I was just saying the other day how much I loved, and still love, E. Nesbit, and lo and behold -- and quite coincidentally -- the lovely people at Hesperus sent me this delighful new edition to review. In actual fact this one, and its predecessor The Story of the Treasure Seekers, were not my favourites of her novels when I was a child. I preferred the ones with magic in them for a start, but also, reading this now, I realize that I was probably a bit too young to appreciate what I now see as one of the most appealing aspects of the novel. That might sound a bit odd -- of course it is a children's book, but I probably read it when I was about seven, an age when Nesbit's skillful and witty manipulation of the narrative voice would have gone right over my head.
Let me explain. These two novels, Nesbit's first books for children, were published at the very end of the 1890s, and concern the adventures of a family of six children, the Bastables. In the first book, their mother has died and their father has lost all his money, so the children decide to find ways of making their fortune, with predictably disastrous and hilarious results. In The Wouldbegoods, all the financial problems have been sorted out, and the children have been sent to spend the summer holidays in the country house of a writer they call Albert's uncle (Albert being their next door neighbor in the previous book). There's no need to look for treasure any more, but the long hot summer stretches before them and they've got to do something. As they got into a lot of trouble last time round, they hit on the idea of forming a society dedicated to doing good deeds, which they will record in a book. The name they choose for themselves is the Wouldbegoods. Needless to say everything goes horribly wrong, and they are constantly in trouble, though their intentions are always more or less pure.
But what's this about the narrative voice? I hear you say. Well, the story is told by the oldest boy, Oswald, who seems to be about eleven. But he tries very hard to conceal his identity, and to speak of himself in the third person. Unfortunately he doesn't keep this up very well, and is always forgetting and saying 'I' instead. And if that wasn't enough, he's full of self-congratulation, always telling you how responsible he is, or at least tries to be, or, if all else fails, how very sorry he is and how he sees clearly where he went wrong. Because of course he has to admit that their schemes have the unfortunate effect of always going awry, leaving him and the children full of gloomy remorse, from which they bounce back remarkably well. So a good deal of the fun of the book is the obvious gap between what Oswald tells you and what you can see really happened. So however pompous and self-deceived he often is, it's impossible not to like him, and perhaps to feel a bit sad when he ends the novel like this:
I wish you didn't grow up so quickly. Oswald can see that ere long he will be too old for the kind of games we can all play, and he feels grown-upness creeping inordiously upon him.
So my second read, after a gap of far more years than I'm prepared to own up to, was an extremely enjoyable experience. If like me you like reading classic children's literature, it's a winner. And of course you could always give it to the kids after you've finished with it. Or even buy it for them for Christmas. Why not?
