The Phoenix and the Carpet #6


 My reading of the sixth chapter of Edith Nesbitt's (1904) children's adventure story "The Phoenix and the Carpet". The children - filled with the middle-class urge to be charitable to the downtrodden - return to the mysterious tower from the start of the story to help distribute some lost treasure to its rightful owners.

There is an interesting vignette at the beginning of this chapter about the nature of doing good and how boring it is to try and be charitable to the people next door. The exotic sufferers of hardship are always rather more appealing than the local ones. This, I suspect, rings decidedly true for quite a lot of people who look to the benighted in far flung parts of the earth but care little for those whose problems they see on a daily basis.



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