ABSTRACT
Five Children and It shows the middle-class children exploring a social as well as a moral and emotional world. Five Children and It, like many such stories, dashes the hopes at the outset by sending the parents away. The children stood round the hole in a ring, looking at the creature they had found. The providing of food is important throughout this story, and it is a continuous reminder of the children’s external and internal dependence on adults. The reactions of the children to each other, and of the Psammead and Martha, the baby’s nurse, for example, to what they do, provide an exploration of moral meanings within the story. The children can’t think of anything, and the hurried wish which Anthea manages to remember – ‘a private wish of her own and Jane’s which they had never told the boys’ – is a response springing from unconscious preoccupations.
