Edith Nesbit's Accidental Magic (1912).

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".

The Story.

This is the story of Quentin de Ward.  He was "rather a nice little boy, but he had never been with other little boys, and that made him in some ways a little different from other little boys. His father was in India, and he and his mother lived in a little house in the New Forest. The house—it was a cottage really, but even a cottage is a house, isn’t it?—was very pretty and thatched and had a porch covered with honeysuckle and ivy and white roses, and straight red hollyhocks were trained to stand up in a row against the south wall of it. The two lived quite alone, and as they had no one else to talk to they talked to each other a good deal. Mrs. de Ward read a great many books, and she used to tell Quentin about them afterwards. They were usually books about out of the way things, for Mrs. de Ward was interested in all the things that people are not quite sure about—the things that are hidden and secret, wonderful and mysterious—the things people make discoveries about. So that when the two were having their tea on the little brick terrace in front of the hollyhocks, with the white cloth flapping in the breeze, and the wasps hovering round the jam-pot, it was no uncommon thing for Quentin to say thickly through his bread and jam:—

‘I say, mother, tell me some more about Atlantis.’ Or, ‘Mother, tell me some more about ancient Egypt and the little toy-boats they made for their little boys.’ Or, ‘Mother, tell me about the people who think Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare.’

"And his mother always told him as much as she thought he could understand, and he always understood quite half of what she told him.  They always talked the things out thoroughly, and thus he learned to be fond of arguing, and to enjoy using his brains, just as you enjoy using your muscles in the football field or the gymnasium.  Also he came to know quite a lot of odd, out of the way things, and to have opinions of his own concerning the lost Kingdom of Atlantis, and the Man with the Iron Mask, the building of Stonehenge, the Pre-dynastic Egyptians, cuneiform writings and Assyrian sculptures, the Mexican pyramids and the shipping activities of Tyre and Sidon.  Quentin did no regular lessons, such as most boys have, but he read all sorts of books and made notes from them, in a large and straggling handwriting.

"You will already have supposed that Quentin was a prig. But he wasn’t, and you would have owned this if you had seen him scampering through the greenwood on his quiet New Forest pony, or setting snares for the rabbits that would get into the garden and eat the precious lettuces and parsley. Also he fished in the little streams that run through that lovely land, and shot with a bow and arrows. And he was a very good shot too.  Besides this he collected stamps and birds’ eggs and picture post-cards, and kept guinea-pigs and bantams, and climbed trees and tore his clothes in twenty different ways. And once he fought the grocer’s boy and got licked and didn’t cry, and made friends with the grocer’s boy afterwards, and got him to show him all he knew about fighting, so you see he was really not a mug. He was ten years old and he had enjoyed every moment of his ten years, even the sleeping ones, because he always dreamed jolly dreams, though he could not always remember what they were.  I tell you all this so that you may understand why he said what he did when his mother broke the news to him". 

You see, as if typical of most stories of this type, one day Quentin heard some terrible news from his mother.  His father had been injured while in combat on behalf of a peculiar institution known as the crown.  The good news was that his dad was alright, and was in recovery even as his mother spoke.  The better news was this meant father would be coming home soon.  Perhaps just in time for his son's next birthday.  The punchline to all this information was that it meant that Quentin's mother would have to travel to Egypt to help bring his father home, and family expenses meant the cheapest option available was to let her son remain in Great Britain while she was sent abroad, and let him attend one of those boarding schools that some of the wealthier parents in the neighborhood sent their own children to.  "The thought of school was not so terrible to Quentin as Mrs. de Ward had thought it would be. In fact, he rather liked it, with half his mind; but the other half didn’t like it, because it meant parting from his mother who, so far, had been his only friend".  The one consolation for the boy remained in one vital piece of information.  The school Quentin would be sent to was located in Salisbury.  That might be enough to make his new school bearable.  Salisbury was the place where Stonehenge was located.

Quentin had more than ample time to become fascinated with monuments and places such as that.  He'd long since discovered that one of the great secrets to learning about ancient history meant sometimes nothing else than finding out about all sorts of fascinating myths and stories that people told about the world.  Nor were these just the usual run-of-the-mill, dry-as-dust, "this is what happened to this person or persons on this given date" type of information.  Instead, the boy had managed to achieve the luckiest break of all.  He'd found out that a great deal of the history of his country was dependent on the Lore that helped inspire its people to create it.  It was this often confounding yet amazing, almost symbiotic attachment of the land to the realm of myth that was the very spice not just of life, but also of human history in general.  It was a pattern that held true throughout all world civilizations, even in Egypt, where his father currently was, waiting to come home.  In fact, his reading up on that subject might have given the lad more than a few unconventional ideas on the topic, yet they don't factor into this story.  The point was being allowed to go to Salisbury meant being close to places like Stonehenge; one of the key location points where myth and history met and melded into one and the same.

