Do-As-You-Please rule

The Do-As-You-Please rule is the governing principle of the Land of Do-As-You-Please, an enchanted realm where expressed wishes are fulfilled almost at once. It transforms the children's ordinary desires into visible parts of the landscape and gives the visit its distinctive promise: unlike a world constrained by scarcity, this land supplies the experience, object, or activity being imagined. Yet the rule also makes freedom unstable. The same wish-fulfilling abundance that produces delight places the visitors in charge of machinery, movement, and choices whose consequences they must still negotiate.

Definition and Invitation

The rule is introduced through a letter from Silky and Moon-Face. They describe the Land of Do-As-You-Please as an especially exciting destination, even nicer than the Land of Take-What-You-Want, and invite Bessie, Fanny, Jo, and Dick to join them shortly before midnight. The invitation establishes the rule as a reason to enter rather than as a restriction to be obeyed: the attraction lies in the prospect that the visitors' wishes will matter immediately.

The threshold itself reinforces the land's departure from ordinary expectations. The children climb through a cloud by lantern light, expecting the darkness associated with their nighttime journey, but find daytime above it. The sudden change from night to day marks the realm as one in which familiar arrangements no longer control experience. The setting resembles a huge amusement park, with roundabouts, swings, see-saws, a railway, and small aeroplanes, while brownies, pixies, and goblins enjoy themselves in the various attractions. The rule is therefore embodied in a whole environment of available pleasure rather than announced merely as an abstract slogan.

Wishes Made Physical

The first major demonstration of the rule turns a desire for a ride into an immediate opportunity. Jo sees Silky and Moon-Face on a roundabout and calls for the others to join them. The ride stops so that the children can board, and each child chooses an animal: Bessie takes a white rabbit, Fanny a lion, Jo a bear, and Dick a horse. The choice is personal and specific, while the result is communal; everyone can select a different form of excitement within the same shared attraction.

The roundabout then magnifies the wish for pleasure through repetition. Jo asks for six rides without getting off, and the request is carried out. Its speed leaves the children giddy enough to roll about like sailors when they finally dismount. The rule thus fulfils not only a single desire but an exaggerated version of it, allowing enjoyment to continue until the body registers its cost. The scene makes the land's generosity comic and physical: nothing prevents the children from asking for more, but their own dizziness supplies a limit that the land itself does not impose.

Food follows the same pattern of instantaneous abundance. Bessie says that she feels like sitting down with six ice-creams, and an ice-cream man immediately arrives with thirty-six, enough to give six to each of the six members of the group. The number makes the rule concrete. A spoken appetite becomes a calculated surplus, and Jo's equal division turns private desire into a fair distribution among the party. The abundance is pleasurable, but the act of dividing it also shows that social judgment remains necessary even in a place where supply appears unlimited.

Agency and Its Boundaries

Jo next wishes to drive a railway engine, a task he has always wanted to try, and invites the others to become passengers. The wish is granted when he runs to the stopping train and takes control. At first the experience confirms the rule's empowering character: Jo is not merely carried through an attraction but is allowed to operate it himself.

That freedom immediately produces a danger. The engine travels too fast, and although Jo pulls the “Go Slow” handle successfully, his concentration on driving prevents him from noticing an approaching station. He passes straight through it, leaving waiting passengers angry and upsetting people in the train who intended to get out there. The episode defines the rule's boundary more sharply than the amusements do. The land provides agency, but it does not remove the need for attention, competence, or responsibility. A wish can open access to an experience; it cannot guarantee that the experience will be safely or perfectly controlled.

The rule also answers a wish that seems impossible within the apparent amusement-park setting. Fanny wants to ride an elephant, and Bessie initially observes that there are no elephants. Almost immediately, six large grey elephants walk solemnly toward the children, allowing everyone to have a ride. The sequence gives the rule a characteristic dramatic rhythm: denial is followed by fulfilment so quickly that the desired object seems to have been summoned by the wish itself. The six elephants also repeat the pattern of collective provision established by the thirty-six ice-creams, converting one person's desire into an experience available to the whole group.

Dick's wish for the sea provides the clearest transformation of landscape. He says that he would love to paddle, while Fanny notes that there is no sea there. A nearby signpost then points toward “TO THE SEA,” and after the group follows it around two corners, a blue sea appears in warm sunshine, bordered by shining golden sands and little waves. The rule does not merely produce an object that can be picked up; it rearranges the geography of the land so that the desired activity becomes possible. Dick removes his shoes and socks, and soon everyone is paddling. Moon-Face and Silky, who have never paddled before, share the children's pleasure, while Dick goes so far out that his shorts become soaking wet. Fulfilment creates a new shared memory, but it also retains the ordinary physical consequences of play.

Order Within Unlimited Choice

The Do-As-You-Please rule differs from nearby enchanted laws because its apparent principle is permission rather than inversion, punishment, or exchange. In Topsy-Turvy Land, the rule requires everyone and everything to be upside-down, including houses standing on chimneys, trees with roots in the air, and people walking on their hands. In the Land of Dreams, the Sandman's sleep-producing sand threatens to immobilize visitors before the land shifts away. In the Land of Presents, by contrast, a visitor may obtain things only to give them to someone else, not for personal use. These contrasts show that an enchanted land's freedom is always defined by a particular rule, and that the Do-As-You-Please rule is distinctive because it makes desire the organizing principle of space and activity.

Even here, however, unlimited choice does not mean the disappearance of social order. The children divide the ice-creams equally, travel together on the attractions, and respond collectively to the dangers created by Jo's driving. The land removes ordinary scarcity and many ordinary prohibitions, but it does not abolish consequences or the need for cooperation. Its fantasy of freedom is therefore relational: wishes are fulfilled most successfully when the group shares the resulting pleasure and manages the risks together.

Narrative Significance

The rule gives the adventure a sequence of escalating wish-fulfilments: a chosen animal on a roundabout, six repeated rides, thirty-six ice-creams, a railway engine, six elephants, and finally a sea. Each episode tests a different kind of desire—recreation, appetite, control, spectacle, and bodily play—while preserving the same underlying mechanism. The land continually turns speech into circumstance, making the children's imaginations temporarily authoritative.

Its most revealing counterpoint is Jo's train journey. The wish to drive is fulfilled, but the failure to notice the station demonstrates that a world without imposed limits still demands self-limitation. The rule offers extraordinary freedom without promising wisdom. That tension keeps the land from becoming merely a catalogue of treats: it is a playful experiment in what happens when wanting and obtaining are separated by almost no interval. The result is exhilarating, generous, and slightly perilous, because the visitors must supply the judgment that the magical environment does not.