Revisiting "The Conscience Pudding" story from E. Nesbit's New Treasure Seekers was a joy and the perfect thing to read between topping up the water during pudding work. If you haven't read it, it's short and Christmassy and stands alone perfectly well. It's about six siblings in 1899 London making a Christmas pudding and having a hilarious crisis of conscience in regard to it.
But if you just want to see some of my favourite moments from the actual making of the pudding:
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[Reading through the cookery book, having never done much more cookery than toasting bread at the fireplace:]
"...Three quarters of a pound of breadcrumbs; half a pound of flour... half a pound of citron and orange peel; half a nutmeg; and a little ground ginger.' I wonder how little ground ginger."
"A teacupful would be enough, I think," Alice said; "we must not be extravagant."
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"Serve it ornamented with holly and brandy poured over it.'"
"I should think holly and brandy poured over it would be simply beastly," said Dicky.
"I expect the book knows. I daresay holly and water would do as well though." [They are apparently under the impression that they're supposed to make a sort of sauce from the holly. They chop it up very fine and boil it in water and... it's certainly a result.]
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"'The citron and orange peel cut into thin slices'âI wonder what they call thin? Matilda's thin bread-and-butter is quite different from what I mean by itâ'and the raisins stoned and divided.' How many heaps would you divide them into?"
"Seven, I suppose," said Alice; "one for each person and one for the potâI mean pudding."
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Father's machine he weighs letters with did to weigh out the things. We did this very carefully, in case the grocer had not done so. Everything was right except the raisins. H.O. had carried them home. He was very young then, and there was a hole in the corner of the paper bag and his mouth was sticky.
Lots of people have been hanged to a gibbet in chains on evidence no worse than that, and we told H.O. so till he cried. This was good for him. It was not unkindness to H.O., but part of our duty.
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We barricaded the nursery door and set to work. We were very careful to be quite clean. We washed our hands as well as the currants. I have sometimes thought we did not get all the soap off the currants. The pudding smelt like a washing-day when the time came to cut it open. [...] The girls had washed the currants with Brown Windsor soap and the sponge. Some of the currants got inside the sponge and kept coming out in the bath for days afterwards. I see now that this was not quite nice. We cut the candied peel as thin as we wish people would cut our bread-and-butter. We tried to take the stones out of the raisins, but they were too sticky, so we just divided them up in seven lots.
How E. Nesbit used her grief, her politics, and her imagination to make a new kind of book for kids.
Books by Nesbit
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/407
There was a time, not so long ago, when things were perfect for the children up at the bright-faced house, at the edge of London. Heaps of toys in the nursery, an enchanted garden that rolled on for ages, and there were always buns for tea. Mother forever merry, forever there. But then Father died, or was imprisoned for treason, or his business partner absconded to Spain with their money, and the family had to abandon all the best old things and perhaps even the beloved house altogether, being reduced to a dank, crumbling cottage. Mother, too, was soon indisposedâdead or shut up in a room writing stories for payâwhich left the children to a crotchety aunt or a kindly old gentleman friend. Mostly it left them to their own devices, unsupervised and largely unschooled, to seek their lost fortune together, with the aid of a time-travelling mole, say, or a sand-fairy who granted wishes. A form of reclamation awaited at storyâs end: the return of the familyâs comfort and prospects, perhaps even the return of Father.
These are the furnishings of the English writer E. Nesbitâs stories for young readers, and, book after book, she rearranged them with enough invention and emotional intelligence to become one of the most celebrated childrenâs authors of the Edwardian decade. H. G. Wells wrote to Nesbit, regarding her book âThe Phoenix and the Carpet,â âI knock my forehead on the ground at your feet in the vigour of my admiration of your easy artistry.â In his essay âOn Three Ways of Writing for Children,â C. S. Lewis wrote that Nesbit provided the older members of her audience with âmore realistic reading about children than they could find in most books addressed to adultsâ; he also plucked his famous wardrobe from Nesbitâs story âThe Aunt and Amabel.â J. K. Rowling helped herself to entire rooms of the Nesbit estate, down to her flourish for creature namesâthe Mouldiwarp, the Psammead, et al. âI identify with E. Nesbit more than any other writer,â Rowling has said.
Nesbit moved easily back and forth between realist and fantasy fiction, and these parallel strains are represented by a pair of her books being reissued this fall: âThe Railway Childrenâ (HarperCollins Childrenâs Classics) and âThe House of Ardenâ (New York Review Childrenâs Collection). Both books, like much of Nesbitâs work, are episodic and sometimes picaresque, shrugging off the moralizing that was native to young peopleâs literature of the time, in favor of privileging a childâs logic and point of view. Both show glimmers of the Socialist beliefs that guided much of Nesbitâs adult life. And, most crucially, both books are constructed from a blueprint that is also a kind of reĂ«nactment of the authorâs own childhood: an idyll torn up at its roots by the exigencies of illness, loss, and grief.
