In com­mon with many, I first dis­cov­ered Edith Nesbit’s The Rail­way Chil­dren via the pop­u­lar film ver­sion made in 1970 and broad­cast on TV on and off ever since. I can con­jure up many mov­ing images from that movie that remind me of the sev­en­ties: the two heav­i­ly-pet­ti­coat­ed girls and their short-trousered broth­er bound­ing down hills, flag­ging down trains with red, home­made flags ; the good-heart­ed and proud sta­tion mas­ter played by Bernard Crib­bins; the emo­tion­al reunion of Bob­bie with her father on a steam-cov­ered plat­form. The book ver­sion I didn’t read until rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly, read­ing it out loud to my daugh­ter over the course of sev­er­al evenings – and we both loved it.

You prob­a­bly know the sto­ry: it revolves around a fam­i­ly who move from Lon­don up to rur­al York­shire into a house near the rail­way sta­tion, after the father, who works at the For­eign Office, is impris­oned after being false­ly accused of spy­ing. The chil­dren befriend a chap they call the Old Gen­tle­man who reg­u­lar­ly takes the 9:15 train near their home; he is even­tu­al­ly able to help prove their father’s inno­cence, and the fam­i­ly is reunit­ed. The fam­i­ly also takes care of a Russ­ian exile, Mr Szczepan­sky, who came to Eng­land look­ing for his fam­i­ly and Jim, the grand­son of the Old Gen­tle­man, who suf­fers a bro­ken leg in a tun­nel.

The book was first seri­alised in The Lon­don Mag­a­zine dur­ing 1905 and then pub­lished in book form in the fol­low­ing year. It’s inter­est­ing to pick up on pos­si­ble inspi­ra­tions from news that was cur­rent at the time. The theme of an inno­cent man being false­ly impris­oned for espi­onage, but final­ly vin­di­cat­ed, may well have been influ­enced by the Drey­fus Affair, which had been a promi­nent news item a few years before the book was writ­ten. Nes­bit will have aligned her­self, no doubt, with Émile Zola’s famous open let­ter in sup­port of the wrong­ly-accused Alfred Drey­fus, J’Ac­cuse.

Nesbit’s own involve­ment in pol­i­tics also pro­vid­ed inspi­ra­tion. Nes­bit was a polit­i­cal activist and co-founder of the Fabi­an Soci­ety in 1894 (she even named her son Fabi­an). She was friends with two real-life Russ­ian dis­si­dents, Sergius Step­ni­ak and Peter Kropotkin, an amal­ga­ma­tion of whom Nes­bit prob­a­bly had in mind for her Mr Szczepan­sky.

We also see ref­er­ences to the then-cur­rent Rus­so-Japan­ese War, in which Japan suc­cess­ful­ly halt­ed Tsar Nicholas II from tight­en­ing his grip on Manchuria and Korea, and Nes­bit has an oppor­tu­ni­ty to sub­tly express her hos­tile opin­ions of Tsarist Rus­sia. I’m not sure if Nesbit’s oth­er books (she pub­lished around 60 books of children’s lit­er­a­ture, includ­ing the Psam­mead series and the Bastable series) sim­i­lar­ly reveal sub­tle polit­i­cal threads with­in them but you wouldn’t be sur­prised now, would you?

Here’s the clip from the film where Bob­bie (Jen­ny Agut­ter) spies her return­ing father amidst the steam on the plat­form and runs to him cry­ing “Dad­dy, my Dad­dy”. I well up every time.