III
The Story of the Treasure Seekers established the prototype for both the “realistic” family adventures and the “magical” fantasies that Nesbit composed over the next few years. At the outset of these novels, we are introduced to a middle-class family, often in distressed circumstances. Since the parents are either absent or preoccupied, the children are nominally in the care of servants, but usually left to their own devices, they embark on a series of exploits, sometimes designed to rectify the situation at home, at other times simply for the sake of adventure or sheer diversion. In The Treasure Seekers, we meet the six Bastable children (four boys and two girls), whose mother is dead and whose father is struggling with business problems. According to the eldest boy, Oswald, the novel’s delightfully bookish and vainglorious narrator, the children seek to restore “the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable,” and they launch their quest by digging for buried treasure in their own garden. The scheme collapses when the roof of their underground tunnel caves in on the hapless Albert-next-door, but thanks to Albert’s amiable uncle—the first of several sympathetic adults—the children end up “discovering” a few small coins in their pile of dirt. In successive episodes, the Bastables continue their fortune-hunting by becoming freelance detectives, selling poetry to an amused literary editor, publishing a newspaper (one copy sold), and “kidnapping” Albert-next-door to extract a ransom from his uncle. The consequences of their later exploits are more serious. Finding a newspaper ad for private loans, the children visit the office of their “Generous Benefactor,” but complications arise when it turns out that the lender is already their father’s creditor. Further embarrassments result from their attempt to secure another benefactor by setting their dog on a rich local aristocrat and pretending to come to his rescue, and from their efforts to market their own wine and Bastable’s Certain Cure for Colds. The loose episode structure that emerges from these relatively self-contained adventures is characteristic of Nesbit’s early novels, though the interaction between juvenile imagination and adult reality often grows more complex in the later episodes. In one of the final vignettes of The Treasure Seekers, the children are imagining the life of a robber when suddenly they see a stranger whom they suspect is the real thing. The stranger, who is actually a friend of their father, pretends that he has been caught in the act, but when another unknown figure appears upon the scene and turns out be a real burglar, the imaginary “robber” borrows the children’s toy gun to scare him off. The novel concludes with another reversal of expectations, when the children discover that their seemingly poor and unremarkable Indian Uncle is actually the rich benefactor for whom they’ve been searching all along. Typical of Nesbit, just as they relinquish their wishes and fantasies in favor of a more realistic point of view, the children discover that the real world may be as enchanted as the world of their dreams. Or as the artfully artless Oswald puts it at the end, “I can’t help it if it is like Dickens, because it happens this way. Real life is often something like books.”
Nesbit went on to write further adventures of the Bastables, including The Wouldbegoods, her greatest financial success, and The New Treasure Seekers. She created a new set of protagonists for her next family adventure novel, The Railway Children (1906), but the design of the story remains much the same. Once again we find a middle-class family in straitened circumstances: Recalling the famous Dreyfus affair (still unresolved at the time Nesbit was writing), the father has been sent to prison, wrongly accused of spying for a foreign power, while the mother transports the family to a country house and tries to make ends meet with her writing. The children, initially unaware of the reason for their father’s absence, are drawn to the local railway line and embark on a series of adventures that lead to unexpected consequences, ranging from embarrassment over their misguided attempt to raise charity for a poor working-class family to commendation for their heroic efforts in helping to avert a railway disaster. Their adventures also place them in contact with a distinguished passenger, an unnamed “old gentleman” whose intervention, akin to that of the Indian Uncle in The Treasure Seekers, leads to the exoneration of their father and his return to the family. Although some readers found the novel excessively sentimental and lamented the loss of the Bastable clan, The Railway Children has remained a perennial favorite, especially in Britain, where it has been dramatized repeatedly on film and television.
IV
After completing her first two Bastable novels, Nesbit began a new serial publication, The Psammead (later changed to Five Children and It), which ran in The Strand Magazine from April to December 1902 with illustrations by her long-term collaborator, H. R. Millar (see endnote 11 to The Enchanted Castle). For this venture she created a new set of siblings—Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their infant brother “The Lamb”—based loosely on her own five children. (“The Lamb,” to whom the book is dedicated, is John Bland, born in 1899, the second child of the affair between Hubert and Alice Hoatson; Edith raised him as her own, though her other four children were already in their teens.) The new fictional family (we never learn their surname) is less hard-pressed than the Bastables, but as soon as they arrive at their remote country house, the parents are called away to attend to other matters, and the children, left in the care of servants, begin to explore the surrounding area on their own. Nesbit’s distinctive mixture of realism and fantasy is apparent from the start. To the children, who have been bottled up in London for two years, the somewhat shabby house seems “a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise” (p. 10), and the chimney smoke from the local limekilns makes the valley beneath them glimmer “till they were like an enchanted city out of the Arabian Nights” (p. 12). In her casual conversation style, the narrator also gets in on the act. After informing her ostensibly juvenile audience that she will skip over the mundane events—to which adults might respond “How like life!” (p. 12)—she cleverly leads her readers (children and adults alike) into the realm of the marvelous by suggesting that when we think about it, the accepted facts of modern science, such as the roundness of the earth and its rotation around the sun, are no less astonishing than the events she’s about to relate, and they require a similar leap beyond the everyday world we can see and feel. Once we accept this demonstration of the marvelous character of the factual, we’re ready for the narrator’s almost matter-of-fact introduction of the marvelous: “Yet I daresay you believe all that about the earth and the sun, and if so you will find it quite easy to believe that before Anthea and Cyril and the others had been a week in the country they had found a fairy. At least they called it that, because that was what it called itself; and of course it knew best, but it was not at all like any fairy you ever saw or heard of or read about” (p. 13).