Edith Nesbit was born in 1858 in Kennington, London, where her father ran an agricultural college that his own father had founded. Daisy, as she was known, spent her earliest years romping with her brothers and mingling with students on the schoolâs three-acre grounds. The family home, she later recalled, âhad a big garden and a meadow and a cottage and a laundry, stables and cow-house and pig-styes, elm-trees and vines, tiger lillies and flags in the garden, and chrysanthemums that smelt like earth and hyacinths that smelt like heaven.â When Daisy was three and a half, her father died of tuberculosis, and her mother took over management of the college. Several years later, one of Daisyâs sisters also fell ill, launching the Nesbits on a semi-permanent European itinerancy in search of sea air and mild winters: Brighton, the South of France, and a farmhouse in La Haye, where, Nesbit wrote, âMy mother, with a wisdom for which I shall thank her all my days, allowed us to run wild.â
Eleanor Fitzsimonsâs wonderful biography âThe Life and Loves of E. Nesbit,â from 2019, opens in Bordeaux, where nine-year-old Daisy visits the infamous mummiesâ crypt at Saint-Michel. âRound three sides of the room ran a railing, and behind itâstanding against the wall, with a ghastly look of life in deathâwere about two hundred skeletons,â Nesbit wrote thirty years later. âSkeletons draped in mouldering shreds of shrouds and grave-clothes, their lean fingers still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out towards me.â The mummies, some of them frozen in the screams and convulsions of death, were âthe crowning horror of my childish life,â Nesbit wrote. The spectre of the undead would haunt many of her stories and books to come, a motif that occasionally dovetailed with an even more dominant refrain: that of expired or absent parents.
Nesbit was erratically educated but constitutionally bookish, having read âThe Anatomy of Melancholyâ by age thirteen. At twenty-one, she married a bank clerk and would-be entrepreneur named Hubert Bland. She was content with bucking Victorian social mores: on the day of her wedding, in 1880, she was seven months pregnant, and, when Bland, a known philanderer, went on to have at least two children out of wedlock, she agreed to raise them as her own. The couple wrote fiction together under the pseudonym Fabian Bland and co-founded the Fabian Society, the genteel Socialist salon that helped galvanize the start of the Labour Party, attracted the likes of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, and today bills itself as Britainâs oldest political think tank. A sympathetic observerâthe wife of a leftist politicianâwrote of the Blandsâ âcharming little Socialist and literary household,â in a London suburb, that the neighbors were âterribly scandalisedâ by the âmerry little Bland children in aesthetic pinafores . . . running about the garden with bare feet!â
As a writer and as a mother, and likely as a child, Nesbit saw kidsâsiblings, especiallyâas self-governing, faintly anarchic communities unto themselves. Her first book for children, âThe Story of the Treasure Seekersâ (1899), established the Nesbit tone: chatty and discursive, but threaded with a stoic wistfulness. It was also the first of her trilogy about the Bastables, whose personalities and circumstances borrowed heavily from the family that Nesbit was born to and the one that she made with Bland. âWe are the Bastables,â the narrator of âThe Treasure Seekersâ announces. âThere are six of us besides Father. Our Mother is dead, and if you think we donât care because I donât tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all.â This oddly childlike turnâto acknowledge pain in the act of deflecting it, and thinking that to do so is very grown-up indeedâis a signature Nesbit gambit. In âThe Railway Childrenâ (1906), the kids are moved by their motherâs transparent attempts, after their father is jailed, to put on a brave face, and they show their gratitude by imitation. âShe doesnât want me to know sheâs unhappy,â one says, âand I wonât know; I wonât know.â
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âThe Railway Childrenâ is possibly Nesbitâs most cherished book in the United Kingdom, owing in part to the comfy familiarity of a 1970 film adaptation starring Jenny Agutter as Roberta, the mature and capable eldest child. The familyâs entire reversal of fortune is pulled off in a single short chapter: Father is arrested after being falsely accused of selling state secrets to the Russians, and, as a result, Mother and the children are forced to âplay at being poor,â moving to a rat-bothered cottage where the garden looks âlike a dripping-pan full of black cabbages.â The matriarch must clear her husbandâs name and, overnight, become the family breadwinner, which she does, quixotically enough, by selling stories; in some ways, she appears to be a sainted version of Nesbit herself. (Both women, for example, enjoyed composing verse for their children âfor their birthdays and for other great occasions, such as the christening of the new kittens, or the refurnishing of the dollâs house, or the time when they were getting over the mumps.â)
âThe House of Ardenâ (1908) is, to some extent, a magic-infused remix of âThe Railway Children.â The Mouldiwarp, a little white mole with a magic clock, facilitates a journey through British historyâthe Gunpowder Plot, Anne Boleynâfor the Arden siblings, the dispossessed heirs to a great estate. Fitzsimons, in âLife and Loves,â identifies an elegiac quality to Nesbitâs interest in the restorative potential of time travel: in 1900, Nesbit and Blandâs fifteen-year-old son, Fabian, died after routine surgery to remove his adenoids, and the unending grief that followed added more of an undertow to Nesbitâs work. In âHardingâs Luck,â the sequel to âThe House of Arden,â she writes, âThere are certain children born now and thenâit does not often happen, but now and then it doesâchildren who are not bound by time as other people are.â
