Harding's Luck

Dickie Harding is poor and lame, a London street-child who walks with difficulty on a crippled foot and lives in a mean back street with a woman he calls his aunt. His only treasures are a few odds and ends — an old rattle, a seal — and his prospects look bleakest of all when a plausible tramp named Beale draws him onto the tramping road.

And then the magic takes him. By the old rattle and some moonseeds — and, behind them, by the will of the white Mouldiwarp and the long memory of the Ardens — Dickie falls asleep in his own hard century and wakes in another. He opens his eyes in the reign of King James the First, in a great house, in a sound and healthy body: the loved, well-born child of a noble family, his lameness gone. From that moment he has two lives — the cold, hungry, crippled life of a modern street-boy and the warm, whole, honoured life of a Jacobean gentleman's son three centuries before — and he can pass between them. The deeper he goes, the clearer it grows that the past is no dream but a true inheritance: Dickie Harding is the lost and rightful heir of Arden.

The companion to The House of Arden (1908), Harding's Luck is among the most morally serious books E. Nesbit ever wrote for children. Beneath its time-slip adventure runs an unflinching, closely observed portrait of poverty and disability, written by a committed socialist who refused to look away from either, and Dickie is allowed to be clever, proud, loyal, and brave rather than merely pitied.

What raises the book above wish-fulfilment is what Dickie does with his two lives — and the choice to which he is finally brought, between his own happiness and the good of others. Few children's books of its day dared set so grave a thing before a young reader, and Nesbit makes it not grim but moving and even glad. It can be read entirely on its own, but read alongside The House of Arden it quietly completes the larger story.