So at first, young master de Ward was willing to give it the somewhat literal "old college try", and show good faith by allowing himself to be packed off to his boarding school without much in the way of complaint.  At first it seemed like everything would be alright.  The journey itself was pleasant, and it took him through Southampton, which he'd never been to before, and therefore it was fun.  He even managed to get settled into his new academic lodgings well enough.  And so, just like that, it all started to go to hell the minute Quentin was introduced to some of the worst examples of English boarding school life.  In his case, it all centered less around the school's daily routine and more on some of the lesser expectations that new-comers like himself were presumed to adhere to with some of his fellow students, in particular those who were a class or two above his own station.  To be fair, even here Quentin started out well enough.  School was constricting, yet at least it allowed him plenty of opportunity to bury himself in the kind of books he liked, and it allowed him to keep himself afloat grade-wise.  The trouble the lad soon discovered for himself is that a lot of the time, the upper classes consider such places as little more than extant nurseries where their spoiled children can spend a few more years of leisure before finding their allotted places somewhere up the chain of command.  

These types of students aren't necessarily there to receive any education, per se.  To them, what should be a school is more like a new, temporary pig pen for them to play in; with themselves as the top boss hog in the sty.  What's even better is you've found a place where the golden rule applies.  If you're the guy with all the gold, you get to make all the rules.  For people like that, a boarding school such as Quentin's is less a place to receive an education for life, and more like a breeding and feeding ground for animals.  One of these specimens noticed Quentin pouring through a volume of Shakespeare one day, and that was sort of all it took.  When animals smell fresh blood in the wild, they tend to make a beeline for the weakest prey, and the new kind just happened to be it.  To the lad's credit, even in a tight spot, he conducted himself with honor.  In fact, you might say that Quentin found out what it was like to learn about the concept of honor in combat through first-hand experience that day.  He might have bested the actual little prig who tried to bully him.  He also, unfortunately, learned another one of the perennial lessons of the school ground.  Sometimes even standing up for the right thing by defending yourself can still get you in trouble.  That's how he found himself in the headmaster's office.

Now, to give credit where it's due, Mrs. de Ward did make a wise choice.  When she sent her son to boarding school for the first time, she didn't make the mistake most parents do.  She actually looked into the establishment's credentials.  What she read about it impressed her enough to hope that her boy wouldn't be too out of place there.  Her decision wasn't entirely misplaced.  The Head of the school was one of those reform minded, Liberal Humanist gents who always fought for a more progressive approach to the duties of academia towards its young charges.  It was this lucky break in the headmaster's outlook that allowed him to at least listen to Quentin's account of the whole affair with an even hand.  Even in what seemed like a moment of personal defeat, the lad held on to his sense of honor, and explained to the full extent about how he was the one in the right here, and the other kid was just a pig looking for an excuse to lose whatever few marbles he had left.  That was the basic truth of the situation, though Quentin was too well educated to ever put it in such terms.  In fact, it was the bits and pieces of hints that de Ward let slip in his explanation of the whole scuffle that got the headmaster's attention.  He didn't spare Quentin any punishment, and the boy was sent to his room, as per routine.

However, when the young de Ward boy had left, the Head and the lad's home room teacher conferred with each other on what they'd both just witnessed.  It was the teacher who observed, ‘He’s got something in him, prig or no prig, sir.’  You were quite right to send him to his room,’ said the Head, ‘discipline must be maintained, as Mr. Ducket says. But it will do...a world of good. A boy who reads Shakespeare for fun, and has views about Atlantis, and can knock out a bully as well…. He’ll be a power in the school. But we mustn’t let him know it.’  This was rather a pity.  Because Quentin, furious at the injustice of the whole thing...was maturing plans".  The idea was pretty simple.  He'd run away from school.  It was by no means the brightest idea he'd ever had.  In addition to being short-sighted, it also opened him to the more severe charge of being unoriginal in his thinking for the first time.  However, his mind was made up.  He didn't feel like he belonged, the school itself seemed a death-trap.  So it seemed best to obey the lyrics of a much later song and "get out while we're young".  Just because Quentin was running away, however, didn't mean he was quite a total fool.  If he was now born to run, it always helped if you had a destination to arrive at.  In the boy's mind, there was only one place in all of the county seat where could ever feel at home.  So Quentin made his way to Salisbury Plain.

He had one particular destination in mind.  Stonehenge awaited him on the fields of the Plain.  It wasn't much of a destination, and it meant sleeping out in the open.  Still, it was better than nothing.  From there, he might be able to hop a train back home, and then just wait until mother and father arrived.  Then it could all go back to like it was before.  Besides, Stonehenge was both history and myth all wrapped up in one.  It would be a more than fitting rest stop on the journey home.  The perfect chance to see and discover the meeting point between real life and its folklore up close.  If he was being honest with himself, it was the kind of opportunity Quentin had been waiting a good part of his still young life to take.  And so, with his mind made up, the young lad from a suburb just outside Southampton made his way toward an old quarry of ceremonial stones that waited for him in a field in England.  

It was the first major mistake of his life.  Quentin was a good and diligent student of history.  Though perhaps he was maybe never quite so attentive as he should have been.  If he was, then he might have had second thoughts before locating a nice spot just underneath one of the ceremonial stones where he could bed down for the night.  The trick with Stonehenge is that it is often regarded as one of life's "Thin Places".  One of those spots where the column of reality has a hole in it.  Stonehenge isn't just a place of myth but of ritual, and some of those rituals can sometimes make the past come alive again.

Conclusion: A Children's Story with a Satirical Bite.

