Two E. Nesbit books
I've been work-travelling! which involved another hotel, another swimming pool, and the chance to swim at six in the morning, as well as in the afternoon, and then again between the last session and catching the bus back home. Bliss! Because summer's ebbing, but hasn't gone yet.
But travelling has cut me off from much, so I'm well behind in many things, including the Shakespeare story exchange. At this stage, I have pretty well selected the prompt, and have two bits of ideas, but am reasonably daunted. (Not unreasonably daunted!)
So what can I post about, before the month finishes, and another two months begin? Well, in the comments on a post by asakiyume, the book Harding's Luck was mentioned, so here's a bit of a ramble about it, and its fellow-travelling book, The House of Arden.
They're an oddly-matched pair. I would have said that Harding's Luck was an afterthought - Nesbit seeing how she could rework the cheerful, lightweight House of Arden into something much more serious and worthy - but that the links to the second book are written into the first. In House of Arden (1908) a brother and sister explore their ancestors' lives (and try to find the lost family treasure) by means of time-magic. It has a wonderfully snarky agent/guide for the magic (this is the Mouldiwarp - rural Sussex for Mole) and lots of fun asides and is very much middle-Nesbit, and the final theme of the story is that treasure isn't nearly as important as familial love. So far, so good - but in their time-travelling the pair encounter a boy, Cousin Richard, who is mysterously from their own time, though not known to them there - and he is very helpful in their adventures, and then the story ends and we know no more about him.
In Harding's Luck (1909) she rewrites the story from Cousin Richard's POV - who in the 1908 world is their lost cousin Dickie, poor, lame and instinctively (because he's of a good family, really) Good - so Good that he takes on himself, at great cost, the task of re-routing the life of a ne'er-do-well tramp, so that he (the tramp) becomes honest, self-respecting, settled and loved.
She clearly had the second book in mind when she wrote the first - but does it work? Well - not very well. Nesbit has to work hard to make things fit, and they don't fit, quite. It doesn't make sense that Dickie would keep on asking Elfrida about the Gunpowder Plot, for example, when he knows quite well how dangerous it is - and there's no explanation as to what he meant, in the first book, by saying he owed a debt to all who bear the name of Arden. Then, the classism really grates - how nobility is genetically inherited, how simple it is to overhaul the lives of the poor, how quaint the poor are in their personal lives, And the Mouldiwarp side of the magic gets hopelessly over-worked, with the revelation that there's a Trinity of them, Mouldierwarp and Mouldiestwarp, existing in an all-white (true) Heaven of Noble People.
I don't want to bag the book, because Nesbit's really trying hard to write a serious message book for children about causes of poverty, and duties of the wealthy, and (in one place) makes a strenuous attempt to counter anti-Semitism - there's a supporting Jewish pawnbroker character who is not only kind and good, but sparks off an authorial aside about how passionate and romantic Jews are, with a vision of righteousness and beauty which "in the Jews has survived centuries of torment, shame, cruelty, and oppression."
But, no matter how good her intentions, the second just isn't thought through - or maybe is over-thought. It's a problem that the brother and sister (Edred and Elfrida) have each other to play off, but Dickie has no-one but the straight-man tramp.
The differences between Edred and Elfrida, for example - Elfrida is quite clearly both cleverer and braver and all-round better than he is, and Nesbit is uncompromising in showing how both of them are uneasily aware of this (because it goes against expected gender roles) and how Edred's fairly constant resentment sometimes threatens to explode:
"No, he wouldn't," said Edred obstinately. "You forget I was sitting on the clock and stopping it. There wasn't any time while you were gone - if you were gone"
"There was with me, said Elfrida. "Don't you see -"
"There wouldn't have been if you'd come back where I was," Edred interrupted
"How can you be so aggravating?" Elfrida suddenly found that she was losing her temper. "You can't be as stupid as that, really.".
"Oh, can't I?" said Edred. "I can, though, if I like. And stupider - much stupider.".
I really like the sharpness of that - the recognition that vindictive resentment can show as deliberate stupidity. (But Edmund doesn't in the book carry out his threat.) But despite this awkwardness, brother and sister like each other and trust each other and work as a team, and the general theme of the importance of family is maintained - and, as I said, both characters benefit from having a peer to argue with and measure themselves against, while poor Dickie has only the Undeserving Poor, in the person of the Tramp, whom he has to work to bring up to respectability and honesty and a happy cottage life, which doesn't give him a chance of being much of a character that the reader can identify with, or do much with at all - only admire his unfailing worthiness.
But Harding's Luck is stronger in having more of the other magic character in the books (other than Mouldiwarp, I mean - I won't count the absurd Mole Trinity.) and more of the philosophy of the magic. This is the Witch, who does feature in the House of Arden, but very capriciously, as it seems - whereas in Harding's Luck she is a constant and loving wise-woman presence, whose care is for Dickie/Richard himself, not the noble house. She is able to help Dickie/Richard to cross from one time to another and reiterates very strongly (a theme in several Nesbit books) that time and death are illusions:
"Times fly - Time flies not
Men die - Man dies not"
she chants, as part of her magic - which is also connected to the mysterious Moonflower, and its pearl-white seeds. (The Mouldiwarp's magic is connected to all things white, so they overlap somewhat.)
Her voice is the last voice in the book, which means in both books. Not the chant, but a longer semi-mystical call to forget dreams (by implication, both time and death) and to concentrate on the reality of the drive to nobility of character and action. Which for me is one of the positives of the very mixed-bag book - I think it's a great final scene.
