The Princess and Curdie

A year on, the mountain is worked out, the king is being poisoned by his own court, and Curdie is sent down to the city with a gift he did not ask for: a hand that knows what a person is turning into. MacDonald wrote the sequel eleven years after the first and made it darker at every turn, ending on a page about a city that does not learn. The beasts who follow Curdie are the strangest company in Victorian children's writing. Thirty-two plates after painters including George Clausen and Camille Corot follow the boy from the mountain down to the city, matching the book's turn from country light to darker streets.