The Book of Dragons

By E. Nesbit

From silly to scary, shocking to absurd, dragons abound in this collection of eight children's stories from beloved author E. Nesbit.

Originally published in the serial magazine The Strand, this anthology was reprinted as a single volume in 1901 and has served as a classic of both children's and dragon's literature ever since.

Within, you'll find stories of a silly king, a stalwart princess, a pair of mischievous children on the hunt for adventure, and many more tales of children besting the terrible beasts of their worlds.

This fine new edition of The Book of Dragons comes complete with a foreword from Eleanor Fitzsimmons, author of The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordFire Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781680576429

E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit was born in 1858 and, like her fictional characters in The Railway Children, her middle-class family was one whose fortunes declined. After surviving a tough and nomadic childhood she met and married her husband, Hubert Bland, in 1880 whilst pregnant with the couple's first child. Financial hardship was to dog Nesbit again when Bland's business failed, forcing her to write to support their burgeoning family. She only later in life focused on writing the children's stories for which she became so well known, including The Story of The Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), Five Children and It (1902) and The Railway Children (1906). She died in 1924.

Book preview

The Book of Dragons

THE BOOK OF DRAGONS

E. NESBIT

This Edition Edited by ALEX HALE

Foreword by ELEANOR FITZSIMONS

Illustrated by H. R. MILLAR

WordFire Press

The Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit

Originally published in 1900. This work is in the public domain.

This new edition edited by Alex Hale

Foreword copyright © 2024 by Eleanor Fitzsimons

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for our personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold, or given away. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68057-642-9

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-643-6

Jacketed Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-644-3

Illustrations are in the public domain.

Cover design by Alex Hale and Allyson Longueira

Cover art by Anton_Lunkov | Depositphotos

Published by WordFire Press, LLC

P.O. Box 1840

Monument, CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

WordFire Press Edition 2024

Printed in the USA

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CONTENTS

Foreword

I. The Book of Beasts

II. Uncle James, or The Purple Stranger

III. The Deliverers of Their Country

IV. The Ice Dragon, or Do as You Are Told

V. The Island of the Nine Whirlpools

VI. The Dragon Tamers

VII. The Fiery Dragon, or The Heart of Stone and the Heart of Gold

VIII. Kind Little Edmund, or The Caves and the Cockatrice

Publisher’s Note

About the Author

About the Illustrator

About the Editor

WordFire Classics

To Rosamund,

chief among those for whom these tales are told,

The Book of Dragons is dedicated in the confident hope that she, one of these days, will dedicate a book of her very own making to the one who now bids eight dreadful dragons crouch in all humbleness at those little brown feet.

FOREWORD

When Alex Hale invited me to write the foreword for this wonderful new edition of E. Nesbit’s The Book of Dragons I accepted without hesitation. Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), born in London, England, wrote mostly as E. Nesbit. Although she is remembered almost exclusively as a writer for children, she wrote in multiple genres, including horror. Her deepest passion was for political poetry. This collection of dragon stories, her first collaboration with the Strand Magazine, represents a pivotal moment in her literary career and heralds the beginning of her great success.

From her earliest days, Nesbit was motivated by the need to earn money. In her early twenties, married to an unreliable husband, and mother to a young child, she took on work decorating blank greeting cards for Raphael Tuck and Sons. Gustave Tuck remembered her as a ‘high-spirited, charming, whimsical’ woman, who had a penchant for inventing verse on the spot and a playful habit of reading the palms of Tuck employees. Since she wrote poetry, it made sense to earn a little extra by writing verse for the inside of the cards too. Soon she was producing decorative gift books filled with slight verse and pretty illustrations.

She progressed to writing modestly successful stories for magazines, some in collaboration with her husband under the pseudonym Fabian Bland. She always found time for poetry, which was admired but did little to boost her earnings. By 1899, when her dragon stories were published, she was mother to four young children: Paul, Iris, Rosamund, and Fabian. A fifth, John, was born towards the end of that year. Nesbit raised all five as her own, but Rosamund and John were the result of an affair her husband had with her best friend, a source of much tension in the household. She dedicated the collected stories, The Book of Dragons (1900) to Rosamund, who was thirteen. Her final dragon story, The Last of the Dragons, written towards the end of her life, was edited, and published posthumously by Rosamund in Five of Us and Madeline (1925), her last book for children.

Nesbit was a quixotic parent who invented brilliant stories for her children, many inspired by events from her own childhood and theirs. Yet few had been published before 1899, when the Strand Magazine commissioned The Seven Dragons, a series of monthly stories to run from March until September. An eighth dragon story was published in their Christmas number in December. In return, she received a very generous thirty pounds per story. This was her first commission from the magazine that would change her fortunes. That year, T. Unwin Fisher advertised the book version of The Story of the Treasure Seekers, a classic of children’s literature, as being by ‘E. Nesbit, author of Seven Dragons’.

The hugely popular Strand Magazine, in print from 1891 to 1950, had a very healthy circulation of just under 500,000 per month and contained articles of general interest, serialised novels, and stories, including a story for readers’ children. It had a reputation for turning its contributors into celebrities. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes became enormously popular after a series of short stories, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia, was published in 1891. Other high-profile contributors of fiction included P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and H.G. Wells. Nesbit’s relationship with the magazine developed slowly. Although her dragon stories were popular, just three further stories were commissioned from her during 1900, and none in 1901. Things took off again in 1902, when she submitted Five Children and It, nine interlinked stories featuring a magical sand fairy and five children who bore an uncanny resemblance to her own.

