The Wouldbegoods - good but not Nesbit's best

As part of my reading of public domain children's literature in general and A. E. Nesbit in particular, I just finished reading The Wouldbegoods, her second book about the Bastable siblings. 

The Bastables are one of the prototypes for kids who innocently get into trouble. Their hearts may be in the right place but they have serious issues with bad judgment and poor impulse control.

In the Wouldbegoods, they set out to become better people during a summer holiday in the countryside. A holiday that they were required to go on after wrecking their uncle's yard and taxidermy collection. Needless to say, chaos follows every good deed they tried to do and every game they try to play.

I pretty much have to compare it to the first book, the Story of the Treasure Seekers.  On the one hand, I found the second book a more enjoyable and fun read. And on the other hand, I found the first book to be deeper and more meaningful.

You see, the poor judgement of the Bastables makes you seriously wonder if there is something wrong with these kids. And, it becomes rapidly obvious in the first book that there is. Underneath their jolly play, they are clearly traumatized by the death of their mother and by their father losing everything when his partner embezzled the company into the ground. 

Their lives are much improved by the second book, which means that we are not reading about a group of kids who are clinging together in order to keep it together. Which is definitely more upbeat but not nearly as moving.

One thing that I have to give these books is that the kids don't get away with any of their accidental hijinks. There are definite consequences to their actions. One of the most striking scenes in the book is the younger daughter practically having a breakdown after discovering that a good deed overturned a barge and dump out a load of coal. The kids are well aware of how many scrapes they get into, even though they can't seem to learn from them. 

The book does get kind of formulaic. Each chapter, we read about how the Bastables have some kind of poorly thought idea and how it will inevitably blow up on them. It's not one of Nesbit's strongest works, particularly compared to the first book. 

Still, the Wouldbegoods is an interesting, if sometimes dated (and even racist) look at the beginnings of modern children's literature.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/794

Finding deeper meaning in the Story of the Treasure Seekers

I'm a big fan of A. E. Nesbit's Psammead trilogy. It's one of the cornerstones of modern children's fantasy, even if I have to always look up how to spell Psammead. So I decided I needed to read more Nesbit. After all, so much of what she wrote is now public domain so I really have no excuse.

So I decided to read her first children's book, The Story of the Treasure Seekers.

To be honest, I found it fairly tough going at first.

The Story of the Treasure Seekers doesn't have any fantastic elements. Instead, it describes how the six Bastable children look for pocket money after their mother dies and their father's business is almost defrauded out of existence. Through a combination of having too much imagination and less common sense than the average brick, their various plans, which include selling wine, making patent medicines and becoming bandits, result in wacky hijinks. 

And here's where I started having problems. The family is in serious shape. Their mother is dead and their dad is clearly on the verge of bankruptcy but the kids seemed to never stop being jolly and silly. And with six of them, the oldest ones, at least, should have some kind of clue.

Looking back at the first chapter, the youngest Bastable is eight. Yeah, these kids are definitely too old to not to realize how serious their family situation is.

However, two things made me end up making an alternate interpretation to their silliness. One is that the narrator, Oswald, is a hysterically blatant unreliable narrator. That puts their whole jolly attitude in question.

And, here and there, there are little comments that make it clear that the Bastables don't want to talk about or even think about their dead mother. It also becomes clear that many of the adults who they encounter deeply pity them.

I found myself reading the Treasure Hunters not as the misadventures of six somewhat dim and possibly deranged kids but as six kids who are deeply traumatized and desperately trying to cope with the way their entire world has fallen apart. Not nearly as funny. Actually kind of dark, really. However, it made the kids a lot more sympathetic for me. 

Seriously, I slogged through the first three and a half chapters. Found it dreadful and put the book down for months. Picked the book up again, came to my alternate interpretation and blazed through the rest of the book in a sitting. Heck, it's really not an alternate interpretation. It's all clearly there.

With that in mind, the theme that now comes through the book is family. Through all of their trials and tribulations, the Bastables hold together as family. In the end, they resolve their problems by bringing their uncle into their family.

The Story of the Treasure Hunters is not going to be one of my favorite Nesbit books but it did have more layers and depth than I was prepared to credit it at first.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/770q