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The Story of the Treasure Seekers
The Story of the Treasure Seekers
The Story of the Treasure Seekers
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The Story of the Treasure Seekers

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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The Story of the Treasure Seekers tells the story of Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel, and Horace Octavius Bastable, and their attempts to assist their widowed father and recover the fortunes of their family. The story is told from a child's point of view. The narrator is Oswald.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherSovereign
Release dateMar 12, 2018
ISBN9781787244740
Author

Edith Nesbit

Edith Nesbit (Londres, 1858-1924) escritora y poetisa que viajó por Inglaterra, España y Francia. Se casó a los 21 años con el político Hubert Bland, con quien tuvo cinco hijos. Su vida fue una continua lucha contra la rectitud victoriana de la época. Es conocida por sus libros para niños llenos de humor y con un estilo innovador que, en ocasiones, desarrolla las aventuras de los protagonistas en una realidad cotidiana con elementos mágicos.

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Rating: 3.8978493408602146 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Six brothers and sisters decide to look for treasure - in their London home and nearby - when their widowed father's business falls on hard times.A nice-enough story, although it does teeter on the edge of trite, and there are times that Nesbit seems a little too pleased with the cleverness of her boy-as-author/flawed-narrator trope.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I thought it was charming, but slight ... but charming enough to smush it into a 4 star category over 3 star. Loved the touch of how the author claimed they would keep a secret who was narrating the story--I can imagine kids reading it and being a bit stymied, but at 51 I was fairly certain I'd figured it out :-)

    (Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This story is that children seek treasure. The ending is good.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Bastable family was rich befor farther died.Arter he died,childlen start to thinking how can we become rich,and try to find treasure.They dig in the garden.This story is fun.As if I back to childhood,this book fill with dreams.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Who wouldn't want to be a Bastable? One of my most treasured books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of my absolute favorite children's book. Used to pretend I was Oswald even though I was a girl. My mother had heard somewhere that Christopher Morley recommended this book and it was one of the very few books that she ever gave me.Then I discovered the Atlanta Public Library (then Carnegie), most of the Nesbit books were in the children's room, so I read a lot of them.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    FIrst read of this Victorian author, Edith Nesbit. This also was her debut novel.

    The story is of the Bastable siblings, set in England during the Victorian era. Their mother has died and their father's partner has absconded with the profits of the business, leaving the children to devise their own methods of restoring the family fortunes...

    their creative imagination in solutions and escapades carry the reader along a genuine experience of childhood in the society of the day. Ms Nesbit herself having experienced much of what she writes, we are privileged with accurate dialogue, colloquialisms, settings and relationships between adults and children.

    The story is narrated by the eldest Bastable son, Oswald, giving his perspective on the activities and adventures and running commentary on his siblings. This gives great insights into the thought of the day regarding expectations on children, class differences, how money is spent, schooling, clothing, and Victorian life generally. I was intrigued by the mention of burying their picnic rubbish as well as orange peels as a positive instruction Oswald wished other mothers would teach their children. Sounding very 'today' for compost and litter awareness!