One of the great things I've discovered about Young Adult Fiction is the way it can surprise you.  You'll go in thinking you're about to read just a simple fairy tale.  Then, somehow, you come away almost blindsided by the level of intelligence that was packed into the narrative behind the scenes.  I think is what has happened with Nesbit's "Accidental Magic".  My memories of the first time I ever read through Edith's short story are that I was looking at nothing but just a simple fantasy and a typical Journey to Another World.  The World in her case was a mythical version of the Earth's past, yet my first mistaken impression is that everything was simple, cut, and dried.  In other words, it struck me this might be the sort of light entertainment that's fun to pass along in a blog post, yet only as a minor diversion.  When I went back to read Edith's story about a magical encounter at Stonehenge, I began to realize just how wrong I was.  What seemed like the kind of harmless cautionary tale you pass on to kids in order to teach them good manners instead revealed itself to be one of the cleverest bits of British Satire that ever took me by complete and unexpected surprise.  The good news, however, that this surprise turned out to be about as pleasant as it was thought-provoking yet enjoyable at it's core.  

Part of what makes the satire work so well is that the author shows us a key ingredient of her theme at the very start, and most readers are bound to walk right past it without so much as a second glance.  It's baked into the author's description in such a way as to seem like a trivial piece of sideline information, when it's really the opening chess move in Edith's stealth thematic game.  Going back and reading that moment again in hindsight reveals this key piece of background information as one of the best played card tricks in literature that I've ever seen.  Edith has turned up the first hand of her deck, and her Poker face was so good that it almost slips our minds the moment she tells us about it.  It's for certain that the reader has quite forgotten all about the importance of Quentin's father by the time he decides to ditch school and makes his way toward that familiar, fog enshrouded quarry outline that is Stonehenge.  Here we're allowed to pause from the story's big hat trick for just a minute to admire the author's skills at navigating readers into the Other World at the narrative's heart.  This is how she plays her next card.

"(Quentin, sic) stopped to think.  He knew that Stonehenge stands all alone on Salisbury Plain. He was very tired. His mother had told him about a girl in a book who slept all night on the altar stone at Stonehenge. So it was a thing that people did—to sleep there. He was not afraid, as you or I might have been—of that lonely desolate ruin of a temple of long ago. He was used to the forest, and, compared with the forest, any building is homelike.  There was just enough light left amid the stones of the wonderful broken circle to guide him to its centre. As he went his hand brushed a plant; he caught at it, and a little group of flowers came away in his hand.  ‘St. John’s wort,’ he said, ‘that’s the magic flower.’ And he remembered that it is only magic when you pluck it on Midsummer Eve.  ‘And this is Midsummer Eve,’ he told himself, and put it in his buttonhole.  ‘I don’t know where the altar stone is,’ he said, ‘but that looks a cozy little crack between those two big stones.’  He crept into it, and lay down on a flat stone that stretched between and under two fallen pillars.  The night was soft and warm; it was Midsummer Eve.

"(He, sic) lay asleep, curled up in his sacking with the inside-out school cap, doubled twice, for pillow.  He fell asleep on the smooth, solid, steady stone.  He awoke on the stone in a world that rocked as sea-boats rock on a choppy sea.  He went to sleep between fallen moveless pillars of a ruin older than any world that history knows.  He awoke in the shade of a purple awning through which strong sunlight filtered, and purple curtains that flapped and strained in the wind; and there was a smell, a sweet familiar smell, of tarred ropes and the sea.  ‘I say,’ said Quentin to himself, ‘here’s a rum go.’  He had learned that expression in a school in Salisbury, a long time ago as it seemed.  The stone on which he lay dipped and rose to a rhythm which he knew well enough. He had felt it when he and his mother went in a little boat from Keyhaven to Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight. There was no doubt in his mind. He was on a ship. But how, but why? Who could have carried him all that way without waking him? Was it magic? Accidental magic? The St. John’s wort perhaps? And the stone—it was not the same. It was new, clean cut, and, where the wind displaced a corner of the curtain, dazzlingly white in the sunlight.

"There was the pat pat of bare feet on the deck, a dull sort of shuffling as though people were arranging themselves. And then people outside the awning began to sing. It was a strange song, not at all like any music you or I have ever heard. It had no tune, no more tune than a drum has, or a trumpet, but it had a sort of wild rough glorious exciting splendour about it, and gave you the sort of intense all-alive feeling that drums and trumpets give.  Quentin lifted a corner of the purple curtain and looked out.  Instantly the song stopped, drowned in the deepest silence Quentin had ever imagined. It was only broken by the flip-flapping of the sheets against the masts of the ship. For it was a ship, Quentin saw that as the bulwark dipped to show him an unending waste of sea, broken by bigger waves than he had ever dreamed of. He saw also a crowd of men, dressed in white and blue and purple and gold. Their right arms were raised towards the sun, half of whose face showed across the sea—but they seemed to be, as my old nurse used to say, ‘struck so,’ for their eyes were not fixed on the sun, but on Quentin. And not in anger, he noticed curiously, but with surprise and … could it be that they were afraid of him"?  It's easy to want to compare this with how C.S. Lewis takes his own child protagonists through the Wardrobe door and into Narnia.  However, that's not quite fair for a number of reasons.