It was of enormous benefit to Nesbit that the Strand Magazine commissioned Harold Robert (H.R.) Miller, a young Scottish graphic artist who had trained as a civil engineer, to illustrate her dragon stories. This was the first of their hugely successful collaborations. Miller’s ability to render her characters so perfectly astounded her and she insisted that they must be connected through some form of telepathy. He could accommodate her chronic tardiness and complete half a dozen elaborate drawings in just a couple of days. Sometimes, she altered her story to fit his drawings. They had worked together for several years before meeting for the first time at a party she hosted for their young fans.

Adult readers of the Strand Magazine read Nesbit’s stories to their children. One avid fan, Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, wrote to her in March 1903, to tell her how popular her Wouldbegoods stories were with his own children, who had been too young for her dragon stories. He admitted to enjoying them himself. I laughed over them riotously, he told her. It seems highly likely that a young boy named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien—better known by his initials J.R.R.—read Nesbit’s dragon stories in 1899, when he was seven years old. He told poet W.H. Auden, "I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon". His masterpiece The Hobbit (1937) features one of the most popular literary dragons in existence. In a letter to his publisher, written two years after The Hobbit was published, he described Nesbit as ‘an author I delight in’.

Experts regard Nesbit as the inventor of the children’s adventure story. She has influenced bestselling authors such as C.S. Lewis, P.L. Travers, J.K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson. Commenting on her own success, she wrote: The reason why those children [in her books] are like real children is that I was a child once myself, and by some fortunate magic I remembered exactly how I used to feel and think about things. A profile in the Strand Magazine in September 1905 praised her astonishing versatility and almost uncanny insight into the psychology of childhood. Key to her popularity was the early appearance of The Seven Dragons series. The Book of Dragons is a hugely significant and highly enjoyable book and I welcome the publication of this brand-new edition.

Eleanor Fitzsimons

Author of The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

I. THE BOOK OF BEASTS

He happened to be building a palace when the news came, and he left all the bricks kicking about the floor for Nurse to clear up—but then the news was rather remarkable news. You see, there was a knock at the front door and voices talking downstairs, and Lionel thought it was the man come to see about the gas, which had not been allowed to be lighted since the day when Lionel made a swing by tying his skipping rope to the gas bracket.

And then, quite suddenly, Nurse came in and said, Master Lionel, dear, they’ve come to fetch you to go and be King.

Then she made haste to change his smock and to wash his face and hands and brush his hair, and all the time she was doing it Lionel kept wriggling and fidgeting and saying, Oh, don’t, Nurse, and, I’m sure my ears are quite clean, or, Never mind my hair, it’s all right, and, That’ll do.

You’re going on as if you was going to be an eel instead of a King, said Nurse.

The minute Nurse let go for a moment Lionel bolted off without waiting for his clean handkerchief, and in the drawing-room there were two very grave-looking gentlemen in red robes with fur, and gold coronets with velvet sticking up out of the middle like the cream in the very expensive jam tarts.

They bowed low to Lionel, and the gravest one said: Sire, your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, the King of this country, is dead, and now you have got to come and be King.

Yes, please, sir, said Lionel; when does it begin?

You will be crowned this afternoon, said the grave gentleman who was not quite so grave-looking as the other.

Would you like me to bring Nurse, or what time would you like me to be fetched, and hadn’t I better put on my velvet suit with the lace collar? said Lionel, who had often been out to tea.Your Nurse will be removed to the Palace later. No, never mind about changing your suit; the Royal robes will cover all that up.

The grave gentlemen led the way to a coach with eight white horses, which was drawn up in front of the house where Lionel lived. It was No. 7, on the left-hand side of the street as you go up.

Lionel ran upstairs at the last minute, and he kissed Nurse and said:

Thank you for washing me. I wish I’d let you do the other ear. No—there’s no time now. Give me the hanky. Good-bye, Nurse.

Good-bye, ducky, said Nurse; be a good little King now, and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ and remember to pass the cake to the little girls, and don’t have more than two helps of anything.

So off went Lionel to be made a King. He had never expected to be a King any more than you have, so it was all quite new to him—so new that he had never even thought of it. And as the coach went through the town he had to bite his tongue to be quite sure it was real, because if his tongue was real it showed he wasn’t dreaming. Half an hour before he had been building with bricks in the nursery; and now—the streets were all fluttering with flags; every window was crowded with people waving handkerchiefs and scattering flowers; there were scarlet soldiers everywhere along the pavements, and all the bells of all the churches were ringing like mad, and like a great song to the music of their ringing he heard thousands of people shouting, Long live Lionel! Long live our little King!

He was a little sorry at first that he had not put on his best clothes, but he soon forgot to think about that. If he had been a girl he would very likely have bothered about it the whole time.

As they went along, the grave gentlemen, who were the Chancellor and the Prime Minister, explained the things which Lionel did not understand.

I thought we were a republic, said Lionel. I’m sure there hasn’t been a King for some time.

Sire, your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s death happened when my grandfather was a little boy, said the Prime Minister, and since then your loyal people have been saving up to buy you a crown—so much a week, you know, according to people’s means—sixpence a week from those who have first-rate pocket money, down to a halfpenny a week from those who haven’t so much. You know it’s the rule that the crown must be paid for by the people.

But hadn’t my great-great-however-much-it-is-grandfather a crown?

"Yes, but he sent it to