Harding's Luck

I finished two books last night and had a bit of a weep at the endings of both. One was They Came Like Swallows, William Maxwell's wonderful novel, which I am not going to blog about till after the Cornflower book group has discussed it. The other was E Nesbit's Harding's Luck. I've discovered from reading her biography, which I'm about halfway through now, that this was her favourite of her children's books. She was very concerned about the plight of children brought up in what were then the slums, and Dickie, the hero of this book, is one such child. But, like the children in The House of Arden, the companion book to this one, he finds a way of accessing magic, and, like them, he goes back to a happier life in the past. Throughout the novel he moves back and forth, and his reasons for returning to the life in the present, in which he is poor and disabled, are almost wholly altruistic. You might think this would make him a boring sort of hero but this is very far from the case. He is an intelligent and thoughtful boy, and it is wonderful to see how he grows and learns through his various adventures. Indeed this is one of Nesbit's strengths -- her children are never perfect -- they are sometimes selfish, often cross -- just like real people, in fact. But they are also capable of behaving extremely nobly and unselfishly in extreme situations. In this book, Dickie's cousin Edred is placed in an almost impossible quandary towards the end -- he is told that he can rescue Dickie from kidnappers, but at great cost both to himself and to his father. He will have to be braver than he has ever been and more unselfish than he ever imagined he could be. Nesbit shows him agonising over this decision all night -- he is, after all, only ten years old, and he is being asked to do something which will have a huge effect on his own life and on his father's. But of course in the end he does the right thing. And Dickie himself has a similarly enormous choice to make at the end and almost does not do what his conscience tells him he must. But in the end he does. This is where I started to cry -- call me silly if you like.
There is no doubt that Nesbit was one of the finest writers for children ever and her books are as fresh today as they were in the early 1900s. Partly I think this was because she had such a clear memory herself of what it was like to be a child -- and because she loved her own children and entered into their worlds very easily -- and partly because she was never quite sure if her ideal reader was a child or an adult.