European Reading Challenge #10

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Railway Children – E. Nesbit

A nice story for hardcore readers like us and children, though hard-boiled American kids may be impatient with English niceness and period corniness The didactic intent is more apparent here than in Nesbit’s other stories such as The Phoenix and the Carpet or its prequel The Five Children and It.

First published in 1906 and set in 1905 in rural England, the novel tells the story of Roberta (Bobbie), Phyllis and Peter, three siblings, who suddenly find themselves forced to move out of a pretty London suburb after the mysterious departure of their father one terrible night.

This change from suburb to country is experienced by the siblings as a real adventure, because arriving at Three Chimneys, they find themselves for the first time very close to the train station. The Railway infrastructure - its bridges, carriages, tunnels and signal sheds  - fascinates the three children. Everything to do with trains comes to life in the minds and reality of the three protagonists, who are brought into contact with a varied collection of people – railway workers, passengers, doctors, porters, schoolboys and all sorts of people in trades.

The move means becoming poor, which their mother does her best to make neither the kids nor other people notice. They don’t become poor in the sense that they are precariously on the edge of the abyss: they always have enough to eat, even if they have to be very careful about “either butter or jam, never both butter and jam.” Like E. Nesbit herself, the brave noble mother of Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis has to write stories for weekly magazines and annuals to get food on the table and pay the cook and maid.

Edith Nesbit must have had a wonderful mind to write the way she wrote. Her style is vivid, spontaneous, fresh and extremely fluent. I especially appreciated the metaphors that enrich the descriptions.

    They all climbed on to the top of the fence, and then suddenly there was a rumbling sound that made them look along the line to the right, where the dark mouth of a tunnel opened itself in the face of a rocky cliff; next moment a train had rushed out of the tunnel with a shriek and a snort, and had slid noisily past them. They felt the rush of its passing, and the pebbles on the line jumped and rattled under it as it went by.

    “Oh!” said Roberta, drawing a long breath; “it was like a great dragon tearing by. Did you feel it fan us with its hot wings?”

    “I suppose a dragon’s lair might look very like that tunnel from the outside,” said Phyllis.

As in the other books, the author will digress to confide in the reader. She’ll bust through that fourth wall, asking us unsociable and end-gaining post-moderns to see where our heroes Roberta, Phillys and Peter are coming from, as they worry so deeply about not hurting those who are close, about doing everyone a loving-kindness, without keeping score and without becoming prigs about it.

The happy ending will make most readers misty but just as touching is the Edwardian optimism that the world really is getting better, richer, healthier. Kind of melancholy too, our knowing that born in 1895 Peter is just the age in 1915/16 to be one of thousands of officers and squaddies whose life expectancy was about a year and a half in the trenches.