Fiction · 1902
Five Children and It
Five siblings — Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother the Lamb — dig up a bad-tempered, ancient sand-fairy called a Psammead in a gravel-pit near their new country house, and it grudgingly grants them one wish a day, which vanishes at sunset. Wishing to be "as beautiful as the day," wishing for wings, wishing their baby brother were grown up, and wishing for a castle under siege all go wrong in ways the children never quite anticipate, and always in time for supper.
E. Nesbit serialized the story in the Strand Magazine from April to December 1902 and published it in book form the same year — the first of a trilogy she continued with The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906).
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of all eleven chapters.
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1858–1924 · Victorian
Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), who published as E. Nesbit, was born in London and spent an itinerant childhood following her widowed mother around England and the Continent in search of a healthier climate for a sickly older sister. In 1880 she married Hubert Bland, with whom she co-founded the socialist Fabian Society the following year; his chronic infidelity and the unconventional household that resulted — for years she raised two of his children by his mistress and secretary alongside her own — left her the family's primary breadwinner, and she wrote constantly and commercially to support it. Turning to children's fiction in her forties, she found her lasting form in stories of ordinary children who stumble into real magic within recognisably everyday English settings: Five Children and It (1902), introducing the cantankerous sand-fairy the Psammead, began a trilogy continued in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906), alongside The Railway Children (1906). Her blend of the fantastic and the domestic directly shaped later writers including C. S. Lewis and Edward Eager. She died in Kent at sixty-five.
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