in Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. xvi.

3 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 71-72.

4 In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis recalls his childhood reading of Nesbit’s novels: “Much better than either of these [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court] was E. Nesbit’s trilogy, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet [sic], and The Amulet. The last did most for me. It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ I can still reread it with delight.” C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Diego: Harcourt, 1970), p. 14.

5 Colin Manlove, From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England (Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2003), p. 47.

6 Mervyn Nicholson, “What C. S. Lewis Took from E. Nesbit,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 16 (1991), pp. 16-22.

7 Edward Eager, Half Magic (1954; San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), pp. 4-5 .

FIVE CHILDREN AND IT

To JOHN BLAND1

My Lamb, you are so very small, You have not learned to read at all. Yet never a printed book withstands The urgence of your dimpled hands. So, though this book is for yourself, Let mother keep it on the shelf Till you can read. O days that pass, That day will come too soon, alas!

The Psammead

CHAPTER I

BEAUTIFUL AS THE DAY

The house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty hired flya had rattled along for five minutes the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and to say, “Aren’t we nearly there?” And every time they passed a house, which was not very often, they all said, “Oh, is this it?” But it never was, till they reached the very top of the hill, just past the chalk-quarry and before you come to the gravel-pit. And then there was a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond, and mother said, “Here we are!”

“How white the house is,” said Robert.

“And look at the roses,” said Anthea.

“And the plums,” said Jane.

“It is rather decent,” Cyril admitted.

The Baby said, “Wanty go walky”; and the fly stopped with a last rattle and jolt.

Everyone got its legs kicked or its feet trodden on in the scramble to get out of the carriage that very minute, but no one seemed to mind. Mother, curiously enough, was in no hurry to get out; and even when she had come down slowly and by the step, and with no jump at all, she seemed to wish to see the boxes carried in, and even to pay the driver, instead of joining in that first glorious rush round the garden and the orchard and the thorny, thistly, briery, brambly wilderness beyond the broken gate and the dry fountain at the side of the house. But the children were wiser, for once. It was not really a pretty house at all; it was quite ordinary, and mother thought it was rather inconvenient, and was quite annoyed at there being no shelves, to speak of, and hardly a cupboard in the place. Father used to say that the ironwork on the roof and coping was like an architect’s nightmare. But the house was deep in the country, with no other house in sight, and the children had been in London for two years, without so much as once going to the seaside even for a day by an excursion train, and so the White House seemed to them a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise. For London is like prison for children, especially if their relations are not rich.

That first glorious rush round the garden

Of course there are the shops and the theatres, and Maskelyne and Cook’s,b and things, but if your people are rather poor you don’t get taken to the theatres, and you can’t buy things out of the shops; and London has none of those nice things that children may play with without hurting the things or themselves—such as trees and sand and woods and waters. And nearly everything in London is the wrong sort of shape—all straight lines and flat streets, instead of being all sorts of odd shapes, like things are in the country. Trees are all different, as you know, and I am sure some tiresome person must have told