbit but can be found in the narrations of classic’s such as Water Babies and Peter Pan. Authors of children’s literature have utilized the second person effectively because it makes the child reader more interested and personally connected to the story. It enables them to feel like an important figure in the book. Nesbit makes use of this knowledge wonderfully in this passage.

The second point that Nesbit makes by making the narrator speak neither from the adults nor the children is allow the children’s negative energy to be directed away from the narrator and towards “adults.” Perhaps as a writer of children’s literature herself, Nesbit did not believe that she was secluded to the realm of grown-up people and thus did not suffer the same faults. Either way, by making the narrator a separate entity, Nesbit gains the child reader’s trust and becomes a creditable person. This paves the way for the rest of the book in which the child reader, already flattered from the narrator’s compliments, is more likely to believe the narrator’s comments and take them with a grain of salt.

A final interesting note about this passage is that Nesbit suggests that adults take advantage of the minds of children in the statement “children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this.” I believe that Nesbit was actually calling out writers of children’s literature and those adults who were in charge of deciding what was proper for children’s literature. I think this is evident in Nesbit’s utilization of an unorthodox magical wish-giving character the Sand-Fairy. Instead of following the example of the children’s literature authors before her, Nesbit created the image of the Sand-Fairy as a strange-looking, grumpy, and often unwilling character. Furthermore, her children are definitely not the image of perfection characteristic of the Victorian era. Instead, her child protagonists are more characteristic of children of the Edwardian era, which were represented as more raw-natured, mischievious, and trouble-making kids. As mentioned before, Nesbit as the narrator did not take her stand with the grown-up people because she felt they could not possibly be able to write for children the most effectively because they themselves could not believe the miracles that exist in their stories. For these reasons I think that Nesbit was making a jab at the adults involved in children’s literature.

In the chapter where the Lamb is turned suddenly into an adult, the kids find themselves dealing with a Lamb that is rude, selfish, and overall lacking in good qualities. Through the whole ordeal, Lamb’s siblings are even more put off by adult Lamb than baby Lamb; except Anthea who worries about him the entire time.

Seemed like a good idea at the time to me too.

For me, the narrator’s commentary in this chapter is what most caught my attention. The narrator seems to be just as unwilling to accept Lamb as an adult as everyone else; almost every time Lamb is mentioned, the reference is followed up with a comment about how he must now be called by one of his real, adult names. For example: “The grown-up Lamb (or Hilary, as I suppose one must now call him) fixed his pump and blew up the tyre” (Nesbit 198).

The chronological development of these references gets more and more wearisome to the narrator, and as sunset approaches, the references get more and more jaded and the narrator goes so far as to comment that, “The grown-up Lamb (nameless henceforth) was gone forever” (Nesbit 205).

Forever is a very permanent word, and yet this decided permanent disappearance is how both the children and narrators view grown-up Lamb: gone forever. This in no way means that the children think that the Lamb will never grow up, it just means that he will not grow into the man they spent all day dealing with – or so they hope.

Here the children address the issue with their different methods: Cyril wants to bully it out of him, Jane thinks kindness will work, Robert wants to improve him over time, and Anthea wants to protect him from all of them (Nesbit 206-207). These varied methods beg the question though, if they are all applied – or even just one – what is to  really stop him from becoming the selfish grown-up he was in this section? The wish here seems to deal with a lesson about growing up and cherishing youth, but is there also another subtle lesson about adolescent development?

Lamb as a Teaching Tool

In Five Children and It by E. Nesbit the character that most interested me was the Lamb and his use as a character to teach morals to the other children. Lamb was the victim of a few of the children’s wishes but was also used to transform the other four siblings internally by the end of the tale.

Lamb was the subject of a wish gone wrong when the children wished someone else wanted the child. That wish turned into everyone wanting the child and the children had to fight off kidnappers to protect their younger brother. I believe this was the first lesson used to teach the children the importance of family, and the need to protect family no matter what.

Lamb and his rapid transformation into adulthood was the second wish made that could have potentially hurt Lamb. What was puzzling to me about his transformation was his rude character and demeanor. His adult self seemed very contrasted from his siblings. When he first shifted I was under the impression he would simply become the version of himself he was meant to grow into, but judging by those who surrounded him it is my belief that this reflected a Lamb made by magic and not what he could have potentially been.

I think this wish was used to teach the children the dangers of growing up too quickly. The children attempted to take control of their own lives by wishing everything they wanted. Controlling one’s future is an adult responsibility, and I think the negative consequences that came after each wish were meant to teach the children to be patient and not rush out of childhood.

I think Lamb as a character served to teach the four children a lessen more so than just to be one of the children. His infant age from the very beginning makes him unique amongst the five. He has this sense of innocence not only because he is so young but also because he himself is the only one who does not make any wishes. He is affected by the wishes of his siblings and even when he is transformed into an adult he does not ask anything of the Psaammead. One of the reasons his absence of wishing preserves his innocence because he is not the direct cause of any of the negative consequences. He is not responsible for the unfortunate side effects of the wishes. The other siblings were forced to lose a piece of their childhood in order to resolve some of these issues they created by lying or being deceitful. This creates a greater divide between the innocence of Lamb and the others.

The only slight loss of innocence experienced by Lamb is when he transforms into an adult, Hilary or St Maur, for a day. During this time, Land is rude and even attempts to go off with a woman. However, even in this situation Lamb was not responsible for his own mistakes. In my opinion, the adult he turned into is not reflective of the adult he would have grown up to be. I believe this is so because of my earlier distinction of how different his character was from the other children. It is likely that he would have grown up similar to the others instead of the character he temporarily portrayed. My belief is that by turning back into a child he will have a second chance to maintain his childhood and grow into a child then adult more similar to the others. In this situation, Lamb will serve as a tool to teach the other children as well as himself.

Five Children and It’s Instruction

In the introduction of Five Children and It, Quentin Blake emphasizes E. Nesbit’s (or Mrs. Hubert Bland’s) focus on entertaining the child reader instead of bettering or instructing the child reader. Blake says,“I suspect that the main purpose of many books written in the nineteenth century was to improve their young readers; with E. Nesbit, by contrast, you feel that she was eager to tell you something interesting and entertaining” (v). This concept is one we’ve seen some other writers in this class try to adopt as well.

I read the introduction after I finished the novel, and I literally laughed out loud when I came to the sentence above because throughout the entire book, I could only focus on the author’s attempts at concealing her instruction. The entire premise of the book is that a few children siblings have access to any wish they want and are repeatedly punished when their wish is too extravagant or impractical. Then, the next day, they have another chance to make a better thought-out wish. The Psammead, the fairy-like creature the children stumble upon that grants their wishes, outright says, “I can’t think why you don’t wish for something sensible – something to eat or drink, or good manners, or good tempers” (167). If that isn’t explicit direction to the child reader, then I don’t know what would be.

I also saw the same types of little snippets of instruction about how to be a “proper British child” in this book as I did in books like The Water Babies. The narrator proposes in Five Children and It that“…it was quite right that [the baker’s son] should be taught that English boys mustn’t use their feet when they fight, but their fists” (170).

This book just strengthened my opinion that children’s literature is impossible without trying to moralize or instruct the reader (not that I’m trying to give a bad rep to children’s lit authors, I believe the same of adult literature authors).