This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/57895.html. Please comment here or there.
But travelling has cut me off from much, so I'm well behind in many things, including the Shakespeare story exchange. At this stage, I have pretty well selected the prompt, and have two bits of ideas, but am reasonably daunted. (Not unreasonably daunted!)
So what can I post about, before the month finishes, and another two months begin? Well, in the comments on a post by asakiyume, the book Harding's Luck was mentioned, so here's a bit of a ramble about it, and its fellow-travelling book, The House of Arden.
They're an oddly-matched pair. I would have said that Harding's Luck was an afterthought - Nesbit seeing how she could rework the cheerful, lightweight House of Arden into something much more serious and worthy - but that the links to the second book are written into the first. In House of Arden (1908) a brother and sister explore their ancestors' lives (and try to find the lost family treasure) by means of time-magic. It has a wonderfully snarky agent/guide for the magic (this is the Mouldiwarp - rural Sussex for Mole) and lots of fun asides and is very much middle-Nesbit, and the final theme of the story is that treasure isn't nearly as important as familial love. So far, so good - but in their time-travelling the pair encounter a boy, Cousin Richard, who is mysterously from their own time, though not known to them there - and he is very helpful in their adventures, and then the story ends and we know no more about him.
In Harding's Luck (1909) she rewrites the story from Cousin Richard's POV - who in the 1908 world is their lost cousin Dickie, poor, lame and instinctively (because he's of a good family, really) Good - so Good that he takes on himself, at great cost, the task of re-routing the life of a ne'er-do-well tramp, so that he (the tramp) becomes honest, self-respecting, settled and loved.
She clearly had the second book in mind when she wrote the first - but does it work? Well - not very well. Nesbit has to work hard to make things fit, and they don't fit, quite. It doesn't make sense that Dickie would keep on asking Elfrida about the Gunpowder Plot, for example, when he knows quite well how dangerous it is - and there's no explanation as to what he meant, in the first book, by saying he owed a debt to all who bear the name of Arden. Then, the classism really grates - how nobility is genetically inherited, how simple it is to overhaul the lives of the poor, how quaint the poor are in their personal lives, And the Mouldiwarp side of the magic gets hopelessly over-worked, with the revelation that there's a Trinity of them, Mouldierwarp and Mouldiestwarp, existing in an all-white (true) Heaven of Noble People.
I don't want to bag the book, because Nesbit's really trying hard to write a serious message book for children about causes of poverty, and duties of the wealthy, and (in one place) makes a strenuous attempt to counter anti-Semitism - there's a supporting Jewish pawnbroker character who is not only kind and good, but sparks off an authorial aside about how passionate and romantic Jews are, with a vision of righteousness and beauty which "in the Jews has survived centuries of torment, shame, cruelty, and oppression."
But, no matter how good her intentions, the second just isn't thought through - or maybe is over-thought. It's a problem that the brother and sister (Edred and Elfrida) have each other to play off, but Dickie has no-one but the straight-man tramp.
The differences between Edred and Elfrida, for example - Elfrida is quite clearly both cleverer and braver and all-round better than he is, and Nesbit is uncompromising in showing how both of them are uneasily aware of this (because it goes against expected gender roles) and how Edred's fairly constant resentment sometimes threatens to explode:
"No, he wouldn't," said Edred obstinately. "You forget I was sitting on the clock and stopping it. There wasn't any time while you were gone - if you were gone"
"There was with me, said Elfrida. "Don't you see -"
"There wouldn't have been if you'd come back where I was," Edred interrupted
"How can you be so aggravating?" Elfrida suddenly found that she was losing her temper. "You can't be as stupid as that, really.".
"Oh, can't I?" said Edred. "I can, though, if I like. And stupider - much stupider.".
I really like the sharpness of that - the recognition that vindictive resentment can show as deliberate stupidity. (But Edmund doesn't in the book carry out his threat.) But despite this awkwardness, brother and sister like each other and trust each other and work as a team, and the general theme of the importance of family is maintained - and, as I said, both characters benefit from having a peer to argue with and measure themselves against, while poor Dickie has only the Undeserving Poor, in the person of the Tramp, whom he has to work to bring up to respectability and honesty and a happy cottage life, which doesn't give him a chance of being much of a character that the reader can identify with, or do much with at all - only admire his unfailing worthiness.
But Harding's Luck is stronger in having more of the other magic character in the books (other than Mouldiwarp, I mean - I won't count the absurd Mole Trinity.) and more of the philosophy of the magic. This is the Witch, who does feature in the House of Arden, but very capriciously, as it seems - whereas in Harding's Luck she is a constant and loving wise-woman presence, whose care is for Dickie/Richard himself, not the noble house. She is able to help Dickie/Richard to cross from one time to another and reiterates very strongly (a theme in several Nesbit books) that time and death are illusions:
"Times fly - Time flies not
Men die - Man dies not"
she chants, as part of her magic - which is also connected to the mysterious Moonflower, and its pearl-white seeds. (The Mouldiwarp's magic is connected to all things white, so they overlap somewhat.)
Her voice is the last voice in the book, which means in both books. Not the chant, but a longer semi-mystical call to forget dreams (by implication, both time and death) and to concentrate on the reality of the drive to nobility of character and action. Which for me is one of the positives of the very mixed-bag book - I think it's a great final scene.
This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/57895.html. Please comment here or there.