The "We" Point of View and E. Nesbit

I've just reread E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers. I reserved it at the library along with a number of other books about treasure hunts and it was just happenstance that I pulled this one out of the pile first.  What's interesting to me, having just finished Then We Came to the End, is Nesbit's use of a combination of the first person and the third person as the point of view. Ostensibly one of the children is writing the book and chooses not to reveal which one he is until the very end. So there's a lot of the "we" point of view, interspersed with many "I" asides:

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 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.

Often those asides are meant to be flub-ups, I think, and it's not very hard to figure out which child's voice it is, at least not when you're reading it as an adult, although I do remember being quite confused by all of this when I first read the book as a child. It's an unusual choice for point of view, tough to pull off, and it's one of the main ways, I think, that the book holds the interest of adult readers.

Nesbit sounds like a fascinating person. That first link is only to her wikipedia entry while the second link is to a very good essay about her in The New York Times, which was written by Gore Vidal in 1964. (Notice how he denigrates librarians for being too enamoured of realistic fiction for children -- what a change from Margaret Wise Brown's time.)  One of the most interesting things about Nesbit (aside from her books) was that she founded the Fabian Society along with her husband. I have reserved two autobiographies of her at the library and can't wait to read them -- Julia Briggs's A Woman of Passion and Noel Streatfeild's Magic and the Magician: E. Nesbit and her Children's Books. (Did anyone else love Streatfeild's books as a child? Nela, I'm thinking your mother must have put you on to those as well as to Blyton's.)

Comments

[babelbabe]

LOVED Streatfield and read every single one I could get my hands on. I used to wish I could be Petrova...didn't everyone? : )

Julia Briggs wrote a terrific book I had to read for a class once, about Shakespeare and Elizabethan England, called This Stage-Play World; stands to reason she'd have written other interesting stuff, can't think why i never thought to check that out, so thanks!

Happy New Year!

[Kate S.]

You've made me want to reread "The Story of the Treasure Seekers" as well! The Briggs biography of E. Nesbit is marvellous. I didn't know Streatfeild had written about Nesbit though. I'd love to read that one--hopefully my library has it. I was a huge Streatfeild fan as a child. Not so much the shoe books which were favourites of many of my friends but "When the Sirens Wailed," "The Growing Summer," and "Thursday's Child." Okay, now I want to reread them too...