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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Lumber Room, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Adults, Children, and Power
Imagination
Morality and Hypocrisy
The World of Conventions vs. the Natural World
Summary
Analysis
The other children are going to the beach at Jagborough “as a special treat,” but Nicholas is not accompanying them because he is “in disgrace” and being punished. Earlier that morning, Nicholas had refused to eat his breakfast of “wholesome bread-and-milk,” claiming that there was a frog in it.
The opening of the story sets Nicholas apart from the other children, suggesting that he is not only different from them but also more important and interesting. His claim about the frog in his food is strikingly absurd and immediately suggests that he has a creative mind. Since he is being punished, he clearly lives in an authoritarian household in which the adults have firm opinions about what is “wholesome” for the children.
Themes
“Older and wiser and better people” told Nicholas not to “talk nonsense” since this was impossible, but there had indeed been a frog in his breakfast—he himself had picked it up from the garden and put it in his breakfast. He had to face a lengthy scolding for committing this “sin,” but what really stood out to Nicholas from this entire incident was that the grown-ups had been wrong when they’d said it was impossible for a frog to be in his food.
Nicholas demonstrates that the social conventions adults believe in so firmly can be easily disrupted—they thought it was impossible for a frog to be in his breakfast, and he shows them that it is completely possible. He quite effortlessly sneaks a frog from the garden into his food, suggesting that it is not hard for the wild outside world to encroach into their seemingly orderly inside world. Nicholas doesn’t seem particularly bothered when the adults are unhappy with his behavior and he is delighted to point out when they are wrong, especially because they always seem so certain that they are right.
Themes
Literary Devices
Now, as punishment for this naughty trick, Nicholas’s boy-cousin, girl-cousin, and “quite uninteresting younger brother” are all going to Jagborough without him. Nicholas’s cousins’ aunt, who, “by an unwarranted stretch of imagination,” claims to be Nicholas’s aunt as well, quickly came up with the idea of the trip just to punish Nicholas by excluding him from the fun. She often comes up with similar punishments—inventing fun activities from which to exclude the wrongdoers—when the children disobey her.
The other children and the aunt are identified by their relationships to Nicholas rather than by their names, which signifies his importance in the story. His younger brother is “quite uninteresting,” so he is likely not as imaginative and rebellious as Nicholas is. The aunt is his cousins’ aunt but insists that she is Nicholas’s aunt as well, a claim that Nicholas finds to be untrue and which sets the stage for the various lies that he will catch her in through the course of the story. In contrast to Nicholas’s expansive creative imagination, the aunt’s imagination is focused on lies and petty punishments, like inventing fun activities to exclude her disobedient charges from.
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Literary Devices
The aunt expects Nicholas to cry when the other children leave for Jagborough, but he doesn’t. Instead, the girl-cousin scrapes her knee and ends up crying loudly, to Nicholas’s amusement. The aunt insists that she will forget about her pain and enjoy herself at Jagborough, and that the children will all have a great time playing on the sand. Nicholas informs the aunt that Bobby won’t, since his boots are too tight. The aunt wonders why Bobby didn’t mention his too-tight boots to her, to which Nicholas says that Bobby did tell her—twice—but that she hadn’t listened. “You often don’t listen when we tell you important things,” Nicholas points out.
The aunt’s desire to see Nicholas in tears as a result of her punishment highlights her vindictive nature. Nicholas seems well aware of this and does not give her the satisfaction. The girl-cousin’s little accident is an ominous beginning to a supposedly fun trip and suggests that it might not be as fun as the aunt hopes. The aunt is unaware of Bobby’s tight boots, which shows that she doesn’t pay much attention to the children or their needs. Nicholas portrays her as an inattentive caregiver.
Themes
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The aunt quickly changes the subject and tells Nicholas to stay out of the gooseberry garden. When he asks why, she simply tells him that he is “in disgrace.” She then becomes suspicious that he will try to get into the garden just to disobey her. To catch him at it, she busies herself with “trivial gardening operations” in the front garden for a couple of hours, even though she has many other things to do. The aunt is “a woman of few ideas, with immense powers of concentration.”
When the aunt feels like her power over Nicholas is slipping because he is challenging her authority and pointing to her failings, she retaliates by heaping on another layer to his punishment by asking him to stay out of the gooseberry garden. She lingers in the garden to ensure that he obeys her, pretending to be busy there even though she has other work to do elsewhere, which emphasizes her petty and controlling nature.
