Previously in this series: How To Tell If You Are In A Terry Pratchett Novel.
You are poor now. So very poor. You have left London and can now only afford a large house in the countryside, a rambling garden, and three (yes, only three) servants. Understandably, the degradation of this crushing poverty is very difficult for your dear Mother, but she bears it nobly.
You have between two and four English siblings with whom you get into jolly and/or dreadful scrapes. They all love eating buns.
Like seriously you are all of you obsessed with buns, they play a very big role in your life.
You are actually eating buns right now, buns that you have picked from a bun tree, a form of plant life on which baked buns organically grow.
It is a hot English summer afternoon. The bees are buzzing in the garden, and something small and magical is rather indignant with you, and you have grown quite hungry and cross and tired. Soon your issues will be resolved and you and your siblings will all have a lovely supper of cold mutton, and cold tongue, and cold chicken, and cold ham, and bread and butter, and buns, and sticky pudding, and cocoa-nut ices, and prunes, and ripe tomatoes sprinkled with salt, and Turkish delight, and a siphon of soda water. Then tomorrow someone will do something pretty dumb and the cycle will repeat itself.
You have softened the heart of a British menial with your forthright manner and confiding ways.
You begin all adventures by donning your “going-out things.”
You and your siblings have again endangered the family baby.
You had only sixpence, and you’ve already gone and spent it on fireworks. What else could you do? It is Guy Fawkes Day, and the garden will not fill itself with flame.
You have a saintly and literary Mother named “Schmee Schmesbit,” who makes a living writing children’s fiction and poetry because your Father is drunk or dead or in the City working or in jail somewhere or something. Whatever, he’s gone is the point; he’s not around.
The only real guidance and supervision you will ever receive comes from a talking Noah’s Ark figurine. Or like a parrot or something. Not your parents. Never your parents, or any adult tasked with looking after you.
You have a grumpy maid somewhere in the house who is always getting on your jock. She is probably named Eliza or perhaps simply Cook. She is the way she is because no one loves her. No one at all. Soon you will order her to make you a toffee pudding, or maroon her in a distant magical land for her own good.
An adventure has gone poorly and you and your siblings are once again stuck underground.
You are a painful racial caricature redolent of the worst in smug Edwardian prejudices. Or a dragon that climbed out of a book and ate a Prime Minister. Whichever.
You are being chided by a magical bird.
You have encountered and been profoundly changed by an encounter with Julius Caesar, or a Megatherium.
You have been to London once on your own. There you purchased threepenny worth of ha’penny buns, and spoke with an individual of a social class lower than your own. This was thrilling.
You are a hook-nosed man very much in love with money. Oh, no, you are not Jewish! Nothing like that. Just a typical, run-of-the-mill, swarthy, dirty, hook-nosed moneylender who’d rather watch a poor man starve than part with a shekel, who has — I cannot emphasize this enough — a long, curved, hook-like nose. Like a falcon’s beak or a fish hook or something else extremely, very hooked.
The adults in your life keep information about you, your family, and your current circumstances a secret from you. These are large, important secrets that have a profound impact your daily life and future. You are grateful to the adults for their consideration.
You are young, yet you know one thing, if you know anything: dragons are dicks.
*
Illustrator: Megan Piontkowski is an artist and illustrator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She does a variety of editorial illustrations as well as fabric installations and embroidered pieces. She also hosts The Feminist Tea Party series.
Tags: books, e. nesbit, how to tell what novel you’re in, Megan Piontkowski, victoria don
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I literally squealed and clapped when this appeared in my inbox.
I think this is my favourite thing the Toast has ever published.
Everything about this piece is magical, just like It.
So. Much. Yes. Those “jolly scrapes” are my JAM. No matter how ridiculously privileged these children are, they always struck me as being *real* children. I would have these convos/fights/adventures with my siblings.
THOSE ENGLISH LUNCHES, my childhood was influenced by these massive, grotesque sounding lunches to my American ears, wondering why anyone would want to eat that much cold meat. Once I spent hours puzzling over what a “soda siphon” could be. (I still don’t know.)
Fun Fact: I still have a fond hope of working “Cyril” into a future child’s name. Thanks, Phoenix & The Carpet. You’re welcome, future kid.
