Jimbo: A Fantasy was published by Macmillan in 1909 — Blackwood’s first novel after three collections of short stories. Jimbo is a small, imaginative boy who is terrified of an empty house near his family home. One day he enters it and falls — literally and figuratively — into a world shaped by his own fears. The empty house becomes a prison ruled by a figure who combines the terror of a strict governess with something far more sinister: a being that feeds on children’s fear.
The novel operates in the tradition of Victorian children’s fantasy (MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, Kingsley’s The Water Babies) but with a darkness that anticipates later psychological approaches to childhood fear. Jimbo’s dream-world is not arbitrary but constructed from his specific anxieties — his terror of the dark, of abandonment, of the power adults hold over children. The “fantasy” is not escape but confrontation.
Blackwood’s sympathy with childhood consciousness — the intensity of children’s perceptions, the absolute reality of their fears — is evident throughout. The novel argues that children inhabit a world more vivid and more dangerous than adults recognize, and that the dismissal of children’s fears as “imagination” is itself a form of cruelty.
Collecting Jimbo
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1909): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $50–$150
- Blackwood’s first novel