Now there is the first sentence of someone who's travelled with children.

One of the most influential and charming of children's authors, Edith Nesbit is a standard-bearer for the friendly, non-instructive authorial tone. No concern to be 'improving' here; Nesbit's address is direct, chatty, friendly, almost maternal. The sentence bowls along merrily, subclause rattling upon subclause, breathlessly informative.

Immediately clear is one of Nesbit's most striking features: the cheerful ordinariness of things. These are not aristocratic children but middle-class ones, and not wealthy: they travel by railway and by hired coach, and not even a particularly clean one at that. These are not implausibly selfless or mature children: journeys are a matter of lively impatience. Normal surroundings are filled with physical energy - and Nesbit observes this with amused tolerance. The sentence notes that the children are being a little silly in their questioning - even a child new to counting can calculate the numbers 'three' and 'five' and work out that three miles and five minutes do not add up to a 'Yes, we're nearly there' - but the sentence is full of motion and humour. The carriage rattles and is dusty, an object in use, no more perfect than the children. The children put their heads out of the window, enthusiastically participating in their environment in a naturalistic, well-observed gesture. All is normal. The modern reader may find the carriage quaint, but the energy of the scene is a pair of open arms to children: these characters are no more saintly than you, but Nesbit cares for them. You are all right.

Nesbit is a writer of incident, small moments, small mistakes leading to entertaining disasters. As we meet her children, they are already in the middle of a mild mistake, already excited at the relatively undramatic (by storybook standards, though not by real-life ones) experience of moving to a new house, already doing what they will do throughout. Her imagination is, once it gets to work, vivid and witty, but her plots revolve around the hair-clutching disasters that arise from the interaction of these ordinary, faulty children and the ancient magics they trip over in their ordinary, faulty way. The drama arises not from the magic itself, but from what happens after the magic - how to deal with being beautiful as the day when the cook doesn't recognise you and won't let you in the house, how to deal with being hungry when your magic wings have flown you into being thoroughly lost, how to cope with everyone wanting to kidnap your baby brother after a moment's irritated wishing to be free of his company. Magic upends the world, but it's wordly reality that creates all the character interaction, and we start as we mean to go on: excitable, jostling, eager.

There's a fundamental kindness in Nesbit's writing, an ability to address without patronising, that's a lot subtler than it looks. Surroundings and children interact, and silly behaviour is noted but not condemned - indeed, treated as normal and natural under the circumstances. After all, if we're coming from the station then we must just be off a train, and with three miles of rattling dust to go through, impatience is something that even an adult might feel. Behaviour might not always be sensible, but the feelings that provoke it have reasons for existing, and those reasons are not unreasonable. Nesbit does not necessarily excuse, but she forgives, because she understands, and encourages us to understand too. For all her lightness of wit, the little cramps and rubs of life are treated with respectful seriousness.

Children, in short, are treated as human beings. Nesbit does not forget that they are children, and shows them in tumbling motion with their child-ness fully on display, but neither does she forget that children are people and people, whatever their age, usually have a reason for doing what they do. Life is real and important to these characters, just as it is for us.

With Edith Nesbit babysitting us, we can all relax.