Girls and women in children's fiction - Essay Example

and motherhood that run counter to the mainstream views of their time, but that the earlier book uses distancing narrative techniques to disguise this fact while the later book uses intimate narrative techniques to celebrate it. The difference in approach is due to the social pressures, or absence of them, which had an effect upon the authors in their respective historical situation. The three children labelled “the railway children” are introduced as part of a prosperous middle class English family who have fallen on hard times due to the mysterious removal of their father, Mr Waterbury.

It emerges later that he was imprisoned on a false charge of spying. The father is therefore absent, and the children’s mother removes herself also for much of the time in order to write and presumably earn a living for the family. This leaves the three children Roberta, Peter and Phyllis, free to roam around the railway area and get to know Mr Perks, a working class station porter and and old gentleman who travels on the trains. The story is in many ways typical of Victorian children’s fiction because it is highly didactic and promotes moral behaviour and adherence to the rather stiff and formal rules of society.

What is unusual about the book for its time is the way that the railway children switch social class for a time, and in a spell of relative freedom from middle class observation and control, experiment with autonomy, devising their own amusements and coming face to face with harsh economic realities and the limitations of conventional society. The children confront class prejudice in the episode of coal stealing with Mr Perks, race prejudice in the encounter with Mr Sczepansky and gender prejudice particularly in the character of Bobbie.

The main character Goggle Eyes is a primary school child called Kitty whose parents are divorced, and who consoles a distressed classmate by telling her about the experience of having parents who divorce. The book shows how