I had forgotten how much I love this story. I've seen nearly all the television adaptations and I have a great respect for Edith Nesbit, but I haven't had the pleasure of being stuck between these pages for several years, so I re-read it.
It was like putting on a cosy pair of slippers, in fact I found that I liked it more than I had when I was younger!
The long and the short of it is that three young children of various ages find their world turned upside down when they are suddenly moved to the country as they father is taken away on 'business'. As the novel progresses we get a look into the more adult themes of the situation as they break through and shine on the children's lives. Turns out their father has been arrested for treason (he was framed) and thus all their assets and reputations were frozen. For safety and money, the kids and their mother had to move and became poor, living off the money their mother could raise through selling her stories. The children, no longer being able to go to school, amused themselves, mainly with the nearby railway where through various events, usually having the children emerge heroic, they became firm friends with most of the village.
The story ends with everything coming good in the end, but I would have loved to have found out if they stayed at Three Chimneys after the kindness everyone had showed them.
I think that this particular one dawns more on you as an adult than it does a child. You become more aware of what Nesbit was saying and understood the themes and what was at stake more. You're more susceptible to the nostalgia the novel is forcing on you without ever having lived near a railway (although I have) and not living in the early 1900s. Things seemed so much more simple then. You'd pass letters on and actually trust the strangers to deliver them. People were more friendly, there was more use for imagination.
I like the look back into a more childish perspective. I like the steam trains, or dragons, also being characters. It just very much reminds me of my own childhood and to be honest I look forward to this being a bedtime story for any future children in my life whether that be my own or any nieces or nephews I acquire.
What I appreciate now more than I did before, was how thorough this novel was. It doesn't seem like it, but Nesbit snuck in an awful lot of detail and emotion into this story which helps paint a much bigger picture than simply 'Bobbie appreciated such and such flowers', no she painted how Bobbie appreciated the simpler things in life, she valued life and was very much a child teetering on the edge of becoming a young woman and was starting to understand what it was to empathise.
With Peter, she managed to convey in a few sentences how he was a young, rather brash boy, who was of the age where he was struggling with his emotions. He knew what it was to be wrong, he knew what it was to be proud, but he struggled with the transition and the consequences from these. We saw him often try to twist it in his mind to convince himself that he was in the right and therefore unable to be scorned, but the reality was that he knew he was wrong but no longer had the excuse of being too young to know better. Peter was very much of the age where understanding was rife.
Darling Phyllis was very much still a child and we saw this through her understanding of life. She was clumsy often and more than ready to use her imagination to explain things that she didn't quite understand, like Dragons being steam engines. She was also quick to lash out at her brother who was quick to lash out at her.
I believe this novel to be genius. In quite a short novel Nesbit has been able to open a pocket into a long ago period of the world and display it as though it really happened. You can see it is outdated, especially when Peter blackens his face with coal dust to portray an advert in a child's game, but equally this is very much something that a child would do, and I just feel like this novel captures childhood so very well that it has become timeless. Every child can relate and every adult is reminded of what it is like to be a child. If only she knew what a masterpiece she had written and how it was still loved generation after generation.
So with this in mind, I'm giving this beloved story a 9/10. It is near on perfect for me. Obviously it is a tiny bit out of date, but I consider this the perfect bedtime story to read over a week or so at my age, or perhaps a little gift for those you want to read. The words are simple, the plot is easy to follow, but it is such an expressive book, no wonder it is cemented in history and loved so.
I have had to rejig my reading for this year due to unforeseen circumstances that to be honest I should have foreseen. It's called ADHD and the hunt for dopamine and sadly my reading has made a bit of a sacrifice, but I'm working on it. Self imposed deadlines and the blog is helping and if I wasn't such a stickler for self imposed rules the whole review blog may have taken a backseat again...but thanks to Phantom Adventures UK being my passion project that hasn't happened yet as I like the order of my posts. So hold on, posts are coming, but updating instagram is sometimes the best I can do for now, no shame.
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