Review: "The Boxcar Children" by Gertrude Chandler Warner

The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
First published 1924
★★★

Four orphaned children in the 1920s find an old boxcar and move in. This was one I read in childhood, and when I stumbled across it I thought I'd give it a quick reread to see how memory held up.

This is of course a deeply romanticized version of homelessness, and also a deeply romanticized version of orphanhood. The children are all sickly good and sweet and hardworking—never the smallest complaint—and for all that they're living rough in the 1920s, they also don't struggle: There's never any question that Henry, the eldest, will be able to find work to support them (and indeed, on his first attempt he finds a wealthy doctor who is more than happy to pay Henry handsomely, and daily, to do odd jobs—imagine if this had been written a few years later, in the Depression!); they never struggle to find sufficient healthy food (within a couple of days they're cooking up hearty stews); when they decide they need plates and cups and so on, off they go to find a dump in the woods, and lo! A dump appears, with everything they could possibly want. If there's any grief over the loss of their parents, we don't see it; they're perfectly happy and self-sufficient until their extraordinarily wealthy grandfather steps in, and then they're perfectly happy to step into a rather more pampered life.

Now. With all that in mind, I remember this being wonderful for the imagination as a child—who among us who read this as a kid didn't dream of running away to live in a boxcar in the woods? Sometimes I still wish it were a possibility. (I also remember a moment in the book where one of the characters is cross for a half second, and everyone is shocked because it's so out of character, but that didn't happen in the book I just read...so I do wonder whether there are a couple of different editions floating around out there!) Sort of a shame that they're only actually in the boxcar for a single book, as reading about rich kids with basically unlimited resources is less fun than reading about kids figuring it out, even if in a very improbable way.

I'd forgotten that their grandfather tells them that they should all go to college, which is great—there's certainly a fair amount of class-based expectation there, I wonder how many girls in the 1920s had the good fortune and privilege for college to be a given.

Also fascinating to see the different covers on this; for a book about children in the 20s they wear some awfully 80s clothing on the covers! I understand why (more appealing to contemporary, or contemporary-at-the-time-of-an-edition-being-published, readers), but this would have been so different a story in the 80s.