The Mystery of the Missing Father in The Railway Children

E. Nesbit influenced many children’s writers after her, including C. S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. She is known for her humor, creativity, and insight into how children think.

As a lover of children’s books, having worked with children for many years and having a sort of whimsy and humor in my personality, I thought it was time I read some of E. Nesbit’s works.

I decided to start with one of her most well-known books, The Railway Children.

About E. Nesbit

A strange thing happens when I start to get into a book. If I find it interesting and engaging, I immediately want to learn more about the author.

So, who is E. Nesbit, and what is the thinking behind The Railway Children?

Edith Nesbit lived in poverty most of her life and wrote fiction to make money. She held to ideals about being a lady and not having to work, but was ironically forced to work because of her family’s economic hardships.

Edith Nesbit’s father died when she was very young. Her own husband was distant and lived apart from her and her children for most of their marriage. This is important, as the “missing father” is a stock character in Nesbit’s works.

You can find more information about E. Nesbit and The Railway Children here and here.

The Mystery of the Missing Father

The main mystery in The Railway Children is: what happened to the father, who was so fun and loving at the beginning of the book?

The narrator provides insight into how the children are processing their father’s mysterious arrest, and their forced move to the countryside with their mother.

“Well, it was just like that with the sorrow the children had felt at Father’s going away, and at Mother’s being so unhappy. It made a deep impression, but the impression did not last long. They soon got used to being without Father, though they did not forget him; and they got used to not going to school, and to seeing very little of Mother, who was now almost all day shut up in her upstairs room writing, writing, writing. She used to come down at tea-time and read aloud the stories she had written. They were lovely stories.”

The story resembles E. Nesbit’s life in several regards, but also paints an idealized version of it. There are many innocent and happy moments in it.

The mystery of the missing father comes into play at various points, interrupting the children’s adventures to the railway station nearby.

Bobbie, one of the girls, articulates her deepest fear to her mother at one point:

“[Bobbie’s] heart was beating horribly. WHY hadn’t Father taken his clothes? When Mother came out of the room, Bobbie flung tightly clasping arms round her waist, and whispered:— “Mother — Daddy isn’t — isn’t DEAD, is he?”

“My darling, no! What made you think of anything so horrible?”

“I— I don’t know,” said Bobbie, angry with herself, but still clinging to that resolution of hers, not to see anything that Mother didn’t mean her to see.

Mother gave her a hurried hug. “Daddy was quite, QUITE well when I heard from him last,” she said, “and he’ll come back to us some day. Don’t fancy such horrible things, darling!”

The reader is left to wonder what has become of the father, and why was he taken away so abruptly? Was he working on some secret government project? Did he forget to file his taxes?

The answer is not revealed until the very end of the story.

Moral Teaching

There are subtle didactic elements throughout the story. As the children learn right from wrong, the reader learns along with them.

One instance is when Peter, the youngest child, has been stealing coals from the coal car he found in a tunnel at the railway station. The family is too poor to afford coal, and Peter reasons that it isn’t stealing if he takes the coal from the bottom of the heap.

The station master catches Peter in the act and his sisters, Bobbie and Phyllis, jump out from where they’ve been hiding.

“The Station Master loosed Peter’s collar, struck a match and looked at them by its flickering light.

“Why,” said he, “you’re the children from the Three Chimneys up yonder. So nicely dressed, too. Tell me now, what made you do such a thing? Haven’t you ever been to church or learned your catechism or anything, not to know it’s wicked to steal?”

He spoke much more gently now, and Peter said:— “I didn’t think it was stealing. I was almost sure it wasn’t. I thought if I took it from the outside part of the heap, perhaps it would be. But in the middle I thought I could fairly count it only mining. It’ll take thousands of years for you to burn up all that coal and get to the middle parts.”

Nesbit captures the delightful reasoning of a child, who is motivated by compassion for his mother and sisters to “mine” the coal. The lesson he learns is that he is still stealing.

There are also some interesting political current events that Nesbit alludes to in this story (written in 1906), which I will go into in my next post.

If you are looking for a fun children’s story, you can read The Railway Children here for free, courtesy of Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1874/1874-h/1874-h.htm

Or, buy the Ebook of all of Nesbit’s works (this is the one I am using):