Abstract
In C. M. Tucker’s Fairy Know-A-Bit; or, a nutshell of knowledge, fairy Know-a-Bit is an instructor to children, giving them lessons that merge didacticism with entertainment. By becoming an urban creature, fairy Know-a-Bit has gained an education, and her transformation traces the evolution of civilization. The scholarly fairy is much more evolved than her rural ancestors, and as such she becomes a suitable instructor to children – primitive creatures in need of an education. Tucker’s fairy Know-a-Bit is a good introduction to Edith Nesbit’s treatment of fairies in Five Children and It because evolutionary allusions inform Nesbit’s supernatural being who reluctantly acts as a teacher to children. Both writer and poetess,2 Edith Nesbit remains famous today for her children’s books, notably The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), the Psammead series (Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), The Story of the Amulet (1906)), The Railway Children (1906), The Enchanted Castle (1907) and The Magic City (1910). Her fiction often interweaves children’s reality with fantasy, using magical objects to spur the children’s adventures. Nesbit also wrote literary fairy tales (collected in The Book of Dragons (1900) and Nine Unlikely Tales (1901)), written for The Strand in 1899 and 1900, which merge the fairy-tale world with contemporary reality and recurrently highlight moral or cultural issues.3
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Notes
A.L.O.E. [Charlotte Maria Tucker], Fairy Know-A-Bit; or, a nutshell of knowledge (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1868), pp. 12–13.
Julia Briggs, Edith Nesbit: A Woman of Passion (Stroud: Tempus, (1987) 2007).
Doris Langley Moore, E. Nesbit: A Biography, rev. edn (London: Ernest Benn, 1967).
Teya Rosenberg, ‘Generic Manipulation and Mutation: E. Nesbit’s Psammead Series as Early Magical Realism’, in Raymond E. Jones (ed.), E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s Classic at 100 (Lanham, Toronto: Children’s Literature Association; Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2006), pp. 63–88 (69).
Edith Nesbit, Wings and the Child; or the Building of Magic Cities (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913), p. 27.
W. W. Robson believes, on the contrary, that Nesbit’s fiction is not designed to be educational, as he argues in W. W. Robson, ‘E. Nesbit and The Book of Dragons’, in Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (eds), Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 251–70 (261).
Nesbit, Wings and the Child, pp. 24–6. A very similar remark appears in The Enchanted Castle: ‘When you are young so many things are difficult to believe, and yet the dullest people will tell you that they are true — such things, for instance, as that the earth goes round the sun, and that it is not flat but round. But the things that seem really likely, like fairy-tales and magic, are, so say the grown-ups, not true at all’ (Edith Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle (London: Puffin Classics, (1907) 1994), p. 27).
Edith Nesbit, Five Children and It (London: Penguin, (1902) 1995), p. 24. All further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
Gideon Algernon Mantell, The Wonders of Geology; or, A Familiar Exposition of Geological Phenomena; Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Brighton, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Relfe and Fletcher, (1838) 1839), I, p. 181, qtd in Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (London now Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, (2003) 2009), p. 25.
Education was for Nesbit shaped like a Palace: ‘In the Palace of Education… many stones will be needed — and so I bring the little stone I have hewn out and tried to shape, in the hope that it may fit into a corner of that great edifice’ (Nesbit, Wings and the Child, p. 16). Moreover, for Nesbit the Crystal Palace epitomized the conflation of beauty and knowledge now vanished: ‘Think of the imagination, the feeling for romance that went to the furnishing of the old Crystal Palace. There was a lake in the grounds of Penge Park… How did these despised mid-Victorians deal with it? They set up, amid the rocks and reeds and trees of the island in that lake, life-sized images of the wonders of a dead world. On a great stone crouched a Pterodactyl, his vast wings spread for flight. A mammoth sloth embraced a tree, and I give you my word that when you came on him from behind, you, in your six years, could hardly believe that he was not real, that he would not presently leave the tree and turn his attention to your bloused and belted self… There was an Ichthyosaurus too, and another chap whose name I forget, but he had a scalloped crest all down his back to the end of his tail. And the Dinosaurus… he had a round hole in his antediluvian stomach: and, with a brother… to give you a leg-up, you could explore the roomy interior of the Dinosaur with feelings hardly surpassed by those of bandits in a cave. It is almost impossible to overestimate the dinosaurus as an educational influence’ (Nesbit, Wings and the Child, p. 48). The Crystal Palace is referred to in many of her works (at the beginning of ‘The Ice Dragon’ (in Edith Nesbit, The Book of Dragons (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, [1900] 2004), in which the protagonists go to the North Pole (see Rosenberg, ‘Generic Manipulation and Mutation’, p. 70), in ‘Whereyouwantogoto’ (Edith Nesbit, ‘Whereyouwantogoto’, Nine Unlikely Tales (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), pp. 49–84), The Magic City and The Phoenix and the Carpet), and underlies The Enchanted Castle in a particularly striking way.
