E. NESBIT in The Reading Room at Kitchen Sink Dramas

The Reading Room

E. NESBIT

(1858-1924)

Edith Nesbit lived an unconventional life, marrying her husband Hubert Bland at nineteen, already pregnant, and supposedly practising an open marriage. A staunch socialist, she was active in the Fabian Society, and counted fellow political writers Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells among her friends. She only began writing for children out of financial necessity, in order to support her own five children when Hubert failed to bring in a regular income. Her books (some forty in total) tend to follow the efforts of a group of children fallen on hard times, who are forced to cope with the unfeeling adult world by relying on common sense, pluck and imagination. The Railway Children contains some very adult themes including wrongful imprisonment and the abominable treatment of pre-Revolutionary Russian dissidents by the state; it is suffused with Nesbit’s trademark sense of social justice. Her heroes and heroines are famous however for being admirably unsentimental creations (although my own childhood copy of The Railway Children eventually disintegrated due to the tears shed on its pages). Gore Vidal wrote of Nesbit, “the child who reads her will never be quite the same again.”