Mary Norton: Bedknob and Broomstick
Dec. 11th, 2023 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustTo the best of my never very reliable recollection, what was in my mind when I picked up this Puffin edition, in whichever charity shop it was, went along the lines that I had read The Magic Bedknob as a child, and that I had liked it less than The Borrowers, that the magic in it had not caught my imagination; but I had never read Bonfires and Broomsticks, and here was the combined edition, why not give it a whirl?
What I did not expect was how much I would enjoy not the magic but the depiction of the children. There are three of them: "Carey was about your age, Charles was a little younger, and Paul was only six." That's an invitation to identify with Carey, isn't it? And much of the narrative follows her point of view. The two older children are not unkind to Paul, but they order him about, they don't treat him as an equal. Yet the author places him at the centre of the story. It is Paul who has observed Miss Price on her broomstick, it is Paul who produces the bedknob to be enchanted, and it is Paul to whom Miss Price gives the spell. Here's the flavour of Paul's world view:
Why would an apparently stereotypical elderly spinster choose Paradise Lost to entertain a small boy who is too young to be taught backgammon? And yet it is a good choice. There is a complicity between Paul and Miss Price, and the children who are "about your age... [and] ... a little younger" are caught between the much older and the much younger.
So it is Paul who chooses the first adventure. Carey and Charles suggest all the places that only a magic flying bed can take them - a South Sea island, the Rocky Mountains, the South Pole, the Pyramids, Tibet, the moon - but Paul is adamant: he wants to go to London. He wants to see the giant flea in the Natural History Museum, and he wants to see his mother. (I can't find any trace of the giant flea - it was only a model - though the NHM still boasts that "The Museum's collection of fleas is large and of great historical importance.&qout;) So London it is: it does not turn out well.
For the second trip, Carey prevails, and they visit a South Sea island, accompanied by Miss Price. The South Sea island lives up to expectations, with clear waters and a coral reef, sand "as smooth and fine and white as icing sugar", turtles and breadfruit and ... Well, it is as beautiful and delightful as every other Pacific island. Inevitably, then, there is a moment of fear when the two elder children are cut off from the bed by the rising tide; then, even worse, there are inevitably cannibals. This is racial stereotyping, certainly, but maybe less so in 1944 than now. But when I first read this, sometime in the 1950s or 60s, the reason my heart sank was that it was such a cliché. I wish I could produce evidence for that. Was it, in fact, as much of a trope as it is now? It's the theme of many jokes, and the internet has a wealth of cartoons on the subject (some fine examples here) many of them, I suspect, later than The Magic Bedknob.
I had certainly met the idea in Edward Eager's Magic by the Lake (published in 1957, later than The Magic Bedknob but I am pretty sure I read it earlier). This article gives some background, and also makes a case for Eager's cannibals having a better grip on the situation than the stereotype suggests.
There's another reason why Bedknob and Broomstick makes me think of Edward Eager, and that's the illustrations. These were new for the omnibus edition (in 1957), and were by Erik Blegvad, whose name I did not recognise; but the images reminded me strongly of Eager's protagonists, as drawn by N.M. Bodecker. There could be a reason for this: the two were lifelong friends and collaborators.
tl;dr version: If you read The Magic Bedknob - and when I read it as a child I probably did - expecting the sort of story E. Nesbit wrote, in which a family of children explore all the possibilities of a magic talisman, you will be disappointed at the mere two magic journeys, one of them not all that magical. But read it for itself, for its characters and its wit, and it is much improved.
This is even more true of Part Two - the story originally published as Bonfires and Broomsticks. It is a single adventure, although the bed flies several times. It takes three chapters to reach the point of take-off, and again, you can regard this as an unconscionable amount of padding, or you can enjoy the children scheming to engineer their reunion with Miss Price, and then persuading her to allow one last adventure.
