The Railway Children

Fiction | Book | Middle Grade | Published in 1906

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

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Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 13 Summary

Dr. Forrest comes to set Jim’s broken leg in a painful process that hurts him. While this procedure takes place, the three children wait downstairs. Peter annoys his sisters by speaking graphically about the process of setting bones and will not cease despite their protests. His sisters get their revenge by agreeing to pretend to set an injured leg for him, only to tie him up instead. When Dr. Forrest discovers what happened, he is displeased. He takes Peter with him to his surgery, and while there, gives Peter a talk about the differences between boys and girls, claiming that “girls are so much softer and weaker than we are” (328), and urging Peter to be more sensitive to his sisters’ feelings considering this fact. Peter does not seem to understand the full implications of Dr. Forrest’s advice, and at first is still rude to his sisters when he returns home, but they eventually make up.

Afterward, Peter speaks to his mother, and during their conversation Peter reveals that he feels the absence of his father very keenly. He wants Jim to stay with them, so that he can finally have some male companionship in the home. Someone arrives at the house and at first they assume it is Dr. Forrest again, but it turns out to be the old gentleman, who is also Jim’s grandfather. The old gentleman makes an agreement with Mother: she will give up writing at a frantic pace for money and instead nurse Jim back to health as her job. Bobbie follows the old gentleman to the gate, where he tells her that he may have good news for her soon about her father. He never believed in Father’s guilt and has been only too glad to seek out a means of overturning his conviction.

Chapter 14 Summary

Life has improved for the children thanks to the old gentleman’s money for Jim’s nursing. There are now two servants on hand to help, and the children again have time and enough attention from their mother to return to taking lessons. Mother surprises her children by once again writing them poems for amusement. Jim continues to bond with the children, especially Peter. The children gradually realize that they are no longer as involved with the railway as they were before and sense that things are starting to change again in their lives.

In honor of their old habits, the children decide to once again wave at the Green Dragon. When they do so, it is no longer only the old gentleman who waves back to them—every passenger in the train does so, to the children’s bewilderment. Bobbie especially senses that something is going on, and soon returns to the station on her own. While there, she notices that people are smiling at her and hinting that this is a happy day for her. When the train arrives, it brings her father. Reunited at long last, Bobbie walks with her father back to the house, where she goes in to tell her mother and siblings the good news.

Chapters 13-14 Analysis

In Chapter 13, the gender roles of the time period play a prominent role, and speak to the different ways in which the children are affected by their father’s absence. Dr. Forrest’s speech to Peter about how “girls are so much softer and weaker than [men] are” (328) reflects Edwardian values of strictly defined social relationships, which the novel endorses. This discussion is also significant because it inspires Peter to be more honest with his mother about his feelings. He confesses to her for the first time that he feels alienated and lonely as the only male in the household and expresses his desire to have Jim stay with them so that he can have more male companionship. Peter’s loneliness in his father’s absence reveals that he is very far from forgetting his father, as Mother previously feared—if anything, Peter has felt his father’s absence far more keenly than he has previously revealed.

The old gentleman’s role as Jim’s grandfather conveniently brings him back into their lives and enables him to solve even more of the family’s problems. After persuading Mother to take on the role of personal nurse for Jim’s convalescence, the old gentleman’s money brings about more comfortable circumstances for the family—servants, more leisure time for Mother and the children, better conditions overall. His sympathy toward Father’s plight and belief in his innocence makes the family reunion ultimately possible, as it is his intervention that secures Father’s release from prison.

This reunion is foreshadowed not only by the better financial circumstances the family enjoys, but by the change in attitude the children sense within themselves toward the railway. The children “seemed to be hardly Railway Children at all in those days and as the days went on each had an uneasy feeling about this” (352). Throughout the novel, the railway served as a symbolic link between the children and their old lives, in particular their link to their absent father. Their growing detachment from the railway hints that the family reunion is imminent, even if they are not fully aware of that fact. Their final appearance to wave at the train together confirms this sense that something has irrevocably changed and the passengers all waving in unison at them signals that something momentous is taking place.

Bobbie’s reunion with her father at the novel’s end rewards her for her endurance and selflessness throughout the novel. The fact that she is the first child to be reunited with Father is also appropriate, since it was her intervention in writing to the old gentleman that secured Father’s release. Her return with her father to the house symbolizes the final healing of the ruptured family unit, ushering in a happy ending for the children and their mother at the novel’s end.