The Box-Car Children
Gertrude Chandler WARNER (1890 - 1979)
MP3 CD
(IDB Productions, March 15, 2017)
The Boxcar Children is the tale of four strayed kids, namely, Henry, Jessie or Jess, Violet, and Benny. In the 1924 edition of the story, the kids are left alone in the first short chapters and in the comprehensively revised and abridged 1942 edition, they have apparently been left without parents for quite some time. When a baker and his wife came to know that the kids have no parents, they create strategies the kids do not concur. In the 1924 version, they plot to bring the kids, who stay in a home next to their bakery, to reside with their grandfather, but the kids have been made to be afraid of their grandfather, whom they have in no way seen, because he did not consent to the marriage of their parents. In the 1942 edition, the kids are at that time living without a home and meandering everywhere at the beginning of the tale. The baker and his wife devise to bring the three older kids, who are mature enough to be of use in the bakery, but to take the youngest kid, Benny to a Children's Home. Gertrude Chandler Warner was an American writer, mostly of tales for children. She was best known for drafting the original story of The Boxcar Children and for the following 18 stories in the series. Gertrude was born in Putnam, Connecticut, to her parents Edgar Morris Warner and Jane Elizabeth Carpenter Warner. Her family counted in an elder sister, Frances, and a younger brother, John. Her middle name of Chandler was from her mother's forefathers, the Chandlers, who had lived close to Woodstock, CT in 1686. Her father Edgar Warner had finished studying at Harvard Law School in 1872 and became a lawyer in Putnam, CT. The Warner's residence on Main Street was situated around from the railroad station.
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