The Railway Children by E. Nesbit: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Railway Children
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The opening of Chapter 1
They were not railway children to begin with. I don’t suppose they had ever thought about railways except as a means of getting to Maskelyne and Cook’s, the Pantomime, Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud’s. They were just ordinary suburban children, and they lived with their father and mother in an ordinary redbrick-fronted villa, with coloured glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bathroom with hot and cold water, electric bells, French windows, and a good deal of white paint, and “every modern convenience,” as the house-agents say.
There were three of them. Roberta was the eldest. Of course, mothers never have favourites, but if their mother had had a favourite, it might have been Roberta. Next came Peter, who wished to be an engineer when he grew up; and the youngest was Phyllis, who meant extremely well.
Mother did not spend all her time in paying dull calls to dull ladies, and sitting dully at home waiting for dull ladies to pay calls to her. She was almost always there, ready to play with the children, and read to them, and help them to do their home-lessons. Besides this she used to write stories for them while they were at school, and read them aloud after tea, and she always made up funny pieces of poetry for their birthdays and for other great occasions, such as the christening of the new kittens, or the refurnishing of the doll’s house, or the time when they were getting over the mumps.
The excerpt below quotes the opening three paragraphs of Chapter 1, in which the narrator says that the three children were not railway children to begin with, describes the suburban villa with its coloured glass and electric bells, introduces Roberta, Peter and Phyllis in order of age, and shows their mother writing stories for them.
Download Full EPUB1906
Novel
60,000 words
3.3 h
Standalone
A redbrick villa in a suburb, then a white house called Three Chimneys in the English countryside, with a railway line, a tunnel, a small station, a canal and a great aqueduct within walking distance.
Fourteen chapters grouped into ten movements
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.70 MB (EPUB) · 0.76 MB (AZW3) · 0.73 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #1874 · Standard Ebooks
The Railway Children is E. Nesbit’s novel of 1906. Roberta, Peter and Phyllis live in a redbrick villa until two men come one evening to see their father, and he is taken away. Their mother moves them to a white house called Three Chimneys, where the railway runs along the valley below. The children name the trains, wave to an old gentleman in a first-class carriage, and make friends with Perks the porter. They take coal from the station heap, stop a train with red petticoats, shelter a Russian exile, carry a baby out of a burning barge and bring a boy with a broken leg home from the tunnel. In the last chapter their father comes back.
The book is told by a narrator who keeps interrupting to say how fond he is of Roberta, and its chapters are numbered rather than titled. The plot turns on what the children are not told: their mother answers no questions about their father, and Bobbie learns the truth from an old newspaper wrapped round a parcel of magazines. What follows is a run of practical rescues, each managed with whatever is to hand. The Wikipedia article on the novel covers its publication and its place among Nesbit’s books for children. — The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1874 and Standard Ebooks.
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page offers a summary and analysis of The Railway Children, with its fourteen chapters set out in reading order, the family and the railway people described, and the story of the father’s arrest read beside the smaller rescues that fill the book. E. Nesbit published it in 1906. The edition reproduced here numbers its chapters I to XIV and prints no titles, so the numbers are the only keys, and the ten groups used below are ours. The main episodes are all here: the coal mine, the landslip, the barge fire, the tunnel and the trial, and the last chapter is given the room it needs. Quotations and names are the novel’s own, and every summary can be carried back to the passage it comes from, so the page works as an index to the book as well as an introduction to it.
The family is the whole of the book’s world at the start. Roberta is the eldest, Peter wishes to be an engineer, and Phyllis means well; their mother writes stories and makes up rhymes, and their father, who works in a Government Office, mends toys and explains things. Then he is called away, and the household drops to a white cottage with no fire in June, jam or butter but not both, and a mother who is always at her writing. Aunt Emma’s ugly clothes and the servants’ hints fill the weeks before the move. The text described here is the Standard Ebooks edition, and a complete reading text also sits at Project Gutenberg #1874. The mother’s writing becomes the family’s income, and the book is honest about what that costs her: long blue envelopes go out, proofs come back, and there are buns for tea when an editor is sensible.
The adults around the railway are drawn with the same care as the children. Perks the porter makes tea in a beer can, leaves his birthday unkept because he has the kids and the missus to keep instead, and is furious when the village collects for him; his wife cries over the presents and calls him an aggravating old thing. The Station Master, whose name is Gills, catches Peter with a bag of stolen coal and then lets him go. The old gentleman in the first-class carriage waves back, sends a hamper when the children write to him for their mother’s medicine, and turns out to be Jim’s grandfather. Dr Forrest charges what he can and lectures Peter on being gentle. Bill the bargee, who twists Peter’s ear, takes them nineteen locks along the canal as a reward for saving his son.
