Classics Book Review: The Railway Children

The Railway Children
by Edith Nesbit (1905)

I’m working my way through the books by Edith Nesbit on my Kindle :) – the book cover here was copied from Wikipedia.

This story is about two brothers and two sisters who are suddenly uprooted from their previous comfortable life in a town house with both their parents, to go and live with only their mother in the countryside, under much poorer circumstances than before. Their father has suddenly had to go away; but the children get no real explanation of why or whereto or for how long, until near the end of the book. They soon understand that Mother prefers not to talk about it, and learn not to ask questions. Mother is also suddenly very busy writing stories for publication; which means that the children are often left to amuse themselves best they can on their own.

As their house is close to the railway, this becomes their main source of adventures. They make friends with the staff at the railway station, and they also get in the habit of waving to the people on a special train that goes by daily – especially to one old gentleman; with whom they later on get closer acquainted, to their mutual advantage.

Perhaps needless to say, after certain complications all ends well, and at the end mysteries are explained and questions answered, to the satisfaction of all involved.

I’d say that in many ways this is a rather typical children’s book for its time. Personally I enjoyed Nesbit’s  ‘Psammead’ series more, as those books offer the reader more of an intriguing interpretation challenge, balancing between children’s imagination and “real” magic – and with a lot of humour, too.

From historical point of view, The Railway Children bears witness about the impact of the railway back in those days, though.

…

According to Wikipedia, the book has been dramatised several times (between 1951 and 2000) for radio, TV and film.

Amusingly, when googling the book title, one of the results that came up was an article from The Telegraph 11 July 2013, stating that:

After more than 40 years, the board responsible for classifying films in Britain receives its first complaint about classic film The Railway Children. [from 1970]

A viewer raised concerns with the BBFC about the danger of depicting children playing on railway tracks, in what was the first complaint received by the BBFC since the Railway Children was classified U in 1970, a rating which means it is generally suitable for children aged four and over.

David Cooke, director of the BBFC said the film had "always been a U on every platform." In the board's annual report it said it judged that as the Railway Children is set in the Edwardian period, access to trains was very different from today, and also the film showed the “potential harm to children if proper care is not taken” near railways.

Teaser Tuesday: Castles, Cameras and Brownies

I assure you that nobody would have known that the black and grey muddle on Elfrida's paper was meant to be a picture of a castle. Edred's was much more easily recognised, even before he printed "Arden Castle" under it in large, uneven letters. --- "There!" he said at last, "it's ever so much liker than yours." "Yes," said Elfrida, "but there's more in mine." "It doesn't matter how much there is in a picture if you can't tell what it's meant for," said Edred, with some truth.

From The House of Arden (1908)
by Edith Nesbit (1858-1924)
(Chapter VIII)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

…

Critical of their attempts at drawing the ruins of the castle, the children come up with the idea of taking a Brownie (camera) with them back into the past. I don’t know yet how that turned out, because I haven’t read that far yet. I had to pause right there and go for a little (Wikipedia) excursion of my own. (Children? Camera? 1908?)

The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera with a simple lens that took 2¼-inch square pictures on 117 rollfilm. With its simple controls and initial price of $1, it was intended to be a camera that anyone could afford and use, hence the slogan, "You push the button, we do the rest." The camera was named after the popular cartoons created by Palmer Cox.

… Palmer Cox (1840 – 1924) was a Canadian illustrator and author, best known for The Brownies, his series of humorous verse books and comic strips about the mischievous but kindhearted fairy-like sprites.

(Click the image to read the book as html-file from www.gutenberg.org)

Okay, I think I’m getting a suspicion where Edith Nesbit may have got some of her inspiration from… (Rhymes, by the way, are also important in The House of Arden.)

