Download Wings and the Child by E. Nesbit. A 1913 war non-fiction work about aviation, childhood, imagination, national preparedness, technology, public responsibility and Nesbit's response to the coming age of air power. Available in PDF, EPUB, MOBI and AZW3 formats.
About Wings and the Child
Wings and the Child by E. Nesbit is a 1913 war non-fiction work about aviation, childhood, imagination, national preparedness, technology, public responsibility and Nesbit's response to the coming age of air power. Ideal for readers interested in classic children's literature, magical adventure, family stories, Victorian and Edwardian fiction, poetry, ghost stories, romance and the roots of modern children's fantasy.
Genre: War Non-fiction
Why Read Wings and the Child?
Wings and the Child is worth reading because it shows Nesbit responding to modern technology and public responsibility, bringing her concern for children and imagination into contact with aviation and national life. First published in 1913, the work is concerned with aviation, childhood, imagination, national preparedness, technology, public responsibility and Nesbit's response to the coming age of air power. Nesbit's writing is unusually flexible: she can be comic, tender, practical, uncanny, lyrical or politically alert, often while keeping the prose clear and inviting.
Readers may value the title for the way Nesbit respects imagination without making it vague or sentimental. In her best-known books, magic is powerful but never tidy. Wishes go wrong, games become serious, and children discover that adventure brings responsibility as well as pleasure. In her adult stories, poems and essays, the same alertness appears in another form: an interest in motive, memory, social pressure, and the gap between what people want and what life allows.
The book is also useful for understanding Nesbit's place in literary history. She helped shift children's fiction towards recognisable modern families and contemporary settings, while still allowing fantasy to break in. Later writers drew heavily from this mixture of ordinary life and impossible events. Her work also reflects late Victorian and Edwardian concerns: class, family security, childhood freedom, education, imagination, social reform and the emotional costs of adult decisions.
This title adds to the larger E. Nesbit collection by showing another aspect of a writer whose range is sometimes hidden by the fame of a few children's classics. Wings and the Child can be read for pleasure, atmosphere and story, but it is also useful as part of a body of work that links everyday life with wonder, unease and moral consequence. Nesbit's strength lies in making the improbable feel close to home.
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