To start with, neither of these stories is the exact same as one another.  All they share in common is the idea of a Journey There and Back Again Through an Other World.  It's the sort of trope that was probably already ancient by the time Edith used it in her own inventive imaginary exploits.  All she did was find the contemporary voice best suited to translating what is essentially a work of myth forward into the modern age.  This is another achievement she shares with Lewis, yet again the comparison amounts to little more than apples and oranges.  She gets her protagonist into the Fantasy Realm in the space of three paragraphs to Lewis's four or five.  Her pacing is brisk and quick as befitting the short story venue, whereas Lewis allows himself to enjoy the more leisured and sedate pace granted by the novel format.  From an objective standpoint, the worst one can say is that both authors demonstrate and admirable degree of professionalism in their handling of this familiar material.  Lewis and Edith know their way around stories of this type, and each of them are willing to give their respective works as much room as they need to breath and live.  Another commonality between them is their prose.  Both of them are serviceable without having to be flashy or pyrotechnic.  They know that it is the events and imagery as opposed to the language which is going to have to carry the day for them in the end.

The good news is I think I can report that Nesbit is able to hold her own as a fantasist.  Once she's got her main lead into her own Other World, Edith begins to lay out the rest of her cards on the table.  It's starts with Quentin and the reader learning just what new kind of reality they've stepped into.  On being discovered by the inhabitants of the boat, instead of following up their initial moment of shock with anger and consternation, like you'd expect.  They don't grab and haul Quentin down to the galley in order to beat answers to all the questions they might want to ask out of him.  Nor does Quentin find himself getting summarily tossed overboard on the spot.  Instead, perhaps even to the reader's surprise, the boy finds himself treated as a literal gift from the gods by all of the inhabitants of the ship.  Turns out there's just one member of the crew who seems to be a lot more down to Earth than everyone else.  This is the character known as Blue Mantle.  It's the name Quentin gives to this curiously obliging interlocutor, based on the type of ancient style clothing he's wearing.  Blue Mantle is the first person in this new Other World to address Quentin, and he's also the one to proclaim him, in that repeated, curious phrase, a gift of the gods.  He thus allows Quentin to have and easy time of it while aboard.

The catch to all this, however, is that once the lad has been comfortably settled in, Blue Mantel comes to Quentin with very specific demands.  ‘Now,’ said he, very crossly indeed, ‘tell me how you got here. This Chosen of the Gods business is all very well for the vulgar. But you and I know that there is no such thing as magic.’ ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Quentin. ‘If I’m not here by magic I’m not here at all.’ ‘Yes, you are,’ said Blue Mantle. ‘I know I am,’ said Quentin, ‘but if I’m not here by magic what am I here by?’ ‘Stowawayishness,’ said Blue Mantle. ‘If you think that why don’t you treat me as a stowaway?’ ‘Because of public opinion,’ said Blue Mantle, rubbing his nose in an angry sort of perplexedness.  ‘Very well,’ said Quentin, who was feeling so surprised and bewildered that it was a real relief to him to bully somebody. ‘Now look here. I came here by magic, accidental magic. I belong to quite a different world from yours. But perhaps you are right about my being the Chosen of the Gods. And I sha’n’t tell you anything about my world. But I command you, by the Sacred Tau’ (he had been quick enough to catch and remember the word), ‘to tell me who you are, and where you come from, and where you are going.’  The whole exchange takes a turn you don't except, and just goes on from there.

"Blue Mantle shrugged his shoulders. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘if you invoke the sacred names of Power…. But I don’t call it fair play. Especially as you know perfectly well, and just want to browbeat me into telling lies. I shall not tell lies. I shall tell you the truth.’ ‘I hoped you would,’ said Quentin gently. ‘Well then,’ said Blue Mantle, ‘I am a Priest of Poseidon, and I come from the great and immortal kingdom of Atlantis.’ ‘From the temple where the gold statue is, with the twelve sea-horses in gold?’ Quentin asked eagerly. ‘Ah, I knew you knew all about it,’ said Blue Mantle, ‘so I don’t need to tell you that I am taking the sacred stone, on which you are sitting (profanely if you are a mere stowaway, and not the Chosen of the Gods) to complete the splendid structure of a temple built on a great plain in the second of the islands which are our colonies in the North East.’ ‘Tell me all about Atlantis,’ said Quentin. And the priest, protesting that Quentin knew as much about it as he did, told And all the time the ship was ploughing through the waves, sometimes sailing, sometimes rowed by hidden rowers with long oars. And Quentin was served in all things as though he had been a king. If he had insisted that he was not the Chosen of the Gods everything might have been different. But he did not. And he was very anxious to show how much he knew about Atlantis. And sometimes he was wrong, the Priest said, but much more often he was right".  It is here that the nature of the conversation takes one, last, ominous turn.

‘We are less than three days’ journey now from the Eastern Isles,’ Blue Mantle said one day, ‘and I warn you that if you are a mere stowaway you had better own it. Because if you persist in calling yourself the Chosen of the Gods you will be expected to act as such—to the very end.’ ‘I don’t call myself anything,’ said Quentin, ‘though I am not a stowaway, anyhow, and I don’t know how I came here—so of course it was magic. It’s simply silly your being so cross. I can’t help being here. Let’s be friends.’ ‘Well,’ said Blue Mantle, much less crossly, ‘I never believed in magic, though I am a priest, but if it is, it is. We may as well be friends, as you call it. It isn’t for very long, anyway,’ he added mysteriously".  I have called this story a satire, and perhaps it's here, in the conversations being had between the story's two ostensible main leads a bit of it starts to become noticeable.  In some ways, what we've just read sounds almost like a reversal of the typical situation we've come to expect from the basic Other World fantasy.  All of the expected plot beats are present and accounted for, until the ancient priest comes into the frame.  In other stories of this kind, this character might have served as a kind of guide, or mentor figure for the protagonist.  The kind of person, in other words, who you expect to be there to help the hero on his or her quest.  So this one seems ready to toss it all over, instead.