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Literary Devices
Nicholas comes out to the front garden a few times and approaches the two doors that lead out to the gooseberry garden “with obvious stealth of purpose,” confirming the aunt’s suspicions that he wants to get into the gooseberry garden. However, Nicholas has no desire to do this—he just wants the aunt to think he does so that she’ll be on “self-imposed sentry-duty” and out of his way.
Even though Nicholas has no intention of entering the gooseberry garden, he sneaks around suspiciously because he wants the aunt to stay outside and guard the doors to the garden. Thus, he cleverly manipulates her into doing exactly what he would like her to.
Themes
After ensuring that the aunt is busy guarding the entrance to the gooseberry garden, Nicholas goes inside the house and “rapidly put[s] into execution a plan of action that ha[s] long germinated in his brain,” which is to enter the lumber room. After retrieving the key from a high shelf in the library, Nicholas slides it into the lock. He’s been practicing unlocking doors for the past few days because “he [does] not believe in trusting too much to luck and accident.” Nicholas opens the door to the “unknown land” that has up until this point been “carefully sealed from youthful eyes and concerning which no questions were ever answered.”
In addition to having a creative imagination, Nicholas is also a meticulous planner. He has carefully considered every detail while making his plan to enter the mysterious lumber room. The aunt refuses to even answer the children’s questions about this locked room, which reveals the kind of relationship they share—she expects their unquestioning obedience at all times. Interestingly, the room that is veiled in such secrecy is only a lumber room (a room used to store unused furniture and knickknacks in old English houses). In the story, the room comes to symbolize a place of wildness and imagination, and the aunt’s stern attempts to keep the children out of it emphasize that she wants to keep wildness and imagination out of their lives.
Themes
Nicholas decides that “the large and dimly lit” room is everything he’s dreamed it would be. It is a “storehouse of unimagined treasures” while the rest of the aunt’s house is “bare and cheerless.”
Nicholas notices that the aunt has stowed away many beautiful and quirky objects in the lumber room, which suggests that she keeps her house plain and boring in order to stifle the children’s imaginations.
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Literary Devices
Nicholas becomes transfixed by a tapestry that is meant to be a fire screen. To him, it looks like “a living, breathing story.” The tapestry depicts a scene in which a huntsman has shot a stag with an arrow while his two dogs charge at the animal. Meanwhile, unknown to the huntsman, four wolves head in his direction—to Nicholas, this is the detail that complicates the otherwise simple scene. He notices that the huntsman has only two arrows left in his quiver, and that he’d shot the stag at “ridiculously short range,” so he probably wasn’t a very skilled marksman. He guesses that there are most likely even more wolves approaching the huntsman from the shadows. Nicholas spends “many golden minutes” pondering the story of the tapestry and concludes that the huntsman and his dogs are in a tight spot.
Nicholas devotes a lot of time and attention to the tapestry. The hunting scene triggers his imagination, probably because he identifies with the conflict between wildness (as represented by the animals of the forest) and the huntsman’s actions to subdue the wild, which he likens with the controlling behavior of adults like the aunt. Nicholas closely observes the tapestry’s details and builds a story around the scene, which points to how observant and clever he is. Nicholas seems to enjoy the presence of the wolves in the tapestry and likes thinking that there are even more wolves than the four shown, and that the huntsman (a stand-in for his aunt) is therefore doomed.
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Literary Devices
Some of the other treasures that Nicholas finds include candlesticks shaped like snakes and a teapot shaped like a duck, compared to which the nursery teapot seems “dull and shapeless.” There is also a sandalwood box filled with brass figures of bulls, peacocks, and goblins, and a plain-looking black book filled with beautiful pictures of exotic birds.
The items in the lumber room that Nicholas finds fascinating have animals or birds on them, suggesting that this room is a place of wildness as opposed to the tameness of the rest of the house. The aunt seems to intentionally keep it this way, as evidenced by Nicholas’s comparison between the interesting duck-shaped teapot in the lumber room and the boring nursery teapot the children use.
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Literary Devices
Meanwhile, the aunt thinks that Nicholas must have climbed over a wall to enter the gooseberry garden, and she is looking for him there. She calls for him to come out of the gooseberry garden, claiming that she can see him. Nicholas, who is still inside the lumber room, smiles to himself when he hears her say this. It is “probably the first time for twenty years that anyone had smiled in that lumber-room.”
The aunt grows desperate when she suspects that Nicholas has disobeyed her and evaded detection. When she says she can see him in the gooseberry garden, Nicholas is amused to catch her lying. He also knows that she’d be much more upset if she knew he was in the wild chaos of the lumber room rather than among the cultivated plants of the gooseberry garden.
