Other editions of book The Story of the Treasure Seekers

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 and The New Treasure Seekers. 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."

She was born in 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, Surrey (now part of Greater London), the daughter of a schoolteacher, John Collis Nesbit, who died in March 1862 , before her fourth birthday. Her sister Mary's ill health meant that the family moved around constantly for some years, living variously in Brighton, Buckinghamshire, France ( Dieppe, Rouen, Paris, Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Pau, Bagneres de Bigorre, and Dinan in Brittany), Spain and Germany, before settling for three years at Halstead Hall in Halstead in north-west Kent, a location which later inspired The Railway Children. When Nesbit was 17, the family moved again, this time back to London, living variously in South East London at Eltham, Lewisham, Grove Park and Lee. A follower of William Morris, 19-year-old Nesbit met bank clerk Hubert Bland in 1877. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on 22 April 1880, though she did not immediately live with him, as Bland initially continued to live with his mother. Their marriage was an open one. Bland also continued an affair with Alice Hoatson which produced two children (Rosamund in 1886 and John in 1899), both of whom Nesbit raised as her own

With all 17 original illustrations. An Andover Classics edition based on the original 1899 novel by E. Nesbit. After their mother dies and their father’s business fails, the six Bastable children drop out of school and set out to restore their family fortune in Victorian England. By schemes, scams, and good old treasure hunting, they endure one hilarious misadventure after another. Andover Classics books are freshly edited and printed with easy-to-read 12 point Georgia fonts.

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 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." 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. The Story of the Treasure Seekers was the first novel for children by Nesbit; it and her later novels exerted considerable influence on subsequent English children's literature, most notably Arthur Ransome's[citation needed] 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. The American writer Edward Eager was also influenced by this and other Nesbit books, most notably in his Half Magic series, where he mentions the Bastable children and other Nesbit characters as heroes of his characters.

When their mother dies and their father's business partner runs off with most of their money, the six intrepid Bastable children are determined to restore their family's fallen fortunes. These resourceful children squabble, make up, and have many memorable adventures, from publishing their own newspaper to foiling a pair of real bandits and even becoming kidnappers themselves. But while the efforts of the Bastables are often ingenious, their good intentions always go hilariously awry.

The Story of the Treasure Seekers CHAPTER 1. THE COUNCIL OF WAYS AND MEANS 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. Dora is the eldest. Then Oswald--and then Dicky. Oswald won the Latin prize at his preparatory school--and Dicky is good at sums. Alice and Noel are twins: they are ten, and Horace Octavius is my youngest brother. 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. It was Oswald who first thought of looking for treasure. Oswald often thinks of very interesting things. And directly he thought of it he did not keep it to himself, as some boys would have done, but he told the others, and said-- ‘I’ll tell you what, we must go and seek for treasure: it is always what you do to restore the fallen fortunes of your House.’