Some of Nesbitâs best stories possess the peculiar, faraway-so-close melancholy of being able to conjure the ghost of a loved one without being able to touch or speak to them, for fear of dissolving the apparition. In âThe House of Arden,â the children infiltrate the kingdom where their father is being held in luxurious captivity by transforming into cats; unable to reveal their identities to him, they only purringly rub against his legs. âArden,â like âThe Railway Children,â takes shape as a desperate mission to save the missing Daddy. The books have extremely similar endings, with identical childrenâs criesâjoyous and anguished at once. In âThe Railway Children,â the authorial voice finds the final scene of reconciliation to be so raw and private that she must turn away. âI think that just now we are not wanted there,â the voice says. âI think it will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away.â
As Nesbitâs wealth and literary celebrity grew, so did the Blandsâ renown as hosts. In 1900, not long before the shocking death of Fabian, they moved into a mansion in Greenwich, replete with moat, swans, wild gardens, and a grand hall for hosting Fabian Society debates and political speeches. In envisioning a Socialist future for England, their praxis was extreme hospitality. The Bland pile was more or less an open house, with the tall and elegant Nesbit presiding over the festivities in her loose-fitting Liberty prints, waving her ever-present cigarette holder. H. G. Wells called the house âa place to which one rushed down from town at the week-end to snatch oneâs bed before anyone else got it.â (Nesbit and Wells later sparred over the question of sentimentality in fiction; they fell out entirely after an alleged indiscretion between Wells and her stepdaughter.)
Nesbitâs Socialist loyalties only occasionally risked tipping her books into becoming Socialist tracts. (Richard, the proud-hearted cousin in âThe House of Arden,â delivers a speech straight from the floor of the Fabian Society: âThey make people work fourteen hours a day for nine shillings a week, so that they never have enough to eat or wear, and no time to sleep or to be happy in.â) Yet, despite her progressive bona fides, Nesbit was more of an old Victorian than she might have liked to admit. Her books are, at moments, blighted by racist and colonialist language and anti-Semitic tropes. And, although it was Nesbitâs career, her talents and determination, that had earned the Blands their home and social prominence, she shared with Margaret Thatcher a for-thee-and-not-for-me gender essentialism. She opposed the cause of womenâs suffrageâmainly, she claimed, because women could swing Tory, thus harming the Socialist cause. When she participated in a lecture series of the Fabian Womenâs Group, she maintained that women were mainly fit to be wives and mothers, and that, according to Fitzsimons, âthe cultivation of the intellectual or masculine characteristics of women would end in sterility and race extermination.â
Such internalized misogyny is less evident in her fiction, even if Nesbit tends to seem more compelled and amused by her boys than her girls. âThe House of Ardenâ contains an enchanting exchange with an enigmatic old woman on how female intelligence can unjustly backfire (âFrom âwise womanâ to witch was a very short step indeedâ). In âThe Railway Children,â Father, just before he is arrested, is made to say, âGirls are just as clever as boys, and donât you forget it!â Nesbit is not pro-girl so much as simply pro-child: in favor of valuing their opinions, honoring the realities of their inner lives, and giving them the freedom to explore and build worlds of their own, together or alone. In âThe House of Arden,â her spin on the didacticism rampant in Victorian childrenâs literature, is a brief, Wordsworthian ode to the meditative state: âNow, if you sit perfectly silent for a long time and look at the sea, or the sky, or the running water of a river, something happens to you . . . a kind of gentle but very strong inside magic, that makes things clear, and shows you what things are important, and what are not.â
In âOn Three Ways of Writing for Children,â in which he sings Nesbitâs praises, C. S. Lewis contends that the writer in her own book is not the same as the writer in real life; and that a similar, subtle alchemyâthe inside magicâoccurs in her reader. âThe printed story grows out of a story told to a particular child with the living voice and perhaps ex tempore,â Lewis wrote. He went on, âYou would become slightly different because you were talking to a child and the child would become slightly different because it was being talked to by an adult. A community, a composite personality, is created and out of that the story grows.â This vision of reading as something at once private and communalâas something generativeâis rather utopian. Nesbitâs utopias, in turn, are rather Socialist, exemplified in the Eden-like London of tomorrow laid out in âThe Story of the Amulet.â More to the point, they are a childrenâs polis. But her children remain children; to read Nesbitâs stories today is to summon a nostalgia for a future that never arrived. âLetâs go into the future again,â one of her young characters proposes. âPerhaps we could remember if it wasnât such an awful way off.â âŠ
There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read - unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over.
Here is the first of many covers that I've been creating for a series of Weird Fiction/ Classic Gothic Horror authors for Hippocampus Press, many more to come!
"From the Dead: The Complete Weird Stories of E. Nesbit | Hippocampus Press Classics of Gothic Horror Series | Edited by S. T. Joshi | Cover art by Aeron Alfrey! https://www.hippocampuspress.com/mythos-and-other-authors/fiction/from-the-dead-the-complete-weird-stories-of-e.-nesbit "Â