Edith Nesbit

The Story of the Treasure Seekers Edith Nesbit

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 (1899) 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." 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. 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' 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.