Orphan Train (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

A$100 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

Signed

KLINE, Christina Baker. Orphan Train. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015. Octavo. Full green leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 278 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: William Morrow, 2013. Between 1854 and 1929, approximately 200,000 children — orphaned, abandoned, or simply too poor to be kept — were transported by train from New York and other eastern cities to rural communities across the Midwest and beyond, where they were placed with farm families who took them in for reasons ranging from genuine compassion to the need for cheap labour. The programme was organised by the Children's Aid Society, founded by the social reformer Charles Loring Brace, who believed that removing children from the corrupting environment of the city and placing them in the moral clarity of agricultural life was the most effective form of social intervention available. For many of the children — known thereafter as orphan train riders — the reality was more complicated and more brutal than that proposition suggests. The programme ran for seventy-five years and constitutes one of the largest organised movements of children in American history, and

• Binding: Hardcover

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