By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Which book for children is this? Written by one of the twentieth century’s most popular British authors of books for children, it features a young girl who is sent away from her parents to stay in a strange house. Finding herself in the large house’s spare room, the girl steps into a wardrobe, only to be transported into a magical fantasy world where everything is cloaked in white and silver. The book also features a lion, a lantern, and a White Witch.
Although the above summary describes The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, it’s also an accurate description of a far less famous book for children: The Magic World (1912), a collection of short stories by E. Nesbit. And whilst Nesbit’s books The Railway Children and Five Children and It are still reasonably well-known (though I wonder how many children in 2025 still read them?), many of Nesbit’s other books which were once popular, such as The Magic City, The Enchanted Castle, and The Wouldbegoods, are far less familiar titles now than they were a century ago.
The Magic World would also doubtless fall into this latter category. None of the stories it contains are as famous as The Railway Children, but stories such as ‘The Magician’s Heart’, which features a fairy known as the White Witch, and ‘Septimus Septimusson’, which boasts among its characters a talking lion, suggest that just as the Bastable children may have played a role in inspiring Lewis to create the Pevensie siblings, so The Magic World may well have been part of the imaginative fabric that Lewis used to weave the world of Narnia. And it is another story from the collection, ‘The Aunt and Amabel’, which most clearly suggests this.
‘The Aunt and Amabel’ begins with the titular Amabel, a young girl staying with her great-aunt and great-uncle, being ‘sent to Coventry’ – and to the ‘best bedroom’ in the house – after a well-meaning gardening mishap displeases her great-aunt. After sniffing the contents of some bottles located in the room – bottles which contain ‘something like very old scent’ – Amabel browses the ABC timetable, the only book in the room, and finds locations listed including ‘Whereyouwantogoto’ (sic) and ‘Bigwardrobeinspareroom’. The timetable implores the reader: ‘You had better go now.’
Nesbit’s narrator tells us she cannot be sure whether the scent in the bottles ‘had anything to do with what happened’. Is Amabel on some drug-induced trip? She duly heeds the command of the timetable and steps inside the wardrobe, whose interior is a ‘crystal cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station’ which is ‘lighted by stars’ with a full moon above the station clock. There are no numbers on the clock: just ‘Now’ placed twelve times around it, where the figures one to twelve ought to appear.
A porter in white satin appears and takes her luggage, which is the ABC book she brought with her into the wardrobe. She is handed a mother-of-pearl ticket and boards a train, where she sits and reads children’s stories while enjoying food which includes peppermint creams, lemonade, and vanilla ice (sadly no Turkish delight, such as Edmund is treated to in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).
When the train arrives as Whereyouwantogoto, Amabel disembarks onto an ivory platform and is greeted by the mayor, who reminds her of her Uncle George, only a more deferential version. The mayor and townsfolk tell Amabel that they have her sympathy over her misjudged attempt to please her great-aunt by digging up the flowers in the greenhouse and putting them in the bare flowerbed. Amabel is seated on a throne of ivory, silver, and pearl, and is the honoured guest of the town.
‘The Aunt and Amabel’, then, is a portal fantasy story which, like many such stories, offers the child-protagonist a form of wish-fulfilment. Unfairly (as she sees it) punished and banished upstairs for trying to do a good deed, Amabel finds herself vindicated in this other world, where she is guest of honour and finds her great-uncle and a host of other characters ready to take her side and redeem her for her gardening faux-pas.
Amabel, for her part, takes responsibility for her faults, telling the assembled people of this strange land that she should have stopped and thought. She meant well, but she nevertheless rushed into her plan without thinking it through. And the wish-fulfilment aspect of the story is confirmed when, no sooner has Amabel expressed a heartfelt wish that her great-aunt were there, than ‘Auntie’ promptly appears, and apologises for being so quick to punish her great-niece, whose heart was, after all, in the right place.
The story ends on this note of reconciliation and understanding: none of the nasty and sticky ends to which aunts come a-cropper in Saki’s brilliant short stories for an older readership (such as his masterpiece ‘The Lumber-Room’). Indeed, it may have been sentimental children’s stories like Nesbit’s which inspired Saki to offer a darker twist on the aunt-child relationship in his stories.
But for all its sentimentality and tweeness, ‘The Aunt and Amabel’ is a nice little story with beautiful imagery, such as the vision of Amabel and her great-aunt embracing ‘beside a white foaming fountain on a marble terrace, where white peacocks came to drink’. It may be a small story but parts of it may well have found their way into C. S. Lewis’s imagination when he created the magical world of Narnia, nearly forty years later.