The Boxcar Children

The first two chapters introduce the Alden children and their risky situation as orphans.

When speaking to the baker’s wife, the kids are mum about their past, but it’s easy to guess that their parents’ deaths are recent and that the children suddenly are thrust into the world with almost no resources and no one to turn to. This is a highly dangerous predicament: Some adults may take advantage of them. The baker’s wife wanted kids to help around the shop but didn’t want to deal with a six-year-old. This suggests someone who wishes not to raise and care for a group of young people, but to exploit them.

Normally, when parents die, next of kin take in the children. The kids have a grandfather who lives nearby, but they believe he disapproved of their mother and that this explains why he never visited them. In their minds, he becomes a mean ogre of a man. The reader can guess that there were conflicts in the family that the children knew little about. Still, their grandfather looms in the background as an antagonist they must avoid at all costs, which is why they stay away from local people while searching for shelter.

As they plan their escape from the bakery, Henry assures Jessie that he has money—$4. Today, that amount is paltry, but dollars were worth much more when the book was published in 1942. In today’s money, Henry’s cash is worth about $80, enough for some food and small emergencies. In the coming chapters, Henry earns more doing odd jobs.

Early on, the kids encounter a “horse and cart” (40), which puts the story’s timeline somewhere in the early 1900s, when many people didn’t yet own cars and still used horsepower for transport. The fountain they find alongside the road dates back to the era when horses, dogs, and people traveled together and needed to refresh themselves on hot days. The author, who used childhood memories to write the book, was born in 1890; she was 10 years old in 1900. The book’s first version was published in 1924 when cars were becoming common—cars figure in later chapters—so it’s likely that the story takes place in the early 1920s.

Meanwhile, Henry, a young teen, goes into town to find work. The warm evenings suggest summer, so he’s not expected to be in school, and the timeline and farming region mean that no one will think twice about hiring a boy. American child labor laws exclude farm work; to this day, children still toil on their families’ farms, often for hours a day.

The Boxcar Children is the first of 19 books written by Warner about the Alden kids. In the manner of the Harry Potter books, during which the main characters grow from childhood to their late teens, the Aldens get older during their book series until Henry is ready to go off to college. After Warner died in 1979, other authors added more books; by the early 2020s, more than 160 novels were in the series.

After the author, an elementary school teacher, rewrote the book 1942 to make it easier for younger readers and those studying English as a second language. She limited the vocabulary to 600 words and simplified the sentence structure. The book has a Lexile ranking of 580L, which puts it roughly at a third-grade reading level. Most of the Boxcar Children series books are written at the same level.

The children became famous for their resourcefulness. Early on, librarians and teachers complained that the stories portrayed the kids as too independent. Perhaps the adults feared that students who read the books might become disobedient or rebellious. The author replied that self-reliance is what young readers seem to enjoy about the Boxcar Children.

Youth spend hours a day working on projects that will help them become more capable. School, sports, hobbies, and social interactions add to a child’s knowledge and skills in ways that will help them when they’re older. The Boxcar Children’s ability to take care of the basics of life becomes something readers can aspire to achieve. What’s more, the Boxcar Children are good to each other, polite to all, hard-working, good at teamwork, and strive to do their best. It’s hard to complain about a group of children who display all the traits adults want them to have.