Getting My Head Out of Summer

            

           

            I think I’m still trying to get my head out of summer and the routines I established during my time off from school. On Monday I’d finished reading Edth Nesbit’s “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, but not until that night. When the writing assignments start soon, I’ll have to free up more work time by cutting away at my holiday habits. For a start, I decided to stop reading the news every day online.

            Of  “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, although it’s a children’s book, I think that it’s about class. In particular, it illustrates the financial deterioration of the British middle class as the British Empire began its decline. Nesbit seems to be setting up a reclamation of middle class values, education, cooperation and a sense of adventure as the cure for the decline.

            Throughout the book, she keeps the middle class separate from the other classes, but allowing a window of communication with the upper class through its oldest and youngest members. As for the working class, they are pretty much all portrayed as faceless and undeveloped characters, only slightly more discernable than the adults in a Peanuts comic strip.

            The only working class character with a personality is the family’s housekeeper, Eliza, but she is mostly presented in a negative light in being irritable and not very good at her job. She is considered so unimportant that when the family’s fortunes change and they move to a mansion in the country, Eliza simply disappears from the story.

            That evening I rode up to Heath and Mount Pleasant and then east to where Heath stops at the woods. I was wearing shorts and an unbuttoned long sleeved shirt. It was not so warm that I felt the need to remove the shirt.