The Story of the Amulet

Nurse's house is in Fitzrovia, the district of London near the British Museum, which Nesbit accurately conveys as having bookstalls and shops filled with unusual merchandise.For some reason, Jimmy does not share the children's magical gift of fluency in the local language: he can only understand (for example) Latin based on his own studies.This episode can be compared to many other visions of utopian socialist futures published in that era; Nesbit's is notable in that it concentrates on how the life of children at school would be radically different, with economic changes only appearing briefly in the background.Amulet coincidentally appeared the same year as the first instalment of another story involving children viewing different periods of history, Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill.A journalist mistakes the Queen of Babylon for the Theosophist Annie Besant (like Nesbit, a socialist and social reformer) and mentions Theosophy in reference to (to him) inexplicable events taking place in the British Museum)."Thought-transference" (telepathy) also gets a mention as part of an elaborate and mistaken rationalisation by the Learned Gentleman of Anthea's stories of the Queen and ancient Babylon.The final chapter in which the lonely Learned Gentleman and the quixotic ancient Egyptian priest fuse into a single being, with the ritual being overseen by Anthea, is one of the most stirring and unusual moments in the book.[5] In the third canto of his poem "Villon" (written 1925, published 1930), British modernist poet Basil Bunting stated he took the image of two drops of quicksilver (mercury) merging from Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet and described her work as the "pleasantest reading of my childhood".