    The forward of the Puffin classics version I have, has a great biographical sketch of the author, Edith Nesbit, which also highlights her life as a Victorian and the influences on her that produced the writing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a wonderful and timeless work. A first person narration by one of the Bastaple children who live in the Lewisham Road in the late 19th century. The family has come upon some hard times and the children seek to assist their Father's precarious financial situation by searching for treasure wherever it may be found.There is plenty of wonderful and subtle humour that is appreciated all the more by thse looking back on childhood with adult eyes. The stories themselves are engaging, and provide a snapshot on late victorian life - at least for the middle classes. If nothing else it will help people understand pre-decimilisation currency!But all in all this was an enjoyable read, and one I would not hesitate to recommend.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The six Bastable children seek to restore the family fortunes by various means, including burglary. The story is narrated by one of the children who tries to remain anonymous but gives himself away right at the start, it is very charming in its innocence and humour.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The six Bastable children are a joy in this book. Oswald is the narrator, although there is an attempt to keep that a secret. What is surprising about it is the age of the book. It was published in 1899. It is over a hundred years old. Charles Dickens had written realistic accounts of children as had Charlotte Bronte, but the Bastable children, although poor, are relatively happy and their interaction with each other is loving and healthy for the most part. Dicken's and Bronte's children lead pretty grim lives. Their mother is dead, but there is not much made of this. The reader doesn't know any of the details; they aren't important for the story. We also don't know what the father's "business" is, nor why it isn't doing well. This story is from the children's perspective and concerns their everyday life, their play and their imaginings. This is a book which influenced many later writers of children's books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Charming little children's book with an amusing first-person narration. Great sense of humour, lovely period piece.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was the first of Nesbit's successful children's books which began life as a serial and which was published in book form in 1899. Dedicated to the scholar and journalist Oswald Barron, its dedicatee furnished the name of the narrator who recounts the 'adventures of the Bastable children in search of a fortune' to revive the failing career of their widower father. The children (Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel and Horace Octavius) use the time when their father cannot afford to send them to school to seek for ways to make money in order to return the family to its former comfortable estate.This is a charming story which reflects the middle-class gentility prevalent in England more than a century ago (observed in detail in A S Byatt's The Children's Book) before the horrors of the First World War changed things forever. The children's approach to fortune-seeking, influenced by their reading and popular culture, gets them into scrapes from which their honesty and honorableness generally rescue them. Nesbit subtly counterpoints Oswald's descriptions of the situations the children find themselves in with her own adult observations, unspoken but implicit in a turn of phrase or in a character's reaction. In this way, the young reader is not spoken down to but the adult reader can perhaps relive the experiences from a child's particular perspective. I thought this was a magical novel despite not including the explicit magic of her later books such as The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Enchanted Castle, a classic feelgood story where goodness overcomes all in the end. This Puffin edition has an interesting Introduction by the late Eleanor Graham (founding editor of Puffin Books and herself a children's author) which, as its title 'E. Nesbit and the Bastables' suggests, gives the background to the writing of the book by reference to Nesbit's own childhood and bohemian life.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a classic British children’s book written by the Nesbit, who was a key influence of C.S. Lewis in writing the Chronicles of Narnia among others. It is a story of six siblings from a family who are regularly left to their own devices who face perils with humor and pluck as they attempt to recover the family’s fortune.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As a child, I loved books with magic. I was often disappointed to discover that books with wonderful magical titles and wonderful magical covers had nothing magical in them. This book sounded like it would be magical. It was not, but I liked it anyway. A family of children hope to restore their family’s lost fortune. They engage in a series of attempts to recover their family fortune including digging for treasure and writing a book, all of which are doomed to failure and yet ultimately result in restoring the family fortune. I liked this book very much. The children have tremendous fun together. It almost tempts one to have an enormous family in the hopes of finding the companionship seen in this family.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    E. Nesbit did not write for children. Oh, yes, I quite enjoyed Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet and so on when I was a child; they're magnificent children's books. But listening to the Librivox recording of The Story of the Treasure-Seekers makes it very, very clear that the magnificent Ms. Nesbit had very firmly in mind the parents who would be reading the books aloud at bedtime. One beautiful example is a scene in which an adult abruptly rises from his seat and walks away to stand at the window with his back to the children in his office. The narrator says he believes the man was trying to conceal his emotions. Which is very true; the emotions, however, were not what the narrator thought. But the narrator, and any child reading or listening who has utter faith that all is just as the narrator perceives it, may believe one thing; the beautiful layer of comedy in the moment is reserved for the grown-ups. Thank goodness we get something; in almost everything else the children are the fortunate ones. The Bastable children possess an innocence which I'm very much afraid is impossible for even a twelve-year-old today. I've seen comments out there amongst the reviews about "imperialist overtones" and casual racism. Thing is, though, this was first published in 1899, and like it or not the world was a very different place then, and as I read it even what could be considered racist has an innocence that keeps it from being offensive. The children are given to understand that a visitor is an Indian, and – fed on adventure novels – assume Amerind, and ask him about beavers. He's India Indian, though, and has no information on such creatures. I honestly don't see how the children's honest excitement about and sympathy for someone from far away who describes himself as a poor broken-down fellow (which they also take literally) can be translated as racist, especially in 1899, and the one extremely unfortunate exclamation that can be (the same as is found in L.M. Montgomery's A Tangled Web) was, sadly, a much more common epithet a hundred years ago. These are the sort of fictional children that make me despair over today's kids: imaginative, well-read, well-spoken, thoughtful under the childish self-centeredness, and self-sufficient; they make today's kids (American, at least) look like Neanderthals. They're not perfect little angels – E. Nesbit was never stupid. But they do set a ludicrously high standard. Dora, the eldest (at 13 or 14?), comes off as a bit of a prig (though this is dealt with in a later chapter in such a way that it made me cry), desperately trying to maintain some moral high ground in a horde of siblings who think it would be absolutely smashing if there were still highwaymen on the heath – or, even better, if they could be highwaymen on the heath. Her objection is that it's "wrong" – as in illegal and people hang for such things, not so much as in the victims of the highwaymen didn't think it was quite so smashing. The again-innocent bloodthirstiness of the kids is remarkable, and just fun. Oswald, the oldest boy at 12 and (you might guess, or you might not!) the narrator of the story, is very nearly as brave and honourable as he wants to appear, and very straightforward. It's rather lovely to see him reluctantly, realistically doing the right thing throughout the book, proceeding quietly and alone when practical – the older ones all do that, shouldering responsibility and striving to make things right when they go wrong. The fierce affection and loyalty among the siblings is, like their father's poverty and worries, never explicitly stated: it doesn't have to be. It is shown, not told. The four younger children – Noel and Alice and H.O. and Dickie, ranging down to I believe six years old – are every one expected by their elder siblings to be just as sharp and responsible and willing and able to contribute as Oswald and Dora. Some allowances are made for their extreme youth, but for the most part they are equal partners in the treasure-seeking, receiving an equal share in any profits – though sometimes excused by protective siblings from punishments. I don't remember E. Nesbit reducing me to tears in the past. This did. And, yes, I laughed out loud. I missed the magic element of some of the other books – but only at first. It didn't take long to realize that most of the magic of E. Nesbit's writing is actually in E. Nesbit's writing. To that point: "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond." ~ C.S. Lewis. I look forward to reading E. Nesbit when I'm fifty, and beyond.