They prevail - well, Carey and Charles certanly gain a degree of leverage when they discover that Paul and Miss Price have already made a trip in the bed (just as far as Blowditch, just to see if it still works). But they also argue that the enchantment of the bedknob allows them to travel anywhere in the present or in the past, and they have never made use of this latter option: "It's a pity to waste the past." I wonder whether this possibility was present in the original text, setting up a sequel already planned, or whether it was inserted when the two books were brought together, to help smooth the transition between them? If anyone has access to the original edition, I'd like to know...
Because there certainly is a transition to be smoothed. This post has been half-written for several weeks, and this is the point at which I stumble: how to describe the chage in flavour between the two parts of the present version? Planning their journey into the past, the children aim for the reign of Queen Elizabeth: since they have no idea how the magic is calibrated, they are doing pretty well to end up in London on the eve of the Great Fire, where they meet a necromancer called Emelius Jones.
The introduction of this second adult shifts the whole emphasis of the narrative: it is still seen through the eyes of the children, but it is about the adults. There is a delicate dance as they come to terms with each other's conception of magic. Miss Price, whom we are accustomed to see as a hesitant, if surprisingly successful practitioner, always on the verge of renouncing an activity which she finds suspect (though irresistible), is overawed to meet an actual necromancer - a professional. But Mr Jones is overwhelmed to meet someone who can actually perform magic, because he believes that there is no such thing. Apprenticed as a boy, he studies the heavens, learns to read the stars and gathers the ingredients for his master's potions. Only when the old man is dying does he reveal that there is no magic: it is all - though he doesn't use the word - headology. Then magic brings to his door three children from the future, and his world is turned upside down. Yet the future from which they come is familiar, because they are visiting from the village where he lived as a child...
So there's a time travel narrative (and time travel, of course, wrks both ways); there's the relationship between two solitary adults; there is an obligatory adventure with peril and last-minute rescue (the original title was Bonfires and Broomsticks, remember!); and the children continue to be sharply and entertainingly observed. But I don't seem to have anything coherent to say about any of it.
tl;dr version: Goodness, I wasn't expecting that.
So now I should probably reread The Borrowers.
What I did not expect was how much I would enjoy not the magic but the depiction of the children. There are three of them: "Carey was about your age, Charles was a little younger, and Paul was only six." That's an invitation to identify with Carey, isn't it? And much of the narrative follows her point of view. The two older children are not unkind to Paul, but they order him about, they don't treat him as an equal. Yet the author places him at the centre of the story. It is Paul who has observed Miss Price on her broomstick, it is Paul who produces the bedknob to be enchanted, and it is Paul to whom Miss Price gives the spell. Here's the flavour of Paul's world view:
Then Miss Price showed Charles and Carey how to play backgammon and lent Paul a large book full of pictures called Paradise Lost. Paul liked the book very much. He liked the smell of it and the gilt-edged pages.
Why would an apparently stereotypical elderly spinster choose Paradise Lost to entertain a small boy who is too young to be taught backgammon? And yet it is a good choice. There is a complicity between Paul and Miss Price, and the children who are "about your age... [and] ... a little younger" are caught between the much older and the much younger.
So it is Paul who chooses the first adventure. Carey and Charles suggest all the places that only a magic flying bed can take them - a South Sea island, the Rocky Mountains, the South Pole, the Pyramids, Tibet, the moon - but Paul is adamant: he wants to go to London. He wants to see the giant flea in the Natural History Museum, and he wants to see his mother. (I can't find any trace of the giant flea - it was only a model - though the NHM still boasts that "The Museum's collection of fleas is large and of great historical importance.&qout;) So London it is: it does not turn out well.
