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 of the Treasure Seekers
AuthorE. Nesbit
IllustratorGordon Browne, Lewis Baumer
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SeriesBastable
GenreChildren's novel
PublisherT. Fisher Unwin
Publication date
1899
Media typePrint (hardback and paperback)
Followed byThe Wouldbegoods 

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.

Influence on other literature

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 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.

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
  1. "The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit – Full Text Free Book (Part 1/3)". Fullbooks.com. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
  2. Nelson, Claudia. "Note on the Texts." Introduction to The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
  3. Nicholson, Mervyn (Fall 1998). "C. S. Lewis and the Scholarship of Imagination in E. Nesbit and Rider Haggard". Renascence. 51 (1): 41–62. doi:10.5840/renascence19985114. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
  4. Graham, Eleanor. "E. Nesbit and the Bastables." Introduction to The Story of the Treasure Seekers. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1971.
  5. "Here are all of J.K. Rowling's favorite books". INSIDER. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
  6. The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1953) at IMDb
  7. The Treasure Seekers (1961) at IMDb
  8. The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1982) at IMDb
  9. The Treasure Seekers (1996) at IMDb

Also at Project Gutenberg:

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