It's not what we're expecting to happen in this kind of imaginary scenario.  So the reader is left wondering just what's going on here?  We're no longer sure what to expect, and this puts us on edge.  It should be clear to any seasoned reader that this is just the exact note that Edith wants to instill in her audience. Rather than the expected atmosphere of high adventure and excitement, she instead introduces a creeping note of unease into the proceedings, and then ratchet's the tension.  The note of defamiliarization leaves us worried about some menace we're not sure of yet but are now beginning to expect.  This is helped in no small part due to the ominous nature of the priest in general, and of his words about not being friends for very long in particular.  It's as if we've managed to stumble across a vaguely sinister sounding version of Merlin or Gandalf.  We aren't prepared for something like that, and that too accounts for why these establishing scenes of characterization and setup leave us unnerved.  Instead of the usual strain of charm and whimsy we expect from a world like this, Nesbit has instead managed the remarkable task of wedding a note of Gothic unease to Lewis Carroll's Wonderland.  It's a combination I've seen done before, yet not often. Edith's ability to pull it off is a real accomplishment.

She continues to play this growing note of dread like a harp throughout the remainder of the narrative.  It's first sounded with the introduction of the Blue Mantle character.  Whoever else he may be, one thing Edith wants her readers to understand is that this guy is no wise and all-knowing Merlin.  Unlike Gandalf, this wizard is no hero, and therefor not to be trusted.  Nesbit continues playing a growing riff of dread on her story until it reaches the same place the whole troubled started, as Quentin finds himself being led, like a pre-Middle Ages head of state back to Stonehenge.  Only this time the whole place looks different.  "As they drew near to the spot Quentin perceived that the great stones he remembered were overlaid with ornamental work, with vivid, bright-coloured paintings. The whole thing was a great circular building, every stone in its place".  This is no longer the ancient ruin we're familiar with from all the tourist brochures.  This is no mere heap of stones, but an actual temple.  It's a structure erected to be a serious house on a serious Earth.  The kind of place where rituals are enacted daily.  It's when Quentin gets a chance to see just what kind of ceremonies take place there that the reader begins to understand the true horrific nature of the satire that Edith has led us into, like lambs to the slaughter.

"(A) very tall, white-robed priest with a deer-skin apron and a curious winged head-dress stepped forward. He carried a great bronze knife...The bronze knife was raised over Quentin. He could not believe that this, this horror, was the end of all these wonderful happenings.  ‘No—no,’ he cried, ‘it’s not true. I’m not the Chosen of the Gods! I’m only a little boy that’s got here by accidental magic!’ ‘Silence,’ cried the priest, ‘Chosen of the Immortals, close your eyes! It will not hurt.  This life is only a dream; the other life is the real life. Be strong, be brave!’  Quentin was not brave. But he shut his eyes. He could not help it. The glitter of the bronze knife in the sunlight was too strong for him.  He could not believe that this could really have happened to him. Every one had been so kind—so friendly to him. And it was all for this!  Suddenly a sharp touch at his side told him that for this, indeed, it had all been. He felt the point of the knife".  We've gone, then, from the Fields of Arcadia to something very much like the kind of situation that an EC Comics protagonist might find waiting for him in an old issue of Tales from the Crypt.  The comparison isn't hurt here by the fact that EC really did publish its own Fractured Fairy Tale line of stories with macabre twists on the Brother's Grimm and the like.

That's the kind of situation Quentin de Ward finds himself in now.  Whether he is able to get out of this jam alive is something that's probably best to let other readers find out for themselves.  From here on out, it's enough to just sum up the nature of the satirical message at the heart of Edith's story, and how it shapes the way she frames or tells her narrative.  To start with the most obvious aspect of the work, the author has been able to fool anyone who decides to read her words while going in blind.  The reader will go in and find themselves greeted by the kind of scenario you'd expect from C.S. Lewis, only to have every table turned on them.  By the end, it's as if we've been treated to marvelous glimpses of a pristine Delphic Grove, only to reach it's heart and discover that it's the kind of hiding place where writers like Arthur Machen liked to stash away various and sundry evil fauns, nymphs, and imps, who are just lying in wait for the unwary traveler to pass their way, so they can reach out and grab him.  It's the kind of setup I've seen numerous times before.  Aside from the works of Machen, it can also be found in Joe Hill's short story, "Faun", as well as Fairy Tale, a Stephen King novel that appeared not long after.  Edith seems to be anticipating both Machen, Hill, and King with this particular story.

The key thing about her efforts is that she's using all of this to work toward a very specific satirical target.  I'd argue that this short story was written in response to a very specific policy that was being exorcised by the British Government in its role as a World Empire.  Specifically, my thesis here is that Edith's "Accidental Magic" was made as a response to the Anglo-Egyptian War of the late nineteenth century.  The entire nature of that conflict was centered around nothing more than a pure dumb luck break for Britannia.  In the year 1882 the English Army had managed to establish a foothold in the nation of Egypt.  It had done so through the simple method of force of number backed up by the decree of both crown an parliament.  It's reason for being there was simple; to both expand the territory of Britain's empire, and to gain the upper hand in trade bargaining that such a conquest would give them in the international marketplace.  This led to the kind of results you might expect from such a brazenly hostile invasion.  It led Britain to exert its influence at the expense of the Egyptians, much like it had done for India during the Raj.  The whole thing was summed up in a satirical cartoon from that time.

