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.