The central secret is handled with unusual patience. The children are told not to ask questions, and Bobbie keeps a resolution not to see what her mother does not mean her to see; the reader waits with her through a birthday, a quarrel over a rake and a borrowed parcel of illustrated papers before a scrap of newspaper headed End of the Trial gives her the verdict and the sentence. The newspaper is pure chance: a parcel wrapped in an old sheet of newsprint, a wait at a level crossing, a column torn off at the bottom. She tells nobody but her mother, and then writes to the old gentleman to ask him to find out who really sold the papers. For another household of children who must make do after a change of fortune, see The Secret Garden, which is free here too.
The last chapters are quieter than the rescues and better for it. Jim mends slowly, the household acquires a cook and a housemaid, lessons come with rhymes, and the old gentleman arranges for the mother to become matron of a hospital with one patient in it. Then the whole train waves, and the father walks up from the station; the reunion is given to Bobbie first, in one scream and one line of dialogue, and the narrator declines to follow the parents indoors. It is a book about waiting as much as about saving trains, and its happiest invention is the old gentleman, who does his good turns by post and by proxy. Readers who want a fantasy of the same decade can turn to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the rest of our Children’s Classics shelf is free as well.
Historical Context
The railway of the book is a working Edwardian line, and Nesbit is exact about its people and its furniture. A station has a station master, a porter, a booking office, a general waiting room with advertisements, a signal-box with levers and an electric bell, and a coal heap with a whitewashed line to show how much has been taken. The porter explains couplings and the communication cord, and tells the children that a tank engine does the shunting, a goods engine does the heavy work and a mainline engine is built for speed as well as power. Trains keep to the left, the children are told, so they walk on the right and face the way the traffic comes, and the tunnel is the one place where that rule is no help at all. The Company gives the three children gold watches for stopping the 11:29, and the inscription on them is dated 1905.
The household is a lesson in respectable poverty. The father is in a Government Office and the family keeps a parlourmaid until the arrest; afterwards there is one woman two days a week, no fire in June because coal is dear, and jam or butter but not both. The mother writes stories for editors, sends them out in long blue envelopes, and celebrates a sale with halfpenny buns for tea. Doctors are paid through a club at twopence a week, which is how Bobbie comes to ask Dr Forrest whether her mother can join. The family keeps up appearances as best it can: the children wear Indian muslin to the presentation and wash it themselves in the back kitchen. School is Latin, arithmetic and the dates of kings, taught at the kitchen table, and the lessons are interrupted by a paperchase, a landslip and a broken leg.
The Russian strand brings the war with Japan into a children’s book. The exile is a writer who was sent to prison for a book about poor people, kept three years in a damp cell, marched to Siberia chained to other convicts and set to work in the mines for life. He volunteers when war comes, deserts at the first chance, and reaches England looking for a wife and children who escaped before him. He learns to say Good morning, Please and Thank you before he can say much else, and the children bring him flowers until the place where he sits is surrounded by fading bunches of clover and roses. Perks, who is a Jap in his own phrase and thinks foreigners are all tarred with the same brush, still refuses to blame the Station Master for keeping the story to himself, and calls it Party Politics.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Roberta: The eldest, twelve at her birthday party, and called Bobbie by everyone else. She keeps a resolution not to see what her mother hides, learns the family secret from a newspaper, and is the one who stays in the dark tunnel with a stranger’s broken leg. The narrator says he is growing very fond of her, and the book is written as though he were.
- Peter: The only boy, ten at the start, who wants to be an engineer and keeps the numbers of engines in a little black notebook. He mines coal from the station heap, thinks of the red flags, goes down into the burning barge cabin and breaks his foot on a rake. He is proud, quick to quarrel and quicker to call Pax, and the doctor’s lecture on gentleness is aimed straight at him.
- Phyllis: The youngest, who means extremely well and is always losing her bootlaces. She cries when Perks is angry and kisses him when he is sorry, carries a shuttlecock into the tunnel to burn under a fainting boy’s nose, and tells the signalman she forgives him for offering money. Her remarks are the book’s comedy and often its conscience, and she is brave without ever claiming to be.