It pictures a then familiar trope, or stock character called "John Bull as a British soldier physically protecting Egypt, who is depicted as the sexualised female object of Orientalist fantasy, passively leaning into Bull’s arms. The Turkish Sultan pleads with Britain ‘to consider whether the time has not now arrived for her return to the arms of her loving uncle.’ Victorians regularly played with gendered tropes to portray Britain as a masculine and heroic saviour, Egypt as feminine and frail, and the Ottoman Empire as weak and in decline. The scene unfolding in front of the Sphinx reflects the appropriation of Egypt’s ancient past during the British occupation of the country (web)".  "The colonial agenda determined Egyptian inferiority according to universal hierarchies of race. Orientalists used the ‘comparative method’ to study the ancient and modern inhabitants of the country, treating Egyptian peasants as passive objects of observation and classification, much like artefacts (ibid)".  The best way I can explain all this is to point out what has to be an ultimate irony at the heart of behavior such as this.  I mean we call it bigotry and prejudice and that is all 100% accurate as far as it goes.

What I don't think most us have stopped to contemplate (though who can blame any of us when the subject matter is so repugnant) is the exact nature of the psychology that drives such behavior, especially when its concentrated into the hands of what might be termed a ruling class.  Here's where the paradox comes in.  You have the crown and parliament of Queen Victoria's day colluding to put their thumb on the scales of power in order to extend whatever part or aspect of the world they think they can get a hold of.  For me, the irony comes into the picture when you stop and realize something pretty damn profound.  Those guys are the one's with all the money.  They got the cash, they got the leisure, even some of the parliamentarians belong to the landed gentry, which means none of them had to work a day in their lives.  All they had to do was sit on their laurels and not bother a damn soul.  If they could have been content with just that, and no more, then while I can't say all would have been right with the world, it would still have been a damn sight better.  And yet it's like they have the unique inability to keep still in a room for more than five seconds before they start to get this itch in their heads.  I've heard this "itch" described as the Will to Power, and the term is useful enough.

However, I think a better way to describe the kind of behavior I'm talking about here is to compare the British Ruling Class and their little Egyptian escapade as comparable to junkies indulging in, whether or you want to call it their "favorite" drug, it's certainly one that they find the most "needful" or "necessary".  Here's the thing, about looking at it all from that angle.  If you want to describe bigots and a troublingly great deal of the 1%  class as addicts, then what is their drug?  I can understand how some might point to concepts like greed and the desire to accumulate greater wealth.  And to be fair, that does play a part in what I'm describing.  However, the more I look on at that shit, the less I'm convinced that greed is the true overarching explanation.  It may be an attendant vice, it is not the controlling one, however.  Part of the irony I'm describing is the fact that money really doesn't seem to be the driving factor for all the prejudice of the kind that the British Empire foisted on Egypt right up until near the start of the Second World War.  Would you like to know just what kind of drug that folks like the Victorian colonialists were after in places like Egypt and India?  'Cause I think I might  have found out what that is.  The answer seems to be: just people.  Rather, it's the need to exploit and dominate others that creates things like bigotry, and results in the colonization of Egypt by the hollow crown.

The specific nature of the irony of such a shared psychosis is that if you try and raise a complaint about such actions, the answer you're most likely to get often amounts to just one familiar catch-phrase: "Fuck your feelings".  The irony of this sentiment is completed by the fact that the very same person who tells you to do just that will then, in the next breath, turn right around and try all they can to do the exact same thing to the person(s) they've just tried to dismiss.  Like with any addiction, the reason for such illogical behavior is because the "inner itch" is in control and calling all the shots upstairs.  The monkey is riding the attacker's back, and this time not even the usual round of "hard candy" is what will do the trick.  The fix for addiction of prejudice doesn't come out of a bottle, needle, or a pill.  Instead, it comes from trying to unlawfully dominate others against their will.  I take that to be the fundamental driving force behind the crown's exploitation of Egypt.  While I can't tell you if Edith was ever aware of just how deep this problem was, what can be said with certainty is that she was dead set against such official acts of "policy".  Her reaction and indignation to what the crown and parliament were doing to the Egyptians, and by proxy to Britons like herself and her friends as well, seems to have been enough of a spur for her Imagination to send up a bright flare of carefully concealed satire in the form of a fantasy.

"Accidental Magic" seems to have been her way of tackling the issue in an indirect fashion.  The reason for not going for the direct approach, and attacking the Ruling Class Establishment in the open was because whatever rights a literary author might be said to enjoy today, that sure as hell wasn't the case in Edith's time.  If she made her anticolonial, anti-imperialist opinions known to the public at large, sooner or later word of this would have gotten back to the Ruling Class themselves.  It also just happened that the Establishment at the time really meant the Ruling part of their title.  It was a time when all the power of the press was concentrated into the hands of the wealthy aristocracy.  That meant the final arbitration of censorship was at the mercy of what some landed magnate sympathetic to the cause of the hollow crown in Egypt or India could find ways of making sure a voice like Edith's was stifled good and proper just by putting her on a list of names to be censored.  It was about as fair as highway robbery, and proof if any were needed that money is one of the easiest roots to domination of the public square.  With nothing in the way of any real free speech clause to fall back on, Edith had to content herself with making her opinions on the matter known in fairy tale form.  She telegraphed the meaning of her satirical message through a number of carefully placed clues throughout the narrative.