Reprinted from the Journal of the Society of Arts, 78, reproduced as a leaflet by James Tennant, qtd in Steve MacCarthy, The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs: The Story of the World’s First Prehistoric Sculptures (London: Crystal Palace Foundation, 1994), p. 89.
‘[I]nstead of imagining causes, one has collected facts’ (Georges Cuvier, ‘Espèces de quadrupèdes’ (1801), trans. Martin J. S. Rudwick, in Martin J. S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 45–58 (47).
Tess Cosslett, The ‘Scientific Movement’ and Victorian Literature (Brighton: Harvester Press;New York: St. Martins Press, 1982), p. 30.
Cuvier’s geology, which did not privilege the story of creation, was not only very often a first introduction to geology for many but also positioned the question of species extinction at the heart of studies of the earth and its inhabitants, perhaps for the first time. It was in 1813 that Cuvier’s ‘Preliminary Discourse’ was published in English as Essay on the Theory of the Earth (trans. Robert Jameson, 3rd edn (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1817), over a decade after the first publication of Recherche sur les ossemens fossiles (1799). Cuvier’s inclusion of ecological scenarios to explain extinction seemed thus to go against all biblical interpretation of natural history and the idea of God’s creation as perfect. Still, Cuvier’s catastrophism ensured his favourable reception in British scientific circles. See Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 61.
See his paper on living and fossil elephants: Georges Cuvier, ‘Mémoire sur les espèces d’éléphans tant vivantes que fossiles, lu à la séance publique de l’Institut National le 15 germinal, an IV’, Magasin encyclopédique, 2ème année, 3 (1796), pp. 440–5.
Nicolaas A. Rupke, The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814–1849) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 132.
Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (New York and London: Norton, (1997) 1999), pp. 203–14.
Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 118–19.
George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, ed. Roderick McGillis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 6.
Caroline Sumpter, The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 39.
[Anon], ‘A Lump of Coal’, Good Words for the Young 1 (Dec. 1868), pp. 102–5 (102), qtd in Sumpter, Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale, p. 41.
Jessica Straley, ‘Of Beasts and Boys: Kingsley, Spencer and the Theory of Recapitulation’, Victorian Studies 49.3 (Summer 2007), pp. 583–609.
Amanda Hodgson, ‘Defining the Species: Apes, Savages and Humans in Scientific and Literary Writing of the 1860s’, Journal of Victorian Culture 4.2 (Autumn 1999), pp. 228–51 (230).
Edith Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), p. 24. The Story of the Amulet even makes explicit that because the Psammead is a prehistoric creature, it may not be as mentally developed as the children: ‘For a creature that had in its time associated with Megatheriums and Pterodactyls, its quickness was really wonderful.’
Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 228.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, North Carolina, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. xii.
Hunt and Sands underline ‘the positive role of the other’ in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill; Peter Hunt and Karen Sands, ‘The View from the Center: British Empire and Post-Empire Children’s Literature’, in Roderick McGillis (ed.), Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 39–53 (45).
Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham, North Carolina, and London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 180. Erin O’Connor argues that the display and frequent fictionaliza- tion of freaks in Victorian shows lifted them ‘into a symbolic structure whose ultimate thrust was to depict the monstrous body as pure representation’ (O’Connor, Raw Material, p. 180). His study also foregrounds the extent to which freaks were linked to Victorian economy, highlighting the ‘vexed status of the human body under capitalism’ (O’Connor, Raw Material, p. 167). His idea that ‘monstrosity was the fairy tale of modern embodiment’, equating the monstrous body with a wonderful machine well adapted to industrial society (except for freaks which were defined as throwbacks, of course, as is more the case in Five Children and It since
See: [Elizabeth Eastlake], ‘The Crystal Palace’, Quarterly Review CXCII (March 1855), pp. 303–55.
[Harriet Martineau], ‘The Crystal Palace’, Westminster Review 6 (1854), pp. 534–50.
[John Lindley], ‘The Crystal Palace Gardens’, The Athenaeum (1854), p. 780. For Lindley, ‘Savages under a glass roof are neither more or less absurd than Saurian monsters in Penge Wood. The difficulty of a proper exhibition of these curiosities is one which exists in the nature of things, and which no artistic arrangement could remove. The juxtaposition is ridiculous: — but if the public will have savages and Saurians in their palace and park, they must reconcile their minds to the incongruity.’
Jane Barlow, The End of Elfintown (London: Macmillan & Co., 1894). Epilogue
Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, (1906) 1994).
John V. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 11.
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© 2014 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
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Talairach-Vielmas, L. (2014). Edith Nesbit’s Fairies and Freaks of Nature: Environmental Consciousness in Five Children and It . In: Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342409_8
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