I haven't got round to her until now, but Edith Nesbit, who wrote as E. Nesbit, should have been one of the first names on my list to explore. She's a foundation stone of children's fantasy and she wrote a whole slew of books that deserve to be read for this project. I started out with 'Five Children and It', a 1902 book originally serialised as 'The Psammead, or The Gifts' in 'The Strand Magazine', like Sherlock Holmes. It became the first in a trilogy, to be followed by 'The Phoenix and the Carpet' and 'The Story of the Amulet'.

I'd heard of it and may even have seen one of its adaptations for British television but I haven't read it and didn't recall what it was about. It turns out to be the template for later books such as Edward Eager's 'Half Magic' in that it sets up the means by which a set of children can make wishes that come true but backfire on them in humorous and awkward ways. Eventually, with a better understanding of what to ask for and how to do it, they learn valuable lessons about life that ought to serve them well as they grow up. In other words, lots of fun but also some value.

In this instance, there are four of them—Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane—with a fifth often in tow, namely the Lamb, the baby of the family, who doesn't take part in shenanigans so much as complicate them. His name is Hilary, but they call him the Lamb after his first word was "Baa". With a similar wordplay mindset, Cyril is often Squirrel and Anthea is often Panther. While the kids are playful, as kids in the country tend to be, Nesbit is playful too and that shines through her writing.

As playful as she gets, she also gets right down to business. These siblings arrive at the White House (not that one) on page one and promptly get out of their parents' way. There's a gravel pit on one side of the house and a chalk quarry on the other, so they wander over to the former and start digging their way to Australia. Needless to say, they don't succeed but they do turn up "something brown and furry and fat" that turns out to be a sand fairy, or Psammead. And sand fairies grant wishes.

Now, they don't know that to begin with. All they know is that they've found something unusual which translates to the most fascinating thing in the world at that moment in time. It's Anthea who figures out what it does by simply stating that she wishes it would come out. So it does and tells them that it's been asleep for a long, long time and so can't grant their second wish. They will have to settle for one a day. And so we're in motion, a mere handful of pages into a novel of a couple of hundred pages.

As with much classic British fantasy, there's a powerful sense of whimsy here but Nesbit is keen to explain things away too, merely not in the way we expect. For instance, when the Psammead says it's been asleep a long time, it means since prehistoric times, when people wished for food rather than more abstract things like to be as beautiful as the day. There was generally a daily routine. The kids would have gone down to the sand, dug up a sand fairy and wished for megatherium or ichthyosaurus, something to feed the family. And, after they're done, at the end of the day, the unused remainder turns to stone or disappears entirely.

That also means that there's a sense of omniscience here that isn't explored. The Psammead is clearly knowledgeable but with contemporary knowledge as well as what it would have known a bunch of millennia ago. Why that is, we don't know, and nobody asks, but that would have to be one of my daily wishes, should I have dug up this sand fairy. "I wish you to explain how you know so much about things like fossils when you were asleep during the centuries in which we found them." Ichthyosaurus steaks can wait until tomorrow.

Of course, these kids, being kids, wish to be as beautiful as the day, which backfires horribly. It works, of course, but now they don't recognise each other. The Lamb doesn't recognise them either and, more importantly, neither does their cook, who won't even let them into their own house because they're strangers, however beautiful they happen to be. You won't be surprised to find that they wish to be rich beyond avarice next, so the Psammead fills the gravel pit with gold and they stuff their pockets and go to town, only to have trouble spending spade guineas and end up at the police station.

And so we go. What shocked me the most was how conversational Nesbit is in her writing, as if she always intended these stories to be read aloud to each other. She offers advice to readers, teaches us things—odd things like how to train your brain to be a human alarm clock—and even chats with us. "Have you ever been up at five o'clock on a fine summer morning?" she asks us at one point. "All the shadows go the opposite way to the way they do in the evening, which is very interesting and makes you feel as though you were in a new other world."

That unusual take on perspective that's exquisitely accepting in a childlike way is part of what makes this magic and it's such an integral part of this novel that it would seem wrong without it. Sure, the little stories are fun. I had a blast with all of them, like Robert suddenly becoming a giant and earning fifteen shillings in the fair; or running home to find that it's transformed into a besieged castle; or getting stranded in the room at the top of a church tower after your wings have disappeared at the end of the day. These are all riotous, anarchic, glorious fun with an accidental wish that everyone would want; the Lamb the most riotous, anarchic and glorious of them all. But it's the little touches that really sold this to me.

It's in details like Anthea knowing what the time is even though the clock is wrong. "At the very moment when she opened her eyes she heard the black-and-gold clock down in the dining room strike eleven. So she knew it was three minutes to five. The black-and-gold clock always struck wrong, but it was all right when you knew what it meant. It was like a person talking a foreign language. If you know the language it is just as easy to understand as English. And Anthea knew the clock language." This is such a glorious point of view and it translates ably to how the children gradually figure out the wish language.

It's in the difficulty of trying to eat marble food in a castle that's mostly in phase with a house. It's in having admiration for the rich outfit of a knight, even though his outfit completely fails every historical accuracy test, because it's "exactly like a picture" and Robert "knew no more of heraldry or archaeology than the gifted artists who usually drew the pictures for the historical romances". It's in most things in London being the "wrong sort of shape—all straight lines and flat streets, instead of being all sorts of odd shapes, like things are in the country."

Everything about this book is joyous, right down to learning what Germans are. They're "little waggly things you see with microscopes. They give you every illness you can think of." Crucially, that joy feels universal. Nesbit was a Victorian. She was born in 1848 and she's been gone for a century, dying in 1924, but references that demonstrate that this book was set in 1902 aside, it feels almost contemporary in its accessibility. Even when Nesbit sounds old-fashioned, she still gets her point across wonderfully. I've quoted a lot from this book already but I'll wrap with my favourite: "I shall not tell you whether anyone cried, nor, if so, how many cried, nor who cried. You will be better employed in making up your minds what you would have done if you had been in their place." ~~ Hal C F Astell