The Railway Children, a theatrical adaptation of which has just opened, has all the ingredients you don't expect from a Christmas treat. It's a story written by a political activist, about a family plunged into poverty by a miscarriage of justice, set against the background of the Dreyfus affair. One of the characters is clearly based on the Russian anarcho-communist, Peter Kropotkin.
Why does a book with all these "serious" elements feel like one long giddy picnic? The answer is that E Nesbit was a kind of writer-superhero. She could levitate the heaviest material and make it float over your head like a butterfly.
Noël Coward said she had "an unparalleled talent for evoking hot summer days". Part of her secret surely is that she knew that the ability to notice small pleasures – such as waving at trains – will bring you through the hardest times. Another is that she understands the subterranean power of great emotions.
The absence of Father frees up the Railway Children for the great adventure, but the sadness of that absence grinds away under the surface, like an approaching earthquake. And when Bobby finds out the truth, all of its power is unleashed. At the end of a summer of adventure, she is shoved into the grown-up world.
When she cries, "Daddy, O my Daddy" tonight, there will hardly be a dry eye in the house. That's because the girl who had to grow up can - for a moment, on that platform, with her Daddy – be a child again. It's not a big speech, just a simple cry. Yet it's one of the most potent lines in all literature.
Edith Nesbit influenced every children's writer who came after her. Jacqueline Wilson has just written a sequel to one of her books. CS Lewis mentions her characters – the Bastables – in the Narnia books. PL Travers and JK Rowling are both massively indebted to her. These are all terrific writers who entertain us by creating fabulous new worlds. But Edith Nesbit does something much more special – something that only a tiny handful of truly great writers can do. She takes our world – the ordinary one of trains and coal and cooking and brothers and sisters and arguments and games – and she shows us that it too is fabulous.
The Railway Children is running at the Theatre on the Lake, Keswick
