If there's any hidden thread of logic to history, then one of its unspoken rules seems to go as follows. Most of the great pioneers will never get the credit they deserve. Neither shall their names be written on anyone's hearts, nor must their memories be allowed to endure. If that sounds harsh, then, it's like, I don't know what to say. We've got all the opportunity in the world left for someone to rediscover the life and fiction and someone like Edith Nesbit. I mean if anyone else would bother with such an effort, I'd be more than happy with that outcome. And so the net result is no one offers themselves any other choice except to ask who or even what the fuck am I talking about? And the literary accomplishment of one of the first major groundbreakers in the creation of the modern fantasy story goes by without notice. All that happens then is that the story of a great talent goes untold. I'm not sure you can describe that kind of outcome as fair. It's just what happens, in spite of a lot of best efforts at keeping worthwhile memories alive. So that's why blogs like this exist, to make sure that a lot of good names, stories, and narratives aren't entirely forgotten. Edith Nesbit is just one such talent out there that deserves to be remembered.
In many ways, her own life reads like something of out of one of her own fairy tales. I've written a previous article on this author that goes into much greater depth on her life. Here, however, I'll have to settle for the truncated version of historic events. Edith's story is told simply enough, though. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who found herself turned into the protagonist of one of her own fairy tales. It all started one day in 1858, when this young child found herself born to parents in the Kennington district of Surrey, England. Together, they decided to call her Edith. Her father, John, was a prosperous agricultural chemist who had even managed to build a successful school dedicated to that same farming practice. The place was devoted to an Industrial Education, in other words. It meant that John Nesbit spent a great deal of his life teaching farmers from both the local and distant countrysides how to survive and thrive in the often merciless, cutthroat world of mid-Victorian era London. As a result, Edith's earliest experiences found the child surrounded by people from a majority working class backgrounds. Since her father was a diligent advocate for the rights of England's lower class citizens, the greatest legacy he seems to have left his daughter was a willingness to see herself as no more than an equal with the poorest citizen of the metropolis. Edith's education was lucky in that sense, anyway.
Her father may not have been able to help when it really counted, yet at least he was able to instill in her the idea that even the lowest classes of the UK had an inalienable dignity that meant they ought to be given a just and fair chance to better themselves and their situations. In that sense, much in the way of stories like this, her father was able to give his favorite daughter a gift. Also much in the vein of such folktales, this gift was never showy or extravagant, yet it wound up being among those talents that counted the most later on. Edith was able to remember the lessons she learned from her father's encounters with England's working classes, and she used the knowledge gained from these early memories to become something of a tireless champion for the poor and the worker's rights. Another gift given to Edith by her parents was that of the Victorian Childhood Nursery. This was the second great teacher in the child's life, and it was the one that gave Edith her future fame and glory.
There is one big, long book to be written about the place of the Victorian Nursery in the development of the modern Fantasy genre and the stories that have gone on to become the guideposts and markers of its identity. Many chapters of this story have already been written in the form of various studies and master's theses. The best volumes out there to explore this topic still remain the same. They are Morton Cohen's landmark biography of Lewis Carroll, Roger Lancelyn Green's
Tellers of Tales:
Children's Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1968, and Stephen Prickett's simply titled, yet comprehensive book-length study,
Victorian Fantasy. The best way to sum up a long yet fun story is to claim that Edith was the recipient of a collective gift. The birth of the middle class type household into which she was born saw the invention and rise of the Nursery as a childhood social institution. I'm not real sure its correct to describe these rooms that soon began to dot the landscape of both British and later American homes as a clear-cut example of the safe space. That's especially not true when writers like Edith, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allan Poe would go on to look back at their semi-shared time in those places as one of learning how to confront their fears of the dark. Instead, I subscribe idea that the parents thought they were giving their kids a safe space, however it just didn't turn out that way.
Instead, what wound up happening is that it's like we sort of ended up carving out a kind of ballpark in which for the first time the Imagination was allowed to roam free and play in. It has to be remembered that nothing quite like this had ever existed before. Until the Nursery came along, while the novel and the reading public had begun to cement themselves as permanent aspects of modern life, it was all still a relatively new social construct. The first major publishing houses had just been set up in the 1730s and 40s during the last century by the likes of Robert Dodsley, and most of the fiction published tended to be in the Manners and Morals vein of Jane Austen, or else it was the first, halting attempts at building the first examples of the modern Gothic Ghost Story, with Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto, or the germ of the fantastic adventure yarn contained in the likes of Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe. These were all very much baby's first steps, rather than the full-fledged fantastic genres as we know them now. If authors like Scott and Dodsley were the ones to throw the ball into the playing pen, then it was kids like Edith, who grew up with this stuff in the Nursery to take the pitch and run with it. That's because the Nursery was where all the folklore of the old world came to have its new Victorian home.
Since the Nursery was designed as a place for children like Edith to entertain themselves, that meant it had to be stockpiled with all the sorts of diversions that were thought to be fit for young adults. The good news for the likes of Nesbit, Kipling, and a young West Midlands lad with the peculiar yet lyrical name of Tolkien was that the adults in charge of the Nursery all seemed to agree that there was no harm in passing along to their young charges reprintings and chap books containing the content from storytellers like Aesop, Charles Perrault, and the Brother's Grimm. That's how a girl like Edith first made the acquaintance of Mother Goose and the denizens of fairyland as charted and cartographed by the likes of Spenser and Shakespeare. This growing trend of the Nursery as the place for childhood idylls was helped along in no small part by the first major translations of The Thousand and One Nights made for children's mass consumption. It made it possible for the YA of Queen Victoria's time to conceive of a visit to the Nursery as yet another chance to take journeys on magic carpets, or open enchanted casements onto a host of other worlds and adventures. This, then, was the second and most telling influence on Edith's childhood. It was enough to turn her into a lifelong fan of the Fantastic.
This initial fan girl crush soon turned into a lifetime professional occupation. As she came of age, Edith soon found herself transforming from just a dedicated enthusiast in the crowd to one of the artists performing for the audience. As she began to train her mind in the art of storytelling, she also began to discover how to take all of the folklore she'd devoured as a starstruck child and find an ideal modern form of creative expression for all of the old myths she used to love as a child. In doing this, she sort of wound up creating the parameters of the modern Fantasy genre as we now have it. A good way to gain a perspective on this achievement is with a simple formula. No Nesbit, no Tolkien and Middle Earth. Also no Neil Gaiman and practically everything he's ever done. None of their later efforts would have been possible if Edith didn't turn out to be the one creative voice that wound up plowing the original field in the first place. The main reason either of the two later names were able to succeed as well as they did was because Nesbit was the one who built the original ballpark for them to play in. In honor of her unrecognized achievement, I thought it might help to remind everyone of what she did by taking a look at one of her short stories for children. This one was a previous publication that was later added to a collection known as
The Magic World, and Edith called it by the title of "Accidental Magic".