A “soda siphon” is a thing that puts the fizzy bubbles in fizzy water (also called seltzer or soda water.) The stuff you probably think of as “soda” is what you get if you mix syrup with the water before putting in the bubbles.
I spent a good deal of my youth imagining, with varying degrees of mouth-watering, what a ’round’ of sandwiches could possibly be.
Round sandwiches? Sandwiches… placed in a circle?
(it’s ok I know now)
And because they were always made with thick slices of white bread slathered in yellow butter, the very suggestion of a ’round’ of sandwiches gives me a delightful sensation of eating that.
Interesting. When I was living (and trying to follow recipes) in the UK, I was a bit bemused that you baked cakes in something called a “sandwich tin” (i.e., a round cake pan about 8 or 9 inches in diameter).
I’m still not 100% sure how those pans were sandwich-related.
The tins are for making a Victoria Sandwich – jam and cream sandwiched between two thin sponge cakes. Google images of “victoria sandwich” to see what I mean.
Aha!! Thank you for enlightening me! 🙂
YES.
This is lovely.
Confession: as a child, I mixed up The Railway Children, The Boxcar Children, and the Growing Summer dreadfully.
But scarlet petticoats and practical magic out in the countryside and fairies and what about the princess and the porcupine? I know E. Nesbit was as racist as any of them but some of her stories stay with me. I’m sorry. So sorry.
It is perfectly fine to like a racist writer for their Good Bits. If it weren’t we wouldn’t be able to like practically any writers at all.
The only thing you want in life is a really good hotel.
You cannot pronounce long words correctly for the life of you, or remember any famous quotations without making comical mistakes.
You often narrate your own adventures in the third person.
If you are a girl, you are a total badass. If you are a boy, you are okay but kind of pretentious.
The soda-water siphon! That is one of my first memories of a moment where I truly understood the depths of my parents’ fallibility. They corrected my pronunciation of siphon, but they could only tell me what siphons are in the general sense, and not what a siphon that is a vessel for carbonated water might be, or look like. I still have no idea what a siphon of soda-water is.
OKAY BUT YES. My engineering parents were entirely HELPLESS, offering me a detailed explanation of physics and what a “siphon” is functionally, but when I said “it can’t be a tube, it has to *keep water in it*” they looked at me like I was from Mars.
I am so glad The Toast has united me with soulmates re: IMPORTANT QUESTIONS from British Children’s Lit.
The wikipedia page has pictures! I think soda siphons mostly appear in the hands of cartoon clowns now.
(I really REALLY want to read your book when it comes out)
Me too! It sounds incredible.
Canard, your comment gives me both life and hope. =)
Thank you OliviaPJones!! I will FIND YOU and GET IT TO YOU when that day comes!! I don’t know how yet but I will.
Hello, I would also but that in a heartbeat! I’m a sucker for magical boarding schools.
For fans of children getting into jolly good scrapes, but who want something darker and more adult, may I recommend the book A High Wind in Jamaica. It’s the story of a group of siblings who get accidentally kidnapped by pirates, and you definitely want to read it.
And the film mysteriously features Martin Amis as one if the children.
My first independent essay for GCSE Eng Lit sa comparison of the representation of childhood inA High WInd n Jamaica and Lord of the Flies!
a lovely supper of cold mutton, and cold tongue, and cold chicken, and cold ham, and bread and butter, and buns, and sticky pudding, and cocoa-nut ices, and prunes, and ripe tomatoes sprinkled with salt, and Turkish delight, and a siphon of soda water
This also sounds reminiscent of The Wind in the Willows. Edwardians liked their food.
For some reason that variant spelling of coconut is the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for me.
It just makes you say the two words separately, doesn’t it?
Like when they spelled hello ‘hulloa’
I can’t not say it.
Wind in the Willows was the first time I’d ever heard the word “gherkin” and it’s still one of my favorite words. Makes me smile every time.
I guess these books were written pre-war , but I remember listening to a podcast about Enid blyton’s books and the person speaking mentioned that the reason there was so much food and childhood freedom was because they were written during (and post) war when there was lots of rationing and kids didn’t get much opportunity to go outside and play. So her books were even more of an escapist fantasy for her readers back then than they are for contemporary readers.
