The New Treasure Seekers

The Treasure Seekers: Bastable Children #3

by E. Nesbit

The six Bastable children fill their free time with entertainments that don't always turn out as they plan. But whether telling fortunes at a party, unwittingly assisting an elopement, reforming their nasty cousin Archibald, or even getting arrested, it is all good fun, and usually for a good cause.

Genres: Classics, Childrens, Fiction, Fantasy, Middle Grade, Adventure, British Literature

219 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1904

About the author

Edith Nesbit (married name Edith Bland; 15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924) was an English author and poet; she published her books for children under the name of E. Nesbit.
She wrote or collaborated on over 60 books of fiction for children, several of which have been adapted for film and television. She was also a political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later connected to the Labour Party.

Edith Nesbit was born in Kennington, Surrey, the daughter of agricultural chemist and schoolmaster John Collis Nesbit. The death of her father when she was four and the continuing ill health of her sister meant that Nesbit had a transitory childhood, her family moving across Europe in search of healthy climates only to return to England for financial reasons. Nesbit therefore spent her childhood attaining an education from whatever sources were available—local grammars, the occasional boarding school but mainly through reading.

At 17 her family finally settled in London and aged 19, Nesbit met Hubert Bland, a political activist and writer. They became lovers and when Nesbit found she was pregnant they became engaged, marrying in April 1880. After this scandalous (for Victorian society) beginning, the marriage would be an unconventional one. Initially, the couple lived separately—Nesbit with her family and Bland with his mother and her live-in companion Maggie Doran.

Initially, Edith Nesbit books were novels meant for adults, including The Prophet's Mantle (1885) and The Marden Mystery (1896) about the early days of the socialist movement. Written under the pen name of her third child 'Fabian Bland', these books were not successful. Nesbit generated an income for the family by lecturing around the country on socialism and through her journalism (she was editor of the Fabian Society's journal, Today).

In 1899 she had published The Adventures of the Treasure Seekers to great acclaim.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The well-meaning but accident-prone Bastable siblings are given another outing by Edith Nesbit, following on from the success of The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and The Wouldbegoods (1900). We reacquaint ourselves with the 'anonymous' author Oswald, with all his familiar malapropisms and self-proclaimed modesty, along with his siblings Dora (the sensible eldest) and then, after Oswald, Dicky (his frequent lieutenant), Alice, Noël (a wouldbe poet), and Horace Octavius (or H. O.).

The thirteen episodes often reference exotic places (including Rome, China, Italy or the Golden Orient) though we never leave the confines of Kent: they also 'big up' the protagonists ('The Intrepid Explorer and His Lieutenant'), suggest dastardly deeds are afoot ('Archibald the Unpleasant', 'The Turk in Chains; or, Richard's Revenge') or feature the Bastables' charitable but doomed attempts to remedy the scrapes they have got themselves into ('The Conscience-Pudding' and 'The Poor and Needy'). As ever, you sense their hearts are in the right place even if their steps constantly lead them astray. Even when they are involved in revenge (at least twice!) you feel they are attempting to right wrongs to the best of their imagination, ability and reasoning.

Dedicated to the illustrator Arthur Watts, who would have been between eleven and sixteen when the Bastable stories started appearing in periodicals, New Treasure Seekers has the Bastable siblings in their middleclass home in Lewisham, London, as their stock has marginally gone up in the world since the previous books were published; the last few chapters in fact see them by the seaside, near Lymchurch in Kent (a thinly disguised Dymchurch, near where Nesbit was eventually to be buried). They are -- extraordinarily to our modern notions -- largely left to their own devices; school is rarely mentioned, if at all (the 'unpleasant' Archibald attends one in term time) and life therefore seems to consist of one long holiday.

Every so often we are given a few autobiographical details in Oswald's flowery mangling of a high literary style mixed with schoolboy slang, as in 'Archibald the Unpleasant':

The house of Bastable was once in poor, but honest, circs. That was when it lived in a semi-detached house in the Lewisham Road, and looked for treasure. There were six scions of the house who looked for it -- in fact there were seven, if you count Father. I am sure he looked right enough, but he did not do it the right way. And we did.

Nesbit, to my ears, sounds to have got that young male braggadocio language just right, especially when modulated by Oswald's genteel bourgeois sensibility -- even when he slips into unconscious humour:

And then, when we were no longer so beastly short of pocket-money, we tried to be good, and sometimes it came out right, and sometimes it didn't. Something like sums.