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The Story of the Treasure Seekers - Edith Nesbit

Edith Nesbit

The Story of the Treasure Seekers

New Edition

LONDON ∙ NEW YORK ∙ TORONTO ∙ SAO PAULO ∙ MOSCOW

PARIS ∙ MADRID ∙ BERLIN ∙ ROME ∙ MEXICO CITY ∙ MUMBAI ∙ SEOUL ∙ DOHA

TOKYO ∙ SYDNEY ∙ CAPE TOWN ∙ AUCKLAND ∙ BEIJING

New Edition

Published by Sovereign Classic

www.sovereignclassic.net

This Edition

First published in 2018

Copyright © 2018 Sovereign

All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 9781787244740

Contents

DEDICATION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

DEDICATION

TO OSWALD BARRON WITHOUT WHOM THIS BOOK COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN

THE TREASURE SEEKERS IS DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF CHILDHOODS

IDENTICAL BUT FOR THE ACCIDENTS OF TIME AND SPACE

CHAPTER 1

THE COUNCIL OF WAYS AND MEANS

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking.

There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, ‘Alas! said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, we must look our last on this ancestral home’—and then some one else says something—and you don’t know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it. Our ancestral home is in the Lewisham Road. It is semi-detached and has a garden, not a large one. We are the Bastables. There are six of us besides Father. Our Mother is dead, and if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all. Dora is the eldest. Then Oswald—and then Dicky. Oswald won the Latin prize at his preparatory school—and Dicky is good at sums. Alice and Noel are twins: they are ten, and Horace Octavius is my youngest brother. 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. It was Oswald who first thought of looking for treasure. Oswald often thinks of very interesting things. And directly he thought of it he did not keep it to himself, as some boys would have done, but he told the others, and said—

‘I’ll tell you what, we must go and seek for treasure: it is always what you do to restore the fallen fortunes of your House.’

Dora said it was all very well. She often says that. She was trying to mend a large hole in one of Noel’s stockings. He tore it on a nail when we were playing shipwrecked mariners on top of the chicken-house the day H. O. fell off and cut his chin: he has the scar still. Dora is the only one of us who ever tries to mend anything. Alice tries to make things sometimes. Once she knitted a red scarf for Noel because his chest is delicate, but it was much wider at one end than the other, and he wouldn’t wear it. So we used it as a pennon, and it did very well, because most of our things are black or grey since Mother died; and scarlet was a nice change. Father does not like you to ask for new things. That was one way we had of knowing that the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable were really fallen. Another way was that there was no more pocket-money—except a penny now and then to the little ones, and people did not come to dinner any more, like they used to, with pretty dresses, driving up in cabs—and the carpets got holes in them—and when the legs came off things they were not sent to be mended, and we gave up having the gardener except for the front garden, and not that very often. And the silver in the big oak plate-chest that is lined with green baize all went away to the shop to have the dents and scratches taken out of it, and it never came back. We think Father hadn’t enough money to pay the silver man for taking out the dents and scratches. The new spoons and forks were yellowy-white, and not so heavy as the old ones, and they never shone after the first day or two.

