Other editions of book The Story of the Treasure Seekers

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.

This is a very funny story set in London in Victorian time, when children learned Latin and went to boarding school, and the fortunes of the honourable house of Bastable have fallen low. There are six Bastable children: Dora the eldest, then Oswald, Dicky, Alice and Noel the twins, and Horace Octavius the youngest who is sensibly called H.O. Not having money is no fun, so the children decide to make their own by seeking their fortune to restore the lost honour of their house. To make it more intriguing one of the children narrates the story but does not reveal whom until the end of the story but it is not too hard to guess before that. They dig for treasure but only manage to nearly bury the boy next door. They try being detectives, writing a newspaper, selling wine, writing poetry, being bandits and kidnappers (and tie up the boy next door and try to feed him bread and water which is the funniest scene), and have to deal with a real burglar. Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) published more than 60 books for children. 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 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 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." 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.

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.