E. Nesbit: The Railway Children

Abstract

In April 1905 Edith Nesbit wrote disconsolately to J.B. Pinker, her literary agent, ‘I wish you could get me an order for a serial for grown-up people — something like the Red House. I don’t think it is good for my style to write nothing but children’s books’.¹ Her remarks expose not merely her personal frustration with the genre of which she was a supremely talented exponent but also her sense of relegation to the ranks of second-class literary citizenship, a danger to which she was keenly alive. Wary of being permanently classified as a literary lightweight, Nesbit constantly tried to diversify her output, continuing to produce adult novels, short stories and poems which failed to match either the financial rewards or the popularity of her juvenile fiction. By 1905 she had published some of the most successful children’s novels of her day, including The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), the last of which had inspired H.G. Wells to write to her prophetically, ‘You go on every Xmas, with a book like this, and you will become a British Institution in six years from now. Nothing can stop it.’²