- Mother: A writer of stories and rhymes who moves her children to a cottage and turns her pen into an income. She will not explain the arrest, will not let the children ask strangers for things, and takes in a Russian exile and then a boy with a broken leg. She tells Bobbie that the worst will be over when Father comes home, and writes through the worst of it, though the book notices how thin she grows.
- Perks: The porter at the station, married with three children, who makes tea in a beer can and answers every question that begins with Why. He is proud, and the village birthday the children arrange for him nearly ends the friendship. His toast, when he comes round, is May the garland of friendship be ever green, which surprises everyone who thought he had no poetry in him.
- The old gentleman: The passenger in the first-class carriage of the 9:15, whose hand the children notice before his face. He waves, sends a hamper of food, wine and roses when their mother is ill, gives them gold watches, finds the Russian’s wife and child, and is Jim’s grandfather. He tells Bobbie he is certain her father did not do it, and the narrator never gives his name.
Core Literary Themes
- The railway as a country: Once the family moves to Three Chimneys, the line in the valley becomes the children’s school, club and post office. They name the trains, learn the hours, and treat the 9:15 as a messenger that can carry their love to their father. The station gives them Perks and the Station Master, the fence gives them the old gentleman, and the tunnel gives them Jim. Nesbit never makes the railway whimsical: it is a working line with rules, fines and dangers, and the children are nearly hurt on it more than once. The final wave from every carriage is the book’s way of saying that the affection was returned, and it is the only miracle the novel allows itself.
- Poverty and the fear of charity: The family is poor in the way that keeps one servant and loses its fires. Money is counted in coal, buns and doctor’s bills, and the children are told not to talk about it. The Perks birthday is the book’s argument on the subject: the village gives, Perks suspects a charity lay, and the labels Bobbie wrote, which quote what each giver said, turn a gift into respect. Nesbit’s distinction is between charity, which humiliates, and friendliness, which the clergyman calls loving-kindness. The same care shows in Mother’s letter to the old gentleman, which thanks him and disapproves of her children in one breath, and in Mother’s rule that the children are not to talk about the family’s affairs.
- The secret and the courage to keep it: Nothing in the book is told at the right time. Mother will not say what has happened, the children are forbidden to ask, and Bobbie resolves not to see what her mother does not mean her to see. The narrator calls this silent sympathy, and the novel tests it: she keeps the secret for weeks, tells only her mother when she learns it, and writes to the old gentleman without telling Peter or Phyllis. The two of them agree to help each other be brave. Nesbit is careful to show the cost, the pink-lidded eyes at tea, the nightmares after the landslip, and the way a kept secret makes a child older than her years and quieter than her brother and sister.
- Prisoners and captives: The prayer Mother teaches her children, to show pity upon all prisoners and captives, joins the Russian’s story to the father’s. One man is sent to Siberia for a book, the other to penal servitude for letters he did not write, and the children meet both cases as persons rather than as causes. Bobbie’s first letter is about a prisoner and a captive; her second is about her own father, and she writes that she sees now what the prayer meant. The book never argues the justice of the sentence, and never shows the prison. It shows a family waiting, a girl learning that the people she pities have names, and a mother who will not let her children hate.
- Fathers, absent and found: The father is gone by the end of the first chapter and does not speak again until the last, so the book is full of substitutes. The old gentleman waves, sends hampers, finds a lost family and turns out to be a grandfather; Dr Forrest lectures Peter on how to treat his sisters; Perks and the Station Master keep an eye on the children; and Peter announces that he is the head man of the family. The substitutes are not replacements, and the book knows it: every kindness makes the absence sharper. The last chapter pays off the whole arrangement in one scream and one line of dialogue, and then the narrator steps back and lets the door close.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Railway Children?
The download is the whole novel: fourteen chapters, from the redbrick villa in the first paragraph to the closing of the door in the last, with the chapter numbers the edition prints and nothing cut. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from the Project Gutenberg transcription made by Les Bowler and David Widger in 1999 and from digital scans at the Internet Archive, so the spelling, the punctuation and the chapter breaks are the edition’s throughout.
Around the text the page supplies what a book of fourteen untitled chapters needs: ten grouped summaries that stop where their chapters stop, six character notes, five themes, and a note on the railway, the household and the Russian exile. The groups are ours; the chapters and their numbering are not. Each summary names the chapters it covers, so a passage found here can be looked up in any edition that prints the numbers, and the ten groups cover all fourteen chapters without a gap and without running ahead of the story.
