4,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
The Story of the Treasure Seekers is a legendary children's story by the enchanting E. Nesbit which has delighted countless generations of children; this brand new edition ensures that it will be able to reach a whole new modern audience. The Bastable children (Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel and Horace Octavius - H.O.) live in London with their widowed father. Too poor to attend school, the children are left to their own devices and they spend their days coming up with ingenious plans to restore their father's fortune. Told from the first person perspective - which lends the narrative substantial bias - The Story of the Treasure Seekers was Nesbit's first work. Refreshingly free of Victorian sentimentality, yet still wonderfully evocative of a bygone era, The Story of the Treasure Seekers makes for timeless reading. Adapted numerous times for television, The Story of the Treasure Seekers is proof of Nesbit's esteemed place in the canon of children's literature.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
the story of the treasure seekers
e. nesbit
contents
foreword
One of my own treasures is my mother’s childhood copy of The Treasure Seekers. It is pleasingly battered in the way that well-loved books tend to be. I remember her reading a couple of chapters aloud to me before I took over and devoured all the stories about the enterprising Bastable children – not just the ones in this book but those in the two sequels, The Wouldbegoods and The New Treasure Seekers.
Many years later I read the stories to my youngest son. He was immediately hooked, drawn in as his mother and grandmother (and probably his great-grandmother) had been by the boastful, pompous, yet endearing Oswald and his invitation to guess the identity of the narrator:
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.
Can the stories still appeal to the current generation of children? I believe so. The theme of get-rich scheming is an evergreen one, and the treasure-seeking Bastables with their frequent squabbles and undone bootlaces are very real. Even though they wear the stiff formal clothes of the late Victorians, eat cold mutton and sago pudding, write on slates and read forgotten books, their feelings are timeless and are so powerfully described that any modern child could identify with them. They find temptation hard to resist, as when they shovel snow from the porch onto the unsuspecting Water Rates man, but more often their misadventures occur because they are carried away by their over-vivid imaginations and sense of enterprise. When they concoct a patent medicine, ‘Bastable’s Certain Cure for Colds, Coughs, Asthma, Shortness of Breath, and all infections of the Chest’, and administer it to the sickly Noel, they are afraid that they have poisoned him and suffer terrible pangs of guilt. Remorse is something which E. Nesbit describes particularly well, not in the vein of a preachy teller of cautionary tales, but as a grown-up who has never forgotten what it is like to be a child: ‘You can be very miserable in the night if you have done anything wrong and you happen to be awake.’
Indeed, though E. Nesbit was forty when the first Bastable stories were published (in a magazine called Father Christmas), she often described herself as one of those people who has never really grown up. Such people, she wrote in a later book for adults, Wings and the Child, are ‘only pretending to be grown-up: it is like acting in a charade. Time with his make-up box of lines and wrinkles… disguises the actors well enough and they go through life altogether unsuspected.’
She herself appears in The Treasure Seekers as the writer Mrs Leslie, whom the children meet on the train when they are going to London to try to get Noel’s poems published. Oswald is impressed because ‘She didn’t talk a bit like a real lady, but more like a jolly sort of grown-up boy in a dress and hat’, and because she is familiar with Kipling’s The Jungle Book, asking if they are off to ‘the Zoological Gardens to look for Bagheera’.
Another sympathetic grown-up writer in the book, Albert-next-door’s uncle, is an idealised version of E. Nesbit’s husband, the journalist Hubert Bland. The Blands’ family dog Pincher also appears in the stories without even a name change. As for the Bastable children, they are based less on Edith’s own children (who later became the models for the family in Five Children and It) than on her own siblings. Her older sister Mary becomes the conscientious Dora. Her adored older brother Alfred (who had died three years earlier) is Oswald, though his character is probably also influenced by Edith’s friend and admirer Oswald Barron, with whom she sometimes collaborated and to whom the book is dedicated. Her other brother Harry is transformed into Dicky, while the twins in the book – game, inventive Alice and sensitive poetry-writing Noel – can each be seen as representing a different side of Edith’s own personality. She was in fact the youngest child in her own family, but for good measure she has given her readers an extra Bastable, Horace Octavius (or H.O. for short).
Several of the incidents in the book are also moulded by events in Edith’s own life. One of her most vivid childhood memories was of her two brothers digging a deep hole and ‘planting’ her in the garden (allegedly because she looked so pretty and flower-like in a party dress). She was so firmly entrenched that an adult had to dig her out. In the chapter ‘Digging for Treasure’ she uses this experience, but instead of siding with the victim she tells the story from the point of view of the adventurous perpetrators: they accidentally bury the fastidious Albert-next-door, who is scared of worms and doesn’t want to join in the digging. There is another such change of perspective in the chapter called ‘The Nobleness of Oswald’, when Oswald puts on his oldest clothes and sells chrysanthemums outside Greenwich Station. In real life, E. Nesbit had reacted angrily when two of her own children had dressed shabbily and sold posies from the garden to commuters, but in the book she switches allegiance, identifying with the ‘noble’ Oswald.
