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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Psammead
The Psammead symbolizes tradition and common sense. It longs for the days when children made sensible wishes—for healthy food—and hints several times that what the five children need is “good tempers, or common sense, or manners” (36). It tells them that they ought to be careful with what they wish for, giving the example of a child who wished he was dead—and was, until sunset.
The children are well aware that their wishes are silly and always go wrong. Cyril points out in Chapter 3 that they are getting in the habit of longing for sunset and wishes that they could ask for something “sensible […] so that [they] should be quite sorry when sunset came” (73). However, they are children, and rambunctious ones at that. They forget and make accidental wishes, or they fail to consider what might happen if they wished that the house were a besieged castle. This tension between their understanding of what they should do and the things they actually do is a major source of conflict in the plot and develops the themes of The Importance of Responsibility When Using Power and The Difference Between Childish Whims and Genuine Needs.
The Psammead’s desire for tradition isn’t always a good thing—at least, not in the light of modern times. In the last chapter, it asks the girls to promise never to tell anyone about it because grown-ups would ask for things like “a graduated income tax, and old-age pensions and manhood suffrage [the right to vote regardless of social factors], and free secondary education” (205). These are ideals that Nesbit, as a socialist, would have cherished, but to the Psammead, they are only bound to turn the world “topsy-turvy.”
The Police
The only adult in the book who believes in the Psammead is the author, who breaks into the story occasionally to offer commentary such as, “Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof” (14). Every time the children attempt to tell an adult the truth about the Sand-fairy, they are admonished or simply considered to be silly or nonsensical. The police, however, are the ultimate symbol of adults’ failure of imagination.
When the children attempt to buy a horse and carriage, the stable master summons a police officer, who immediately declares, “I’ll take ’em up on a charge of unlawful possession, pending inquiries. And the magistrate will deal with the case. Send the afflicted ones to a home, as likely as not, and the boys to a reformatory” (49). There is no question of listening to the children’s story; only the adults matter, and it is a given that they will not believe the story.
The police don’t have to be present to represent a failure of imagination. Just the mention of them conjures up a world of unimaginative, unfair, judgmental adults. When the cook threatens to summon the police after the children become as beautiful as the day, Anthea immediately pictures the children going to prison. Similarly, when Robert becomes a giant at the fair and Cyril is plotting his brother’s escape. Cyril tells Jane, “It’s no good Robert going out and knocking people down. The police would follow him till he turned his proper size, and then arrest him like a shot” (158). Finally, when Jane wishes that Mother would receive Lady Chittenden’s stolen jewelry, Robert says that the police will of course be summoned, at which Cyril and Anthea remember “how convincing the truth about the Psammead had been once before when told to the police” (197).
At the time of Nesbit’s writing, the criminal justice system was harsh on both children and adults. Young thieves were indeed sent to reformatory school, as the police officer threatens in Chapter 2. The police are a symbol of adults’ failure to support and believe in children.
Clichés
Clichés are a motif in several of the children’s wishes, as when they want to be “beautiful as the day” and “rich beyond the dreams of […] avarice” (24, 37). The former phrase is part of the cliché “beautiful as the day is long,” while the latter phrase is often attributed to 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, as quoted by his biographer. When the children wish in terms of clichés, they are always foiled because they have failed to bring specificity to the wish and haven’t thought through the consequences.
As critic Susan Ang says of the clichés that typify the children’s wishes, “Since even as linguistic constructions the phrases contain little meaning, the fulfillment of the wishes brings scant satisfaction” (Ang, Susan. The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English. Cambridge University Press, 2001). Nesbit, indeed, casts thinking in terms of clichés in a poor light.
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By E. Nesbit