Themes
Soon after, Nicholas hears the aunt scream and then call out for someone to help her. He carefully locks up the lumber room and replaces the key in the library, and then goes out to the front garden to investigate. The aunt is calling his name from inside the gooseberry garden, and Nicholas asks, “Who’s calling?” The aunt replies that she has fallen into the empty rain water tank in the gooseberry garden and asks him to bring her a ladder so she can climb out. To this, Nicholas replies that he was told not to go into the gooseberry garden.
It is a funny moment in the story when Nicholas saunters into the garden asking, “Who’s calling?”—he clearly knows it is the aunt. Nicholas thinks quickly and starts laying the foundation for his plan to not help her, and first does this by using the aunt’s order against her. She told him to stay out of the gooseberry garden, so he says he cannot go inside it to help her. He clearly enjoys having the upper hand while she is helpless in the water tank.
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Literary Devices
When the aunt impatiently says that he can now go into the gooseberry garden, Nicholas replies that her voice doesn’t sound like the aunt’s and that he suspects it might be the “Evil One” tempting him to be disobedient. He says the aunt always said that Nicholas gave in to the Evil One’s temptations but that this time he wouldn’t.
Nicholas builds on the idea that he doesn’t know who is talking to him from inside the water tank and he goes on to claim that he thinks it is the “Evil One,” or in other words, the Devil. This is a brave claim to make against the strict aunt, but Nicholas builds his case well. He once again uses the aunt’s words—this time, it is that he always gives in when the Evil One tempts him—to refuse to help her.
Themes
The “prisoner in the tank” tells Nicholas not to “talk nonsense” and to bring the ladder. Nicholas asks if they would have strawberry jam with their tea, and the aunt says they certainly would. Nicholas then shouts that he is now sure it is the Evil One talking to him and not the aunt—the previous day, the aunt had said there was no strawberry jam when the children asked her for some. Nicholas had checked the store cupboard and knew there were four jars of jam, and the Evil One knew this, too, but the aunt must not have known since she said there wasn’t any. Nicholas triumphantly says, “Oh, Devil, you have sold yourself!”
Nicholas cleverly lays a trap for the aunt when he asks about the strawberry jam. He knows that the aunt lied to the children about the jam, and he shows her that he knows this. The aunt is left in a difficult situation because the only way for her to claim she is not the Devil is to admit she’d lied about the jam earlier, and this would destroy her façade of being “older and wiser and better” than the children. The aunt’s lie about the strawberry jam is very petty, especially since she has not one but four jars of jam in storage. She seems to take joy in denying the children small pleasures and insisting they eat the bland “bread-and-milk” she offers them. Her lies and small-mindedness suggest that Nicholas is justified when he calls her the Devil.
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Literary Devices
While Nicholas enjoys the luxury of talking to the aunt as if she were the “Evil One,” he understands with “childish discernment” that he shouldn’t push his luck in this conversation. So, he walks away, leaving the aunt stuck inside the water tank. Eventually, a kitchen maid finds the aunt and rescues her.
In addition to his wildly rebellious behavior and flights of imagination, Nicholas demonstrates that he also possesses sound practical judgment by walking away from this interaction while he still has the upper hand.
Themes
That evening, tea is a quiet and uncomfortable affair. The other children had not enjoyed themselves at Jagborough because the tide was high—“a circumstance that the aunt had overlooked in the haste of organising her punitive expedition.” They hadn’t been able to play on the sands, and Bobby’s tight boots had put him in a grumpy mood. The aunt is upset after being stuck in the water tank for 35 minutes. Nicholas is quiet like the others, as well. He is thinking deeply about the tapestry he’d found in the lumber room, and thinks that the hunter might be able to escape with his dogs if he left the stag he’d killed for the wolves to feast on.
In contrast to Nicholas’s meticulous planning of every trick he pulls off, the aunt’s plan to send the children to Jagborough was hurried and sloppy. Nicholas turns out to be right when he predicted that Bobby’s boots would prevent him from having fun. While the aunt seethes in silence at having been stuck in the water tank, she is unable to scold or punish Nicholas for not helping her because of the clever way he manipulated their conversation. While the rest of the family has their tea in collective misery, Nicholas is happily preoccupied as he is thinking about the tapestry. He is coming up with another solution for the problem of the huntsman and the wolves. In this new scenario, the huntsman and his dogs might escape if they leave the stag to the wolves—so the wild creatures get to feast while the bumbling huntsman runs for his life. Nicholas foresees a happy ending for the wolves that he seems to identify with.
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