This is a book very close to my heart, and in my top ten of my all-time favourite classic children's books. I first read this when I was 8 or 9, and have re-read it many times since. In fact my copy is looking decidedly battered and worse for wear (you always know you're on to a good book when the cover threatens to fall off). In many ways this is an underrated novel of E. Nesbit, and I will readily admit it is not one of her best. Nonetheless, I still love it more than 'The Railway Children', 'The Treasure Seekers', etc, with perhaps the exception of 'The Story of the Amulet' (the sequel to 'Five Children and It'), which comes a very close second.The story concerns three children, two brothers (Gerald and Jimmy), and their sister, Cathy. They are on holiday, away from their parents (don't all the best adventures happen on these types of occasions?), and staying in Cathy's boarding school under the supervision of the French schoolmistress, who sits around looking wistful. To break the monotony of the boarding house, they decide to explore the local countryside, and get hopelessly lost. They come across a hole in a hedge which leads to an underground passage, which itself leads them into a beautiful garden with an ornate castle at its centre. The garden is seemingly deserted, and the feeling of magic grows as they come to the entrance of a maze. Following a scarlet thread, which brings them to the maze's epicentre, they discover a sleeping princess, who Jimmy wakens with a smacker on her cheek (Gerald ought to have done this as he was the eldest, but he chickened out). After providing a feast for them in the castle (bread and cheese) the princess turns out not to be a princess after all, but a girl named Mabel. Nonetheless she does possess a magic ring...'The Enchanted Castle' is a very episodic, with the children having different adventures in each chapter. What joins the chapters together to a unified whole is the enchanted ring. Through its powers they can become invisible and make wishes. They help the local policeman catch a burglar, make the statues in the garden come alive, and help the French schoolteacher find her long lost love. The wishes they make also quite naturally get them into all sorts of scrapes, including getting the ring stuck on their finger, growing too tall in 'Alice in Wonderland' style, and making inanimate objects come alive into 'Uglie-Wuglies', more terrifying than it sounds. Throughout all this, Nesbit writes in her typically relaxed, natural style, and her characters, while not well-rounded, talk and act like real children (albeit from 1907). It is this inherent realism that makes the magical elements seem so real. Special mention should also go to H. R. Millar, who illustrated the original book with evocative line drawings, effectively capturing the main elements of the story. In short, I can't praise this book highly enough. As the tattered state of my personal copy can testify, I love it to bits.
When three children discover a castle, a sleeping princess, and a magic ring over their summer holiday, what they find are magics false and true and tricky, beginning them on a rambling journey of enchanted adventure. The Enchanted Castle is a book of fluff and whimsy, but it's not without heart. Much of the plot is the near-episodic doing and undoing of mischievous magicstales of "be careful what you wish for," but never quite in the way either characters or audience expect. Characterization is slightly more colorful than realistic, and Nesbit's voice is wry, humorous, and hugely enjoyable to readand while it's antiquated, that serves to make it quaint rather than unapproachable. These adventures are simply fun, and the book's other aspects help to sustain their longevity, but for me they nonetheless began to run a little long. It's not that aren't some wonderful moments: it's just that they begin to run together after a while, with too little forward movement to give them purpose. Luckily the book's final third revives it, rediscovering the plot to give the story backbone. And what a plot it is: there's still plenty of fluff and fun and silly character interaction, but the truth of the remarkable enchanted castle is original and gently breathtaking. In the end, sprinkled selectively within the froth are a few sympathetic events, some beautiful images, and true enchantmentwhich is never a small thing to find, and in The Enchanted Castle it twinkles brilliantly from the hidden corners of our own real world. This book is engaging, color, clever, unusual, and well stands the test of timeand though its architecture was not always to my personal taste, I enjoyed it. I recommend it.
What do You think about The Enchanted Castle (1994)?
E. Nesbit's classic story about children who stay at boarding school for the holidays and find an enchanted castle with majic objects, hidden inside a everyday great house.While the story is interesting and well worth reading for someone who likes reading historic fiction, Nesbit's day has passed and I think it would be a rare child who would be able to enjoy this story today. The Enchanted Castle is full of references to objects and food that are no longer common but the difficulty in reading it stems from the romanticised and very twee viewpoint of childhood held in the early 1900's.The children themselves are quite unconvincing (have children changed that much since it was written? Or is it merely our ideas about children that have changed?) and the situations are fantastical, in a good way, but unlikely. The story takes off best after we actually start upon the 'enchanted' part of it, so not really until page 75.
—Deborah Ideiosepius
When my children were little we read, I thought, all the E. Nesbit books and loved them. (We also loved Edward Eager and Jane Langton and...others who have the delicious knack of making ordinary worlds shift to extraordinary happenings).Somehow I missed this one, which I picked up the other day at a rival's bookshop (well, there are no rivals in the book world, not really).It has all the pleasures of a good E. Nesbit, and I much enjoyed it; a group of children, a magic ring, a castle, gardens, reunited lovers...oh, everything. And Nesbit is very true to the world of the imaginative child. At least the imaginative Edwardian child. Now, my kids, who are now in their 30's and 20's, never minded in the least that these books were somewhat different in the social scene than their own world, but I found myself wondering as I read how my grandchildren, if I had any, would react. (well, I think MY grandchildren would love it, because surely a taste for the remarkable is in the genetic mix).And I think surely bookish imaginative children (and grownups who still have that quality within) will adore E. Nesbit's writings. Yes. Don't miss them, grab whatever comes to hand (and this one is just dandy).
—Kathy
There are two types of enchantment in this book. One is the everyday sort, evidenced by how enthralled the reader might be as they proceed through the book, and especially by the young charmer Gerald who sweet-talks his way through pretty much every situation. This is enchantment that lives up to the term's origins, where chanting, speaking, singing and silent perusal of words creates the magic that keeps us literally in its spell.Then there is the sort of enchantment that manifests itself most strikingly in this book, the kind described eloquently by Nesbit herself in Chapter Nine: "There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs forever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets and the like, almost anything may happen." And in The Enchanted Castle it inevitably does.The theme of the book can be described as "Be careful what you wish for." Siblings Gerald, Kathleen and James find themselves absolutely free to enjoy their affluent middle-class summer holiday in a West of England private school, near the fictional village of Liddlesby. A youthful expedition takes them into the grounds of Yalding Castle where they meet with housekeeper's daughter Mabel and find that magic of the everyday sort gets rapidly superceded by enchantment that makes their holidays unforgettable.Nesbit wrote for a middle-class audience of more than a century ago and sensibilities in manners and language have shifted over that time, but not so much that we can't have sympathy for the children that Nesbit has conjured up for this tale. Witty resourceful Gerald steals the show but Mabel impresses too, and Mademoiselle's literal translations into English of French vocabulary and idioms are well and humorously observed (no doubt informed by Edith's own childhood education in France). The joyous culmination of the enchantments has much in common with 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' chapter of the nearly contemporary Wind in the Willows; both works perhaps were a kind of final golden vision of Edwardian England before the horrors of the Great War were visited on all and sundry.
—Chris
