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Suggest pagesThe Story of the Treasure Seekers
| The Story of the Treasure Seekers | |
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| Author(s) | E. Nesbit |
| Illustrator | Gordon Browne, Lewis Baumer |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Bastable |
| Genre(s) | Children's Novel |
| Publisher | T. Fisher Unwin |
| Publication date | 1899 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Followed by | The Wouldbegoods |
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 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."[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.
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[edit] Influence on other literature
The Story of the Treasure Seekers was the first novel by Nesbit; it and its successor 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 also notes in the first chapter of The Magician's Nephew that the portion of that book's action that takes place in this world happens at the same time as this book.). American writer Edward Eager was also greatly influenced by this and other Nesbit books, most notably in his Half Magic series, which actually mention the Bastable children (and other Nesbit titles and characters) as heroes of Eager's 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.[2] Another notable feature is the depiction of the realistic quarrels and faults of the children.
British writer Michael Moorcock would later use the character, or his name, of Oswald Bastable for the hero and first-person narrator of Moorcock's trilogy A Nomad of the Time Streams which, published from 1971 until 1981, greatly influenced the nascent genre of steampunk.
[edit] TV adaptations
The book has been made into TV series three times, in 1953, 1961, and 1982.[3] It was made into a television movie as The Treasure Seekers in 1996.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Story-of-the-Treasure-Seekers1.html
- ^ Graham, Eleanor. "E. Nesbit and the Bastables." Introduction to The Story of the Treasure Seekers. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1971.
- ^ IMDb - "The Story of the Treasure Seekers" (1982)
[edit] External links
- The Story of the Treasure Seekers at Project Gutenberg
- The Story of the Treasure Seekers from the Full Text Archive
- LibriVox* Free audiobook from LibriVox
- The 1996 TV movie at the Internet Movie Database
- The 1961 TV series at the Internet Movie Database
- The 1953 TV series at the Internet Movie Database
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