Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy

"That beautiful Baalbec temple in the desert! Plenty of good sand there, and no politics! I wish I were there, safe in the Past—that I do," whines the Psammead, that magical Sand-Fairy, at the very end of The Story of the Amulet (1906), the third book in E. Nesbit's magical trilogy that began with Five Children and It (1902) and continued with The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). Like so many other moments in the trilogy, this final scene is tinted by Nesbit's soft, warm sense of irony: after all, even though the Sand-fairy's wish is swiftly fulfilled, readers of The Amulet would be the first to know that the past is rarely free from politics—and never really safe.

This truism is certainly reflected in this new collection of essays commemorating the trilogy's centenary. Although they approach the texts from very different theoretical and methodological perspectives, all the contributors dwell on the intriguing relationship among fantasy, ideology, and the trilogy's constructions of the past—Nesbit's fascination with earlier historical epochs (from ancient Egypt to the Roman conquest of Britain), but also her Edwardian "present" as viewed from the twenty-first century. The trilogy encourages this reading, but, even more significantly, it performs it: that Nesbit herself was able to depict Edwardian society in historical, even historiographical, terms (in one of the most celebrated episodes in The Amulet, the children travel to the London of the future) is merely another demonstration of her genius.

Interestingly, although Nesbit's position as "one of England's preeminent writers for children" seems irrefutable, several of the contributors to the volume still feel obliged to defend Nesbit's eminence and justify the importance of her work. This slight sense of anxiety—which is probably missing from the other Centennial Studies published by the Children's Literature Association (dedicated to the work of Potter, Baum, and Barrie)—surfaces from time to time in this collection, for example, in the many allusions to Humphrey Carpenter's assertion (in Secret Gardens) that Nesbit was merely "an energetic hack," and that as soon as one examines her novels closely, "doubts begin to emerge as to the real nature of her talent." While Carpenter's authority certainly added force to his claim, it is nevertheless indicative of the current state of scholarship about Nesbit that critics are still obliged today to confront misgivings that were first voiced a century ago.

Following Raymond E. Jones's comprehensive introduction, the collection includes thirteen chapters, all of them written especially for this volume, with the exception of Suzanne Rahn's "News From E. Nesbit: The Story of the Amulet and the Socialist Utopia," which first appeared in 1985 in ELT and is republished here in a newly edited version (chapter ten). Offering a remarkably astute reading that traces the fantasy back to Nesbit's Fabian credentials, Rahn's essay—published, incidentally, the same year Carpenter issued his damning account—marked a new, more sophisticated era in Nesbit scholarship. Its inclusion in the collection is therefore well earned and most welcome.

The volume is not divided into any distinct chronological or thematic sections; nevertheless, chapters one–seven all focus on the trilogy itself by approaching Nesbit's texts through various critical and cultural strategies. Among other issues, the essays explore Nesbit's ambiguous treatment of gender (chapter one); offer a postcolonial critique of her views of empire (chapter three); discuss her "comic spirituality" (chapter five) and her comic techniques (chapter six). Though not groundbreaking, these are all solid, extremely useful contributions. Particularly helpful is Monica Flegel's essay on Fabianism and didacticism (chapter two), which complements Rahn's work on The Amulet by turning to Nebsit's other novels and examining the tension between her socialist convictions and her middle-class bias. Another original essay is Teya Rosenberg's reading of the Psammead series as an early manifestation of magic realism (chapter four), a term usually associated with South...