"Railway Children" plagiarism?

[John Ashworth]

E Nesbit's classic The Railway Children accused of 'plagiarism'

Victorian writer Ada J Graves's granddaughter believes pivotal scene was 'lifted' from The House by the Railway

* Benedicte Page
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 March 2011 14.40 GMT

It is arguably the single most memorable episode of E Nesbit's much-loved children's book The Railway Children. The three children, Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis, playing close to the railway line, witness a landslide on to the tracks, and bravely save a train from crashing into it by waving warning flags made from the girls' red flannel petticoats. And when they succeed in stopping the train – in the nick of time – Bobbie falls down in a dead faint.

But it has now emerged that the dramatic episode may not have been purely the result of Nesbit's imagination. Another children's book – published in 1896, nine years before The Railway Children appeared – includes an episode seemingly too similar for coincidence alone.

In The House by the Railway by little-known writer Ada J Graves, middle-class children from the suburbs move to the countryside with their mother, just as Bobbie and her siblings do, and save a train from crashing into an obstacle on the line by waving a red jacket to halt it in its tracks. And, just as in The Railway Children (as seen on our TV screens each Christmas in the classic 1970 film), they are presented with engraved watches as a reward for their courage.

Other similarities connect the two novels. Both books include an episode in which someone the children befriend on a passing train turns out to have a connection to somebody else in their story, and both end with an emotional family reunion. However, the particularly heart-wringing theme of The Railway Children, in which the children's father is absent because he has been wrongly imprisoned for spying, only to be dramatically freed at the end of the novel, is Nesbit's alone.

Ada Graves's 64-year-old granddaughter Anne Hall-Williams, who found a copy of The House by the Railway in her late father's house, is convinced that the pivotal near-crash scene was "lifted" by Nesbit from her grandmother's book. "It is quite blatant really, the plagiarism," she says. "It is pretty obvious that Nesbit had read the earlier book. I realise that lots of authors operate in this way, but it seems a bit naughty of her. Poor Ada deserves a bit of credit."

However, Kate Agnew of the Children's Bookshop, Muswell Hill, north London, was sceptical about the connection. "There was a huge sweep of railways spreading across Britain from the 1830s and it had a profound effect on the whole country, so it was inevitable that there would be children's fiction about railways," she says. "And it's a classic trope of children's adventure that the children do something crucial that saves the day. In a book about railways, that's likely to be something to do with saving a train, and red has always been the colour of danger. I don't think it's enough of a coincidence to be certain."

Nesbit, born in 1858, wrote about 40 children's books in all, and had already published many of the books that would become classics – including The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It and the Phoenix and the Carpet – by the time The Railway Children appeared in 1906. She was also a writer and lecturer on socialism, co-founding the Fabian Society alongside her husband Hubert Bland – although thanks to Bland's philandering and her own penchant for relationships with younger men, her own family life was far from the cosy ideal often presented in her novels.

Agnew says Nesbit's books remain very popular with today's young readers. "She has very contemporary heroes and heroines, though they have a strong Victorian sense of duty," she says. "They have very realistic adventures, even when they are magical ones – you enter the world of magic from a shop in Kensington, for example – and children love that."