The Story of the Amulet

The Story of the Amulet is one of the books by E Nesbit I'm pretty sure I didn't read while I was a child. I picked it out recently because I read somewhere recently that her socialist beliefs were very apparent in the book. Which indeed is the case.

I would imagine the time travel aspect of the story would have had more impact when it was first written. As two of my son's crazes at the moment are the Back to the Future films, and Dr Who, you can imagine there is a fair amount of discussion at the moment in our house about time paradoxes. When reading the book I wondered how new the ideas would have been to readers at the time it was published. The Amulet came 10 years or so after HG Wells' The Time Machine, and there is a character in the book named Wells, presumably after HG, who was a friend of E Nesbit and fellow member of the fabian society. As far as I remember though, the time traveller in Wells' book goes forward, not backward, in time.

Some quick research shows there were other early examples of time travel novels (eg A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain). I guess I am wondering how you judge a novel, when your opinion will change based on whether an idea/approach/genre is new to you. And also, once you find out more about the author and other contemporary works, your opinion might change again as to whether a book is exceptional or groundbreaking.

I am the sort of person who likes finding out more about how things are created or written or made, and in general this enhances my enjoyment of whatever it is. But I suppose if you discovered something was heavily copied from someone else's work that could make you rate it less highly. It's an interesting consideration when looking at children's books, in that children are perhaps more likely to be coming to an idea as being fresh and new, than an adult trying to judge the book on their behalf.

Lots to think about.

I also found that the children, and the way they interact is very believable and real. I have read that E Nesbit was one of the first authors to write about children in this way. But again as a modern reader we are so used to reading about children in this way that in itself, it does not seem remarkable.

To sum up my feelings about the book, at halfway through I would have said I didn't enjoy it as much as the other "magical companion" Nesbit books, but I did like the ending and felt it resolved in a very satisfactory way. I'd like to read The Treasure Seekers now, another one I don't remember reading, although I had a copy of The Wouldbegoods and read it more than once.