The Story of the Amulet
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| Author | Edith Nesbit |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Psammead Trilogy |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy, Children's Novel |
| Publisher | T. Fisher Unwin |
| Released | 1906 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | The Phoenix and the Carpet |
The Story of the Amulet is a novel for children, written in 1906 by E. Nesbit. It is the final part of a trilogy of novels that also includes Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). In it the children re-encounter the Psammead—the "it" in Five Children and It. As it no longer grants wishes to the children, however, its capacity is mainly advisory in relation to the children's other discovery, the Amulet, thus following a formula successfully established in The Phoenix and the Carpet.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
At the beginning of this book, the children's father (a journalist) has gone overseas to cover the war in Manchuria. Their mother has gone to Madeira to recuperate from an unspecified illness, taking with her their younger brother the Lamb. The children are living with "old Nurse", who has set up a boardinghouse in central London. The only boarder who remains, now that the children have moved in, is a scholarly Egyptologist who has filled his bedsit with ancient artifacts. During the course of the book, the children get to know the "poor learned gentleman" and by the end of the book have befriended him and call him Jimmy.
Cook's house is in Fitzrovia, the district of London near the British Museum, a district in which there are (as Nesbit accurately conveys) many bookstalls and shops filled with unusual merchandise. In one of these shops, the children encounter the Psammead! It has been captured by a trapper, who failed to recognise it as a magical being. The Psammead is terrified: it cannot free itself (it can grant wishes to others, but not to itself), and the negligent shopkeeper will eventually wash out the cage: water, as we all know, will kill a Psammead. Using a ruse, the children persuade the shopkeeper to sell them the "mangy old monkey", and they liberate their old friend.
Under the guidance of the Psammead, the children purchase an ancient Amulet (in the shape of an Egyptian Tyet) which should be able to grant them their hearts' desire: the safe return of their parents and baby brother. But the item they purchase turns out to be only the surviving half of the original Amulet. By itself, it cannot grant their hearts' desire: however, it can serve as a magic portal, enabling time travel to find the other half.
Over the course of the novel, the Amulet transports the children and the Psammead to various times and places where the Amulet has previously existed, in the hope that — somewhen in time — the children can find the Amulet's missing half. Among the ancient realms they visit are Babylon, Egypt, the Phoenician city of Tyre, a ship to "the Tin Islands" (ancient Cornwall), and Atlantis just before the flood. In one chapter, they meet Julius Caesar on the shores of Gaul, just as he has decided that Britain is not worth invading. Jane's childish prattling about the glories of England persuades Caesar to invade after all.
In each of their time-jaunts, the children are magically able to speak and comprehend the contemporary language. Nesbit acknowledges this in her narration, without offering any explanation for how it happens. The children eventually bring "Jimmy" along with them on some of their time trips. For some reason, Jimmy does not share the children's magical gift of fluency in the local language: he can only understand (for example) Latin based on his own studies.
Perhaps the most intriguing chapter of the novel describes the children's visit to the future, visiting a British utopia in which H.G. Wells is venerated as a prophet. Wells and E. Nesbit were both members of the Fabian political movement, as was George Bernard Shaw, and this chapter in The Story of the Amulet is the least plausible in the narrative: whereas all the other adventures in this novel contain scrupulously detailed accounts of past civilisations, the children's trip into the future represents Nesbit's wishful thinking for a Utopia based on her own desires for socialist reform. Among Nesbit's unlikely predictions: in the future, trousers will be obsolete and men will wear kilts!
[edit] Literary significance & criticism
The Story of the Amulet profits greatly from Nesbit's deep research into ancient civilisations in general and that of ancient Egypt in particular. The book is dedicated to Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, the translator of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities of the British Museum, with whom she met to discuss the history of the ancient Near East while writing the book. The Amulet is sentient and is named Ur Hekau Setcheh; this is a genuine Ancient Egyptian name. The hieroglyphics written on the back of the Amulet are also authentic.
Amulet coincidentally appeared the same year as the first installation of another story involving children viewing different periods of history, Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, which may have owed something to Amulet.[citation needed]
During their adventure in Babylon, the children attempt to summon a Babylonian deity named Nisroch but are temporarily unable to recall his name: Cyril, in an obvious in-joke, refers to the god as "Nesbit". Author E. Nesbit was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn[citation needed], and was knowledgeable about ancient religions; she may well have been aware that there was indeed an ancient deity named Nesbit: this was the Egyptian god of the fifth hour of the day.[citation needed] In F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre's novel The Woman Between the Worlds (1994, taking place in 1898), E. Nesbit briefly appears in the narrative, dressed in costume as the Egyptian god Nesbit.
The chapter The Queen in London contains broadly negative stereotypes of stockbrokers clearly intended to be Jewish: they are described as having "hooked noses"; they have names such as Levinstein, Rosenbaum, Hirsh and Cohen; and their dialogue is rendered in a painfully exaggerated dialect of Yiddish-inflected English. All of this is clear evidence of Nesbit's tendencies toward anti-Semitism; similar slurs occur in The Treasure Seekers and in more disguised form in The Phoenix and the Carpet. Anti-Semitic stereotypes also occur in several other chapters of Amulet, although somewhat more subtly.
[edit] Allusions and references in The Story of the Amulet
The chapter "The Queen in London" satirizes then-contemporary occult belief. A journalist mistakes the Queen of Babylon for the Theosophist Annie Besant (like Nesbit, a socialist and social reformer) and mentions Theosophy in reference to (to him) inexplicable events taking place in the British Museum). "Thought-transference" (telepathy) also gets a mention as part of an elaborate and mistaken rationalization for the Queen's "delusion" that she comes from ancient Babylon.
The eponymously named ninth chapter, which takes place in Atlantis, though primarily inspired by Plato's dialogue Critias, also borrows such details from C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne's book The Lost Continent (1900), such as the presence of mammoths, dinosaurs, and a volcanic mountain on the island.
The world of the future in the chapter The Sorry-Present, and the Expelled Little Boy owes something to H. G. Wells, but perhaps more to William Morris' novel News from Nowhere (1896)[citation needed]. It clearly reflects Nesbit's own socialist attitudes. Both a young girl from the future and the Queen of Babylon (where, as the book makes mention, slavery took place) express horror at the conditions suffered by working class people of the present. The Queen says that the working people have harsher conditions even the slaves of her own time.
[edit] Influence on other works
Several elements in The Story of the Amulet were borrowed by C. S. Lewis for his Narnia series, particularly The Horse and His Boy (1954) and The Magician's Nephew (1955)[citation needed]. The deity Nisroch closely resembles the Calormene god Tash, while his name may have influenced the title of the Calormene king, the Tisroc. The King of Babylon, like the Tisroc, must have his name followed by "may he live forever", and the Queen of Babylon's accidental journey to London, and the havoc she causes there, closely parallel the appearance of Jadis, Queen of Charn, in London in The Magician's Nephew. Other possible influences on the Narnia books include: a learned but eccentric man in an upstairs room, a world-travelling talisman whose materials come from Atlantis, and magical trips that take no time at all in our world. The latter trope, though, occurs often in fantasy fiction, especially in works intended for children, as a covenient way of explaining how the protagonists can go away for extended period of time without their parents worrying.
Nesbit's description of the tidal wave overcoming Atlantis resembles J. R. R. Tolkien's description of the destruction of Númenor in his Akallabêth, which also began as part of a time-travel story, "The Lost Road" (later expanded as The Notion Club Papers). Nesbit's story may have influenced Tolkien, though the influence may have been less conscious than that on Lewis.[citation needed]
