Magic in Children's Literature

It is a chancy business, re-reading books that one loved as a child; either a happy recollection shrivels under one's grown up gaze, or one may have the pleasure of discovering subtleties and depths of meaning that one's child self completely missed.

I started on this train of thought after reading John Andrews' article on the Patron Deity of the River Severn in QUEST for December 1981. The invocation that he quoted from Milton's Comus, “Sabrina fair, listen where thou art sitting under the glassy, cool, translucent wave...”, I recognised as having been used by the Edwardian writer for children, E.Nesbit, in her book Wet Magic. One of the youngsters in the story absentmindedly repeats the opening line in an appropriately damp situation and finds that he has inadvertently conjured up a mermaid, with whom he and his siblings go adventuring to a magic country under the sea.

The “quotation that triggers weird events” is a well-tried opening gambit for the authors of magico-mystical stories. Of recent writers, Penelope Lively has used it convincingly in her book The Whispering Knights - perhaps more convincingly than E.Nesbit, in that her children do prepare the brew and repeat the spell from Macbeth with intent, at least to the extent of wanting to “see what will happen”, and they are being influenced by the atmosphere of the place where they find themselves, which has ancient magical associations. But, to draw an analogy with Sci-fi, Mrs. Lively bases her writing on genuine lore and traditions and produces Magic Fiction, whereas the magical rules and conventions in most of E. Nesbit's stories come from her imagination and the result is Magico - Fantasy. The only exception, as far as I know, is The story of the Amulet, which I personally think is her best book. Before she wrote it, she seems to have felt that her powers of invention needed a boost and she sought out the famous Egyptologist, B.A.Wallis Budge, who, busy man that he was, was intrigued enough by her odd request to tell her a bout Babylonian and Egyptian magic and explain how Names of Power were used. He appears in the book as the nicest of the group of professors who find themselves unexpectedly confronted by an angry Queen of Babylon demanding the return of all her property from the British Museum; I wonder if he felt adequately repaid for his trouble? The book is a delight, both for its authentic magic and the reality of its characters, (especially the tart tongued and unsentimental Psammead, or Sand Fairy, who guides the children on their forays into ancient epochs), and I remember being surprised, when I came to take a serious interest in Magic, how much that I remembered from the story was accurate and relevant.

Curiously, another book that is a jolly good read as well as a source of great knowledge also begins with “quotation magic” - in Puck of Pook's Hill, Dan and Una perform a part of A Midsummer Night's Dream on Midsummer Eve and find themselves face to face with Puck himself. Rudyard Kipling had a deep love and understanding of his home soil, its folklore and history, and he was a consummate wordsmith, so it is hardly surprising that in this book and its sequel, Rewards and Fairies, he wrought something as magically magnificent as the sword made by Weland for Hugh the Novice - and if you don't get that allusion, read the book!

(If you do, I apologise - but I have been surprised how little known it seems to be in occult circles. I did once have chunks of it quoted at me by members of a Gardnerian coven, who insisted that it was “part of our ancient lore”, but the same lot also quoted St.John's Gospel similarly, so were not pleased when their sources were pointed out to them).

Once one begins to follow the magical thread through the weave of children’s literature, it is surprising where it sometimes leads. If one walks with George MacDonald's Curdey, one is back in a land of fantasy, as one is if one ventures to The Back of the North Wind, though North Wind herself is undoubtedly a version of the Great Mother. For all that Kenneth Grahame was writing to amuse his little son, do not the jolly, hedonist bachelor lives enjoyed by the animals in his The Wind in the Willows suggest a yearning for lost liberties and a dissatisfaction with marital responsibilities? Be that as it may, the chapter The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, when the Mole and the Water Rat find Pan watching over the lost baby otter, is one of the most beautiful and accurate descriptions of the Numinous I know. Even John Buchan occasionally rose beyond his customary snobbery with violence when he turned to his Highland roots and tapped the sap of Celtic mysticism - there is a short story of his that I read when I was at school, about a young man who is haunted by a vision of the Isle of Apple Trees, which made a very strong impression on me and which I have never since re-discovered. Would it still move me, or would it be another that turned to dust and ash in my mouth, like fairy fruit? I wonder?

If the outmoded political and social attitudes of writers like Kipling and Buchan make some of their work heavy going for us today, another hazard is all the psychoanalysis that has been done on distinguished-but-dead authors by the post-Freud generations of biographers, so that, willy nilly, one finds oneself looking for homosexual undertones in the limericks of Lear, and the bibliography to The Annotated Alice of Martin Gardner lists eight titles under the heading “Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Lewis Carroll”. Which brings me to that most paradoxical of Victorians, the Rev. Charles Kingsley. Like Kipling, he combined a naturalist’s eye with a poet's pen. Whenever strain and overwork brought him to the verge of emotional or physical breakdown, as occurred at intervals throughout his life, his proven cure was to retire with a fishing rod to some secluded place and there, in the modern metaphor, recharge his batteries. Yet, again like Kipling, he could write in his novels of (say) the massacre of a Spanish garrison in Ireland in the sixteenth century with a chauvinistic gusto that is totally distasteful nowadays. The stern and orthodox upbringing that he underwent, applied to what was both a sensitive and sensual nature, meant that,before his wedding night, he had to indulge in tortuous mental gymnastics in order to subjugate his sexual inhibition?, and he left drawings amongst his papers that range from the mildly erotic to the frankly pornographic.

In the nineteenth century, a dog collar was store or less essential equipment in many intellectual fields, and some men wore their cloth lightly enough, for the sake of academic advancement. Kingsley was not one of these. He took his Anglican faith seriously, pamphleteering against the Church of Rome, toiling conscientiously in his parishes, campaigning for social reform. It was to describe this man that the expression “Muscular Christianity” was coined, and despite a speech impediment, he enjoyed a considerable reputation as a preacher. How odd, then, that this should be the man who, in The Water Babies, gave the world the most perfect evocation of the Lady of the Three Aspects anywhere in Literature. She is the Irishwoman, outfacing Grimes the Sweep on the road to Harthover? she is Mother Carey, sitting on a rock teaching things to make themselves; she is Mrs. Doasyou-wouldbedoneby , with her sweetmeats and her stories and her lap for all the children - these are all faces of the Mother. As Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid she is the Hag. And the Maiden? From the moment that Tom, lost in the chimney flues, emerges by mistake into the bedroom of the lady who needs so much washing, (and there's no end to the symbolism to be wrung from that, situation), to the climax of his quest, when he finds “the loveliest creature in the world”, the Maiden is, of course, Ellie.

In preparing this article, I have re-read as many of the stories I refer to as I could, but some were not available and I have had to rely on memory, so I apologise for any references that are not quite accurate. As part of my research, I consulted a Dictionary of Quotations, and I came across one that was new to me, but which may well be the key to the enigma of a man like Charles Kingsley. It comes from yet another Nineteenth Century Man of Letters, Israel Zangwill, and possibly such an insight could only come from a Jew. He said, “Scratch a Christian and you will find a pagan, spoiled.”