'"Children are like jam: all very well in the proper place, but you can't stand them all over the shop — eh, what?"

These were the dreadful words of our Indian uncle. They made us feel very young and angry; and yet we could not be comforted by calling him names to ourselves, as you do when nasty grown-ups say nasty things, because he is not nasty, but quite the exact opposite when not irritated.

My father said, "Perhaps they had better go to boarding-school." And that was awful, because we know Father disapproves of boarding-schools. And he looked at us and said, "I am ashamed of them, sir!"'

The Bastable children behave so badly that their father sends them away to live in the countryside. Determined to be good in the future, they form a society, the 'Wouldbegoods', for being good in. But things don't go exactly as they plan...

English author Edith Nesbit s impressive body of work includes poems, plays, novels, and even ghost stories, however, she is best known for her beloved children s adventure stories, published under the name E. Nesbit. Among Nesbit s best-known works are The Story of the Treasure-Seekers, The Railway Children, The Wouldbegoods and Five Children and It. Nesbit s novels departed from the children s literary tradition of fantasy-worlds popularized by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, and instead focused on the adventures to be had from real-life experiences.