Today we are all familiar with books about the escapades of ordinary children, but we don’t all realise that we have E. Nesbit to thank for their origin. Her biographer, Julia Briggs, credits her with being the first modern writer for children. ‘She invented the children’s adventure story more or less single-handedly, and then added further magic ingredients such as wishing rings and time travel.’ There is no magic as such in The Treasure Seekers or its sequels. Like the family in The Railway Children, the book which E. Nesbit is perhaps best known for today, the Bastables live completely in the real world. The only fantasy element is that of their imaginations. They are avid readers, and most of their schemes to restore their fallen fortunes are inspired by their favourite stories: they dig for treasure because characters in books always find it; they become bandits, capturing the hapless Albert-next-door; they reject the idea of being Highwaymen ‘like Dick Turpin or Claude Duval’ in favour of pretending to rescue an eccentric Lord ‘from deadly peril’ (having set their dog Pincher on him). All of these adventures are an extension of their imaginative play, and they relish the flowery bookish language which they feel entitled to use: ‘Let me feast my eyes on the golden splendour,’ says Alice, trying her hand with a divining rod, ‘hidden these long centuries from the human eye.’
Despite the powerfulness of their imaginations, they are usually aware of the difference between play and reality (the latter usually being far more prosaic.) ‘Greenwich Park is a jolly good park to play in,’ says Oswald at the beginning of the chapter entitled ‘Noel’s Princess’. The children proceed to play one of their favourite story-games: ‘I see the white witch bear yonder among the trees! Let’s track it and slay it in its lair,’ declares Alice. So it is supremely ironical that on this occasion the author has them discover a dumpy prim little girl who at first appears surprisingly good at joining in their games of being princes and princesses, and then turns out actually to be a real princess and is carried away kicking and screaming by a servant who won’t allow her to play with common children. ‘And I thought it was play. And it was real. I wish I’d known! I should have liked to ask her lots of things,’ said Alice.
On that occasion the Bastable children are made aware of the irony of their situation. But there is an irony of a different kind which runs through the whole book. Oswald knows that his father has fallen on hard times, but when the family silver cutlery is replaced by lightweight ‘yellowy-white’ ones, he believes that it has been taken away ‘to have the dents taken out’. Likewise, when a servant leaves and Dora’s silver thimble simultaneously goes missing, he concludes, ‘We think she must have forgotten it was Dora’s and put it in her box by mistake.’ There is a whole adult world of business failure, creditors, dodgy money-lenders and scandal-mongering newspaper editors which the children in the book misinterpret or are only dimly aware of, and which actually I suspect many children reading it might fail to fathom.
It is not altogether surprising that the original editor was unsure if the stories were aimed at children or adults. (The answer must surely be both.) While child readers will relish the humour of sentences like ‘Oswald always likes to be a peace-maker so he told Dicky to shut up’, they might not realise that many of the opinions E. Nesbit puts into his voice are not her own and that she is often poking fun at the attitudes of the Victorian establishment, particularly towards women. Oswald announces condescendingly that ‘It is not right to let girls smoke,’ yet his creator was a heavy smoker, lighting one home-rolled cigarette from another and smoking them through an extra long cigarette holder.
The children’s aspirations and the adults’ reality are both constantly present in this book and often pitted against each other. The Bastables are not the Famous Five, catching smugglers and finding actual treasure. Although – with a deceased mother and a shadowy preoccupied father – they are deliciously free to rove and to forge their own adventures, they are ultimately at the mercy of often cross grown-ups, forfeiting a trip to the pantomime, being sent to bed early, or being told off for adding sugar to sherry and trying to sell it. This realism is characteristic of all E. Nesbit’s books, even (perhaps especially) the ones with magic in them because the magic almost always goes wrong.
It therefore comes almost as a surprise that The Treasure Seekers has an abundantly happy ending, following the appearance on the scene of their newly discovered ‘Indian Uncle’. Once again, there is a mismatch between the children’s perceptions and the real situation: imagining him to be a noble savage, like ‘the poor Indian’ in Pope’s poem, they feed him and give him a threepenny bit. In fact he is an Indian of the wealthy colonial tiger-hunting kind, who is so touched by their generosity that he invites the whole family to live with him and showers them with presents. For once there is a resolution between the world of reality and that of books and games, and I for one am happy to accept Oswald’s charming apology:
‘This ending is like what happens in Dickens’s books… I can’t help it if it is like Dickens, because it happens this way. Real life is often something like books.’
