Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Railway Children - The Original Classic Edition by E. Nesbit E Nesbit's classic The Railway Children accused of 'plagiarism' It is arguably the single most memorable episode of E Nesbit's much-loved children's book The Railway Children. The three children, Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis, playing close to the railway line, witness a landslide on to the tracks, and bravely save a train from crashing into it by waving warning flags made from the girls' red flannel petticoats. And when they succeed in stopping the train – in the nick of time – Bobbie falls down in a dead faint. But it has now emerged that the dramatic episode may not have been purely the result of Nesbit's imagination. Another children's book – published in 1896, nine years before The Railway Children appeared – includes an episode seemingly too similar for coincidence alone. In The House by the Railway by little-known writer Ada J Graves, middle-class children from the suburbs move to the countryside with their mother, just as Bobbie and her siblings do, and save a train from crashing into an obstacle on the line by waving a red jacket to halt it in its tracks. And, just as in The Railway Children (as seen on our TV screens each Christmas in the classic 1970 film), they are presented with engraved watches as a reward for their courage. Other similarities connect the two novels. Both books include an episode in which someone the children befriend on a passing train turns out to have a connection to somebody else in their story, and both end with an emotional family reunion. However, the particularly heart-wringing theme of The Railway Children, in which the children's father is absent because he has been wrongly imprisoned for spying, only to be dramatically freed at the end of the novel, is Nesbit's alone. Ada Graves's 64-year-old granddaughter Anne Hall-Williams, who found a copy of The House by the Railway in her late father's house, is convinced that the pivotal near-crash scene was "lifted" by Nesbit from her grandmother's book. "It is quite blatant really, the plagiarism," she says. "It is pretty obvious that Nesbit had read the earlier book. I realise that lots of authors operate in this way, but it seems a bit naughty of her. Poor Ada deserves a bit of credit." However, Kate Agnew of the Children's Bookshop, Muswell Hill, north London, was sceptical about the connection. "There was a huge sweep of railways spreading across Britain from the 1830s and it had a profound effect on the whole country, so it was inevitable that there would be children's fiction about railways," she says. "And it's a classic trope of children's adventure that the children do something crucial that saves the day. In a book about railways, that's likely to be something to do with saving a train, and red has always been the colour of danger. I don't think it's enough of a coincidence to be certain." Nesbit, born in 1858, wrote about 40 children's books in all, and had already published many of the books that would become classics – including The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It and the Phoenix and the Carpet – by the time The Railway Children appeared in 1906. She was also a writer and lecturer on socialism, co-founding the Fabian Society alongside her husband Hubert Bland – although thanks to Bland's philandering and her own penchant for relationships with younger men, her own family life was far from the cosy ideal often presented in her novels. Agnew says Nesbit's books remain very popular with today's young readers. "She has very contemporary heroes and heroines, though they have a strong Victorian sense of duty," she says. "They have very realistic adventures, even when they are magical ones – you enter the world of magic from a shop in Kensington, for example – and children love that." ISBN 13: 9780192744456. The Railway Children (Oxford Children's Classics) Nesbit, E. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. Family! Friendship! Adventure! Mystery! Roberta, Peter, and Phyllis have their lives turned upside down when their father mysteriously has to go away. The railway becomes the centre of their new life, but little do they know what wonders and changes it will bring to them - maybe even the answer to Father's disappearance . Oxford Children's Classics present not only the original and unabridged story of The Railway Children in a beautiful new edition, but also help you to discover a whole world of new adventures with a vast assortment of recommendations and activities. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. E. Nesbit was born in London in 1858. Her father died when she was four years old and she spent much of her childhood travelling around England, France, Germany, and Spain with her mother and sister Mary, in an attempt to cure Mary of tuberculosis. Elizabeth married Hubert Bland in 1880 and they went on to become two of the founding members of the Fabian Society. She wrote many stories and poems for both children and adults, including the much-loved Five Children and It , The Story of the Treasure Seekers , and The Railway Children . Elizabeth Nesbit died in 1924 and is buried in Kent. Edith Nesbit is endlessly surprising and inventive . She is also simply the funniest writer we have ever had, while being the one who could most easily and sweetly break your heart with a phrase. Just try saying "Daddy oh my Daddy" without catching your breath * Frank Cottrell-Boyce * I love her books * Neil Gaiman * My all-time favourite classic children's author * Jacqueline Wilson * Your IP Address in Germany is Blocked from www.gutenberg.org. We apologize for this inconvenience. Your IP address has been automatically blocked from accessing the Project Gutenberg website, www.gutenberg.org. This is because the geoIP database shows your address is in the country of Germany. Diagnostic information: Blocked at germany.shtml Your IP address: 116.202.236.252 Referrer URL (if available): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2638/2638-h/2638- h.htm Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_0) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.79 Safari/537.4 Date: Thursday, 17-Jun-2021 12:39:15 GMT. Why did this block occur? A Court in Germany ordered that access to certain items in the Project Gutenberg collection are blocked from Germany. 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The Railway Children is a children's book by Edith Nesbit, originally serialised in The London Magazine during 1905 and first published in book form in 1906. It has been adapted for the screen several times, of which the 1970 film version is the best known. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography credits Oswald Barron, who had a deep affection for Nesbit, with having provided the plot. Contents. 1 Plot summary 2 Adaptations 2.1 BBC radio dramatisation 2.2 BBC television series 2.3 Film 2.4 2000 version 2.5 Stage versions. Plot summary. The story concerns a family who move to "Three Chimneys", a house near the railway, after the father, who works at the Foreign office, is imprisoned after being falsely accused of spying. The children befriend an 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 take care of a Russian exile, Mr Szczepansky, who came to England looking for his family (later located) and Jim, the grandson of the Old Gentleman, who suffers a broken leg in a tunnel. The theme of an innocent man being falsely imprisoned for espionage and finally vindicated might have been influenced by the Dreyfus Affair, which was a prominent worldwide news item a few years before the book was written.