Magical Classics: 'Harding's Luck' by E Nesbit

Delia Sherman on a favourite time-travelling hero

 

Harding’s Luck  (1923) is not one of E. Nesbit’s better known titles, so I was delighted when Delia Sherman chose it as her ‘Magical Classic’; I love it too. It’s the story of young Dickie, lame and poor, who lives in a London back street near New Cross:

At least the address was New Cross, but really the house where he lived was one of a row of horrid little houses built on the slope where once green fields ran down to the river, and the old houses of the Deptford merchants stood stately in their pleasant gardens ... All those good fields and happy gardens are built over now.  It is as though some wicked giant had taken a big brush full of yellow ochre paint, and another of mud-colour, and had painted out the green in streaks of dull yellow and filthy brown; and the brown is the roads and the yellow is the houses. 

One day Dickie sows a packet of Artistic Bird Seed in his wretched little back yard, hoping that they will 'come up parrot-coloured': and up comes a moonflower: a great flower like a sunflower, only white. 

“Why,” said Dickie, “It’s as big as a dinner plate.” It was. It stood up, beautiful and stately, and turned its cream-white face to the sun.

 

“The stalk’s like a little tree,” said Dickie, and so it was.  It had great drooping leaves, and a dozen smaller white flowers stood out below it on long stalks, thinner than that need to support the moonflower itself.  “It is a moonflower of course,” he said, “if the other kind’s sunflowers. I love it!  I love it!  I love it!” 

Dickie’s adventures really begin when he tries to exchange the flowers for his only treasure, a silver rattle he calls Tinkler, which his aunt has pawned. Before long he's off on adventures with a kindly but unscrupulous tramp called Beale, sleeping out of doors in 'the bed with the green curtains' and being used – as Oliver Twist was – for a burglar's assistant. Caught, he returns home to find his house empty and his 'aunt' gone. Alone in the moonlight, he makes a pattern with the moonflower seeds, a six-pointed star. 'And then the magic began’ – and lame little Dickie Harding is transported into the past by two of E. Nesbit’s magical creatures, the white mouldiwarps, to awake as Richard Arden, heir to a great house – and no longer lame. But which life is real?

Here is Delia to tell you more. 

I can’t remember when I first read E. Nesbit or even which book I began with, except that it was not The Railway Children.  I think it must have been Harding’s Luck, though, because I am much attached to Harding’s Luck in that wide-eyed, delighted, unquestioning way one is attached to books read as a child.  I do know it is one of the influences that pushed me towards my life-long obsession with Renaissance England and time travel and even issues of class and poverty and privilege and noblesse oblige and nature and nurture, all these things being very central to both the text and subtext of Harding’s Luck.

I was also, I fear, much influenced by Nesbit’s episodic plotting, slightly arch Edwardian prose, and tendency to fall into dialect and obsolete idiom given the slightest excuse.

Many years later, I still love Harding’s Luck.  Dickie Harding is one of my favorite Nesbit heroes.  He is refreshingly matter-of-fact about his disability and the difficult, hard-scrabble life he lives with the drunken, abusive woman he calls his aunt.  They are what he knows, and he makes the best of them without self-conscious heroism.  Not unnaturally, he’s a good liar, and does so cheerfully until he learns better on his first trip into the past.  While Nesbit sets him up to become saintly, he never becomes a plaster saint, too good to be true or truly likable.  He has a sense of humor and a temper and a romantic streak that make him feel very real, and very suited to the 17^th century life he choses in the end.

Which is the life I would have chosen, too, given the way Nesbit writes about it.  The clothes, the people, the society she describes are pure story-book, absent the dirt, disease, poverty, drink, and abuse so feelingly rendered in the “modern day” Edwardian plot.  Yet it is tremendously satisfying that Dickie, who takes refuge from the miseries of his life in romances like Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, be allowed to live exactly the life he’s longed for, full of honor and love and beauty, where danger is a matter of choice, not happenstance, not to mention magical moles who twist time to give children wonderful adventures.

May I confess that when I picked up Harding’s Luck for this re-read that I’d forgotten all about the mouldiwarps?  I remembered Tinkler and the moon seeds and Dickie and the bed with green curtains fondly, and greeted their appearance with joy, but the Mouldiwarps came as a surprise.  To me, they are peripheral to Dickie’s story, and, as charming as they are, I wish she’d left them out. Perhaps this is just me not liking the book’s prequel, The House of Arden, very much, or its scatterbrained protagonists, who are constantly having to be rescued from the consequences of their shortsightedness by the family talpae ex machina.  It was a pattern that worked well enough in the Psammead books, but I just can’t warm to Edred and Elfrida—in this book, either.