– Julia Donaldson, 2013
the story of the treasure seekers
e. nesbit
Being the adventures of the Bastable children in search of a fortune.
To Oswald Barron without whom this book could never have been written
The Treasure Seekers is dedicated in memory of childhoods identical but for the accidents of time and space
chapter one
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 someone 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.’
Dora said it was all very well. She often says that. She was trying to mend a large hole in one of Noel’s stockings. He tore it on a nail when we were playing shipwrecked mariners on top of the chicken-house the day H.O. fell off and cut his chin: he has the scar still. Dora is the only one of us who ever tries to mend anything. Alice tries to make things sometimes. Once she knitted a red scarf for Noel because his chest is delicate, but it was much wider at one end than the other, and he wouldn’t wear it. So we used it as a pennon, and it did very well, because most of our things are black or grey since Mother died; and scarlet was a nice change. Father does not like you to ask for new things. That was one way we had of knowing that the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable were really fallen. Another way was that there was no more pocket money – except a penny now and then to the little ones, and people did not come to dinner any more, like they used to, with pretty dresses, driving up in cabs – and the carpets got holes in them – and when the legs came off things they were not sent to be mended, and we gave up having the gardener except for the front garden, and not that very often. And the silver in the big oak plate-chest that is lined with green baize all went away to the shop to have the dents and scratches taken out of it, and it never came back. We think Father hadn’t enough money to pay the silver man for taking out the dents and scratches. The new spoons and forks were yellowy-white, and not so heavy as the old ones, and they never shone after the first day or two.
Father was very ill after Mother died; and while he was ill his business-partner went to Spain – and there was never much money afterwards. I don’t know why. Then the servants left and there was only one, a General. A great deal of your comfort and happiness depends on having a good General. The last but one was nice: she used to make jolly good currant puddings for us, and let us have the dish on the floor and pretend it was a wild boar we were killing with our forks. But the General we have now nearly always makes sago puddings, and they are the watery kind, and you cannot pretend anything with them, not even islands, like you do with porridge.
Then we left off going to school, and Father said we should go to a good school as soon as he could manage it. He said a holiday would do us all good. We thought he was right, but we wished he had told us he couldn’t afford it. For of course we knew.
Then a great many people used to come to the door with envelopes with no stamps on them, and sometimes they got very angry, and said they were calling for the last time before putting it in other hands. I asked Eliza what that meant, and she kindly explained to me, and I was so sorry for Father.
And once a long, blue paper came; a policeman brought it, and we were so frightened. But Father said it was all right, only when he went up to kiss the girls after they were in bed they said he had been crying, though I’m sure that’s not true. Because only cowards and snivellers cry, and my Father is the bravest man in the world.
So you see it was time we looked for treasure and Oswald said so, and Dora said it was all very well. But the others agreed with Oswald. So we held a council. Dora was in the chair – the big dining-room chair, that we let the fireworks off from, the fifth of November when we had the measles and couldn’t do it in the garden. The hole has never been mended, so now we have that chair in the nursery, and I think it was cheap at the blowing-up we boys got when the hole was burnt.
‘We must do something,’ said Alice, ‘because the exchequer is empty.’ She rattled the money-box as she spoke, and it really did rattle because we always keep the bad sixpence in it for luck.
‘Yes – but what shall we do?’ said Dicky. ‘It’s so jolly easy to say let’s do something.’ Dicky always wants everything settled exactly. Father calls him the Definite Article.
‘Let’s read all the books again. We shall get lots of ideas out of them.’ It was Noel who suggested this, but we made him shut up, because we knew well enough he only wanted to get back to his old books. Noel is a poet. He sold some of his poetry once – and it was printed, but that does not come in this part of the story.
Then Dicky said, ‘Look here. We’ll be quite quiet for ten minutes by the clock – and each think of some way to find treasure. And when we’ve thought we’ll try all the ways one after the other, beginning with the eldest.’
‘I shan’t be able to think in ten minutes, make it half an hour,’ said H.O.. His real name is Horace Octavius, but we call him H.O. because of the advertisement, and it’s not so very long ago he was afraid to pass the hoarding where it says ‘Eat H.O.’ in big letters. He says it was when he was a little boy, but I remember last Christmas but one, he woke in the middle of the night crying and howling, and they said it was the pudding. But he told me afterwards he had been dreaming that they really had come to eat H.O., and it couldn’t have been the pudding, when you come to think of it, because it was so very plain.
Well, we made it half an hour – and we all sat quiet, and thought and thought. And I made up my mind before two minutes were over, and I saw the others had, all but Dora, who is always an awful time over everything. I got pins and needles in my leg from sitting still so long, and when it was seven minutes H.O. cried out – ‘Oh, it must be more than half an hour!’
