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The Railway Children

The Railway Children

by E. Nesbit and C. E. Brock
Hardback

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ANITA SILVEY begins her entry on Edith Nesbit by observing, "One wonders if Edith Nesbit was at all aware of just how unconventional her children's novels were and that they would determine the direction for both realistic family stories and fantasy in the twentieth century." All true, and the gentle realism (so unlike the escapist adventures of her contemporaries Barrie, Baum, Shepherd, and Grahame) is based upon real situations and real people. In this story, the three children have to move abruptly from a comfortable suburban, middle-class home to a spartan, unheated farmhouse close to a railroad. What the children are not told (but manage to find out) is that their father is in jail for a crime he did not commit. What they can see is that their mother is, to put it mildly, at her wit's end. How the children cope with this unexplained disruption, how they save a train from certain disaster, how they manage to insinuate themselves into the hearts and lives of the community, how they cope with abewildering array of situations over which they have no control and less understanding is the platform on which Nesbit builds the book (events, not coincidentally, reflective of her own life that took its own turn for the worse when her husband, already ill with smallpox, lost all his money and it became clear she would have to write to survive). Beautifully (maybe a little too beautifully) illustrated in color wash drawings by Dryhurst, the only hardcover edition of this beloved and enduring children's classic.
ISBN:
9780811849333
9780811849333
Category:
General fiction (Children's / Teenage)
Format:
Hardback
Publisher:
Chronicle Books LLC
Country of origin:
United States
E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit was born in 1858. Her father died when she was only three and so her family moved all over England. Poverty was something she had known first hand, both as a child and as a young married woman with small children. Like the Railway Childrens' Mother, she was forced to try and sell her stories and poems to editors.

Her first children's book, The Treasure Seekers, was published in 1899. She also wrote Five Children and It but her most famous story is The Railway Children which was first published in 1905 and it hasn't been out of print since.

Edith Nesbit was a lady ahead of her time - she cut her hair short, which was considered a very bold move in Victorian times, and she was a founding member of a group that worked towards improvements in politics and society called The Fabian Society. She died in 1924.

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