Father was very ill after Mother died; and while he was ill his business-partner went to Spain—and there was never much money afterwards. I don’t know why. Then the servants left and there was only one, a General. A great deal of your comfort and happiness depends on having a good General. The last but one was nice: she used to make jolly good currant puddings for us, and let us have the dish on the floor and pretend it was a wild boar we were killing with our forks. But the General we have now nearly always makes sago puddings, and they are the watery kind, and you cannot pretend anything with them, not even islands, like you do with porridge.

Then we left off going to school, and Father said we should go to a good school as soon as he could manage it. He said a holiday would do us all good. We thought he was right, but we wished he had told us he couldn’t afford it. For of course we knew.

Then a great many people used to come to the door with envelopes with no stamps on them, and sometimes they got very angry, and said they were calling for the last time before putting it in other hands. I asked Eliza what that meant, and she kindly explained to me, and I was so sorry for Father.

And once a long, blue paper came; a policeman brought it, and we were so frightened. But Father said it was all right, only when he went up to kiss the girls after they were in bed they said he had been crying, though I’m sure that’s not true. Because only cowards and snivellers cry, and my Father is the bravest man in the world.

So you see it was time we looked for treasure and Oswald said so, and Dora said it was all very well. But the others agreed with Oswald. So we held a council. Dora was in the chair—the big dining-room chair, that we let the fireworks off from, the Fifth of November when we had the measles and couldn’t do it in the garden. The hole has never been mended, so now we have that chair in the nursery, and I think it was cheap at the blowing-up we boys got when the hole was burnt.

‘We must do something,’ said Alice, ‘because the exchequer is empty.’ She rattled the money-box as she spoke, and it really did rattle because we always keep the bad sixpence in it for luck.

‘Yes—but what shall we do?’ said Dicky. ‘It’s so jolly easy to say let’s do something.’ Dicky always wants everything settled exactly. Father calls him the Definite Article.

‘Let’s read all the books again. We shall get lots of ideas out of them.’ It was Noel who suggested this, but we made him shut up, because we knew well enough he only wanted to get back to his old books. Noel is a poet. He sold some of his poetry once—and it was printed, but that does not come in this part of the story.

Then Dicky said, ‘Look here. We’ll be quite quiet for ten minutes by the clock—and each think of some way to find treasure. And when we’ve thought we’ll try all the ways one after the other, beginning with the eldest.’

‘I shan’t be able to think in ten minutes, make it half an hour,’ said H. O. His real name is Horace Octavius, but we call him H. O. because of the advertisement, and it’s not so very long ago he was afraid to pass the hoarding where it says ‘Eat H. O.’ in big letters. He says it was when he was a little boy, but I remember last Christmas but one, he woke in the middle of the night crying and howling, and they said it was the pudding. But he told me afterwards he had been dreaming that they really had come to eat H. O., and it couldn’t have been the pudding, when you come to think of it, because it was so very plain.

Well, we made it half an hour—and we all sat quiet, and thought and thought. And I made up my mind before two minutes were over, and I saw the others had, all but Dora, who is always an awful time over everything. I got pins and needles in my leg from sitting still so long, and when it was seven minutes H. O. cried out—‘Oh, it must be more than half an hour!’

H. O. is eight years old, but he cannot tell the clock yet. Oswald could tell the clock when he was six.

We all stretched ourselves and began to speak at once, but Dora put up her hands to her ears and said—

‘One at a time, please. We aren’t playing Babel.’ (It is a very good game. Did you ever play it?)

So Dora made us all sit in a row on the floor, in ages, and then she pointed at us with the finger that had the brass thimble on. Her silver one got lost when the last General but two went away. We think she must have forgotten it was Dora’s and put it in her box by mistake. She was a very forgetful girl. She used to forget what she had spent money on, so that the change was never quite right.