H.O. is eight years old, but he cannot tell the clock yet. Oswald could tell the clock when he was six.
We all stretched ourselves and began to speak at once, but Dora put up her hands to her ears and said –
‘One at a time, please. We aren’t playing Babel.’ (It is a very good game. Did you ever play it?)
So Dora made us all sit in a row on the floor, in ages, and then she pointed at us with the finger that had the brass thimble on. Her silver one got lost when the last General but two went away. We think she must have forgotten it was Dora’s and put it in her box by mistake. She was a very forgetful girl. She used to forget what she had spent money on, so that the change was never quite right.
Oswald spoke first. ‘I think we might stop people on Blackheath – with crape masks and horse-pistols – and say “Your money or your life! Resistance is useless, we are armed to the teeth” – like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. It wouldn’t matter about not having horses, because coaches have gone out too.’
Dora screwed up her nose the way she always does when she is going to talk like the good elder sister in books, and said, ‘That would be very wrong: it’s like pickpocketing or taking pennies out of Father’s greatcoat when it’s hanging in the hall.’ I must say I don’t think she need have said that, especially before the little ones – for it was when I was only four.
But Oswald was not going to let her see he cared, so he said –
‘Oh, very well. I can think of lots of other ways. We could rescue an old gentleman from deadly Highwaymen.’
‘There aren’t any,’ said Dora.
‘Oh, well, it’s all the same – from deadly peril, then. There’s plenty of that. Then he would turn out to be the Prince of Wales, and he would say, “My noble, my cherished preserver! Here is a million pounds a year. Rise up, Sir Oswald Bastable.”’
But the others did not seem to think so, and it was Alice’s turn to say.
She said, ‘I think we might try the divining rod. I’m sure I could do it. I’ve often read about it. You hold a stick in your hands, and when you come to where there is gold underneath the stick kicks about. So you know. And you dig.’
‘Oh,’ said Dora suddenly, ‘I have an idea. But I’ll say last. I hope the divining rod isn’t wrong. I believe it’s wrong in the Bible.’
‘So is eating pork and ducks,’ said Dicky. ‘You can’t go by that.’
‘Anyhow, we’ll try the other ways first,’ said Dora. ‘Now, H.O..’
‘Let’s be Bandits,’ said H.O.. ‘I dare say it’s wrong but it would be fun pretending.’
‘I’m sure it’s wrong,’ said Dora.
And Dicky said she thought everything wrong. She said she didn’t, and Dicky was very disagreeable. So Oswald had to make peace, and he said –
‘Dora needn’t play if she doesn’t want to. Nobody asked her. And, Dicky, don’t be an idiot: do dry up and let’s hear what Noel’s idea is.’
Dora and Dicky did not look pleased, but I kicked Noel under the table to make him hurry up, and then he said he didn’t think he wanted to play any more. That’s the worst of it. The others are so jolly ready to quarrel. I told Noel to be a man and not a snivelling pig, and at last he said he had not made up his mind whether he would print his poetry in a book and sell it, or find a princess and marry her.
‘Whichever it is,’ he added, ‘none of you shall want for anything, though Oswald did kick me, and say I was a snivelling pig.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Oswald, ‘I told you not to be.’ And Alice explained to him that that was quite the opposite of what he thought. So he agreed to drop it.
Then Dicky spoke.
‘You must all of you have noticed the advertisements in the papers, telling you that ladies and gentlemen can easily earn two pounds a week in their spare time, and to send two shillings for sample and instructions, carefully packed free from observation. Now that we don’t go to school all our time is spare time. So I should think we could easily earn twenty pounds a week each. That would do us very well. We’ll try some of the other things first, and directly we have any money we’ll send for the sample and instructions. And I have another idea, but I must think about it before I say.’
We all said, ‘Out with it – what’s the other idea?’
But Dicky said, ‘No.’ That is Dicky all over. He never will show you anything he’s making till it’s quite finished, and the same with his inmost thoughts. But he is pleased if you seem to want to know, so Oswald said –
‘Keep your silly old secret, then. Now, Dora, drive ahead. We’ve all said except you.’
Then Dora jumped up and dropped the stocking and the thimble (it rolled away, and we did not find it for days), and said –
‘Let’s try my way now. Besides, I’m the eldest, so it’s only fair. Let’s dig for treasure. Not any tiresome divining rod – but just plain digging. People who dig for treasure always find it. And then we shall be rich and we needn’t try your ways at all. Some of them are rather difficult: and I’m certain some of them are wrong – and we must always remember that wrong things –’
But we told her to shut up and come on, and she did.
I couldn’t help wondering as we went down to the garden, why Father had never thought of digging there for treasure instead of going to his beastly office every day.
