100 Things - Book #6
100 Books By Women, Courtesy of Gutenberg.org
6. The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
So I love good children's literature. It's not surprising, given that I work with children, spend most of my time with them. But I believe good children's lit is not much different than a good book from any other genre. To this day, I cannot read through Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess without tearing up. I have a whole shelf in my bookcase devoted to her works, and The Chronicles of Narnia, Winnie the Pooh, The Princess and the Goblin, Black Beauty, etc. And every few years, I reread them quite joyfully.
E. Nesbit is one of those authors I'm sure I've heard mentioned before, I just can't remember where, and I'd never read one of her books before. I wish I could say I loved this book the way I love some of the ones I just mentioned, but I can't. While there were some parts of this story that were utterly charming, other got very heavy-handed, in a way I feel the best of children's literature avoids.
I do not see why children deserved to be lectured in their fun reading, any more than other people. Let them read, let them enjoy themselves, leave the lessons in good behavior to their parents.
This is probably why I preferred Peter and Phyllis to Bobbie, too. Bobbie was too good, too angelic. Give me Peter and his discussions of setting bones, or Phyllis and her untied shoelace any day.
Also, I felt like I wanted the kids to be more proactive. It seemed like almost every time something came along, their default response was to ask the old gentleman for help. I shouldn't say every time; there are a couple of instances in the book where they are genuinely heroic. But still, given the overarching plot of the book is their missing father, it annoys me that they don't really do anything about that at all.
At the heart of this book, though, is something I do find fascinating. The railway, specifically the mystique of the railway at the turn of the century. Boys grew up wanting to be engineers, young children thought engines were dragons. They were so big and fast and exciting.
We've lost that feeling, today, for the most part. Railroads are just another way of moving things around. Kids don't talk about working for the railroad when they grow up. But there's a boy at my daycare, about eighteen months old, and there's a railroad on the other side of the fence from the park where we play. And every time a train goes by, he shouts, “train, train,” and stands there, slack-jawed and trembling until the train disappears. So, obviously, before it's overwhelmed by our twenty-first century cynicism, we do still have that awe of railroads within us. That's what I thought about whenever this book bored me.