They all (but Oswald especially) are dismissive or mildly tolerant of Noël's poetical pretensions, such as

'My dear sister sits
And knits,
I hope to goodness the stocking fits'

and the exquisite

'Oh, Geraldine! Oh, Geraldine!
You are the loveliest heroine!
I never read about one before
That made me want to write more
Poetry. And your Venetian eyes
They must have been an awful size;
And black and blue, and like your hair,
And your nose and chin were a perfect pair.'

"... and so on for ages," is Oswald's bitter comment.

Dora, as the eldest, is given due respect but Oswald, despite his gentlemanly inclinations, often feels he should be deferred to more, and is usually the one to call for family 'councils' to be take place. Alice is the sensitive one, the epitome of the girly type the author herself generally eschewed, while H. O. scarcely gets a look in after a memorable escapade near the start. We are reminded early on about their particular family tragedy when Oswald alludes to Christmas "nearly a year after Mother died" but declines to write about it, a detail that points up the poignancy of many families at the time when Empire, poverty and illness deprived many of loved ones in distressing circumstances.

Unlike the magic in The Enchanted Castle or the sequence beginning with Five Children and It the 'magic' of the Treasure Seekers series is of the mundane sort, but no less enchanting for it. Too soon we arrive at the end of the last chapter to read the doom-laden words

This is the end of the things we did when we were at Lymchurch in Miss Sandal's house. It is the last story that the present author means ever to be the author of. So goodbye, if you have got as far as this.
Your affectionate author,
OSWALD BASTABLE

Luckily even the last sentences aren't the last word or even the end of the matter, because four more stories by the 'affectionate author' were to appear in the collection Oswald Bastable and Others (1905). But with New Treasure Seekers there is definitely a sense of the closing of the door. I, for one, will miss them.

[Shauna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of stories about the further adventures of the Bastable children. It would have worked better if they had been linked in some way instead of jumbled up chronologically.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a hidden gem! This series has brought much needed levity and laughter to an anxious season of life for me. The Bastables are hilarious and well meaning and bricks and I wouldn’t be surprised if PG Wodehouse was a fan because the humor is very similar. I can picture Oswald as a Bertie Wooster later in life. E. Nesbit captures the voice of Oswald Bastable so well. It’s masterful. If you like classic children’s lit, do give these a go!

[meeners · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of the wisest pieces of advice i ever received as a child came from this book. i quote:

The Constitutions of Clarendon
Clarendon (sometimes called Clarence) had only one constitution. It must have been a very bad one, because he was killed by a butt of Malmsey. If he had had more constitutions or better ones he would have lived to be very old. This is a warning to everybody.

so sayeth albert-next-door, age 9 (or thereabouts). heed his words, my friends! heed them well, i say!

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure why I loved this book best of all the Bastable books - maybe because the children are a bit older, and a bit better at doing nice things? Oh God, I'm Dora.

Lovely installment by E. Nesbit.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was hilarious and I got plenty of good chuckles out of it. The Bastable children are incorrigible and their adventures are original. I enjoyed Oswald's style of narration. I just wish I could have read the other books first.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish this one, but unlike Nesbit's other works, not as magical or as interesting.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

The New Treasure Seekers is a collection of short stories starring the Bastable siblings. Some stories are set BEFORE The Story of the Treasure Seekers; some stories are set AFTER The Wouldbegoods. The stories vary in quality, in my opinion. On the one hand, there are a few stories that are truly wonderful. I absolutely adore "The Conscience Pudding," even though the end of the story has a not-so-nice word in it, a product of its time perhaps. I do enjoy Oswald's narration. But reading The New Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods so close together, while nice in some ways, was a bit too much. I found myself getting a bit bored by the misadventures after a while.

[DDog · Rating 4 out of 5]

E. Nesbit is one of the best authors for kids' books that every kid and adult should read.

[Lady Clementina ffinch-ffarowmore]

I'd forgotten HOW hilarious these children are! And the illustrations- perfect- the book wouldn't quite be the same without them.

[Heidi Burkhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful, timeless stories.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore E Nesbit and I adore Oswald Bastable as the narrator of the Bastable children books. It's such a pleasure to read these books, to take a break from the dumpster fire that is the news and the internet and social media. I can momentarily forget how awful everything is by reading about the innocent adventures of 6 siblings in Edwardian England.

I've set a new reading goal for myself - to reread the E Nesbit books I read as a child and to read the E Nesbit books I didn't know about as a kid.

At last we got it out of him what had happened. He doesn't tell a story right from the beginning like Oswald and some of the others do, but from his disjunctured words the author has made the following narration. This is called editing, I believe.

