Five Children and It
OCLC 4378896 | | |
Followed by | The Phoenix and the Carpet | |
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Text | Five Children and It... at Wikisource |
Five Children and It is a
Plot
Like Nesbit's
All the wishes go comically wrong. The children wish to be beautiful, but the servants do not recognise them and shut them out of the house. They wish to be rich, then find themselves with a gravel-pit full of gold
The children's infant brother, the Lamb, is the victim of two wishes gone awry. In one, the children become annoyed with tending to their brother and wish that someone else would want him, leading to a situation where everyone wants the baby, and the children must fend off kidnappers and Gypsies. Later, they wish that the baby would grow up faster, causing him to grow all at once into a selfish, smug young man who promptly leaves them all behind.
Finally, the children accidentally wish that they could give a wealthy woman's jewellery to their mother, causing all the jewellery to appear in their home. It seems that the gamekeeper, who is now their friend, will be blamed for the robbery, and the children must beg the Psammead for a complex series of wishes to set things right. It agrees, on the condition that they will never ask for any more wishes. Only Anthea, who has grown close to It, makes sure that the final wish is that they will meet It again. The Psammead assures them that this wish will be granted.
Characters
The five children
- Cyril, known as Squirrel: the eldest sibling, who is brave, diplomatic, and book-smart (very intelligent)
- Anthea, known as Panther: the second eldest, who is kind, sensible, and good-hearted.
- Robert, known as Bobs: the middle child, he is a practical joker with a quick temper.
- Jane, known as Pussy: a generally agreeable little girl with a tendency to be oversensitive, she is sometimes weepy and easily frightened.
- Hilary, the baby, known as the Lamb (because his first word was "baa"). He is too young to walk and has to be carried everywhere.
The Psammead
The Psammead is described as having "eyes [that] were on long horns like a snail's eyes. It could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey's" and whiskers like a rat's. When it grants wishes it stretches out its eyes, holds its breath and swells alarmingly.
The five children find the Psammead in a
The word "Psammead", pronounced "sammyadd" by the children in the story, appears to be a coinage by Nesbit from the Greek ψάμμος "sand" after the pattern of
Sequels
By Nesbit
The book's ending was clearly intended to leave readers in suspense:
"They did see it [the Psammead] again, of course, but not in this story. And it was not in a sand-pit either, but in a very, very, very different place. It was in a – But I must say no more."[4]
The children reappear in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). The Psammead is offstage in the first of these sequels (it is simply mentioned by the Phoenix, who visits it three times to ask for a helpful wish when the situation becomes difficult), but it plays a significant role in the second sequel after the children rescue it from a pet shop. An omnibus edition of the three books titled Five Children was published in 1930.[1] The trilogy is also known as the Psammead series.[2]
By other authors
The Return of the Psammead (1992) by Helen Cresswell concerns another family of Edwardian children who discover the Psammead.[5]
Four Children and It (2012) by Jacqueline Wilson is a contemporary retelling of the story in which four children from a modern stepfamily encounter the Psammead.[6] One of the children has read the original book and wishes to meet Cyril, Anthea, Jane and Robert.
In Five Children on the Western Front (2014) by Kate Saunders, set nine years after the original story, the children encounter the horrors of the First World War.[7]
Adaptations
Five Children and It has been adapted for television and film several times:
Television
- In 1985–86 TMS. No English dubbed version was ever produced, but it came out in other languages.
- There have been two adaptations on British television of the novel, both by the BBC. In 1951 a basic two part production was dramatised by Dorothea Brooking. This was only shown in the South of England and Midlands. A more lavish production was made in 1991 when the BBC turned the story into a six-part television series. It was released in the UK under the story's original title. In the USA it was released as The Sand Fairy. This was followed by The Return of the Psammead in 1993, with the Psammead the only character linking the two series. Both these series were scripted by Helen Cresswell, and Francis Wright puppeteered and voiced the Psammead. He was voiced here by the puppeteer Francis Wright.[8]
- In 2018, as The Psammy Show, an animated series co-produced by DQ Entertainment, Method Animation and Disney Germany.[9] This rendered the title character as a green dog-like creature.
Film
- In 2004 a film version was released, starring Freddie Highmore, Tara FitzGerald, Jonathan Bailey, Zoë Wanamaker and Kenneth Branagh, with Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.
Theatre
- A stage musical adaptation by Timothy Knapman (book) and Philip Godfrey (music/lyrics) was completed in 2016.[10]
- In 2022, it was adapted into another musical by playwright Rita Cheung Baird.
Comics
- It was also adapted as a comic strip by Henry Seabright.
Works inspired by
A
References
- ^ a b Clute, John (15 October 2021). "Nesbit, E". In Clute, John; Langford, David (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (4th ed.).
- ^ ISBN 978-0-511-07410-3.
- ^ Five Children and It, Chapter 1
- ^ Last paragraph of Five Children and It
- ^ "The Return of the Psammead". fantasticfiction.co.uk. Retrieved 31 August 2015.
- ^ "Four Children and It". fantasticfiction.co.uk. Retrieved 31 August 2015.
- ^ Buckley-Archer, Linda (18 October 2014). "Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders review – respectful homage packs a punch". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
- ^ Mark J. Docherty, Alistair D. McGown, The Hill and Beyond: Children's Television Drama - An Encyclopedia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), p. 102
- ^ "DQE's 'Psammy Show' Heads to China with CCTV Deal". Animation Magazine. 5 August 2019. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
- ^ Philip Godfrey – Vocal & Theatre
Further reading
- Jones, Raymond E., ed. (2006). E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy: A Children's Classic at 100. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-5401-7.
External links
- Five Children and It at Standard Ebooks
- Five Children and It at Project Gutenberg
- Five Children and It public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- The 1991 TV movie
- The 2004 film
- New York, 1905 edition (scanned page images from the Library of Congress)
- The 1985–86 anime Onegai! Samia Don, Samed el duende mágico
- The Return of the Psammead 1993 sequel to Five Children and It