"[1] However, his occasional lapse into the first person, and the undue praise he likes to heap on himself, make his identity obvious to the attentive reader long before he reveals it himself.

The children, Dora, the eldest, Oswald, the narrator, Dicky, Alice and Noel (10-year old twins), and H. O., the youngest, decide to restore the fortunes of their house by finding or earning treasure.

They try various methods that work in books, such as digging for it, being bandits, marrying a princess, inventing a patent medicine, rescuing a rich gentleman, but somehow nothing is successful.

This and her later novels exerted considerable influence on subsequent English children's literature, most notably Arthur Ransome's[citation needed] books and C. S. Lewis'[3] The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis notes in the first chapter of The Magician's Nephew that the portion of the action of that book that takes place in this world happens at the same time as that of the Treasure Seekers.

[5] British writer Michael Moorcock later used the character, or at least the name, of Oswald Bastable for the hero and first-person narrator of his trilogy A Nomad of the Time Streams, published from 1971 until 1981, an influence on the nascent genre of steampunk.