Friday Memories of Books that Shook My World
E. Nesbit’s books about the Bastables of Lewisham Road were formative in my upbringing. First of all, The Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods let me know that there were other bookish children like me in the world. Such confirmation is no small thing.
Equally important, the books played a role in firming up my moral compass. Yesterday I wrote about David Brooks calling for “an education in morals as rigorous as [a] technical and career education.” Only in this way, he contended, can our country rediscover a common good. Nesbit’s books show a family of six children constantly exploring ethical questions, even if they sometimes fall short of their goals.
The Bastables have lost their mother and have been impoverished as a result of their father’s partner running off with the company funds. Treasure Seekers shows their attempts to restore the family fortune and Wouldbegoods (as the title indicates) shows them setting out to do good in the world.
As the eldest of four boys, I identified with Oswald, who is the eldest of the six and who narrates the books. (The others are Dora, Dickey, twins Alice and Noël, and Horace Octavius or H.O.) Also, like the Bastables, the Bates boys were somewhat set apart from our peers, in part because of our immersion in books. This was especially true when we spent a year in France, where we had only each other and so were always together as we visited movies, parks, department stores (les Galeries Lafayette at Christmas time was especially magical), and the American Library.
Each chapter in Nesbit’s books features a new enterprise, one that often ends in comic failure. Often, like Tom Sawyer, the children are inspired by the books they’ve read, and in The Wouldbegoods they unleash a disaster when they attempt to perform the Jungle Books. The enactment includes a running hose (for a waterfall), stuffed animals from their uncle’s collection, and skin lotion for the dog (to change its color) and for themselves (the brown tint remains for days).
As far as I knew, I was the only one in my class familiar with the Jungle Books, which meant that I saw the Bastables as kindred souls. I also appreciated Oswald’s description of the writer who lives next door:
That’s one thing I like Albert’s uncle for. He always talks like a book, and yet you can always understand what he means. I think he is more like us, inside of his mind, than most grown-up people are. He can pretend beautifully. I never met anyone else so good at it…[I]t was Albert’s uncle who first taught us how to make people talk like books when you’re playing things…
Like Oswald, I was always organizing projects for my own siblings, and like Oswald I felt a sense of eldest child responsibility. I could relate when he and the others grappled with whether their actions were right or wrong.
They don’t always get it right, of course, but after the Jungle Book debacle and the subsequent punishment (the boys are caned and all are confined to their rooms with bread and water for three days), they set up a society that will help them be good. In the spirit of Lewis Carroll, Nesbit has fun satirizing Victorian preachiness (or jawing, as Oswald calls it). The girls and a visitor come up with the idea for the society and read aloud their declaration:
NEW SOCIETY FOR BEING GOOD IN
‘I, Dora Bastable, and Alice Bastable, my sister, being of sound mind and body, when we were shut up with bread and water on that jungle day, we thought a great deal about our naughty sins, and we made our minds up to be good for ever after. And we talked to Daisy about it, and she had an idea. So we want to start a society for being good in. It is Daisy’sidea, but we think so too.’
‘You know,’ Dora interrupted, ‘when people want to do good things they always make a society. There are thousands–there’s the Missionary Society.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said, ‘and the Society for the Prevention of something or other, and the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society, and the S.P.G.’
‘What’s S.P.G.?’ Oswald asked.
‘Society for the Propagation of the Jews, of course,’ said Noël, who cannot always spell.
‘No, it isn’t; but do let me go on.’
Alice did go on.
‘We propose to get up a society, with a chairman and a treasurer and secretary, and keep a journal-book saying what we’ve done. If that doesn’t make us good it won’t be my fault.
‘The aim of the society is nobleness and goodness, and great and unselfish deeds. We wish not to be such a nuisance to grown-up people and to perform prodigies of real goodness. We wish to spread our wings’–here Alice read very fast. She told me afterwards Daisy had helped her with that part, and she thought when she came to the wings they sounded rather silly–‘to spread our wings and rise above the kind of interesting things that you ought not to do, but to do kindnesses to all, however low and mean.’
Among the rules they pass are the following:
1. Every member is to be as good as possible.
2. There is to be no more jaw than necessary about being good. (Oswald and Dicky put that rule in.)
3. No day must pass without our doing some kind action to a suffering fellow-creature.
4. We are to meet every day, or as often as we like.
5. We are to do good to people we don’t like as often as we can.
Of course, all kinds of things go wrong in their efforts to be good. Nevertheless, in some deep way I internalized their aspirations.
It helped, as I noted yesterday, that the other children’s books I read—and that I read to my own sons—had characters for whom behaving decently and honorably is paramount. These included C.S. Lewis’s protagonists, Huck, Harper Lee’s Jeb and Scout, and Sam and Frodo.
Lewis’s characters are always internally wrestling with moral codes—think of Jill in Silver Chair with the signs in Silver Chair or Digory in Magician’s Nephew with the apple—and I’m not surprised to learn (from Wikipedia) that Nesbit’s novels were a major influence on The Narnia Chronicles. (Lewis even mentions the Bastables in Magician’s Nephew.) They also inspired Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books, Edward Eager’s Half Magic series, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, and I see their spirit at work in Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time. In all of these one finds children confronting life’s challenges and attempting to work through them as a group.
Of course, children’s lit is not the only way to instill a moral code in future voters. Given the power of story, however, its influence should not be underestimated. Fortunately, it’s a resource readily available to every language arts teacher.
Further thought: The Bastable books also were my first encounter with an unreliable narrator. Oswald narrates his story from a third person point of view but, time after time, unintentionally reveals that he is the actual author. It’s very funny and, as a child reader, I found it stimulating to catch him out.