We did not tell Matilda about it. She was a red-haired girl, and apt to turn shirty at the least thing.

That was the day when Oswald found out a thing that has often been of use to him in after-life. However rudely poor people stare at you they become all right instantly if you ask them something. I think they don't hate you so much when they've done something for you, if it's only to tell you the time or the way.

Though Oswald cannot approve of my sister being in a street fight, he must own she was very quick and useful in pulling ears and twisting arms and slapping and pinching. But she had quite forgotten how to hit out from the shoulder like I have often shown her.

This really happened before Christmas, but many authors go back to bygone years for whole chapters, and I don't see why I shouldn't.

We did not ask Father if we might go. Oswald thought it would be more amusing for Father if we told it all to him in the form of an entertaining anecdote, afterwards.

We clapped, of course, but not with our hearts, which were hissing inside us

"It might be worse, I tell you," said Dicky. "Suppose instead of telling us to keep out of doors it had been the other way?" "Yes, said Alice, "suppose it had been, 'Poor Mrs. Bax requires to be cheered up. Do not leave her side day or night. Take it in turns to make jokes for her. Let not a moment pass without some merry jest'? Oh yes, it might be much, much worse."

If we had been in a book the Police would have been touched to tears by Oswald's simple honesty. He would have said "Noble boy!" and then gone on to say he had only asked the question to test our honour. But life is not really at all the same as books. I have noticed lots of differences.

There are points about having a grown-up with you, if it is the right kind. You can then easily get it to say "Yes" to what you want, and after that, if anything goes wrong it is their fault, and you are pure from blame.

When you think about yourself there is a kind of you that is not what you generally are but that you know you would like to be if only you were good enough. Albert's uncle says this is called your ideal of yourself. I will call it your best I, for short.

[LobsterQuadrille · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Puffin Classics cover art seems to promise mystery and wonder in equal measure, but New Treasure Seekers left me cold. It lacks genuinely funny or exciting scenes, and most of the Bastable kids' adventures are tedious and repetitive. It ends up feeling like E. Nesbit just wrote it to fulfill demand for another Bastable book, without having any strong ideas of what to put in it. The whole thing is a jumble of different settings, making it hard to settle into the plot.

The young heroes were another letdown. There are so many of them, and besides prim and proper Dora, tomboy Alice, and the self-aggrandizing Oswald(the thinly veiled mystery narrator) the personalities are paper-thin. Noel's sole character trait is writing poetry, and I couldn't tell you a darn thing about Dicky. They tended to come off as incredibly dense too. I could believe that a much younger sibling like H.O. would think it was a good idea to lease someone's rooms without permission, but what is Dora and Oswald's excuse? I got the impression that they were around eleven or twelve years old, and so should have been old enough to know better than get involved in some of the weird schemes they cooked up.

But at least it's not all bad. Two chapters, "The Conscience-Pudding" and "The Flying Lodger" were the clear standouts from all the rest. The pudding chapter is pretty funny, and the second has something so weird and incongruous that I couldn't help but appreciate it. I guess there's nothing like an escaped madman threatening to throw children out a window to liven things up.

[Katja Labonté · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars & 5/10 hearts. I really enjoyed this book. The children got into fewer scrapes, but it was just as funny as ever. I laughed aloud reading this book. There was a mention of drinking; also the children pretended to tell fortunes—with a little editing it's all right; also was also some mild language (euphemisms). The stories are just hilarious and the children are so real! I really enjoyed this third book as much as the first two and can't wait to read the last one.

A Favourite Quote: “Quarrels should always be made up before bedtime. It says so in the Bible. If this simple rule was followed there would not be so many wars and martyrs and law suits and inquisitions and bloody deaths at the stake.”
A Favourite Humorous Quote: “‘“...half a pound of citron and orange peel; half a nutmeg; and a little ground ginger.” I wonder how little ground ginger.’
“‘A teacupful would be enough, I think,’ Alice said; ‘we must not be extravagant.’ ...
“‘“[C]hop the suet as fine as possible’—I wonder how fine that is?’ replied Dora and the book together—‘“and mix it with the breadcrumbs and flour; add the currants washed and dried.”’
“‘Not starched, then,’ said Alice. 
“‘“The citron and orange peel cut into thin slices”—I wonder what they call thin? Matilda's thin bread-and-butter is quite different from what I mean by it—“and the raisins stoned and divided.” How many heaps would you divide them into?’
“‘Seven, I suppose,’ said Alice; ‘one for each person and one for the pot—I mean pudding.’”

[heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book starts off well, although the story gets jumbled up a bit initially as the narrator starts off with the current Christmas celebration and then went back to the first Christmas after Mrs. Bastable died. After that the chapters started to jump back and forth in time until the Bastable children start their journey to Miss Sandal's house by the seaside. Then the fun begins as the Bastable kids innocently get themselves into one stupid adventure after another. Laugh out loud moments abound :D

However this book only gets 4 stars from me because the ending feels flat. And I was dreading the ending all along because this book is the last of the Bastable series! I wish the final book would feel a bit more satisfying... I really love the Bastable series and I think such A1 stories deserve an A1 ending. Alas!

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last book featuring the Bastables, and perhaps the weakest in purely narrative flow. I liked it, but was irritated by the time changes, as well as the lack of conclusion.

On the bright side, the book comes off better if you take it as a series of stories that might be published in a newspaper. All the children are themselves (thank goodness!) and we get an absolutely priceless story in which Oswald dresses up as a woman. Nesbit knew what it was like to really be a child. And at a time a lot of people were circulating tommyrot about it all.

[Ritika · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book varies in quality as it is closer to a collection of short stories format rather than a single narrative. A few of the stories remain delightful, but you miss the poignancy of The Treasure Seekers or the spirit of The Wouldbegoods. The ending comes on rather abruptly and I blinked quite a few times before realizing the book was definitely coming to an end. However, this remains a pleasant addition to the Bastable Children stories and at best works as a filler rather than as the last book in a trilogy.

Special note: 1000th book read!

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember liking it but I don't recall much of the story.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Bastables are back in form in these assorted adventures.

[Morghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read The Conscious of Pudding, but it was a delightful short story.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Old fashioned and slightly patronising.

This is the adventures of the six Bastable childrrn who try to be good and virtuous but their schemes often backfire.

Narrated by Oswald Bastable each chapter is a separate but linked story. This makes the book somewhat disjointed.

Some of the language is shocking, patronising to poor people, gypsies, girls, chinese and ethnic groups.

Is of its time i suppose. I think today's children would struggle, no flow at all, each story takes a while to get going, it is hard to distinguish all the characters with six children and most are morality tales rather than edge of seat excitement.

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Third in the Bastable Children series. Mainly a bunch of random adventures and mishaps that happened through the years during vacations at the beach, Christmases, weddings, etc. These kids never seem to go to school or have lessons.

Footnote: 1) It’s stated in one of the stories that ‘no man ever wants to be a woman’. That’s certainly changed since then. Shouldn’t have.

Fave scenes: the ‘dynamite machine’, making the pudding, finding the secret room, a baby for a cradle and replacing the fortune teller.

[Gil-or (readingbooksinisrael) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 I didn't like this as much as the first two. The Bastables are older so you think Oswald would have learned from his adventures but Dora is the only one who seems to have. And then Dick's personality has vanished (I think he gets one line in the whole book?) and they're a lot more bourgeoise than they were.

However, despite not having learned from their adventures, for the most part, their adventures were quite fun, especially when they get mixed up in adult affairs, like smuggling. I also really enjoyed H.O. is this one, more so than the first two. Alice was great as always.

[hiaa123 · Rating 3 out of 5]

More delightful adventures of the Bastables. This collection wasn't as strong as the others, and there seemed to be much more racism. Still a fun read but I'm done with the Bastables now.

"At least I suppose his brothers Dicky and Noel and H.O. are heroes too, in a way, but somehow the author of these lines knows more about Oswald's inside realness than he does about the others. But I am getting too deep for words."

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 3.5 star rating. I enjoyed this collection of short stories about the adventures of 6 children at the turn of the the twentieth century in England. The children like excitement and seem to be motivated by kind hearts. The adventures are funny and often go wrong but usually have a positive twist. I did find that the language used took some getting used to and was shocking at times in its racism and sexism (the rating would have been a 4 star one, apart from this.) I enjoyed the snapshot into the everyday lives of people at this time.
The version of the story I read was-
The Project Gutenberg eBook, New Treasure Seekers, by E. (Edith) Nesbit, Illustrated by Gordon Browne and Lewis Baumer.( I could not find this version on Goodreads website when I searched for it.) I loved the accompanying illustrations.

[Chrisanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh dear. I must admit to laughing at the pudding chapter, because I'm familiar with those recipes but the following chapters aren't really worth it. Especially in view of her presentation of different nationalities.

[Rachel Louise Mutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's a nice book

[Lynne Carlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious

[Arak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oswald is my favorite character

[Donald Owens II · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as the first.