Girls and women in children's fiction Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Girls and women in childrens fiction - Essay Exampleand motherhood that run counter to the mainstream views of their time, but that the earlier book uses distancing floor techniques to disguise this fact while the later book uses intimate narrative techniques to celebrate it. The difference in approach is due to the companionable pressures, or absence of them, which had an effect upon the authors in their respective historical situation.The trey children labelled the railway children are introduced as part of a prosperous middle class face 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 childrens mother removes herself excessively for much of the time in order to write and presumably earn a living for the family. This leaves the one-third children Roberta, Peter and Phyllis, free to roam around the railway area and get to know Mr Perks, a operative class station porter and and old gentleman who travels on the trains. The story is in many shipway typical of Victorian childrens fiction because it is highly didactic and promotes moral behaviour and adherence to the quite a 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 reflexion 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 tolerate class prejudice in the episode of coal stealing with Mr Perks, race prejudice in the brush 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 weighty her about the e xperience of having parents who divorce. The book shows how