For the second trip, Carey prevails, and they visit a South Sea island, accompanied by Miss Price. The South Sea island lives up to expectations, with clear waters and a coral reef, sand "as smooth and fine and white as icing sugar", turtles and breadfruit and ... Well, it is as beautiful and delightful as every other Pacific island. Inevitably, then, there is a moment of fear when the two elder children are cut off from the bed by the rising tide; then, even worse, there are inevitably cannibals. This is racial stereotyping, certainly, but maybe less so in 1944 than now. But when I first read this, sometime in the 1950s or 60s, the reason my heart sank was that it was such a cliché. I wish I could produce evidence for that. Was it, in fact, as much of a trope as it is now? It's the theme of many jokes, and the internet has a wealth of cartoons on the subject (some fine examples here) many of them, I suspect, later than The Magic Bedknob.
I had certainly met the idea in Edward Eager's Magic by the Lake (published in 1957, later than The Magic Bedknob but I am pretty sure I read it earlier). This article gives some background, and also makes a case for Eager's cannibals having a better grip on the situation than the stereotype suggests.
There's another reason why Bedknob and Broomstick makes me think of Edward Eager, and that's the illustrations. These were new for the omnibus edition (in 1957), and were by Erik Blegvad, whose name I did not recognise; but the images reminded me strongly of Eager's protagonists, as drawn by N.M. Bodecker. There could be a reason for this: the two were lifelong friends and collaborators.
tl;dr version: If you read The Magic Bedknob - and when I read it as a child I probably did - expecting the sort of story E. Nesbit wrote, in which a family of children explore all the possibilities of a magic talisman, you will be disappointed at the mere two magic journeys, one of them not all that magical. But read it for itself, for its characters and its wit, and it is much improved.
This is even more true of Part Two - the story originally published as Bonfires and Broomsticks. It is a single adventure, although the bed flies several times. It takes three chapters to reach the point of take-off, and again, you can regard this as an unconscionable amount of padding, or you can enjoy the children scheming to engineer their reunion with Miss Price, and then persuading her to allow one last adventure.
They prevail - well, Carey and Charles certanly gain a degree of leverage when they discover that Paul and Miss Price have already made a trip in the bed (just as far as Blowditch, just to see if it still works). But they also argue that the enchantment of the bedknob allows them to travel anywhere in the present or in the past, and they have never made use of this latter option: "It's a pity to waste the past." I wonder whether this possibility was present in the original text, setting up a sequel already planned, or whether it was inserted when the two books were brought together, to help smooth the transition between them? If anyone has access to the original edition, I'd like to know...
Because there certainly is a transition to be smoothed. This post has been half-written for several weeks, and this is the point at which I stumble: how to describe the chage in flavour between the two parts of the present version? Planning their journey into the past, the children aim for the reign of Queen Elizabeth: since they have no idea how the magic is calibrated, they are doing pretty well to end up in London on the eve of the Great Fire, where they meet a necromancer called Emelius Jones.
The introduction of this second adult shifts the whole emphasis of the narrative: it is still seen through the eyes of the children, but it is about the adults. There is a delicate dance as they come to terms with each other's conception of magic. Miss Price, whom we are accustomed to see as a hesitant, if surprisingly successful practitioner, always on the verge of renouncing an activity which she finds suspect (though irresistible), is overawed to meet an actual necromancer - a professional. But Mr Jones is overwhelmed to meet someone who can actually perform magic, because he believes that there is no such thing. Apprenticed as a boy, he studies the heavens, learns to read the stars and gathers the ingredients for his master's potions. Only when the old man is dying does he reveal that there is no magic: it is all - though he doesn't use the word - headology. Then magic brings to his door three children from the future, and his world is turned upside down. Yet the future from which they come is familiar, because they are visiting from the village where he lived as a child...
So there's a time travel narrative (and time travel, of course, wrks both ways); there's the relationship between two solitary adults; there is an obligatory adventure with peril and last-minute rescue (the original title was Bonfires and Broomsticks, remember!); and the children continue to be sharply and entertainingly observed. But I don't seem to have anything coherent to say about any of it.
tl;dr version: Goodness, I wasn't expecting that.
So now I should probably reread The Borrowers.
