Knowing Your Station

Jessica Roake reveals the British imperialism lurking in Thomas the Tank Engine and its creator, Rev. Wilbert Awdry:

An Oxford-educated Anglican clergyman, Awdry told his first train story to measles-ridden son Christopher in 1943, while a minister in Birmingham (in exile for his pacifist views on World War II). He began to write and publish his stories in 1945, setting his trains' adventures on Sodor, an island situated, according to Mark I. West's A Children's Tour of British Literature, "in the North Sea … not only set off physically from Britain, but also separated from the modernization that occurred in Britain after World War II." On Sodor, the messiness of midcentury British class conflicts, civil-rights movements, and post-colonial political struggles never happened, erased by a minister nostalgic for the power and the glory of the British empire. The reverend later reflected on his two vocations, railways and the church, by saying, "both had their heyday in the mid-nineteenth century; both are regularly assailed by critics; and both are firmly convinced that they are the best means of getting man to his ultimate destination."