I loved E. Nesbit as a kid. And then, for some reason, forgot all about her. Or I assumed that I had read all her stuff, and would read it again at some point, but I didn’t have any more stuff to search out.
Then, as I may have mentioned, I found The Charmed Life in an anthology, and then forgot who had written it or where I found it, and then I found it again, and with it E. Nesbit as a writer of short stories. So when I came across The Book of Dragons at a used book sale, I gathered it up.
I noticed something about these stories that is scarcely unique, but I’m wondering if there are others that work in the same way. What I mean is this: Ms. Nesbit wrote the stories (and the novels, at least the ones I’ve read) as a kind of low fantasy, combining dragons and magic and whatnot with contemporary suburban life. But her contemporary suburban life is itself a kind of magical fantasy for me, reading it today. So the combination of psammeads and sixpences, manticores and magistrates, gargoules and guineas, is not, for YHB, the combination of fantasy and reality, but the combination of two different kinds of fantasies. And in some ways, the sixpences and bathing machines one is the more fantastical.
I suppose the Oz books have something of this to them, and perhaps Charlotte’s Web as well, now that I think about it. Although I must admit, as a pathetic Anglophile, there’s the added greatness of it being all English. Hurrah! Yah boo!
This is separate (to me) from steampunk or other current pseudo-Victorian fantasy in that Ms. Nesbit really is dealing with matter-of-fact things, so the texts themselves haven’t a trace of nostalgia. The problem, of course, is that they have more than a trace of racism, gender typing, xenophobia, and other traits of the time. Ah, well. But they are wonderful, wonderful stories.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.