Edith Nesbit

The Story of the Amulet

1906. Puffin Classics, 1996.

breathing in the quiet, safe air of Regent's Park

Escaping a sticky situation in Ancient Egypt, where the amulet's magical powers had taken them, the children are relieved to find themselves back in the present and listening to 'the peeking and patting of the sparrows on the gravel and the voices of the ragged baby children playing Ring-o'-Roses on the yellow trampled grass'.

sitting on the grass...under trees whose leaves would have been clean, clear green in the country, but here were dusty and yellowish, and brown at the edges.

On an earlier visit the children take a picnic. This is the grimy, polluted London of 1905 - see the Henry James entry for a 1902 description of 'shabby grass' and 'smutty sheep'.

all round and beyond were the faded trees...where the little ragged children were playing Ring-o'-Roses. But through the opening of it shone a blaze of blue and yellow and red

The magic amulet causes a 'great red arch' to appear. Some 20 years earlier (August 1886) Nesbit had gone for walks in the park with Bernard Shaw to whom she had formed a 'passionate attachment', in Shaw's words (A Woman of Passion: the Life of Edith Nesbit 1858-1924. Julia Briggs). Could there be a link between the sensuous imagery - the 'great red arch' with its 'blaze' of colours - and their unconsummated relationship?