Rereading Harding’s Luck has reminded me that I love Charles Kingsley, too.  Now I shall have to go reread Water Babies.  And possibly Hereward the Wake. 

  

Delia Sherman writes historical/folklore/semi-comic fairy stories with a serious twist.  Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in many anthologies.  Her adult novels are 'Through a Brazen Mirror' and 'The Porcelain Dove' (which won the Mythopoeic Award) and, with Ellen Kushner, 'The Fall of Kings'.  She is the author of two novels for younger children, 'Changeling' and 'The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen', featuring impetuous, warm-hearted Neef, the official changeling of New York's Central Park. Her most recent novel is The Freedom Maze (2011). Set in Louisiana in 1960 -- and 1860 -- it is a fantasy novel that uses the device of time-travel to explore themes of slavery, courage, womanhood, and family ties. Though ostensibly aimed at young-adult readers, the historical research underpinning the novel makes it accessible to anyone with an interest in US history. The novel won the 2012 Prometheus Award ^[1] and the Andre Norton Award.

Harding's Luck can be read online here: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/nesbit/luck/luck.html   Illustrations by HR Millar. 

 

The Snow Child

A guest post by Delia Sherman

When I was a child, I had a book called Fairy Tales of Many Lands, edited by H. Herda and published by Franklin Watts in 1956. It’s sitting by my desk as I type, its disintegrating cover patched by my mother, some time in the early 60’s, with lavender and blue flowered Contac paper. It was originally published in German, which explains the extremely idiosyncratic choice of tales (“The Good Shepherd”? “The Gnome’s Advice”? “The Enchanted Hill?”), the unfamiliar artists (Gerhard Grossman? Hilde Koeppen? Ursula Wendorff-Weidt?), and the stiff, translated prose. In any case, I pored over its strange tales and sketchy wash illustrations with the single-hearted obsession of a child in love with a book. There’s not a single story in there that hasn’t influenced me in some way or another, including the ones I hated (“The Weathercock” and “The Wonderful Coffee Mill,” if you’re curious). But the one that really got me where I lived was a Russian folk tale called “The Snow Child.

It’s not a well-known story, so here’s a summary:

A childless couple celebrate the first snowfall of winter by sculpting a snow baby. A stranger walks by, and the snow baby stretches, laughs, and becomes a perfect, pale baby girl with blue eyes and hair like starlight. The couple, delighted, take her home, put her in their empty cradle, and call her Snowflake.

Snowflake grows quickly into a beautiful, good, obedient, merry child, who helps her mother around the house and is beloved by everyone who sees her. All winter she laughs and plays with the village children, but when the spring comes, she turns pale and quiet and takes to hiding in shady corners. Come midsummer, she agrees to go out into the woods to celebrate with her friends. But when they press her to leap over the midsummer bonfire, she slips away into the woods and heads towards the mountains to the north.

When Snowflake fails to return from the bonfire with the other children, the distracted parents search the forest until the village wise woman tells them to stop. Their daughter was the gift of King Winter, who has undoubtedly taken her back into his frozen kingdom. They should be grateful for the gift and stop mourning.

In the meantime, Snowflake journeys through the woods, having adventures with a pair of lost bear cubs, turning down an offer to be Queen of a pond of musical Frogs, and sleeping under an oak tree, watched over by kindly giants, squirrels, and dwarves. She reunites the cubs with their mother and begs a ride from a skeptical eagle, who carries her to his eyrie. That night, King Winter appears to tell her that she is a snow child, whose real home is a crystal palace behind the moon. He will take her there, but first she must return to her parents and tell them goodbye. A flurry of snowflakes carries her back to her village, where she appears to her parents and tells them to be glad for her because she’s going home. Then the sun rises and she melts and rises as a cloud to heaven.

It is, of course, a fable about children dying, right on up there with the death of Little Nell in its sentimental piety. The oldest versions, referenced in the scholarly literature as tale-type 703, end at the midsummer bonfire, with the snow maiden giving into peer pressure and evaporating up to heaven, leaving everyone to wonder what has become of her. Another variant has her growing up, falling in love, and melting from the heat of her sweetheart’s first kiss.

I like H. Herda’s version better.