The files come in three formats with the same text and the same chapter breaks. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, by USB or through Send to Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. No account is needed for any of them, and nothing in the downloads is locked, watermarked or time limited, so the files keep working long after the app you first opened them in is gone.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text of The Railway Children is set from the Project Gutenberg transcription by Les Bowler and David Widger and from scans at the Internet Archive, with the chapter numbers kept as the edition prints them.
- Complete text in fourteen chapters Every chapter from the villa to the homecoming, numbered as the edition numbers them, with no chapter text abridged and no scene summarised in place of the original.
- Ten grouped chapter summaries Ten summaries in reading order, each keyed to the chapters it covers and stopping at their end, so that the page can be read beside the novel without spoiling the chapter it has not reached.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the chapter breaks and the chapter numbers intact and no reader software to install beyond the one you already use.
- Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel of a girl sent to a shut-up house, a locked garden and a cousin who believes he is ill, and the nearest book to this one in its faith in children left to themselves. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- L. Frank Baum’s American fantasy of 1900, published six years before Nesbit’s railway story, with a girl, a scarecrow and a road that has to be walked. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The shelf where this edition sits, with the rest of our free children’s classics in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel has fourteen chapters and, in this edition, no titles: they are numbered I to XIV, and the numbers are the only keys. The ten group names here are ours, added to make the book easy to follow, and no chapter is given a title it does not have. Each group begins where its first chapter begins and stops where its last chapter stops, so the page can be read beside the novel without running ahead of it. Chapters are cited by number throughout, and the numbering is the same in all three downloads.
- Chapters 1–2 — The villa, the coal mine and Three Chimneys: The father is called away by two men who come in the evening, the household is packed up, and the family reaches a white house in the dark with no supper. Peter mines coal from the station heap to keep a fire going, is caught by the Station Master, and is let off with a warning.
- Chapter 3 — The old gentleman and the hamper: The children name the 9:15 the Green Dragon and wave to it, and a hand waves back from a first-class carriage. When their mother falls ill, they write to the stranger for the things the doctor ordered, and a hamper arrives with food, wine, roses and a letter.
- Chapter 4 — The engine-burglar: Bobbie climbs into the cab of a moving engine to ask the driver to mend Peter’s broken toy, and is carried off down the line before the men see her. The driver Bill and the fireman Jim adopt her, and Jim’s second cousin’s wife’s brother solders the engine.
- Chapter 5 — The Russian at the station: On a wet day the children find a shabbily dressed stranger at the station who speaks no English and has lost his ticket. Bobbie holds his hand, the stranger picks out a Russian stamp from Peter’s collection, and Mother, arriving from Maidbridge, takes him home and tells them about Siberia.
- Chapter 6 — Six red flags: The Russian is nursed in Father’s clothes, and the children take him strawberries and wild cherries. At the cutting they see the trees walking and then the whole bank come down on the line; they tear their red flannel petticoats into flags and stop the 11:29 twenty yards short of the mound.
- Chapter 7 — The watches, and a request: The railway company gives the three children gold watches at the station. Bobbie writes to the old gentleman to ask him to find the Russian’s wife and children, and ten days later he walks across the field with the news, and the exile is packed off to his family.
- Chapters 8–9 — The barge on fire, and Perks’s birthday: The children fish from the canal bridge, quarrel with Bill the bargee, and then see smoke coming from his cabin; Peter carries out the baby Reginald Horace. Later they collect presents from the village for Perks and nearly lose his friendship by seeming to offer charity.
- Chapters 10–11 — The newspaper, and the tunnel: Bobbie learns the truth about her father from a scrap of newspaper round a parcel of magazines, and tells only her mother. On the day of the paperchase the children follow the hounds into the tunnel, where the last of them, a boy in a red jersey, lies with a broken leg.
- Chapters 12–13 — Jim, and his grandfather: Bobbie stays in the dark with the injured boy and cuts his boot away, while Peter and Phyllis wake a sleeping signalman and fetch help from Brigden’s farm. Jim is carried to Three Chimneys to be nursed, and the old gentleman turns out to be his grandfather.
- Chapter 14 — The last chapter: Life settles into lessons, rhymes and chess, and the household gains a cook and a housemaid. The children begin waving to the 9:15 again, and the whole train waves back; Bobbie goes down to the station, and her father steps out of the 11:54. The narrator will not follow the parents indoors.
The Railway Children: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Children’s Classics · 1900s