I asked my father, who was a child during WWII, why the kids in the Noel Streetfield books always ate so much (like in Enid Blyton’s books) and he said it was because there was no central heating back then and England is almost always cold and damp and so people needed to eat that much just to get enough calories. Not sure I buy it as he is still a bit of a glutton even though my parents’ house has central heating.
That’s fascinating. When I re-read The Borrowers recently I realized that I’d missed some of the subtext as a kid. It was published in the early 50s, during austerity, but most of it’s set in the Victorian era. And it’s not a particularly flattering version of the Victorians, with all of that useless STUFF, just lying around, gathering dust, begging to be borrowed.
That’s so interesting, and rings really true. For many years during my (sedentary, bookish, filled-with-Enid-Blyton-inspired-fantasies) childhood, my ideal lunch was a) a picnic and b) included ginger beers (usually kept cool in some handy nearby brook), fresh juicy plums, slices of cake, and tomatoes with salt twisted up in a scrap of newspaper.
Someone needs to write a ‘How To Tell If You Are In An Enid Blyton Novel’ piece.
There is at least one natural feature which is just like something man made. It may be a cave with a curtain of fern and a shelfat the back which functions as a llarder, or a rockpool which is exactly the right size for a swimming pool, or a complicated series of rocks which keeps other people out. Whatever, the point is that Nature Loves You.
I had completely forgotten about that whole theme, but you are so right!
See also: Brian Jacques and his Redwall books. Paragraph after paragraph of lovingly described feasts because he had to endure rationing as a child, and never wanted to think about food shortages again. (By his own explanation!)
Or CS Lewis, who wrote the Narnia books during rationing/austerity:
“But meals [in the 1890s] were nicer than they are now [1950s], and as for sweets, if I told you how cheap and good they were, it would only make your mouth water in vain.”
I had assumed this was hyperbole and/or nostalgia, but when I thought about it, the poor man hadn’t had a properly epicurian meal in decades. And he JUST missed the Nouvelle Cuisine revival.
Yeah, there was definitely not much in the way of luxury for most people during rationing (e.g., one egg per person, per week). Even high-end restaurants became highly restricted in what they could serve.
Rationing did hold on for quite a while in the UK after the war. Sugar and sweets remained rationed until 1953.
I have some cookbooks from that period, and it’s very interesting to see how people managed. (A lot of root vegetables, mostly!)
Every time I re-read 84 Charing Cross Road I’m struck by the post-war rationing and it breaks my heart.
That’s a great book! I need to re-read that.
Almost all of Nevil Shute’s books include the severe rationing either in the background of the story or as an actual plot point — I’m pretty sure in one of the books, the heroine makes the decision to move to Australia from England because she is literally starving to death. Disclaimer: all of Nevil Shute’s books have terrible racist bits, but I can’t help loving them despite that.
Remember that scene in The Wind in the Willows when Ratty and Mole are wandering around lost in the snow, and then they happen to find Badger’s house, and it’s all warm and cosy and there are cured hams hanging from the ceiling? Maybe it’s because of how many times I had WitW read to me as a child, but for some reason, the idea of cured hams hanging from the ceiling still provokes in me a strong sense of coziness and home-comfort.
Or when it’s Christmas, and they find Mole’s old house, and make a little Christmas supper, and the field-mice come around carol-singing!
Other than Rat’s speech about the River, it’s my favorite bit.
I’ll definitely be adding this decor suggestion to my Nancy Meyers-inspired kitchen.
I love that scene!
-You are an animate marble statue! Jolly fun!
-You are best of friends with an animate marble statue!
-You are being hunted by an animate marble statue.
I came down here to say that! :scared:
Excellent use of exclamation points, here.
You’ve got raging Stockholm Syndrome and, despite it’s cheating bastard nature, burn one of your five remaining wishes to get another visit from a sand-fairy at some point in the future. Can’t be for more wishes, because the wishes all turn to stone in your hands. Can’t be for the company because the sand-fairy’s a miserable, hateful bastard creature. Stockholm Syndrome’s the only rational answer.
