The narrator and Professor Gibberne test the professor’s potion that will speed up their metabolisms by a factor of a thousand or more.

Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It about five English children and their wish-granting Psammead never engaged me as a child, nor did her sequels: The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and finally The Amulet, which was the only one with time travel. In that third story, the eponymous magic amulet takes them to times that span from ancient Egypt to the future. It was only the amulet that had the power of time travel, and even if I never bonded much with Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and the baby, I do admire Nesbit for bringing time travel to children’s stories.

The story was initially serialized as The Amulet in twelve monthly issues of The Strand before the book was published in 1906 as The Story of the Amulet. Decades later, the children show up in a cameo in the fourth book of Edward Eager’s Tales of Magic series.

Puck is an elf who magicks people from the past to tell their stories to two children in England.

These first ten Puck stories were published in British version of The Strand Magazine from January through October of this year. In the states, the first four stories appeared simultaneously in The Ladies’ Home Journal. All ten stories along with sixteen poems were published together in the 1906 collection, Puck of Pook’s Hill.

1. “Weland’s Sword” The Strand, Jan 1906
2. “Young Men at the Manor” The Strand, Feb 1906
3. “The Knights of the Joyous Venture” The Strand, Mar 1906
4. “Old Men at Pevensey” The Strand, Apr 1906
5. “A Centurion of the Thirtieth” The Strand, May 1906
6. “On the Great Wall” The Strand, Jun 1906
7. “The Winged Hats” The Strand, Jul 1906
8. “Hal o’ the Draft” The Strand, Aug 1906
9. “Dimchurch Flit” The Strand, Sep 1906
10. “The Treasure and the Law” The Strand, Oct 1906

Some of these stories were told by Puck himself rather than by historical figures. Puck told me that the first time-traveling storyteller was Sir Richard Dalyngridge in the second Puck story in the February Strand.

Janet brought a copy of The House of Arden up to the ITTDB Citadel at Christmas in 2014, and we all sat around reading it to each other. In the story, Edred Arden, a nine-year-old poor orphan, unexpectedly discovers that he’s actually the next Lord Arden, but still penniless unless he and his sister can use a trunk of magic clothes to have adventures in past times and discover where the family treasure lies hidden—much like the time-traveling mechanism in Nesbit’s earlier The Story of Amulet. Also like Amulet, this story was initially serialized in The Strand before the book publication. A companion book, Harding’s Luck, appeared the following year.

In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute connects the two books to the Fabian Society (named after the British socialists Fabian Society, which also included H.G. Wells) because “Nesbit’s consistent Fabian socialism is central to the version of British history’ presented in the books.