Bonfires and Broomsticks
novel 1947 Bed-Knob and Broomstick
Record
| First published | 1947 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
Bonfires and Broomsticks continues the story two years after the events of The Magic Bedknob, as Carey, Charles, and Paul persuade their mother to let them visit Miss Price again. Using the same enchanted bedknob, the children travel back in time to the reign of King Charles II, where they meet a well-meaning but inept necromancer named Emelius Jones and accidentally bring him forward into their own time. With Emelius now out of place in the twentieth century, Miss Price and the children must find a way to help him either adjust to his new surroundings or return safely to his own era, all while keeping her continuing use of magic hidden from the wider world.
Where it sits
- Universe: Bed-Knob and Broomstick
- Series: Bed-Knob and Broomstick core; position 2 of 2 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Mary Norton
Notes
- From the series record (Bed-Knob and Broomstick): Two originally separate novellas -- The Magic Bedknob (1944, J.M. Dent UK / G.P. Putnam's Sons US) and its sequel Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947, J.M. Dent) -- later combined into a single omnibus volume, Bedknob and Broomstick, in 1957 with new illustrations by Erik Blegvad. Both original volumes are catalogued here under their own first-publication years per this project's author-credit-fidelity convention; the 1957 combined edition is the commonly available modern printing but not a separately registered work. Confirmed a genuinely separate, unrelated story from Mary Norton's The Borrowers, with no shared characters or setting -- a young boy and his siblings discover a magical bedknob that lets a bed travel through time and space, first to a Caribbean island and then, in the sequel, back to 17th-century England to meet a would-be necromancer. Loosely the basis for Disney's 1971 film Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Bed-Knob and Broomstick: position 2 of 2: previous The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1944)
Sources
← Bed-Knob and Broomstick dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.