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.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Beautiful as the Day”
Content Warning: This section discusses racist descriptions of Indigenous people and Romani people. Derogatory language is reproduced in quotations only.
The story begins as five siblings arrive in a hired carriage to a house next to a garden and orchard. Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and baby Hilary (always called “the Lamb”) have come from London for a holiday and are thrilled to be staying at the house, which they call the White House. There are woods behind it, a chalk quarry on one side for mining chalk (used to make cement and bricks), and a gravel pit (a natural deposit of gravel used in construction) on the other.
The author interrupts her story to insist that she will only tell the “really astonishing things” that happened to the children because “children will believe almost anything” (14). She is sure that her readers will believe that before the children had been at the house for a week, they found a fairy.
After both parents are called away suddenly, the children go to dig a hole in the ancient gravel pit. Anthea (also called “Panther”) sees something moving at the bottom. As she touches fur, a dry, husky voice in the sand calls out, “Let me alone” (18).
Anthea says that she wishes the creature would come out, and it does. The strange brown, furry, fat creature has eyes on “long horns like a snail’s eyes,” ears “like a bat’s ears,” a tubby body “shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur,” and hands and feet (19). The creature is grossly insulted when the children don’t recognize it, and after kindhearted Anthea apologizes, it reveals itself to be a Psammead (pronounced “Sammyadd” by Anthea), or Sand-fairy.
Robert calls it the “wonderfullest” thing he has ever seen, which makes the Psammead a bit less disagreeable. It reveals that it is thousands of years old and lived in the time of pterodactyls and ichthyosaurus, when the gravel pit was part of the ocean. Sand fairies were numerous, it explains, and children would come down to the sea every morning to get the day’s wishes. The wishes, however, would turn into stone at sunset. The sand fairies have nearly died out because they often got wet, causing them to catch cold and die.
The children discover that the Psammead can still grant wishes, so Anthea wishes that they were “all as beautiful as the day” (24). This is a difficult wish, and the Sand-fairy says that it can grant it if they limit themselves to one wish per day. The children agree, and the fairy swells itself up and then disappears into the sand, leaving behind “perfect strangers, all radiantly beautiful” (25). Only the Lamb looks like himself, as he is too young to be part of the group wish.
The older children recognize each other by their clothing, but the Lamb doesn’t know Anthea or Jane (also called “Pussy”) and refuses to go home with them. Finally, he consents to be carried home, but the nursemaid, Martha, believes that the children are strangers who have kidnapped the baby and refuses to let them in the house. The children are still beautiful but are also tired, hungry, and worried that they will turn to stone at sunset. Jane points out that for future wishes, they’ll have to ask the Psammead to arrange for the servants not to notice anything different about them.
The children fall asleep and waken at sunset to find that they are themselves again, much to their relief. At home, Martha scolds them, and Anthea says, truthfully, that they couldn’t come home because the children who were beautiful as the day kept them out. Robert vows that they will take care never to see the beautiful children again.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Golden Guineas”
The next morning, Cyril appears in the girls’ bedroom and announces that they will go make another wish after breakfast. This time, they will make up their minds together about the nature of the wish, and all must agree on it.
Martha takes the Lamb to visit her relatives, and the older children hurry to the gravel pit after breakfast. Quarreling as they grow warm from shoveling, they uncover the Sand-fairy, who threatens to grant them good tempers. Robert asks first for the small wish that the servants not notice the fairy’s gifts, which is easily granted. Second, Robert asks to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The fairy mutters to itself that this won’t do them much good, but it offers to fill the gravel pit with gold. The children quickly pocket gold pieces, noting that they are not the familiar gold coins called sovereigns. The weight of the coins disturbs Jane when Robert tries to bury her in them, and it disturbs Cyril as well, who staggers under their weight.
They arrive at a nearby village, tired, hot, and dusty as the gold seems to grow heavier in their pockets. The inn they stop at won’t take the coins, and Cyril must buy them snacks with his own money. Anthea manages to hire a pony cart for the price of one coin, which she learns is a spade guinea (from the late 18th century). They travel to a bigger town, Rochester, where no shopkeeper will accept the old coins. At last, desperate with hunger, they rush into a bakery and each three buns each in their dirty hands. The baker is forced to accept one of the guineas but refuses to give them change.
Anthea insists that they try to purchase their own horse and carriage, but the stable keeper they ask instead sends his assistant to summon the police. Asked where they got the guineas, the children are silent until “truthful” Jane volunteers that a Sand-fairy from the gravel pit granted their wish. When Anthea agrees, the stable keeper concludes that the children are “touched” (meaning “disturbed”).
The police offer who arrives threatens to send the girls to a home and the boys to a reformatory, and he and the keeper hurry the children along to the police station. Fortunately, they run into Martha and the Lamb. Since Martha magically cannot see the gold, she dismisses the men’s complaints while accompanying the group to the station. As dusk falls, the children turn out their pockets for an inspector and find them empty.