The first and biggest clue comes in right at the beginning of the story where she tells us about Quentin's family situation.  We're told his father is abroad in Egypt as a soldier in the British army.  It starts out sounding like minor bit of information.  Just one of those casual fairy tale setups where the main character's parental or adult guardian figures have to be maneuvered out of the way so that all the fantastical trappings can be brought on stage without interruption.  This sort of thing may be a staple of the Fantasy genre as a whole, yet here again, Nesbit finds a way to take an already time worn trope and use it as an expression of her satire.  The whole reason Quentin winds up in the mess he's in is because his dad gets injured in the course of a battle that's never named or explicitly brought up.  That seems to be intentional on the writer's part.  The constrictions of her time and place prevented Edith from ever broaching the subject of the Anglo-Egyptian War, especially to an audience of YA readers.  That was a conflict that became pretty much inevitable once the citizens of Egypt found themselves under the repressive heel of the English Empire.  It's the kind of situation that turns daily life into a natural pressure cooker.  Sooner or later there's going to be talks among a conquered people of wanting to get that bootheel off your neck by staging a revolt for the sake of independence from the yoke tyranny. 

It's what led to the revolt of the native population of Egypt, and in many ways, it was one of the longest conflicts in that country's history.  It wouldn't even be settled until the year 1936, and even then it took a while for the crown to hand over complete and total control of the land back the people who had already lived there and established a natural right to their own lives.  This is the conflict that underlies the entirety of Quentin de Ward's life.  It's also the one plot point that we're never told about directly.  The writing just keeps hinting at it from an indirect angle.  We only ever hear about it in terms of the effects that it has one Mr. de Ward's son.  It comes very close to tearing the entire family apart not just in term's Quentin's father, but also at the eventual risk of the boy's own life.  This seems to be Edith's way of highlight the cost that the war had on both middle and lower class families in Britain.  The costs of both the crown's occupation in Egypt and its sooner or later inevitable conflict meant that the less economically well off children of the Empire could face consequences as dire as homelessness and starvation from the government's antics abroad.  This is something Edith was well aware of at the time.

The families of the wealthy officer's class had their money and status to fall back on whereas guys like
Quentin (who seems to come from a lower-middle class background) were left at the mercy of a state unconcerned with the welfare of its people.  Nesbit is willing to show her protagonist a greater deal of mercy than this, however Quentin's implied general awareness of the precarious nature of his social and economic situation leaves the character in state that makes him regard the authority and upper class figures around with a natural distrust that he seems to have come by honestly.  It's this distrust which seems to be a shared commonality between character and author.  This is the target of Edith's satire throughout her story, and it underlies her presentation of the narrative's more fantastic elements.  The main reason the ancient mythical Britain that Quentin finds himself in winds up sounding so different from the kind of setup you'd expect to find in a story by Tolkien, Lewis, or Malory is because here Nesbit is using the barbarism of England's past as a useful commentary on it's present.  The whole point of this satire culminates in the moment when Quentin finds himself in danger of becoming a sacrificial human lamb for the sake of some faulty and inscrutable system of thought that does no one any good.  It's the author's veiled commentary on the nature of the British Imperial policy of the Victorian Age.

In the climactic moments of her narrative, she presents us with an image that is the perhaps one of the most dire representations of that moment in time.  It's the picture of Britain as this barbaric monolith willing to sacrifice both its people, and even worse and more important, it's literal children on the alter of Imperial policy.  The funny thing for me is that it is just possible to find a lot of commonalities between what Edith was up to here, and the work of Tolkien, believe it or not.  His own work was written in response to a similar venture between the world's empires.  In a lot of ways, Middle Earth can be looked at as one long satire on the way that bad governments can work together to spoil a lot of good things.  The critical expert Tom Shippey has even spoken of how in the final chapters of The Hobbit, Tolkien does his best to make "a plea for tolerance across an enormous gap of times and attitudes and ethical styles (66)".  This may be one of the lesser know reasons for just why Middle Earth has endured in the popular imagination for so long.  It's also possible that this idea of tolerance between different cultures (in her case, Egyptian and British) amounts to nothing less than a shared riff on the same idea.  It seem there's a greater deal of identical overlap between the two writers in terms of a shared theme.

Perhaps the best clue for the presence of Edith's anti-colonial/imperial, pro-tolerance theme can be found in a notion that she keeps returning to time and again over the course of her short story.  It is summed up by the narrative's sub-heading title: "Don't Tell All You Know".  Edith let's this message adorn her story's title page like some enigmatic banner.  She elaborates on her choosing this message for her sub-title by returning to it time and again at various parts of the story.  In a later conversation between Quentin and the ancient Celts, for instance, Blue Mantle goes into a lofty speech about what Stonehenge is designed for.  That’s all you know,’ said Quentin, not very politely. ‘It is not by any means all I know,’ said the priest. ‘I do not tell all I know. Nor do you.’ ‘I used to,’ said Quentin, ‘but I sha’n’t any more. It only leads to trouble—I see that now.’  And he's right, for as the Mantle Priest himself notes, he's a unbeliever of the very exalted message he's meant to represent.  In this way, Blue Mantle's thematic purpose seems to be to represent the cynical manipulators helming England's colonial project in Egypt.  He knows its not for any good cause, and that he himself is little more than just a selfish greed bag and maybe even something worse for convincing the populace to sacrifice its young in the service of a rapacious profit making scam, yet he just shrugs and allows it to along anyway.