Myself I’m getting more and more fascinated with my own time-travelling (by books as well as old family photographs and postcards) into the early 1900’s…

More Magic (Psammead Trilogy 2+3)

The Phoenix and the Carpet
by Edith Nesbit
(1904)

1st edition cover (Wikipedia)

Sequel to Five Children and It.
In this book the children are left alone (in the care of servants) quite a lot in their London home, while their parents are off on various business and trips. Their mother buys a second hand carpet for the nursery. The children find an egg rolled into it, which hatches in the fire into a talking Phoenix. Much the same sort of adventures as in the first book continue to happen, as the carpet can also grant wishes. The Psammead (sand-fairy) from the first book does not appear “in person” in this one, but is referred to.

I found this book as entertaining as the first one, and also interesting from historical point of view (London in the early 20th century). Among the places the children visit is the Phoenix Fire Insurance Company (which the Phoenix assumes to be his Temple).

Fire is a theme throughout the book… There is of course a fireplace in the nursery – no central heating back in those days! I have to admit that had I had children, and read this book with them, I might have got a bit paranoid about locking away all matches and lighters safely out of reach… But since no children, I don’t need to dwell too much on that aspect :)

Quotes:

‘The people who decide what the weather is to be, and put its orders down for it in the newspapers every morning, said afterwards that it was the hottest day there had been for years. They had ordered it to be “warmer—some showers,” and warmer it certainly was. In fact it was so busy being warmer that it had no time to attend to the order about showers, so there weren’t any.

It is very difficult to remember things in the dark, unless you have matches with you, and then of course it is quite different, even if you don’t strike one.

The sound of a bell is quite different, somehow, when there is someone inside the house who hears it. I can’t tell you why this is—but so it is.

Robert stuck steadily to his point. One great point about Robert is the steadiness with which he can stick.

‘I do know a lot of French,’ whispered Robert, indignantly; ‘but it’s all about the pencil of the gardener’s son and the penknife of the baker’s niece---nothing that anyone ever wants to say.’

‘You should always speak politely to people when you want them to do things, and especially when it’s going away that you want them to do.’

Don’t trample on its feelings just because it’s only a carpet.

That is one of the most annoying things about stories, you cannot tell all the different parts of them at the same time.

‘But it’s true,’ said Jane. ‘Of course it is, but it’s not true enough for grown-up people to believe it,’ said Anthea.

 

The Story of the Amulet
by Edith Nesbit
(1906)

1st Edition cover (Wikipedia)

The Story of the Amulet is the third book in the Psammead trilogy.

In this book the four older children are separated from their parents and their baby brother for a longer period of time. Father is off abroad working, and Mother, with the baby, is away on Madeira recuperating after an illness.  The children are staying with an old nurse who has a boarding house near the British Museum. While the children are staying she only has one other boarder, an old learned man who is an Egyptologist.

The children miss the country house where they spent last summer (and where they first found the Psammead, a sandfairy who can grant wishes). However, they decide to make the most of all the things there are to see in London for free (or almost).

They start by exploring some markets and shops in the neighbourhood, and there they happen to find first the Psammead in a pet shop, and then (half) an old Egyptian amulet. The Psammead can no longer grant wishes to the children (only to other people), but the amulet turns out to to be new gateway to adventures for them, as through it they can travel to other times and places where the amulet has at some point been. The Psammead goes with them, and the learned Egyptologist gentleman gets involved as well (but he of course keeps thinking that he is only dreaming…) Besides Egypt they also visit ancient Babylonia, Atlantis and the Phoenician city of Tyre. They also meet Julius Ceasar before he invades Britain, and even manage a trip into a utopian future.

Comparing this book to the first and second in the series, there is a definite development towards more and more complex fantasy-adventures.

It got obvious to me during the reading of this last book especially, how strongly influenced by this story that C.S. Lewis must have been when writing his Chronicles of Narnia. And I’ll dare a bet that J.K. Rowling read it as well!

Edith Nesbit dedicated The Story of the Amulet to Dr Wallis Budge, an English Egyptologist, Orientalist and philologist who worked for the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum – “as a small token of gratitude for his unfailing kindness and help in the making of it”.

