Children Nesbit, Edith: Mouldiwarp Chronicles/House of Arden(Omnibus, Illus). v1. 22 July 2015

[GrannyGrump]

THE MOULDIWARP CHRONICLES:
“The House of Arden” & “Harding’s Luck”
by Edith Nesbit (1858–1924)
Illustrated by Harold R. Millar (1869–1940)

First published in 1908 and 1909.
The text and illustrations of this book are in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

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Edith Nesbit Bland, English author and poet, published approximately 40 books for children under the name of E. Nesbit. She created an innovative body of work that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures.

Book synopses:

Spoiler:

The House of Arden
It had been a great house once, but the Arden family has fallen on hard times. The orphaned Edred and Elfrida Arden live with their aunt Edith, who keeps a boarding-house. Just before his tenth birthday, Edred inherits the title of Lord Arden and the crumbling family castle, where they find an ancient spell that conjures up the Mouldiwarp, a magical white mole. With his help, they travel back in time in search of the lost Arden Treasure.

Harding’s Luck
Born into poverty, lame young Dickie Harding leads a pathetic life with the uncaring woman who raised him, until he's lured away by a seemingly kind tramp into doubtful, even criminal, adventures. While trying to do the right thing, Dickie discovers a kind of magic, and learns to travel through time. Ultimately, he meets Edred and Elfrida, for whom he performs deeds of selflessness. This is not a sequel, but rather a companion volume to The House of Arden, and Dickie’s story runs concurrently with that of Edred and Elfrida.

These two books are perhaps not as well-known, nor as well-received, as some of Nesbit’s other works, but many, including Gore Vidal, declare them to be favorites. Nesbit fans will delight in these tales of fantastical, magical time-travel and adventure.

Younger readers may have a bit of a hard slog with some obscure historical references, and also with the extensive use of “cockney” dialect dropped h’s in Harding’s Luck (thousands of apostrophes) – for the kids’ best enjoyment, that one is a prime candidate for read-aloud.

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Texts and illustrations were obtained from upenn.edu, gutenberg.org, and archive.org. Punctuation, diacritics, and italics have been formatted; punctuation and some spelling were Anglicized and standardized. Embedded decorative fonts for titling and drop-caps. Images are mid-resolution, based on 800x1100 px.
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Just to let you know, you have here a rare bird indeed – in extensive on-line search, I found only one (ONE!) free version of the illustrated “House of Arden” (at upenn.edu). So now there are two.
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