Children Nesbit, Edith: 5 Children/Psammead Trilogy (Omnibus, Illus.). v1. 13 July 2015

[GrannyGrump]

The Saga of the Five Children
( The Psammead Trilogy )
by Edith Nesbit (1858–1924)
Illustrated by Harold R. Millar (1869–1940)

First published in 1902, 1904, 1906.
The text and illustrations of this book are in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

Edith Nesbit Bland, English author and poet, published approximately 40 books for children under the name of E. Nesbit. She created an innovative body of work that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures. Nesbit gently subverts the Romantic stereotype of children as innocent little angels: her characters can be cranky, conceited, selfish – but also courageous, kind, and generous. When they find themselves in magical realms, they are not dealing with super-powers, or pure Good and pure Evil and the fate of the world, but with unexpected situations, and have to somehow muddle through.

Book synopses:

Spoiler:

Five Children and It
“It” is a Psammead (pronounced “Sammy-ad”), an ancient, ugly and irritable sand fairy the children find one day in a gravel pit – and It grants them a wish a day, lasting until sunset. But they soon learn it is very hard to think of really sensible wishes, and each one gets them into unexpected difficulties. Magic, the children find, can be as awkward as it is enticing.

The Phoenix and the Carpet
It’s startling enough to have a Phoenix hatch in your house, but even more startling when it reveals you have a magic wishing carpet on the floor. Conceited it may be, but the Phoenix is also good-hearted and obligingly accompanies the children on their adventures through time and space – which, magic being what it is, rarely turn out as they were meant…

The Story of the Amulet
The five children often stumble into marvelous adventures. So it is no surprise when they come across their old friend the Psammead, the wish-granting sand fairy, in the middle of London. “The strongest charm in the world,” it tells them, is in a junk shop, waiting for the children to buy it. So they do. Then they find there’s a catch: it turns out they have bought only half the charm. With the missing half, the charm has the power to give them their heart’s desire. But to find it, they must travel to the past, thousands of years ago. How can four children go back in time?

(Story synopses taken from book-jacket blurbs.)

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Texts were obtained from gutenberg.org; illustrations were obtained from gutenberg.org, archive.org, and MobileRead.com (some first-edition images were not available). Punctuation, diacritics, and italics have been formatted; punctuation and some spelling were Anglicized and standardized.

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