Five Children and It
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Five Children and It is a children's book by Edith Nesbit, first published in 1902. It is the first of a trilogy.
Contents |
Details of the book
Characters
The five children, brothers and sisters, are:
- Cyril, known as Squirrel
- Anthea, known as Panther
- Robert, known as Bobs
- Jane, known as Pussy
- and their baby brother Hilary, known always as the Lamb.
"It" is the Psammead: see below.
Plot
Like Nesbit's Railway Children, the story begins when a group of children move from London to the countryside of Kent. While playing in a gravel pit soon after the move, they uncover a rather grumpy, ugly and occasionally malevolent sand-fairy known as the Psammead who is compelled to grant one wish of theirs per day. (The name Psammead appears to be a coinage of Nesbit's, from the Greek ψάμμος "sand" after the pattern of dryad, naiad, oread, etc.).
The children's wishes are:
- To be as beautiful as the day. (Because of problems discovered immediately afterwards, subsequent wishes are all with the proviso that the house servants should not be able to perceive the results of the wish.)
- To be rich beyond the dreams of avarice (refined to: That the gravel pit be full of gold pieces: specifically, spade guineas.)
- That everyone would love the Lamb. This wish produces the result that various people attempt to kidnap the child.
- That the four older children would grow wings, and be able to fly.
- That their house would become a castle under siege by knights.
- That Robert would be bigger than the baker's boy. (He becomes about eleven feet tall.)
- That the misbehaving Lamb would "Grow up" (He becomes an unpleasant and condescending man)
- That they would have an encounter with Red Indians.
- An assortment of simultaneous wishes relating to some stolen jewels, in return for a promise that they would never ask for another wish.
Almost all effects of wishes end at sundown.
Sequels
The book was clearly originally intended to leave readers in suspense: it ends
- They did see it [the Psammead] again, of course, but not in this story. And it was not in a sand-pit either, but in a very, very, very different place. It was in a— But I must say no more.
The story was continued in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and then The Story of the Amulet (1906), in both of which the same characters reappeared.
Film versions
In 1991 the BBC turned the story into a six-part series. In the UK it was released under the story's original title; in the USA it was released as The Sand Fairy.
A movie, starring Freddie Highmore (played Charlie Bucket in the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Kenneth Branagh, Zoë Wanamaker, and Norman Wisdom, with Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead, was released in 2004. There are some differences between the film and the book: the movie is based on the children's father going to war and their mother looking after wounded soldiers as a nurse. As a result the children end up staying at their cousin's house, where they meet the sand-fairy. The movie got great reviews, although people who read the book were disappointed because of the huge changes from the book to the movie.
A NHK/Tokyo Movie Shinsha production named Onegai! Samia Don was broadcast from 2 April 1985 to 4 February 1986 with a total of 78 episodes produced.