Edward Eager’s (1911 - 1964) quartet of books for children about time are strange and uneven. So far, I’ve not been able to find out much more about Eager than Wikipedia mentions but I might be looking in the wrong places. He was a playwright and lyricist but appears to have written the books to please his son. His lasting love on E. Nesbit’s books is clear through out the books on time (Half Magic (1954), Knight’s Castle (1956), Magic by the Lake (1957), The Time Garden (1958)) which feature four children who go on adventures whilst their parents are otherwise engaged and he constantly references her and her work. Sometimes this is slightly ad nauseam.
In Half Magic, the four children find an old coin which, when rubbed, transports them through time and allows them to have adventures before returning home. They begin to find out that magic has strict rules to protect itself and the historical world, so avoiding the Grandfather Paradox). The following books in the sequence feature the next generation of children whose parents and aunts and uncles were the children of the first book, so setting up a recursive fantasy in which the children meet (and the later children rescue) the old generation from cannibals. The books echo the sense that order must be maintained in timeslip worlds (which Philippa Pearce uses in Tom’s Midnight Garden) to maintain the world of the here and now. In Knight’s Castle, the adventurers slide into an Arthurian court which comes across as more of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court than the Morte D’Arthur where Merlin repeats the counsel that time and history must be preserved and Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe is the setting for Magic by the Lake.
The Time Garden is the best and perhaps the worst of all four books. It is the best in terms of Eager’s comfort with story telling and he ventures into Paul Revere’s Ride, an underground rail road for slaves in the Civil War and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women where the children see the courage to stand up for liberty. Given its retelling, I do wonder if this is a clear joining with a prevailing mood in the US against McCarthy’s communist witch hunts. It is certainly quieter, if less subtle, than either James Thurber (whose The Wonderful O challenges the misappropration of language) or Henry Miller’s The Crucible. It also closes the circle since Aunt Katharine, the relative with whom they stay, pushes them into the garden where they come across the Toad and the varieties of thyme.
It is truly awful in its slapdash use of history and the (ahem) accent and dialect of the Natterjack toad which reminds me of Dick Van Dyke’s appalling ‘Cockney’ accent in the film of Mary Poppins. (Since the film was released in 1964 I really can’t entirely blame it.)
Eager’s adventures move from what come across as retellings of Nesbit’s stories and into books he might have been reading to his son and so echo a tradition of books which play with time and its notions. They are certainly an entertaining read but perhaps slight. It echoes a sense of accessible exchange of cultures and texts in literature which is accessible though not yet post-modernist. Eager is interesting but not perhaps one of the great voices of children’s fantasy.
Updated: a couple of spelling corrections but no change to the original text.
I beg to differ. I am rereading Half Magic to my granddaughter, laughing giddily about Carrie the cat’s attempts to speak and her conclusion that “fitzsilence is fitzgolden.” These books are not slight. They are clever and witty and appeal to the funny bone of a 53 year old and and an 8 year old. Certainly the humor and foreigner imitations (“how” and “chop chop” are slapstick from the 50s/60s but that’s silliness at its best. For example, Peter Seller’s Clouseau–are you going to denigrate his terrible attempt at a French accent? And have you ever watched the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope “Road to” series? Sheer fun. Your comments show how, in our 21st century sophistication, we can’t even appreciate these tender jokes. I recently saw “Rango” and it tries so hard to be verbally clever and appeal to grownups and to pack every second with monotonous action; now that’s “ad nauseum” (and my grandkids still liked it, though I’m sure the dialogue went over their heads). In some ways, I think Edward Eager’s seven books are better than C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books; Eager’s children are more human, and their situations are closer to life, and the underlying lessons as profound if not so heavy handed.
P.S. The children did not have to rub the coin to activate the magic. Just touching it did the trick, which makes for much of the humor because at first they don’t even know what is causing their wishes to – half – come true. Brilliant!
Kimberlea, Perhaps I was a bit harsh re-reading this post some months later. Whilst I’m not a big fan of these books, they are enormous fun and I certainly did not make enough of this in the post.
The humour of the Time Garden is the best part of it but the historical aspects jar the reading for me. I have seen and enjoyed the Sellar’s Clouseau films and some of the “Road To…” series (which, sadly, did nothing for me really). I think we might be coming at Eager from slightly different angles. If I was looking at the humour we might be more in accord in seeing the Toad’s dialect as more of a send up than reality or “21st century sophistication”.
I am glad that you and your granddaughter are enjoying them though.
I see you are researching/writing a book on a history of children’s fantasy. I would be very interested in knowing how that is coming along, at ravenapark@aol.com. I read some of your links this morning and am trying to get past the lingo to discover what seems to be the cutting edge of literary criticism, for instance, this would be my first exposure to the term “word cloud.”
Concerning the original topic: certainly in retrospect, Eager is engaging in broad stereotypes, but broad stereotypes provide a source of humor that especially engages young children (and older persons ?). Have you ever heard an American child attempt a British accent? It is marvelous fun — and dreadful.
I’ve been rereading the Eager–much as I love him, as an adult I admit I am irritated that he dispensed of the conflicts in Knight’s Castle with blatant — what is the term? deus ex machina? Although when I read it as a child, I was completely entranced.
K, I can see it working whilst reading it as a child. I haven’t heard that attempted for several years but I think most children’s impressions are fun. I think Eager does go through quite a few scenarios really rather quickly, as if creating the book like reading to a child in the evening, where one moves on to a new episode. John Masefield does this as well in the Kay Harker books (Box of Delights & Midnight Folk).