The Railway Children & Kafka

Edith Nesbit's famous children's book may be the only work for children which has parallels with the High Priest of Anxiety, Franz Kafka's unsettling work "The Trial." In it Josef K, a banker is taken away on his thirtieth birthday, by unknown people of an unknown organisation for an unspecified crime. After being made to run from pillar to post, for a year, he is brutally executed without knowing the nature of his offence.

This work was influenced by the notorious "Dreyfus Affair" in France, which had an anti Semitic angle.

In "The Railway Children" also, the loving husband & father of a family, is suddenly taken away by officials, with the children  kept in the dark about the reason by the mother, who prohibits them from asking any questions. Without the man's earning, the family is suddenly plunged into penury from affluence & move to the countryside to economise. There the mother ekes out a scanty living by selling her stories to magazines. The children discover a train, which passes nearby, & wave at it. This is noticed by an old gentleman travelling in the train, who eventually discovers that their father is "framed" in a spy case, (Like the ISRO case) & gets the father released & brought home, fortunately unlike the gruesome ending of Kafka's "The Trial."