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, Bastable, and their attempts to assist their widowed father and recover the fortunes of their family. The Bastable family lives on the Lewisham Road in London in straitened circumstances, the widowed father having been cheated by his business partner. The children, Dora, the eldest, Oswald, the narrator, Dicky, Alice and Noel (10-year-old twins), and H. O., the youngest, decide to restore the fortunes of their house by finding or earning treasure.  They try various methods that work in books, such as digging for it, being bandits, marrying a princess, inventing a patent medicine, rescuing a rich gentleman, but somehow nothing is successful. However, during their imaginative adventures they make many friends. 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. The Story of the Treasure Seekers was the first novel for children by E. Nesbit. This and her later novels exerted considerable influence on subsequent English children’s literature, most notably Arthur Ransome’s 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. 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. The events of the story take place while the children are isolated as a group, for example, while on holiday. They couldn’t wait to get the fortune but when the billing came in the wife, or the mother was caught and charged with insufficient will meaning she took the will without it being signed to her name. The kids were found by the mother’s sister or their aunt and were kept there until the wife’s jail sentence was over which was 4 years. When the mother was set free the kids went with the mother and lived humbly not chasing a fortune.