Fiction · 1906
The Railway Children
The Railway Children, first published in 1906, has been pulled into the Bibliomancer archive: the complete text, carefully cleaned and typeset, free to read online. Its editorial introduction is still being prepared.
Contents
- Dedication
- Chapter I — The beginning of things
- Chapter II — Peter’s coal-mine
- Chapter III — The old gentleman
- Chapter IV — The engine-burglar
- Chapter V — Prisoners and captives
- Chapter VI — Saviours of the train
- Chapter VII — For valour
- Chapter VIII — The amateur firemen
- Chapter IX — The pride of Perks
- Chapter X — The terrible secret
- Chapter XI — The hound in the red jersey
- Chapter XII — What Bobbie brought home
- Chapter XIII — The hound’s grandfather
- Chapter XIV — The End
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1858–1924 · Victorian
Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), who published as E. Nesbit, was born in London and spent an itinerant childhood following her widowed mother around England and the Continent in search of a healthier climate for a sickly older sister. In 1880 she married Hubert Bland, with whom she co-founded the socialist Fabian Society the following year; his chronic infidelity and the unconventional household that resulted — for years she raised two of his children by his mistress and secretary alongside her own — left her the family's primary breadwinner, and she wrote constantly and commercially to support it. Turning to children's fiction in her forties, she found her lasting form in stories of ordinary children who stumble into real magic within recognisably everyday English settings: Five Children and It (1902), introducing the cantankerous sand-fairy the Psammead, began a trilogy continued in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906), alongside The Railway Children (1906). Her blend of the fantastic and the domestic directly shaped later writers including C. S. Lewis and Edward Eager. She died in Kent at sixty-five.
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