but engagingly comic dignity—proud, poetic, and disdainful of the prosaic character of modern life. The Psammead reappears in The Story of the Amulet, but it plays a relatively minor role in the quest for the missing half of a magic charm that has the capacity to confer “our hearts’ desire” (p. 281). The clue to the missing half-amulet is buried in the past. The search takes the children on a series of voyages in time, first to a prehistoric village along the Nile (c.6000 B.C.) and then to ancient Babylon at the height of its glory. After that, they voyage to the seafaring civilization of ancient Tyre, the glorious mythical continent of Atlantis just before it sinks into the sea, ancient Britain at the time of Caesar’s conquest (55 B.C.), again to ancient Egypt (this time during the reign of the Pharoah), and finally forward in time, first to a utopian London free of the ills of the Edwardian city, and then to the near future, where they encounter their own adult selves. Nesbit has nearly as much fun with overlapping times as she did with overlapping spaces in Five Children and It, when, for instance, the Queen of Babylon is transported from her own time to the children’s London and is not only appalled by the shabbiness of the modern metropolis but also insists on the return of her jewels from the British Museum. (C. S. Lewis, who admired the novel, recreates this episode in The Magician’s Nephew [1955], where the much more treacherous Queen Jadis escapes from her own world and stirs up trouble in Edwardian London.)4 Despite such touches of humor, each of these time-travel adventures invites reflection on the nature of society and the state, and taken together they reflect the increasingly serious mood of Nesbit’s later fantasies. So does the joining together of the two halves of the amulet, which produces a vision of a higher domain that transcends the injurious divisions and contradictions of everyday life and allows us to pass “through the perfect charm to the perfect union, which is not of time or space.” Nesbit would never abandon the kind of “funny” magic that prevails in Five Children and It, but the resolution of The Story of the Amulet points to the more “serious” magic that would come to the fore in her next major fantasy, The Enchanted Castle.

V

Nesbit’s most ambitious work of fiction starts off as most of her previous novels. Once again, we meet a group of middle-class siblings who set forth on a series of adventures. In this instance, we begin with a threesome—Gerald, Kathleen, and Jimmy—who are compelled to remain at school for the holidays in the charge of a young schoolmistress, the good-natured “Mademoiselle.” Like the Bastables and the “five children,” these siblings are reasonably well differentiated and inclined to incessant squabbling. Gerald, the oldest and most resourceful, bears a certain resemblance to Oswald Bastable. Unlike the latter, he is not the narrator of the novel, but he possesses the habit of narrating his own actions in a self-conscious literary manner (annoying to the other children, if amusing to us) that inevitably grants him pride of place: “ ‘The young explorers, ... dazzled at first by the darkness of the cave, could see nothing.... But their dauntless leader, whose eyes had grown used to the dark while the clumsy forms of the others were bunging up the entrance, had made a discovery’ ” (p. 198). Jimmy, by contrast, is the resident skeptic who not only punctures the pretensions of others but also plays an important role as the doubting Thomas of this mischievously magical universe. Kathleen, the middle child, is less well marked, but as with Anthea and some of Nesbit’s other young girls, her common sense and compassion offset some of the eccentricities of her male companions and provide some ballast to the group. Like the “five children” before them, Nesbit’s new team wanders into a magical world, but we soon discover that in this novel it is often difficult to distinguish the enchanted and the real, and questions of truth and belief play a more prominent role than in the earlier novels. Over time we also discover that the plot of this novel, which seems to begin as another loosely organized sequence of episodes, is more unified and considerably more complex than its predecessors. Nesbit offers no explicit structural signposts, but if nothing else, the twelve untitled chapters seem to fall into two discrete sets