Five Children and It
Five
Children and It is a children's
novel by English author
E.
Nesbit. It was originally published in
1902 in the Strand Magazine
under the general title The Psammead, or the Gifts, with a segment
appearing each month from April to December. The stories were then expanded
into a novel which was published the same year. It is the first volume of a
trilogy that includes The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). The book has never been out of print since its
initial publication.
Plot summary
Like
Nesbit's The Railway Children, the story begins when a group of children move from London to the countryside of Kent. The five children – Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and
their baby brother, known as the Lamb – are playing in a gravel
pit when they uncover a rather grumpy,
ugly, and occasionally malevolent Psammead, a sand-fairy with ability to grant wishes. The Psammead persuades the
children to take one wish each day to be shared among them, with the caveat
that the wishes will turn to stone at sunset. This, apparently, used to be the rule
in the Stone Age,
when all that children wished for was food, the bones of which then became fossils. The five children's first wish is to be "as beautiful
as the day". The wish ends at sunset and its effects simply vanish,
leading the Psammead to observe that some wishes are too fanciful to be changed
to stone.
All
the wishes go comically wrong. The children wish to be beautiful, but the
servants do not recognise them and shut them out of the house. They wish to be
rich, then find themselves with a gravel-pit full of gold spade guineas
that no shop will accept as they are no longer in circulation, so they can't buy anything. A wish for wings seems to be
going well, but at sunset the children find themselves stuck on top of a church
bell
tower with no way down, getting them into
trouble with the gamekeeper
who must take them home (though this wish has the happy side-effect of
introducing the gamekeeper to the children's housemaid, who later marries him).
Robert is bullied by the baker's boy, then wishes that he was bigger —
whereupon he becomes eleven feet tall, and the other children show him at a
travelling fair for coins. They also wish themselves into a castle, only to
learn that it is being besieged, while a wish to meet real Red Indians ends with the children nearly being scalped.
The
children's infant brother, the Lamb, is the victim of two wishes gone awry. In
one, the children become annoyed with tending their brother and wish that
someone else would want him, leading to a situation where everyone wants
the baby, and the children must fend off kidnappers and Gypsies. Later, they wish that the baby would grow up faster,
causing him to grow all at once into a selfish, smug young man who promptly
leaves them all behind.
Finally,
the children accidentally wish that they could give a wealthy woman's jewellery
to their mother, causing all the jewellery to appear in their home. It seems
that the gamekeeper, who is now their friend, will be blamed for robbery, and
the children must beg the Psammead for a complex series of wishes to set things
right. It agrees, on the condition that they will never ask for any more
wishes. Only Anthea, who has grown close to It, makes sure that the final wish
is that they will meet It again. The Psammead assures them that this wish will
be granted.
Characters
The
five children are brothers and sisters:
- Cyril, known as Squirrel: the eldest sibling, who is brave, diplomatic, and book-smart (very intelligent)
- Anthea, known as Panther: the second eldest, who is kind, sensible, and good-hearted.
- Robert, known as Bobs: the middle child, he is a practical joker with a quick temper.
- Jane, known as Pussy: a generally agreeable little girl with a tendency to be oversensitive, she is sometimes weepy and easily frightened.
- Hilary, the baby, known as the Lamb (because his first word was "baa"). He is too young to have much of a personality.
- "It" is the Psammead, a grumpy, ancient, wish-granting fairy who causes trouble for the children but nevertheless grows fond of them.
The Psammead
In
Five Children and It, the Psammead is described as having "eyes
[that] were on long horns like a snail's eyes, and it could move them in and
out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was
shaped like a spider's and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were
furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey's" and whiskers like a
rat's. When it grants wishes it stretches out its eyes, holds its breath and
swells alarmingly.
The
five children find the Psammead in a gravel-pit, which used to be seashore.
There were once many Psammeads, but the others died because they got cold and
wet. It is the only one of its kind left. It is thousands of years old, and
remembers pterodactyls and other ancient creatures. When the Psammeads were
around they granted wishes that were then mostly for food. The wished-for
objects turned into stone at sunset if they were not used that day, but this
does not apply to the children's wishes because what they wish for is so much
more fantastic than the wishes the Psammead granted in the past.[1]
The
word "Psammead", pronounced "sammyadd" by the children in
the story, appears to be a coinage by Nesbit from the Greek ψάμμος
"sand" after the pattern of dryad, naiad
and oread, implicitly signifying "sand-nymph". However, its
hideous appearance is very unlike traditional Greek nymphs, who generally resemble beautiful young maidens.
Sequels
The
book's ending was clearly intended to leave readers in suspense:
"They
did see it [the Psammead] again, of course, but not in this story. And it was
not in a sand-pit either, but in a very, very, very different place. It was in
a – But I must say no more."[2]
The
children reappear in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and then in The Story of the Amulet (1906). The Psammead is offstage in the first of these
sequels (it is simply mentioned by the Phoenix, who visits it three times to
ask for a helpful wish when the situation becomes difficult), but it plays a
significant role in the second sequel after the children rescue it from a pet
shop.
Some
fifty years later the premise of Five Children and It inspired the plot
of Half Magic
(1954) by Edward Eager,
an American author of children's books.
The
Return of the Psammead (1992) by
Helen Cresswell
concerns another family of Edwardian children who discover the Psammead.[3]
Four Children and It (2012) by Jacqueline
Wilson is a contemporary version of the
story in which four children from a modern blended
family encounter the Psammead.[4] One of the children has read the original book and wishes
to meet Cyril, Anthea, Jane and Robert.
In
Five Children on the Western Front (2014) by Kate
Saunders, set nine years after the original
story, the five children encounter the horrors of the First World War.[5]
Adaptations
Five
Children and It has been adapted for television and
film several times:
- In 1985–86 NHK broadcast a Japanese anime version, Onegai! Samia-don, 78 episodes were produced by animation studio TMS. No English dubbed version was ever produced, but it came out in other languages.
- In 1991 the BBC turned the story into a six-part television series. It was released in the UK under the story's original title, but in the USA it was released as The Sand Fairy. This was followed by The Return of the Psammead in 1993, with the Psammead the only character linking the two series. Both series were scripted by Helen Cresswell, and Francis Wright puppeteered and voiced the Psammead.
- In 2004 a film version was released, starring Freddie Highmore, Tara FitzGerald, Jonathan Bailey, Zoë Wanamaker and Kenneth Branagh with Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.
- A stage musical adaptation by Timothy Knapman (book) and Philip Godfrey (music/lyrics) was completed in 2016.[6]
- In 2018, The Psammy Show is an animated series co-produced by DQ Entertainment, Method Animation and Disney Germany.[7]
- It was also adapted as a comic strip by Henry Seabright.
References
· · Last paragraph of Five
Children and It
· · Morris, Sally (25
September 2014) Children's
Books - Five Children on the Western Front The
Mail Online
·
"DQE's
'Psammy Show' Heads to China with CCTV Deal". Animation Magazine. 5 August 2019. Retrieved 5 August
2019.
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