The Story of the Treasure Seekers
The
Story of the Treasure Seekers
is a novel by E. Nesbit.
First published in 1899, it tells the story of Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel, and Horace Octavius (H. O.) Bastable,
and their attempts to assist their widowed father and recover the fortunes of
their family; its sequels are The Wouldbegoods (1901) and The New
Treasure Seekers (1904). The novel's complete name is The Story of the
Treasure Seekers: Being the Adventures of the Bastable Children in Search of a
Fortune. The original edition included illustrations by H.
R. Millar. The Puffin edition (1958) was illustrated by Cecil
Leslie.
The
story is told from a child's point of view. The narrator is Oswald, but on the
first page he announces:
"It
is one of us that tells this story – but I shall not tell you which: only at
the very end perhaps I will. While the story is going on you may be trying to
guess, only I bet you don't."[1]
However,
his occasional lapse into first person, and the undue praise he likes to heap
on himself, makes his identity obvious to the attentive reader long before he
reveals it himself.
Publication
The
Bastables stories from The Story of the Treasure Seekers were first
published between 1894 and October 1899 in an assortment of periodicals: Nister's
Holiday Annual, the Illustrated London
News and its supplement Father
Christmas, The Pall Mall Magazine, and the Windsor
Magazine.[2]
The
order in which the chapters appeared was changed for the one-volume publication
in 1899. Some of them also underwent extensive rewriting.
The
Story of the Treasure Seekers
was the first novel for children by Nesbit; it and her later novels exerted
considerable influence on subsequent English children's literature, most
notably Arthur Ransome's[citation needed] books and
C.
S. Lewis'[3] The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis notes in the first chapter of The Magician's Nephew that the portion of the action of that book that takes
place in this world happens at the same time as that of the Treasure Seekers.
The American writer Edward Eager
was also influenced by this and other Nesbit books, most notably in his Half
Magic series, where he mentions the Bastable children and other Nesbit characters
as heroes of his characters.[citation needed]
Nesbit's
influence on other British and American children's literature rests largely on
the following motifs: her protagonists are a set or sets of siblings from a
separated or incomplete family who must (or prefer to) amuse themselves alone
while on holiday. Through magic or complex imaginative play, the children face
perils that they overcome through pluck.[4] Another notable feature is the depiction of the realistic
quarrels and faults of the children. J.
K. Rowling, writer of the Harry Potter series,
ranked Nesbit as one of her favourite authors, and The Story of the Treasure
Seekers as her favourite of Nesbit's books.[5]
British
writer Michael Moorcock
later used the character, or at least the name, of Oswald
Bastable for the hero and first-person
narrator of his trilogy A Nomad of the Time
Streams, published from 1971 until 1981, an
influence on the nascent genre of steampunk.
TV adaptations
The
book has been made into TV series three times, in 1953,[6]
1961,[7] and 1982.[8] It was made into a television movie as The Treasure Seekers in 1996.[9]
References
· "The
Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit – Full Text Free Book (Part
1/3)". Fullbooks.com. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
· · Nelson, Claudia.
"Note on the Texts." Introduction to The Story of the Treasure
Seekers and The Wouldbegoods. Palgrave Macmillan,
2013.
· · Nicholson, Mervyn
(Fall 1998). "C.
S. Lewis and the Scholarship of Imagination in E. Nesbit and Rider
Haggard". Renascence. 51 (1): 41–62.
Retrieved 26 October 2015.
· · Graham, Eleanor.
"E. Nesbit and the Bastables." Introduction to The Story of the
Treasure Seekers. Penguin
Books: Harmondsworth, 1971.
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