Oswald spoke first. ‘I think we might stop people on Blackheath—with crape masks and horse-pistols—and say Your money or your life! Resistance is useless, we are armed to the teeth—like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. It wouldn’t matter about not having horses, because coaches have gone out too.’

Dora screwed up her nose the way she always does when she is going to talk like the good elder sister in books, and said, ‘That would be very wrong: it’s like pickpocketing or taking pennies out of Father’s great-coat when it’s hanging in the hall.’

I must say I don’t think she need have said that, especially before the little ones—for it was when I was only four.

But Oswald was not going to let her see he cared, so he said—

‘Oh, very well. I can think of lots of other ways. We could rescue an old gentleman from deadly Highwaymen.’

‘There aren’t any,’ said Dora.

‘Oh, well, it’s all the same—from deadly peril, then. There’s plenty of that. Then he would turn out to be the Prince of Wales, and he would say, My noble, my cherished preserver! Here is a million pounds a year. Rise up, Sir Oswald Bastable.

But the others did not seem to think so, and it was Alice’s turn to say.

She said, ‘I think we might try the divining-rod. I’m sure I could do it. I’ve often read about it. You hold a stick in your hands, and when you come to where there is gold underneath the stick kicks about. So you know. And you dig.’

‘Oh,’ said Dora suddenly, ‘I have an idea. But I’ll say last. I hope the divining-rod isn’t wrong. I believe it’s wrong in the Bible.’

‘So is eating pork and ducks,’ said Dicky. ‘You can’t go by that.’

‘Anyhow, we’ll try the other ways first,’ said Dora. ‘Now, H. O.’

‘Let’s be Bandits,’ said H. O. ‘I dare say it’s wrong but it would be fun pretending.’

‘I’m sure it’s wrong,’ said Dora.

And Dicky said she thought everything wrong. She said she didn’t, and Dicky was very disagreeable. So Oswald had to make peace, and he said—

‘Dora needn’t play if she doesn’t want to. Nobody asked her. And, Dicky, don’t be an idiot: do dry up and let’s hear what Noel’s idea is.’

Dora and Dicky did not look pleased, but I kicked Noel under the table to make him hurry up, and then he said he didn’t think he wanted to play any more. That’s the worst of it. The others are so jolly ready to quarrel. I told Noel to be a man and not a snivelling pig, and at last he said he had not made up his mind whether he would print his poetry in a book and sell it, or find a princess and marry her.

‘Whichever it is,’ he added, ‘none of you shall want for anything, though Oswald did kick me, and say I was a snivelling pig.’

‘I didn’t,’ said Oswald, ‘I told you not to be.’ And Alice explained to him that that was quite the opposite of what he thought. So he agreed to drop it.

Then Dicky spoke.

‘You must all of you have noticed the advertisements in the papers, telling you that ladies and gentlemen can easily earn two pounds a week in their spare time, and to send two shillings for sample and instructions, carefully packed free from observation. Now that we don’t go to school all our time is spare time. So I should think we could easily earn twenty pounds a week each. That would do us very well. We’ll try some of the other things first, and directly we have any money we’ll send for the sample and instructions. And I have another idea, but I must think about it before I say.’

We all said, ‘Out with it—what’s the other idea?’

But Dicky said, ‘No.’ That is Dicky all over. He never will show you anything he’s making till it’s quite finished, and the same with his inmost thoughts. But he is pleased if you seem to want to know, so Oswald said—

‘Keep your silly old secret, then. Now, Dora, drive ahead. We’ve all said except you.’

Then Dora jumped up and dropped the stocking and the thimble (it rolled away, and we did not find it for days), and said—

‘Let’s try my way now. Besides, I’m the eldest, so it’s only fair. Let’s dig for treasure. Not any tiresome divining-rod—but just plain digging. People who dig for treasure always find it. And then we shall be rich and we needn’t try your ways at all. Some of them are rather difficult: and I’m certain some of them are wrong—and we must always remember that wrong things—’

But we told her to shut up and come on, and she did.

I couldn’t help wondering as we went down to the garden, why Father had never thought of digging there for treasure instead of going to his beastly office every day.

CHAPTER 2

DIGGING FOR TREASURE

I am afraid the last chapter was rather dull. It is always dull in books when people talk and talk, and don’t do anything, but I was obliged to put it in, or else you wouldn’t have understood all the rest. The best part of books is when things are happening. That is the best part of real things too. This is why I shall not tell you in this

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