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The Bastable children are up to yet more adventures in this sequel to The Story of the Treasure Seekers--a delightful classic that will charm children and adults alike The Bastable children have been banished to the country in disgrace--following a particularly damaging reenaction of a jungle scene featuring expensive stuffed animals and a garden hose. The gang of six, Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel, and Horace Octavius (H.O.), decides to turn over a new leaf. Spurred on by Dora's urgings, the children found "The Society of the Wouldbegoods"--aiming to mend their ways by being good whenever possible. But the schemes they undertake to try to be good and make themselves useful never seem to quite go as planned. Even when they are attempting to be well behaved, they seem unable to endear themselves to adults, instead, among other things, they cause a fire, some flooding, get held hostage, and find time to purchase a pistol along the way. It seems that despite their best intentions, they are destined to leave a trail of destruction in their wake--and to be, frankly, naughty.… (more)
User reviews
I didn't find this nearly as much fun as The Treasure-Seekers.
It's a bit funny to read (listen to) this almost immediately after The Railway Children. That set of kids was well-intentioned, good-hearted, and heroic; this lot is much more lawless and self-absorbed. The very name "Wouldbegoods" is a sign of it: they realize that they are prone to petty criminality as the sparks fly upward, and the two "prissy" girls, Dora and Daisy, propose to form a club to try to improve themselves.
It doesn't go terribly well.
I hate to say it, being as he (along with his creator) is a birthday-twin, but … I don't like Oswald Bastable in this. He was somewhat endearing in his pompous yet insecure self-praise in TTS, but here he and one or two of the others seem to have a bit more of a mean streak, or perhaps simply carelessness. Oswald will go far, though, with his attributes – or end up hanged.
I think part of it was that I missed Albert's Uncle in The Wouldbegoods - hey! Where did his beloved go? And why did I only just think of that? Hm. Anyway. I loved Albert's Uncle in The Treasure Seekers, but while he was nominally the adult in charge here he was locked up in his room writing a great deal. Rather more than might have been wise given the amount of close supervision these children require. Without him, there is less of the second-hand, through-the-lens-of-Oswald's-POV adult reaction which made Treasure Seekers so priceless.
I think that's a big part of why the constant string of incidents wore a bit thinner in The Wouldbegoods than in Treasure Seekers: it very soon becomes don't these kids ever learn? combined with Oswald at least must be old enough to know better by now. But they haven't, and he doesn't, and there goes the pig galloping down the road while the sheep vanish in the opposite direction. The one certainty in any given chapter is that there will be breakage.
Wouldbegoods is still miles better than most of what's put out today, as far as I've seen; it's still great fun. So: not my favorite, but still – E. Nesbit. That counts for a great deal.
Just as funny, if not more so, than the first in the trilogy.
I mention all this to show that the origins of the escapades and scrapes that the Bastable children get up to during their long summer holiday seem to be similarly drawn from life. Due to various misdemeanours the six siblings get ‘banished’ to Moat House in Kent (largely modelled on Well Hall in Eltham, where Edith and her extended family moved after Lewisham) and resolve to form a society, the Wouldbegoods, to counteract their unwitting misdeeds. Needless to say their actions largely result in near or complete disasters due to their apparent inability to consult about the appropriateness of their charitable deeds; this is compounded by their further inability to learn from their mistakes in what I feel is the only real flaw in this sequel to The Treasure Seekers. However, the tedium of successive episodes involving misunderstandings and disregard for property is more than balanced by Oswald who, as narrator, has that perfect boyish mix of ego and kind-heartedness expressed in entertaining bombast and endearing malapropisms.
The author concentrates on six protagonists (as in The Treasure Seekers) but rings the changes by largely not involving the rather insipid Dora who, it may be remembered, appeared to be the eldest sibling in the earlier book but is here relegated to a stay-at-home. Her place amongst the activists is often taken by either Denny or Daisy, mousey characters who redeem themselves by the end. Otherwise, the established figures of Dicky, Alice, Noel and H. O. feature, all led by the dominating persona of Oswald as they build dams, go on pilgrimages, give drink to the thirsty or seek for lost relatives. Adults are by turns forbidding and distant figures or lend sympathetic ears when they are not representing stranger danger in an otherwise innocent world. The Wouldbegoods is a fascinating window into an England of a century and more ago, both familiar and yet strangely exotic but one where middle-class children (and us, vicariously) can live out their fantasies.
A good example of her adult ghost stories is "Mansize in Marble".