NO, ALTHEA. NO. WALK AWAY FROM THE SAND-FAIRY, ALTHEA.
Perfect timing: just last night I switched my comforting bedtime re-read from Gaudy Night to The Railway Children.
Also, author Victoria Don? Might you be the Victoria who was at nerd camp with me at Skidmore College in, oh, 1999?
If so, I’m so glad you’re writing! I still remember your story about a chain-smoking woman with cancer and glamorous head-scarves.
And if not, my bad! I’m still glad you’re writing, Victoria who is Not from My Past, because we most definitely need a YA novel with Asian-American protagonists and magic.
OH MY GOD!!! PRIYANKA!!!! Yes, this is that exact Victoria! Hello my friend, it is so good to run into you again! I feel amazed and happy, because you are awesome and I like you so much, and now my day is 1,000 times better. (Does this mean The Toast is the 2015 internet equivalent of nerd camp? I do feel a strange sense of belonging here.) Can we catch up? I am on Facebook, are you on Facebook?
I got the Five Children and It trilogy (in a single volume) for Christmas when I was in sixth grade. The first chapters seemed magical, but it took me three months to read all three books and I outgrew E. Nesbit by the end of The Story of the Amulet. Looking back, I’m almost thinking those were the last three “child fantasy” books I ever read (I had already churned through Narnia, Half Magic, etc.) Then it was a long parade of Judy Blume and those Sixth Grade Bat in my Gymsuit books, and Agatha Christie, and eventually Anna Karenina.
And I didn’t really get back into fantasy lit until a friend loaned me a copy of His Dark Materials.
I am genuinely looking forward to the day my niece (currently eight) is old enough for His Dark Materials. She could probably read it now (she’s a damn good reader) but I think a lot of it wouldn’t make sense. I’m thinking twelve?
Then again–I think a lot of it goes over kids’ heads, period.
Okay but the scene in The Railway Children where Phyllis gets yelled at for putting both jam AND butter on her buns but they have like 3 kinds of cold chicken/tongue/ham and 3 servants waiting on them?? I don’t understand how money works in E. Nesbit novels!
That seems to have been a surprisingly common thing back then, even among the upper classes. I think using both jam *and* butter was considered a sign of moral degeneracy, or something.
I was listening to an oral history thingie once about a lady who knew Queen Victoria– she grew up on the Isle of Wight (where Victoria and Albert spent part of the year), and used to spend time with the various royal children. She talked about being invited for tea with the royals, which she thought would be very grand, but it was actually much more plain than they had at home. AND they weren’t allowed to have jam and butter together, only one or the other.
I also remember listening to another set of interviews on Irish radio with the grandchildren of Augusta, Lady Gregory (who was sort of the grande dame of the Irish literary scene). They were only allowed to have jam *or* butter, but not both. (This was the rule even for adult visitors!) The kids were scandalized when Bernard Shaw came to visit, because he claimed to be using only jam on his toast but had secretly buttered the other side.
Bernard Shaw, you sneak!
At first they were shocked, then they were like, “Damn, why we didn’t *we* think of that?”
That whole documentary is delightful, by the way. Highly recommend:
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/2009/0528/64598…
Wow, I just realized how very, very deep my WASPyness goes. I am a jam OR butter person also and I am slightly scandalized by both, though if you are a guest in my house of course you may have both. My mother is an American who went to a British boarding school in the 1960s and I an positive that is where this preference was formed. I honestly never thought (as an American who attended public schools) of the class implications of JAM.
And I thought the jam thing loosened up in the post-war era!
A wise and kindly doctor gives you a literally chapter-long speech about why you have to be patient with girls because they’re weaker than you while setting your broken leg. The reader throws The Railway Children across the room in disgust, but continues to read all these books, and seeing them remembered on The Toast years later makes her day.
Except that Nesbit totally does not believe that for one second. Remember in The Enchanted Castle when Gerald and Mabel are dealing with the Ugly Wuglies, only Gerald has the ring to keep him from freaking out and Mabel doesn’t, and Mabel just powers through and doesn’t give any sign of how terrified she is? Mabel > Gerald. Roberta > Peter. Who waits with the hound in the red jersey in a railway tunnel where a train could come through any minute? Roberta. Who waves her red petticoats directly in front of an oncoming train? Roberta. Who basically resolves the Dreyfus Case? Roberta. That whole pages-long speech is just boys telling each other stories to soothe their deep sense of inadequacy.