Martha takes them home in a carriage. The next day, the children’s conscience troubles them, as they worry that the pony cart driver will also have lost his guinea. He hasn’t, however—he is wearing it around his neck on a chain—and Anthea further soothes her conscience by sending stamps to the baker to pay for the buns.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Being Wanted”
The children are less excited when they wake up the next morning, as now they have had two wishes, beauty and wealth, and “neither had exactly made them happy” (55). Anthea and Robert worry that the Psammead is not to be trusted and is secretly sabotaging their wishes. Cyril and Jane, however, don’t think that the Psammead is against them and think that their wishes were merely silly. What they need, Cyril says, is a useful wish. They decide to ask for £50 in two-shilling pieces.
Martha insists that the children take the Lamb with them to the gravel pit. The baby is so naughty that Robert accidentally wishes that “everybody did want him with all their hearts” so that they can have some peace (62). The Sand-fairy appears to say that the wish has been granted—and that the children should be careful what they wish for. Discouraged, they head home and encounter Lady Chittenden, a “grand” woman in a carriage who asks if she can adopt the baby. Being told that she cannot, she snatches the Lamb and drives off, with the children running behind.
When the carriage finally stops and Lady Chittenden gets out, her groom and coachman get into a fistfight over the child, and Cyril is able to steal him back. On the way home, people continue to want the Lamb until the children hide in a hedge whenever they see anyone coming. Nearing home, they come upon a company of “gipsies” (a slur for Romani people) who all want to hold the baby. One of the men grabs the child, claiming it to be his own. Cyril cleverly tells the man that he can have the baby after sunset.
The Roma share their dinner with the children, who care for the baby while wishing desperately for sunset to come. Cyril again longs for a “really sensible” wish as the Roma crowd close, eager to reclaim the baby. When the sun finally sets, the Roma want nothing to do with the Lamb except for one woman, who kisses and blesses him. Back at the house, Robert muses that it turns out that they wanted the baby as much as anyone. Cyril says that they always do when they are being their proper selves.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
By the end of Chapter 1, the children have already learned The Importance of Responsibility When Using Power, one of the novel’s major themes and a staple of folklore found in many countries. Nesbit puts rules in place surrounding the magic—one wish per day, ending at sunset—to ensure that the children never get into a situation that they cannot ultimately resolve. At the same time, the children never learn to carefully plan their wishes or think about the possible outcome.
Nesbit plays with another folklore tradition by promptly dispatching the children’s parents in Chapter 1, leaving them in the care of the nursemaid, Martha. She is a particular example of the devices of low fantasy. The rule that the children put into effect in Chapter 2—that the servants do not notice the effects of the magic wishes—creates a humorous element in the story. These adventures also all take place no farther than a carriage ride from the children’s summer home. In creating the genre of low fantasy, where magic occurs within the realm of daily life, Nesbit has struck on a formula that requires no time travel or magic portals.
The Relativity of Justice and Moral Codes is on display throughout these early chapters. The siblings, though rambunctious, are nonetheless fair. They are not above biting into buns first and then paying for them, but they also take turns speaking to the shopkeepers and visit the pony-cart driver to make sure he still has his guineas. When Robert accidentally wastes a wish by saying that he wished everyone would want the Lamb, the others are too “noble” to reproach him. The children are thoroughly human characters but are also heroic in their own way.
Nesbit also introduces her symbols and motifs in these opening chapters. The Psammead is the voice of tradition and common sense. It is not exactly like an adult since the novel’s adults universally dismiss the possibility of magic, while the Psammead is quite proud of its magical abilities. However, it does function something like a parent in the absence of the children’s own since it implores them to be careful with what they wish for. That the children are dimly aware of this is evident in Chapter 3 when Cyril notices that they have gotten in the habit of wishing for sunset to come.
The police symbolize the ultimate adult authority figures in the novel. They are totally lacking in imagination and quick to judge the children. Not only are they unconvinced that the gold coins in Chapter 2 have been obtained honestly, but they have also all but found the children guilty even before they reach the police station.
The children’s first two wishes are based on clichés. To be “beautiful as the day” is part of the cliché “beautiful as the day is long” (24) To be “rich beyond the dreams of […] avarice” is a phrase often attributed to 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, as quoted by his biographer (37). Nesbit employs this motif to show that fuzzy, lazy thinking doesn’t bring good results.
Although Nesbit was a free thinker in many ways, the text exhibits racist attitudes. She portrays the Roma, whom she calls by the derogatory term “gipsies” (they were originally believed to be Egyptian even though they originated in northern India), as being ragged and unclean speaking broken English. Roma people had been in England since the 16th century, but because of their customs—living in caravans, with their own language and style of dress—they were viewed with suspicion and hostility. In making the Lamb attractive to everyone, but especially to the Roma, Nesbit is perpetuating a medieval myth about the people: that they stole children. Nesbit does, however, attribute some good qualities to the Roma people in Chapter 3. They invite the children to eat supper with them, and one woman kisses and blesses the baby even after the sunset has ended his enchantment. Robert thinks that she is silly, but Cyril, Anthea, and Jane all comment on her humanity.
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