41 pages • 1 hour read
E. NesbitFive Children and It
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: E. Nesbit
E. Nesbit was born in London in 1858. Her childhood was unhappy; she was only four when her father died, and she was sent to boarding schools and later lived abroad with her mother and siblings before returning to England.
In 1880, when she was seven months pregnant, she married Hubert Bland, a bank clerk. She and Bland had three children together and adopted two of Bland’s children whom he had with a woman who lived with them and cared for the children. Together, they founded the Fabian Society, a socialist group whose members included well-known authors George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. The Blands frequently welcomed other socialists and writers to their home. Influenced by Fabian politics, themes of social justice frequently appear in Nesbit’s work. She was not, however, at all interested in women’s rights and once gave a lecture on “The Natural Disabilities of Women.”
Already a well-regarded poet by the 1890s, Nesbit began writing for children’s magazines and published her first full-length novel for children, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, in 1899. She would eventually write or collaborate on over 60 books, both for young readers and adults. Her children’s works were either adventure stories, like her much-loved The Railway Children (1906), or fantasies like her three “Five Children” books, in which everyday children encounter a magical being or situation.
All her children’s works are known for vividly drawn characters, true-to-life dialogue, and humorous and wildly imaginative situations. She once told a friend, “I make it a point of honor never to write down to a child” (Fitzsimons, Eleanor. The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit. Abrams, 2019). Her playful writing style, in which children bicker and use slang, set her apart from her contemporaries and earned her the title—as one of her biographers called her—of “the first modern writer for children.” Early-20th-century British racism, however, is also present in her work, informing the depiction of Indigenous and Roma people in Five Children and It.
After the death of her first husband, Nesbit married again in 1917 and died in 1924. Her books have been published in many languages, and she has been the subject of several biographies and a 1998 documentary.
Cultural Context: Edwardian-Era Children’s Literature and Low Fantasy
King Edward VII took the throne at age 59 after the death of his mother, Queen Victoria, and his reign was brief, lasting only from 1901 to 1910. Children’s literature had changed over the course of the Victorian period. At its beginning, children’s books had strong religious and moral overtones in works by authors such as Maria Edgeworth. However, several significant writers of fantasy and adventure stories emerged during Victorian times, including Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865), George MacDonald (At the Back of the North Wind, 1871), and Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, 1883).
This trend would continue in the Edwardian period, which produced a remarkable number of children’s classics in a short span. Ten of E. Nesbit’s books, including the three “Five Children” books that began with Five Children and It (1902), appeared during the decade. Fantasies and realistic stories alike reflected Edwardian-era British life, including social norms and family dynamics. Nesbit is considered the first writer of the genre known today as low fantasy for its mixture of fantastical elements with a real-world setting. The children do not have to journey to an alternate world to experience magic, like Carroll’s Alice falling down a hole into Wonderland. Instead, magic intrudes on their everyday lives.
Mid-20th-century author Edward Eager (1911-1964), author of Half Magic and other fantasies for children, paid open homage to Nesbit in each of his books. In a 1958 article about Nesbit for Horn Book magazine, he refers to the “dailiness” of the magic in Nesbit’s fantasies. It is “the ordinary or garden world we all know, with just the right pinch of magic added” (Eager, Edward. “Daily Magic.” Horn Book, 1 Oct. 1958).
It is this intersection of ordinary people, places, and events with magic that creates the novel’s humor and suspense. Nesbit demonstrates these elements of low fantasy through the fair vendor, for instance, who says that the giant-sized Robert is “the eldest son of the Emperor of San Francisco,” compelled through an unfortunate love affair to leave his country and take refuge in “England—the land of liberty—where freedom [i]s the right of every man, no matter how big he [i]s” (154). People who go on acting just as they always do, even in the face of magic, help to propel the action in each chapter.
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