This might just be the most biting aspect of Nesbit's satire.  It's an example of Edith in full on take no prisoners mode.  She has no time for the hollow crown's war machine, or the way it tortures both its subjects and those it would enslave for the sake of ill-gotten gains.  This is also the incidental explanation for her story's sub-title.  The author wants to rip the facade away from the war machine, and expose the hollow crown for the dark satanic mill that it is in reality.  The writer is also smart enough to know that she is powerless to do this out in the open, because she has two strikes against her as far as the ruling class is concerned.  On the one hand, she is a mere woman, and there are ways of punishing the fairer half if they get too out of line.  In the second place, she's not one of the ruling class, she's one of the little people, and that means she is the one in the vulnerable position if the ruling class ever decided it was best to make an example of her.  So, she must couch her critique of imperialism in the form of a children's fantasy narrative.  As Edith points out to her readers near the end of the work, "(It) is not always wise to tell all you know".  That doesn't mean you can't strike a blow for the little people, however.  You just have to learn to be smart in how you go about it.  Edith seems to have learned a lesson from the poetical pen of Emily Dickinson here: "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant". 

For all of these reasons, I'm going to have to give "Accidental Magic" a lot of high marks.  It's the kind of work that sneaks up on you in a good way.  you go into it thinking you're going to read a fun children's yarn, and to be fair, this is what you get with the finished product.  The most important aspect to any work of fiction always boils down to one final question.  Is it good as an entertainment?  In terms of a writer like Nesbit, the answer has to be a complete yes.  There are a tone of good reasons why she deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of the modern fantasy genre.  Some of them have been explored here, yet there will be a lot more to talk about on this score.  Her short story about Quentin de Ward and his harrowing adventure in a mythical past contain all the kind of hallmarks you can want out of a narrative like this.  At the same time, it's not just an empty diversion.  Instead, it turns out to be one of those kid's stories that manages to sneak up on you in a good way.  What Edith has written here is a very effective Gothic fairy tale for youngsters, while at the same time having the kind of thematic depth that makes for a good hair-raising and eye-opening adventure for adults.  Neil Gaiman once described Coraline as the kind of book that kids read as a fun fantasy, and grown-ups as a nightmarish Horror story.  It's therefore interesting to see Edith Nesbit pull off this same feat near the turn of the century.

She's written one of the great unheralded satirical fairy tales.  It's the kind of fantasy that can trace its ancestry as far back as possibly Homer, Aesop, and Alexander Pope.  While also looking ahead to the work done by the likes of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Norton Juster, and even Suzanne Collins.  It's the kind of fantasy with a serious purpose going on underneath all of the imaginative trappings, characters, and events.  I suppose another way to describe it might be that Nesbit has given us a good idea of what a Twilight Zone episode geared toward the YA demographic would look like.  She seems to have an implicit form of understanding with the likes of Gaiman and Jim Henson that kids are a lot smarter than the (so-called) grown-ups will perhaps ever give them credit for.  All three artists understand that it's possible to show kids scenarios that can sometimes be frightening, yet at the same time, most children will be able to handle material like this.  It's the same level of understanding that undergirds not just books like Coraline, but also films like The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth.  What those efforts share in common with a story like "Accidental Magic" is a willingness to take the young audience on journeys of exploration into the more harsher aspects of life, while also managing to highlight the important message of being able to somehow hold on to a vital sense of childlike wonder and Romanticism.

One of the major implications in all of Edith's fiction (whether short of novel-length) is that the people we term as adults or "grown-ups" are really little more than Big Kids.  There doesn't have to be anything inherently wrong with becoming a Big Kid, Nesbit seems to say.  The major issue there is that Bigger Kids come in two types, one of them is perhaps best described as decent enough, the other, not so much.  What you've got to work with boils down to Big Kids who are smart, and those who just turned out wrong somehow.  A smart Big Kid is someone who remembers that they will always be something of a child from first breath to last.  If you can keep that knowledge alive, Edith appears to be saying, then you'll know how to pace yourself in terms of life goals and expectations, while also always knowing that you have to make room for Imagination and the wonder that can stem from good efforts at fantasy making every now and then.  It's the wrong-headed kids, meanwhile, who try to spoil everyone else from having fun, or else just enjoying what could otherwise have been a normal day and life  That's a lesson that characters like Quentin de Ward have to learn.  His fate in the short story implies that learning such a valuable lesson can sometimes amount to the difference between life and death.  

It's as if the wonder of childhood will always remain some sort of vital survival mechanism.  If nothing else, it proves just how strange yet exciting life can be.  It's this baked in sense of wonder that helps keep a story like "Accidental Magic" fun and entertaining all the way through.  Edith means it to serve as a rallying cry of sorts for little and big kids of any nationality to stand up for themselves against bullies wherever they may come from.  It's a plea for wonder and Imagination in the face of tyranny.  I'd call that a pretty damn good reason for giving "Accidental Magic" the highest of recommendations.