One Tale for Four and New Morals for Old: The Construction and Themes of E. Nesbit's 'The Magician's Heart'

This article examines ‘The magician's heart’, E. Nesbit's burlesque Kunstmarchen for children in relation to its sources, noting its conflation of four Marchen prototypes, ‘The sleeping beauty’, Rickey with the tuft,’ ‘The magician and his pupil’, and ‘The ogre's heart in the egg’. The deliberate changes made to traditional folk material in this narrative from the sphere of modern popular culture are scrutinised in the light of the gradual processes of the mutation of Marchen themselves as they are retold over time and space. This scrutiny shows the ways in which the themes, tones and values of this Kunstmarchen are like and unlike the individual Marchen on which it is based, and it suggests a series of questions which can be asked in order to describe a Kunstmarchen with relative accuracy.