Quotes:

‘This isn’t tomorrow!’ ‘Is it still yesterday?’ asked Jane. ‘No, it’s today. The same as it’s always been. It wouldn’t do to go mixing up the present and the Past, and cutting bits out of one to fit into the other.’ ‘Then all that adventure took no time at all?’ ‘You can call it that if you  like,’ said the Psammead. ‘It took none of the modern time, anyhow.’

‘The present’s the present and the past’s the past.’ ‘Not always,’ said Cyril. ‘When we were in the Past the present was the future.’

The Past’s as full of different times as—as the sea is of sand.

 

Besides enjoying the humour and language and story-telling in this trilogy I also found it interesting from historical and literary history perspective. I’m a little surprised that I’ve not heard more about it; but checking up on it, it seems only some of Edith Nesbit’s books were translated into Swedish at all, and I’m not sure this particular trilogy was available in Swedish in my childhood.

I’ll continue to read some more of her collected works in between other books. I have not yet decided which one to read next.

Easily Amused

I just read a post by the MadSnapper Sandra, entitled: How to make a post out of Anything/ Everything/ NOTHING … And I wrote in my comment that I was just thinking of doing a post with the title Easily Amused. So now I have to.

Actually I was just going to do that anyway, so all that remains for me now is to try to explain. Which is the hard part, or I would already have done it by now.

The thing is, I’m still giggling on and off at a chapter in a children’s book that I read two days ago. At the age of 57, I’m not sure if that’s something one ought to admit.

But I just checked, and found that after all, Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) was 44 when she wrote it (or at least she was when it was published, in 1902). The book is Five Children and It, and the chapter that had me particularly amused was Ch 9, entitled Grown Up.

If I knew that you (dear readers) had all read the book, the explaining part might not be so difficult. Those who haven’t might need a little bit of background, though.

While playing in a gravel pit near their home, five children—two boys, two girls, and their baby brother, nicknamed “the Lamb”—uncover a rather grumpy sand-fairy known as the Psammead, who has the ability to grant wishes. (Only one per day and they only last for a day, at sunset all goes back to normal.)

Getting your wishes granted turns out more trouble than one might think,  as the Psammead tends to act on the very first “I wish” of the day that happens to come to mind for any of the children, whether they mean it as an actual wish or not.

One day, for example, one of them happens to wish that their (sometimes rather troublesome) little baby brother would “grow up”… Which, of course, he immediately does; and instead of being their baby brother, he becomes their grown up brother for a day. But as his brothers and sisters know he will suddenly turn back to a baby at sunset, they still can’t let him go off on his own. So they have to watch out for him, even though now it’s he who does not want their company.

That is not really the funny part though.
And neither is this, in itself:

The grown-up Lamb frowned. 'My dear Anthea,' he said, 'how often am I to tell you that my name is Hilary or St Maur or Devereux? - any of my baptismal names are free to my little brothers and
sisters, but NOT "Lamb" …

What set me giggling, and still does, is how the author treats that name-issue throughout the rest of the chapter (these are just some examples):

The grown-up Lamb (or Hilary, as I suppose one must now call him) fixed his pump and blew up the tyre.

Quietly but persistently the miserable four took it in turns to try to persuade the Lamb (or St Maur) to spend the rest of the day in the woods.

'He doesn't know who he is. He's something very different from what you think he is.'
'What do you mean?' asked the lady not unnaturally, while Devereux (as I must term the grown-up Lamb) tried vainly to push Anthea away.

[Anthea] caught the Lamb (I suppose I ought to say
Hilary) by the arm.

'Who are these very dirty children?' she asked the grown-up Lamb (sometimes called St Maur in these pages).

Again and again the Lamb (Devereux, I mean) had tried to stop Jane's eloquence, but…

If anyone would like to read the whole chapter you can find it here (Click on Part 3 and scroll down to Ch. 9).

And then you may shake your head at me, if you wish. (Just remember to be careful what you wish for.)