Perfect Little Protagonists: from E. Nesbit's "Harding's Luck"

As luck would have it, I began reading this book completely unaware of anything about it except its author—E. Nesbit. The copy I pulled (at random) from my mom’s bookshelf one night when I was desperate for more reading material (at the time my TBR pile was dangerously short for some reason) was an older hardcover with no dust jacket, no blurb on the back, or really any other indication of what sort of book it was. I’ve read several of Nesbit’s other books for children, so I was sort of hoping this one (it had gilt lettering on the spine) was for adults.

It was not, which I realized as soon as I opened it. This copy was full of illustrations that immediately exposed Harding’s Luck as following a boy protagonist through various adventures. Although disappointed that it wasn’t a more sophisticated story, I wasn’t so deterred from reading it. In fact, for the first several chapters I rather enjoyed it….

Dickie Harding is an Oliver Twist sort of character, a young orphan boy living in poverty with his “aunt” (really just his father’s landlady, who took Dickie in as a sort of ward/servant after his father died). Dickie is crippled, uneducated, and generally unloved. His only treasure is a possession given to him by his father, a silver rattle he calls “Tinkler.” Without really understanding what is missing from his life, Dickie longs for love, relatives, friends, and (on a more general note) beauty. 

Living in the slums of London, he longs for a garden, to see green things and flowers grow. He secretly plants some “moon seeds” in a neighbor’s yard, which grow into a mysterious plant valuable enough to get his Tinkler out of hock when his aunt steals it and pawns it. It is at the pawn shop that some of mysterious things about Dickie are revealed: first, the pawnbroker notices that the rattle has a seal on it, indicating it once belonged to a noble house; second, Dickie exhibits his passion for reading and speaking “genteelly,” as he is able to change his accent to sound more posh and also employs a sort of “book speak” by using vocabulary he’s read.

The pawnbroker shows an interest in this odd boy who looks like a peasant but speaks like an aristocrat (when he wants to, anyway), but otherwise no importance is attached to the incident at the time. Dickie goes on with his life…which turns out to be one misadventure after another. While running an errand for his “aunt” Dickie gets on the wrong train and ends up accidentally running away, taking up company with a beggar named Mr. Beale who adopts him (or rather, who Dickie adopts as a “farver”) and teaches him all sorts of scams.

Until this point the novel was very interesting, exploring a sort of child protagonist that doesn’t come along very often. Dickie is cheerfully dishonest, rather selfish, and also disrespectful of his aunt—though she’s unpleasant enough to make that last fault understandable. It is when Dickie starts an actual life of crime that the narrator chickens out. Instead of allowing Dickie to be a criminal and thus allow for character growth and reform throughout the story, Nesbit explicitly reminds the reader several times that, although what Dickie did was wrong, he wasn’t a bad person because he didn’t know it was wrong.

As a cop would say, ignorance of the law is no excuse!

Besides, it doesn’t make sense that Dickie was ignorant, because he’s been shown to be a reader of heroic stories and therefore has some idea of right vs. wrong. Even if he wasn’t well-versed in morality through this aspect of his life, it’s also well-established that Dickie is highly observant, clever, and quick to understand situations, so the idea that Mr. Beale could fool him about this is extremely far-fetched.

I would be inclined to forgive this had Nesbit continued in an otherwise realistic vein. However, this was a sequel to a sort of fantasy/time-travel book called The House of Arden, and thus halfway through the book it quite jarringly changes direction. Dickie gets some more of these magic moon seeds and plants them, immediately falling asleep in the moon and—this is where the plot lost me—he time-traveled back to the time of James I, where he was no longer Dickie Harding, but rather the son and heir to Lord Richard of the House of Arden. There he had a father, a mother, a baby brother, cousins, and a pony. He also was no longer a cripple. He spends months in this new world, until he begins to think this is reality and his life in Edwardian England was the dream.

But then he wakes up. He’s back in London, and he rejoins his “farver”—though now with a vastly improved moral compass that no longer will go along with the scams or crimes, but rather insists that they get an honest living. Dickie slowly begins to figure out how to travel between lives at will. Even though it is difficult for him to leave his perfect life in the past, he continues to come back for Mr. Beale in order to better his life. He uses the education he gains in the past to get the reformed beggar started in a business of training and breeding dogs. They buy a house and even furnish it.  This would have been more interesting if it didn't come across that Dickie was now the "adult" of the duo. 

Without completely spoiling the plot, I'll sum up by saying that Dickie started out as a promising street urchin, but the revelation that he is "high born" immediately transforms him into a perfect (and little protagonist. Granted, he actually has to go to some effort to accomplish his goal (unlike Andy and Chet from First at the North Pole), but I would have been much more interested in his character development if he hadn't been related to the Arden family at all.