My 8-year-old daughter was furious about this.
“a lovely supper of cold mutton, and cold tongue, and cold chicken, and cold ham, and bread and butter, and buns, and sticky pudding, and cocoa-nut ices, and prunes, and ripe tomatoes sprinkled with salt, and Turkish delight, and a siphon of soda water.”
This “lovely supper” would be a PALTRY SNACK in Salamandastron. Reassess, Nesbit.
You attend a midnight feast where there are lashings of ginger beer. I never got the “lashings” part although I understood the general idea.
Ma’am, the Malory Towers books are that way.
Well this is goddamn delightful.
I love The Story of the Amulet more than life, and yet the Queen of Babylon chapter is so horrible and anti-semitic. I don’t know how to deal with this. Yes I’m Jewish.
I’m kind of surprised my mother allowed that book in the house. She loves The Railway Children best so maybe it slipped her mind.
I have the same issue. My parents let that book in the house because the books are so damn good they figured we could all just deal with that issue.
What’s fascinating about Nesbit’s anti-semitism is that at the time of the Dreyfus Case the position of the left towards the Jews was a very positive, supportive one, and Nesbit tried but she just couldn’t do it. If you look at Harding’s Luck, she starts out by creating this sympathetic Jewish pawnbroker who’s one of the few people who likes and helps Dickie Harding. He’s still a Jewish stereotype, but he’s a nice one, and Nesbit makes it very clear that he really is disinterestedly generous. But then, as the book goes on, he turns little by little into the money-grubbing Jewish stereotype of her other novels, as if she just can’t sustain the effort necessary to create a positive Jewish character.
That’s about a third of my undergrad thesis, right there.
Just the whole “dark fairies” (ahem, dark JEWISH fairies) and “light fairies” thing in one of her stories about a bell? I think? Was enough to break my heart as an adult. Ah, well. Open eyes, I guess. I have a baby niece and I want to give her all the books but so many of our childhood loves were racist as fuck. It’s really difficult to think about what to do. Is it better to shelter them and not gift them with said books ever ever, or to read the books allowed with them and be like, “So Laura’s dad is wearing blackface in this scene. Do you know what that is?”
Late reply, sorry:
And yet, when the kids meet actual Gypsies (and btw, if you want a view into racism in Europe, you simply have to mention gypsies anywhere and wait for the bigotry to appear), she manages a fair and evenhanded approach where even the bad things they do can be waved away with “well, they were under a spell”.
The only E Nesbit book I ever read was The Enchanted Castle, and I only read it because I was obsessed with Edward Eager, who was super influenced by her. The children in his books were constantly referencing her and saying “this is just like an E Nesbit story!”
Me too! I think I read a few E Nesbit’s but I don’t remember anything about them. But I do remember Edward Eager! His books, especially Half Magic, made a huge impression on me.
He’s racist too, but not as much toward Jews as toward Arab and or Pacific Islander-type people. Or Africans? I think? All I remember is one of the books has the children end up almost eaten by cannibals.
The cannibal outing is unfortunate. But there is a weird, interesting little interlude in Half Magic when the kids travel to the Sahara and meet this Arabic guy who at first is this stereotypical villain. But when he sees the magic charm the children have, he suddenly becomes righteously angry and sympathetic, and the kids learn that “their” charm was stolen from his people. So they use the charm to give him all the happiness he could wish for, and they part on very good terms.
Looking back, they should have just given the magic charm itself back to him. But it is a curious interlude which at least tries to play with/examine the racism and colonialism which is unfortunately so prevalent in these kinds of books.
This is lovely!
I read a lot of E. Nesbit growing up, but I’m realizing that I don’t remember any details. At all. If I were to re-read one, which ones hold up best? Which are the least offensive? (I’m still a bit traumatized by re-reading the Pern books)
The thing to bear in mind with Nesbit is that her books were serialized, so they’re really episodic. If you can deal with that, I think there’s a lot in them that’s pretty amazing.
