Five Children and It
Haven't you ever thought what you would wish for if you were granted three wishes? In Nesbit's delightful classic, five siblings find a creature that grants their wishes, but as the old saying goes: be careful what you wish for, it might come true...
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2012–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I don’t have hard evidence, but when I was a kid I enjoyed the children’s book ‘Five children and it’, written ~1900
The children cart their two year old sibling around with them everywhere (sans parents) and it’s totally unremarkable.
- The article mentions that two of her books (The House of Arden and The Railway Children) are being republished this fall. That said, her copyrights have expired, so they’re also available now as open‐source, public domain ebooks at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-nesbit
I was a big fan of Nesbit’s Psammead trilogy as a child: Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet.
- > the homepage really does say "hello i am maia arson crimew (it/she)".
> I'd feel uncomfortable referring to anyone as "it" though
In Five Children and It (published in 1902), the "It" of the title is a magical creature. However, one of the characters is a human baby who is always referred to with the pronoun "it". I glossed right over that reading the book as a child, but I found it pretty disturbing rereading as an adult.
However, once rereading the book had called the phenomenon to my attention, I noticed that it's not uncommon for me to want to refer to a generic child as "it". I wouldn't refer to a specific child that way.
So referring to a person as "it" is sometimes the normal thing to do. (And, of course, intensely inappropriate at other times.) On the other hand, the intro appears to specify that maia arson crimew wants people to use "she", an exclusively subject pronoun, as the object pronoun for she. That is deeply unnatural and virtually nobody will be able to comply; it's much worse than using "it" for a person.
- Interesting tidbit for those debating the correctness of he/she/they in the title: at one (very brief) period of time, there was a school of English writers that believed 'it' was the correct gender-neutral term for living human beings of either gender.
The argument being that 'they' was plural, and therefore blatantly incorrect as a he/she replacement, whereas it was singular and gender-less (though gender-less != gender-neutral (at least, not necessarily)).
Anyone that's read E. Nesbit's The Five Children and It (the 'It' in the title is completely unrelated, as it refers to a mythical being and not any human) would have experienced this oddity of the English language, and <strike>they</strike> it would have probably paused and wondered about the usage of 'it' as a gender-neutral pronoun.
According to Nesbit, saying something like 'A lover and its crush' or, more confusingly, 'The life of a founder, and its priorities' with 'it' here referring to the founder and not his/her's (its <smirk>) life.
Sounds weird? How many times have you said a sentence along the lines of "Was it your father or your mother that was in the Army?" Nesbit's approach was the same, taken a few orders of magnitude further :)
