Five Children and It

Five Children and It is a children's book by Edith Nesbit, first published in 1902. It is the first of a trilogy.

Details of the book

Characters

The five children, brothers and sisters, are:

• Cyril, known as Squirrel
• Anthea, known as Panther
• Robert
• Jane, known as Pussy
• and their baby brother Hilary, known always as the Lamb.

"It" is the Psammead: see below.

Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Like Nesbit's Railway Children, the story begins when a group of children move from London to the countryside. While playing in a gravel pit soon after the move, they uncover a rather grumpy, ugly and occasionally malevolent sand-fairy known as the Psammead who is compelled to grant one wish of theirs per day. (The name Psammead appears to be a coinage of Nesbit's, from the Greek ψάμμος "sand" after the pattern of dryad, naiad, oread, etc.).

The children's wishes are:

1. To be as beautiful as the day. (Because of problems discovered immediately afterwards, subsequent wishes are all with the proviso that the house servants should not be able to perceive the results of the wish.)
2. To be rich beyond the dreams of avarice (refined to: That the gravel pit be full of gold pieces.)
3. That everyone would want the Lamb.
4. That the four older children would grow wings.
5. That their house would become a castle.
6. That Robert would be bigger than the baker's boy. (He becomes about eleven feet tall.)
7. That the Lamb would become an adult.
8. An assortment of simultaneous wishes relating to some stolen jewels, in return for a promise that they would never ask for another wish.

Almost all effects of wishes end at sundown.

Sequels

The book was clearly originally intended to leave readers in suspense: it ends

They did see it [the Psammead] again, of course, but not in this story. And it was not in a sand-pit either, but in a very, very, very different place. It was in a— But I must say no more.

The story was continued in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and then The Story of the Amulet (1906), in both of which the same characters reappeared.

Film versions

In 1991 the BBC turned the story into a TV movie. In the UK it was released under the story's original title; in the USA it was released as The Sand Fairy.

A cinematic movie, starring Kenneth Branagh, Zoë Wanamaker, and Norman Wisdom, with Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead, is due for release in 2004.