The Last of the Dragons and Some Others by E. Nesbit
I needed a quick win after my long break from dedicated reading. After a conversation about old children’s literature with a new friend, I decided that E. Nesbit’s The Last of the Dragons and Some Others was the answer.
I purchased this book a few months ago, under the assumption it was, at the earliest, a mid-century book. Clearly, I had no idea who E. Nesbit was. Before I reached the first page of text, I fell in love with the illustrations and doubled-back to find specifics. Erik Blegvad illustrated this collection in the 1970s, but the stories? They were originally published in 1899.
My favorite illustration by Blegvad. Yes, that’s a dragon about to swallow a town.
Surprised, I began reading and found myself falling in love with the first story. I texted my friend, who responded with a review of E. Nesbit’s written by–of all people–Gore Vidal*.
“Publishers attribute [E Nesbit’s] failure in [The United States] to a witty and intelligent prose style (something of a demerit in the land of the free) and to the fact that a good many of her books deal with magic, a taboo subject nowadays.”
Ouch.
From what I read, I agreed with his take on “witty and intelligent prose style.” Take my favorite back-and-forth from the first story The Last of the Dragons.
I will kill the dragon,” said the Prince firmly, “or perish in the attempt.”
“It’s no use your perishing,” said the Princess.
“It’s the least I can do,” said the Prince.
“What I’m afraid of is that it’ll be the most you can do,” said the Princess.
Gold. Love it.
But after this first (and best) story, I start to disagree with most reviewers out there–Gore Vidal included–who say that E. Nesbit didn’t write for children.
Yes, there is witty story-telling that most children won’t appreciate.
And yes, she often takes on a sensible British tone appropriate for a schoolmaster.
But the stories themselves could never, imho, be broadly enjoyed by adults on account of their often tedious simplicity.
In googling for this article, I came across a brilliant listicle titled “How To Tell If You Are In An E. Nesbit Novel” by the Toast. The last item on the list perfectly sums this up:
You are young, yet you know one thing, if you know anything: dragons are dicks.
The specifics vary. Like, maybe in this story, the protagonist defeats the dragon with the help of a cockatrice. In another, perhaps it’s a pig-herder who happens to relay the right information. Maybe in this story, instead of the dragon changing size, it loses its wings, or grows tame, or both! But there’s nothing witty about the stories themselves. There’s an obvious ending, and the path there meanders a bit in a childlike way, but nothing feels particularly clever or well thought out.
Nesbit offsets this in a singular way: she makes the specifics as goofy as she can.
Animals are the opposite size of what they are here: mice so immense the world can only accommodate one, and elephants the size of cats. Instead of dogs, one character hunts with a pack of hippopotamuses. There’s a world where baked goods grow on trees but people must make their own vegetables and fruit. You get the picture. Just random, off-the-wall stuff.
I don’t find things that are absurd for no other reason than they’re not realistic funny–nor do most adults I know. But you know who does? Children.
Frankly, after the first (legitimately delightful) story, I read The Last of the Dragons and Some Others with very mild interest. But even so, I could imagine reading those same words to a five-year-old and them shrieking with delight. I could even imagine the inflection on my voice as I’d describe the dormouse big as a mountain with a snore that shook the waters or the snarling pack of hippopotamuses on a hunt.
I can’t fault E. Nesbit for this pairing of styles. She wrote children’s stories, and I have no reason to believe that young children wouldn’t like them.
One thing I can–and will–fault her for, however, is lying.
“Clouds are, of course, made up of meringue, with storm-clouds flavored with licorice or treacle or even cinnamon. Adults will say they’re made of evaporated water, of course, but adults are silly and never properly value sweets, so you can’t trust their opinion.”
I wrote the above, but it could fit into one of her stories. She makes up facts like this regularly, then tells the reader that everyone will claim that she’s lying, but she isn’t. The rest of the world is lying.
There’s a fine line here. As a kid raised in a punitive Evangelical world that I only escaped through critical thinking and questioning what I was told, I love when children’s books encourage not taking things at face value. But that’s not what she’s doing. She’s taking a fact, making it goofy, then saying you cannot trust anyone who says that her goofy farce on a fact isn’t true.
As an adult watching my country decimated by people of all ages refusing to listen to the most basic science because they distrust everything except the unprovable, though—I am not a fan of this sort of story-telling. I am so not a fan of this story-telling that I wouldn’t read this book to my (hypothetical) kid without a conversation first. We’d discuss the difference between “making up a story” and “lying” and play a game as we read through the stories where we point out where something is lying instead of story-telling.
Alas, but were that the biggest thing I didn’t like from this book.
The Fiery Dragon begins as such:
The little white Princess always woke in her little white bed when the starlings began to chatter in the pearl-grey morning. As soon as the woods were awake, she used to run up the twisting turret-stairs with her little bare feet, and stand on the top of the tower in her white bed-gown, and kiss her hands to the sun […] and say “Good morning pretty world!”
If you’re instantly on edge due to the use of the word “white” in that paragraph … your radar is on point. Several pages later, we meet the Princess’s cousin:
“He was a false prince, with a skin like leather, and hair like hearth-brushes, and a heart like a stone.”
So we’ve got an evil prince with leather-like skin, hearth-brush-like hair, who is awful in every single way, who also hunts with a pack of hippos rather than dogs.
... Yeah. That’s racist AF.
A quick google of “E. Nesbit racism” corroborates the undeniable racism of that story. For the sake of brevity, I’ll borrow two (sadly) amusing entries from the previously mentioned Toast’s “How To Tell If You Are In An E. Nesbit Novel:
“You are a painful racial caricature redolent of the worst in smug Edwardian prejudices. Or a dragon that climbed out of a book and ate a Prime Minister. Whichever.”
“You are a hook-nosed man very much in love with money. Oh, no, you are not Jewish! Nothing like that. Just a typical, run-of-the-mill, swarthy, dirty, hook-nosed moneylender who’d rather watch a poor man starve than part with a shekel, who has — I cannot emphasize this enough — a long, curved, hook-like nose. Like a falcon’s beak or a fish hook or something else extremely, very hooked.”
Alas. I mean, it’s not exactly surprising, but it’s still disappointing.
I guess the one thing I’ve learned about the older children’s books, like this one or Roald Dahl or Dr. Seuss, is that their racism is somehow overt, limited, and easily delineated. They could be an excellent tool for beginning those more difficult conversations about racism with children.
In any event, it was an interesting to read such old stories. I think about the only other fantastical literature I’ve read from this time was The Princess and the Goblin (which I loved) and Lewis Carroll’s stuff (which I didn’t … don’t get me wrong, I love me a good Lewis Carroll literature based movie or TV show, but I can’t find comparable joy in the literature itself) — neither of which can be considered the least bit “forgotten.”
* I’m sorry, but I can’t help myself. I find it interesting that Gore Vidal defended Roman Polanski by saying his treatment (over his rape of that child) was in large part due to antisemitism but didn’t mention E. Nesbit’s antisemitism once...