I would say start with The Enchanted Castle. It stands alone, has nothing offensive that I can think of offhand, and has some truly glorious passages.
The Story of the Amulet is fantastic as well, but seriously marred by that horribly anti-Semitic chapter. It’s also brought down by a chapter set in the future that’s just kind of dopey. But the rest of is phenomenal, so I have to recommend it anyway. And it was the first children’s time-travel book ever!
The Railway Children is solid and not particularly problematic, and was made into a wonderful film in (I think) the seventies. Confusingly, the original movie and the recent remake both star Jenny Agutter. Do not be led astray by this; watch the original.
I find the Railway Children a bit sappy. Maybe the Treasure Seekers (if you don’t require magic) and Enchanted Castle if you do? I really love the Treasure Seekers. They are aggressively lovably wrong-headed. The Conscience-Pudding will give you a flavor. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/nesbit/new…
The thing that redeems Story of the Amulet is it’s full of really terrifying and awe-inspiring scenes as well as comic ones. I can’t think of another children’s book that as successfully combines the High Seriousness of Magic with true-to-life child raffishness and humor.
And hooked noses, regrettably. I didn’t notice this till I was a teenager.
Yes! All those moments when something truly frightening is happening and the children barely escape, and then they look back through the arch of the amulet and see this horrific scene framed there in a living picture? Always gives me chills. She’s such a visual writer, and she’s so good at playing around with the uncanny – taking something that could be straight-up horror and turning it into sublime, transcendent MAGIC.
I somehow have never met another woman who knows E. Nesbit, let alone can quote her (let alone owns all her books and occasionally re-reads them well into her thirties). I should have know I would find them all on the Toast, and yet I’m still thrilled to make this discovery!
This delights me.
When do we get the Swallows and the Amazons? One of the main characters is named Titty!
Yes. The world absolutely needs more commentary on Titty. I always thought that series needed another character named Fanny….
SWALLOWS AND AMAZOOOOONS!!!!
ahem. Sorry. Books that mean a lot to me and mine.
you basically live off chocolate and ginger beer except when the First Mate slaves away over a camp fire and produces a feast. Or pemmican. Which i think is canned beef, so it is pemmican both before and after being renamed by the Bold Explorers.
SWALLOWS AND AMAZOOOOONS!!!!
ahem. Sorry. Books that mean a lot to me and mine.
you basically live off chocolate and ginger beer except when the First Mate slaves away over a camp fire and produces a feast. Or pemmican. Which i think is canned beef, so it is pemmican both before and after being renamed by the Bold Explorers.
I had to break up with A. S. Byatt a long time ago. I read 'The Game' and I was like NO THANK YOU. My good friend also sustained life-long trauma from another Byatt book that had an incident with the heroine, her a mentally disabled little brother, and a horrific refrigerator injury. I haven't read that one but she says it still gives her nightmares. 'Posession' is one of my favorite books ever, but I just cannot even anymore.
Whenever you make up after a fight you refer to Medes and Persians, whoever the $#%#% they were.
I say, Victoria, that’s just spiffing! I grew up on The Railway Children, and can quote great chunks of it, some of which made it into my novel – especially buns.
I know E. Nesbit mostly through Edward Eager who would not shut up about how great she was but whose own books were significantly better.
No no no no no. Dragons can always be befriended by good honest English manners.
And sometimes racial aliens (beautiful Frenchwomen say) turn out to have hearts of gold.
And your family crest comes to life and reveals the whereabouts of both the family treasure and your kidnapped father. But you must search for both in the Past or Peru or someplace.
And clergymen are always useful to read ancient texts for you, maybe even magical hieroglyphics.
Nesbit inspired Edward Eager, C.S. Lewis and Joan Aiken, but she’s better than any of them.
Oh John! I’ll let you have Edward Eager and CS Lewis (mostly because of the Last Battle) but will defend Joan Aiken to the death.
I read all the E Nesbit stores as a little kid growing up in England, love this
no-one likes the Psamead?
Also, author Victoria Don? Might you be the Victoria who was at nerd camp with me at Skidmore College in, oh, 1999?
If so, I’m so glad you’re writing! I still remember your story about a chain-smoking woman with cancer and glamorous head-scarves.