It is at once a pleasure and a responsibility to respond to two papers that address E. Nesbit's cross-writing, as demonstrated in Nesbit's de-scription of the Bastables' visit to the Red House in the novel of that name. It is a pleasure to find Nesbit's work being treated with the seriousness it deserves, and a responsibility because any response risks narrowing, rather than opening up, the field. Mavis Reimer and Erika Rothwell contribute valuably to ongoing theoretical discussions concerning the construction of the child at the end of the last century; they set the figure of the child in the perspectives of empire and of earlier writing for children, and they explore the question of persuasion or even coercion implicit in the adult writer's address to the child reader. These are key issues, and their very centrality permits a response more closely focused upon the initial circumstances of publication of The Story of the Treasure Seekers as a text generated by and within a context of cross-writing. I am conscious of pursuing a rather different line of argument, but my approach through intertextuality and publishing history, which is intended to complement rather than to counter the arguments Reimer and Rothwell establish, is made possible by their more fundamental concern to define the relationship between adult and child as figured in Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers, The Red House, and The New Treasure Seekers.

Yes, these stories are good. They are written on a rather original idea, on a line off the common run. Here we have the life of a family of children told by themselves in a candid, ingenuous and very amusing style. Of course, no child would write as E. Nesbit writes, but the result is that we have drawn for us a very charming picture of English family life... the stories are individual—they will please every grown up who reads them. Edward Garnett, Reader's Report to Fisher Unwin on Seven Stories from the Pall Mall Magazine, 1898