Previous
Summary
Themes
and Colors
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.
Active
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.
Active
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 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.
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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.”
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.
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.”
Active
Themes
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Active
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!”
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.
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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.
