The Story of the Treasure Seekers was published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1899. The novel introduces the Bastable family: six children whose father is in financial difficulties (their mother has recently died, though this is handled with a reticence typical of the era). The children decide to restore the family fortune through their own efforts, and each chapter chronicles a different money-making scheme — digging for treasure, selling poetry to newspapers, capturing a bandit, starting a newspaper — each of which fails humorously but ultimately leads them toward the genuine assistance that resolves their situation.
The novel’s revolution was in its narrative voice. Oswald Bastable — the narrator, though he coyly refers to himself in the third person and claims the narrator’s identity is a secret that readers must guess — speaks in a voice of magnificent, unself-aware pomposity. He is heroic in his own estimation, generous in acknowledging his siblings’ lesser qualities, and supremely confident in his judgments. The gap between Oswald’s self-assessment and the reality the reader can perceive is the source of the book’s comedy.
Nesbit was the first children’s writer to allow her child characters to be genuinely funny, genuinely wrong, genuinely unkind (and then genuinely remorseful), and genuinely real. Before Nesbit, fictional children in English literature were either exemplary or awful — moral models or cautionary tales. The Bastables are simply children: inventive, quarrelsome, loyal, vain, generous, and perpetually getting things wrong in ways that feel absolutely authentic.
Collecting The Story of the Treasure Seekers
First edition (T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1899): Cloth binding, illustrations by Gordon Browne and Lewis Baumer.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $500–$1,500
- Very good: $200–$500
- Good: $80–$200