The power of suggestion which is exerted through things and persons and which, instead of telling the child what he must do, tetts him what he is, and thus leads him to become durably what he has to be, L· the condition for the effectiveness of all kinds of symbolic power that will subsequently be able to operate on a habitus predisposed to respond to them. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 52

A startling moment in Edwardian children's literature occurs in a book not written for children at all, when a remarkably spelled letter from the Junior Blackheath Society of Antiquaries and Field Club arrives at the breakfast table of Len and Chloe, protagonists of a domestic comedy, The Red House, published in 1902 by E. Nesbit. The Antiquaries turn out to be none other than the Bastable children and their friends, who have decided to recast the visit of the Maid-stone antiquarian society to the Moat House, a visit that forms the basis of one of the stories in The Wouldbegoods (1901). The report of the genesis of the children's plan and Oswald's account of the Red House experience appear in yet another context, one of the stories in the New Treasure Seekers collection (1904). Julia Briggs observes that the Bastables" put in a guest appear-ance" in Nesbit's adult novel (WP 215), a comment implying that the Bastables' presence is somehow incidental to the trajectory of the text. My experience of reading The Red House, however, was that the Bastables' eruption into Nesbit's novel radically disrupted the text. Not only does the" free" talk of the children (RH 226) generally