A name like Chris Van Allsburg, for example, might have just the faintest hint of familiarity, yet odds are even most of us can never recall why. We might pick up on some kind of vibe that tells us, "I know that person from somewhere, don't I? He did..."? and that's about as far as it goes. Not necessarily because that's outcome we're looking for. It's just the best you can do once it hits us that we sometimes don't pay as much attention to good writing as we should. As a result, names like Stephen King and R.L. Stine amount to household words, while writers like Allsburg or Richard Matheson are stuck as brief flashpoints of half-remembered familiarity. There at the edge of our recollection for an instant, then gone without a trace. It therefore falls to the more die-hard bookworms out there to remind everyone else that a writer like Allsburg was the man responsible for given us The Polar Express. On a related (and ironic) note, however, how many people know Stephen King is responsible for the film Stand By Me? Come to think of it, who wrote Jumanji? This is what I mean when I say books are at the mercy of memory. It's what happens when even good stories aren't given a chance to shine.
A talented scribbler like Allsburg is just one example of this phenomenon. He's the case of a Name that's in danger of slipping into obscurity. His achievements remain popular, while the creator himself seems perched on the tip edge of that precipice oblivion where pop-culture memory begins to lose its grip. When that happens, it is possible to have a career resurrection. However, that can take time and effort, though it is still not impossible. All that's required is one of two things. It's either the help of a site like this, which dedicates itself to re-excavating the forgotten great names of the past. Or else the neglected writer can create their own comeback with a stellar literary performance that puts their name back on the top shelf. Since I'm no storyteller myself, I'll have to just go with the first option. Chris Van Allsburg is one of those names who might have to earn an article for himself on this site sooner or later down the line. Right now, I'd like to focus the spotlight on another name that doesn't deserve to be forgotten. If Allsburg remains on the tip of the tongue, then Edith Nesbit seems to be the kind of name where the average audience member has no choice except to ask me who or what on Earth am I even talking about? I'm thinking, right now, of a children's author who should be rediscovered.Perhaps the best way to describe her is that she stands as the literary great grandmother of guys like Allsburg. She's the one who wound up creating all the templates and story devices that made works like Jumanji and The Polar Express possible. It's a mistake to claim she did it all in a vacuum. Coming of age in the same era that gave us the likes of Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling, I think it's fair to say that Edith had a bit of help in pioneering the children's story as we now have it to this day. However, she seems to have been the great synthesizer the sub-genre was looking for. She was the author who came along at the right place and time and began to help put the finishing touches on the mold that the Mowgli and Alice books would both belong and fit into. In other words, she's the writer who helped define the nature of the modern children's story as we know it. Perhaps the best testament to her half-forgotten status is the sketchy, patchwork quality to what little critical commentary there is on her efforts. Which is quite the way to treat the co-founder of a literary tradition. Every useful scrap of information about Edith and her art is fitful and incomplete.
A scholar like Marcus Crouch, however, is able to grab hold of at least one handful of truth when he explains that, "No writer for children today is free of debt to this remarkable woman...(Being) content in the main to make good stories out of the recourses of her experience and her imagination, she managed to create the prototypes of many of the basic patterns in modern children's fiction. The three books about the Treasure Seekers are the form foundations of all our family comedies. In her 'Five Children' stories she initiated the comedy of magic applied to the commonplaces of daily life, and in The Enchanted Castle she showed how poetic and comic fantasy might be blended. Her Arden books are, with Kipling's, the pioneers of the 'time' element theme in historical reconstruction; and even The Railway Children...has...fostered a host of other tales of family fortunes and misfortunes (16)".
Perhaps a better way to illustrate Crouch's main idea might to highlight all the ways that Nesbit has managed to leave a series of invisible fingerprints all throughout some of the best regarded entertainment we still enjoy today. How about if we turn to a list of beloved films from the 80s? You know that stuff with films like Stand By Me, The Karate Kid, Ferris Bueller, and The Breakfast Club? All of them can trace their DNA back to books like The Treasure Seekers. What about that inexplicable yet somehow iconic run of Fantasy/Sci-Fi Adventure movies we had back then? The kind that were often geared toward children, and yet wound up being fun for audiences of all ages, when they weren't (or maybe even because they in fact were) grade-A nightmare fuel, remember? It was stuff like Secret of Nimh, The Land Before Time, Labyrinth, An American Tail, and especially stuff like Gremlins and The Goonies in particular. Not to mention cinematic adventure yarns like the aforementioned Jumanji? Or how about a lot of the clever kids oriented Science Fiction flicks we had back then? What about Flight of the Navigator, Explorers and Back to the Future? What's interesting is that you can take the vast majority of elements that go to make up those films (even down to details such as character, theme, or plotting) and trace all of them back to works like The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet. The commonality of all these books is their author, E. Nesbit.
I suppose a more simplified way of saying it is to claim that there is a very real sense in which Edith is E.T.'s long forgotten great grandmother. The one element that all those 80s films just listed have in common is that, like Nesbit's stories, the plots tend to focus on a child or group of young adult protagonists going off and having adventures on their own. Often times these adventures would center around encounters with the fantastic and the supernatural in the form of encounters with otherworldly beings and creatures. At other times, they could involve trips through different historical periods, which could sometimes lead to an expansion of the main character's outlook on the world and their own place and context within a grander scheme of existence. And when all else fails, you could get a series of good, slice-of-life stories about children slowly coming of age through the various inevitable adversities that most of us meet along the road of life. These include moving to a new neighborhood, dealing with the regular passage of time, making and losing friends, dealing with bullies, or even just those one chance encounters that can still go on to shape your future in ways you couldn't even imagine at first.
While all of the scenarios I've just described applies to just about every 80s movie ever made, they can also be found in Nesbit books like The Wouldbegoods, The House of Arden, and The Magic City. All of which is to say that when Marcus Crouch called Edith a trendsetter, anyone who bothers to pick up any of her Children's Fantasy oriented works and read them will soon begin to see that he's being dead serious. All of the 80s movie tropes that we've come to love today got their initial start within the pages of Victorian children's novels, and E. Nesbit was the author who wound up planting all of the now identifiable flags and story markers that we have in turn inherited from her, and kept alive throughout the centuries. In all of this respect, perhaps another good way to describe her is as a kind of gender-flipped version of Steven Spielberg, except she works in the book trade. While such a basic introduction might give readers a beginner's idea of who Edith was, it still doesn't answer the most important question. Is her work any good? What do the stories of an old Edwardian kid's writer have to offer 21st century audiences? I think a look at one of Edith's own short stories can helps us here.