Five-minute digest
Five Children and It
Summary
Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane, with their baby brother the Lamb, have come from two years in Camden Town to a white house in the Kent countryside near Rochester, between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit. Their father is called away on business and their mother goes to nurse their sick grandmother, leaving them in the care of the nursemaid Martha and the other servants. Digging in the gravel-pit, they uncover a cross, furry creature with eyes on long horns like a snail's, bat's ears, and monkey's hands: a Psammead, or Sand-fairy, thousands of years old, which once granted Stone Age children a Megatherium for breakfast. It agrees to give them one wish a day, which will last until sunset, and at their request arranges that the servants will never notice the magic. Every wish goes wrong. Wishing to be as beautiful as the day, they are shut out of their own house by Martha, who does not recognize them. Boundless wealth fills the pit with gold guineas that no Rochester shopkeeper will change, and the boys are taken to the police. Robert's grumble that he wishes everyone wanted the Lamb leads a lady in a carriage and a camp of gipsies to try to claim the baby. Wings carry them over the countryside, but after taking food from a clergyman's larder and leaving money and a note, they fall asleep on a church tower and wake wingless and locked in; the clergyman and his gamekeeper find them. A castle wish puts them under siege by armored knights, with an invisible dinner. Robert grows eleven feet tall after a fight with the baker's boy and is exhibited at a fair for fifteen shillings. A careless wish that the Lamb would grow up gives them a grown young man who bicycles off with a lady and wants nothing to do with them. Cyril's reading of The Last of the Mohicans brings a war party of Indians to the gravel-pit. At last Jane wishes that their mother could find lovely jewels at home, and the jewels of the local great lady, Lady Chittenden, appear in their mother's room, threatening her and the servants with suspicion of theft. Anthea promises the Psammead that if it will undo the mischief they will never ask for another wish; it grants a string of last wishes, asks one for itself, that they may never tell grown-ups about it, and disappears into the sand. The book was first serialized in The Strand Magazine in 1902 as The Psammead, or the Gifts, with illustrations by H. R. Millar, and published the same year in book form by T. Fisher Unwin. The children return in The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet.
Top Lessons
Be careful what you wish for
Every wish the children make seems wonderful until it is granted. Beauty gets them locked out of their own house, wealth makes them look like thieves, and wings strand them on a church tower. Nesbit shows that a wish can grant exactly what was asked for and still miss what was really wanted.
Words spoken in anger can hurt
Robert says in a temper that he wishes everyone wanted the Lamb, and the wish comes true in a way that nearly loses them their baby brother. Later Cyril wishes the Lamb would grow up, and the baby they love is replaced by a stranger. The children learn that careless words about the people we love have consequences.
Honesty when no one will believe you
The servants cannot see the magic, so the children often have no story anyone will believe. On the church tower and with their mother at the end, they still try to tell the truth, and Robert repeats their father's advice that those who do nothing wrong and speak the truth need not be afraid.
Verified Quotes
“For London is like prison for children, especially if their relations are not rich.”
Frequently cited
“Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof.”
“It is wonderful how quickly you get used to things, even the most astonishing.”
“I wish we were all as beautiful as the day”
“Robert was not proud of himself for having been so cross, and the others were not proud of him either.”
“there is only one safe way of taking things out of little children's eyes, and that is with your own soft wet tongue.”
“Father says we need never be afraid if we don't do anything wrong and always speak the truth.”
“They'd get hold of me, and they wouldn't wish silly things like you do, but real earnest things”
Medical Lens
This is a comic fantasy with little medical content. Its background is an ordinary Edwardian household: the mother is away nursing an ailing grandmother, the baby is said to be benefiting from country air, and the children doctor one another with nursery remedies such as licking sand from a baby's eye. The recurring comic misfortune of missed meals, in Chapters 1, 4, and 6, treats hunger as the most immediate hardship a child can feel. There is no illness or medicine of note.
- Chapter 3
When the Lamb gets sand and then ginger-beer in his eyes, Jane cleans them with her tongue, which the narrator calls the only safe way.
- Chapter 6
Inside the wished-for castle, Martha's dinner is invisible and cannot even be felt, and the four children share out a few broken biscuits from Cyril's pocket.