This Snowflake may be a compendium of Victorian virtues, but she’s anything but passive. And she’s got a strong sense of self-preservation as well as a good heart. She runs away from the fire—and the insensitive children who are pressuring her to jump it. She knows how to catch trout with her bare hands and get honey from a hive. She’s polite to frogs and wolves alike and she isn’t afraid of flying over ravines and gullies on an eagle’s back. She’s not afraid to die.

There’s a reason that the spine of Fairy Tales from Many Lands is broken at the illustration of Snowflake in the eagle’s nest, looking longingly at the moon. As a child, I was asthmatic, at a time when the treatment for asthma was pretty much a hot humidifier and Vicks Vaporub for mild attacks, and the hospital, an oxygen tent, and prayer for more severe ones. Every time I couldn’t breathe, I was sure I was going to die. And even though I was all too obviously not good, obedient, pious, industrious, or beloved by all who beheld me, I found hope in Snowflake’s after-evaporation reunion with her brother and sister snowflakes.

The comfort I found in Snowflake’s death is why I’m so appalled by the 20th Century’s cultural redefinition of fairy tales as simplistic, sanitized, happily-ever-after stories of heterosexual romance for children. Yes, Fairy Tales of Many Lands was published for children, and I can’t read it now without wincing at the slightly twee tone of the prose (“Does this child really want to go up to the sky, this bewitching little child whom no one can resist?”). And yet the stories confront the bitter side of human relations as well as the sweet, and the protagonists triumph over bandits and malicious friends as well as giants and dragons. With few exceptions, the girls in these stories are as active and clever as the boys, and their rewards are not restricted to marriage.

Reading the story now, it seems odd to me that I identified so strongly with Snowflake. Where she revived in the cold, I withered and wheezed. Where she was slender and dainty and blonde, I was plump and bespectacled and mousy brown. I was too allergic to animals to have a pet, let alone romp with bears, and couldn’t even play outside at recess, let alone go adventuring in the woods. I was afraid of heights. And my parents, while they loved me, did not approach the standards set by old Ivan and Maria. Yet her story was, on one level, mine. We were both children adopted by much older parents when we were babies, we were only children, and we were the gift of a stranger. Neither of us fit the norms of the world we’d been brought into. Both of us longed for a home we could hardly imagine, among people who not only loved us, but knew and accepted us for what we were.

Snowflake had to evaporate to find her home. I only had to grow up.

As an author, I have retold “The Snow Child” only once, in a story called “The Printer’s Daughter,” written for the Windling/Datlow fairy tale anthology Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears. My chance-child is made of paper, not snow, and her adventures take place in the wilderness of Elizabethan London rather than in a Russian forest. Frisket is a post-modern heroine, fully conscious that she’s not human, always longing to go back to paper and ink. Which she does, in the end, with the help of a scruffy poet. It’s one of my favorite pieces of my own fiction, drawing on all the Elizabethan prose I read for my degree in Renaissance studies as well as on “The Snow Child.” But it’s not the only piece of fiction that story has touched. Almost everything I write has got a foundling in it somewhere, a child out of place or out of time, raised and loved by those who have no blood kinship with it. Like Snowflake, each of these foundlings is and is not me, their stories rooted in mine and branching from it, like tributaries from the river that is my drive to write.

Delia Sherman writes historical/folklore/semi-comic fairy stories with a serious twist.  Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in many anthologies.  Her adult novels are 'Through a Brazen Mirror' and 'The Porcelain Dove' (which won the Mythopoeic Award) and, with fellow-fantasist Ellen Kushner, 'The Fall of Kings'.  She has also written two wonderful novels for younger children, 'Changeling' and 'The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen', featuring impetuous, warm-hearted Neef, the official changeling of New York's Central Park. "Kind of bi-cultural, human and faery", Neef is always getting into scrapes - as you might expect when the Wild Hunt howls on autumn nights in Central Park, fox spirits and moss women live in the woods, and the odd Fictional Character such as the Water Rat or Stuart Little may be found down by the lake.

Delia is an active member of the Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts and a founding member of the board of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, dedicated to art found  in between genres and crossing boundaries.  She lives – where else? – in New York City with Ellen Kushner, travels whenever she gets the chance and writes wherever she happens to be.  Her latest book is The Freedom Maze, about a supposedly white child magically transported to the time of her ancestors who were slave-owners and slaves in the old South.

Picture Credits: 

The Snow Child by Victor Vasetnov

The Snow Maiden by A Vedernikov
Black and white photographs of snowflakes by Wilson Bentley (1865-1931)