The Rocking-Horse Winner

.......“The Rocking-Horse Winner” is a short story that incorporates elements of the fable, the fantasy, and the fairy tale. Like a fable, it presents a moral (although it does so subtly, without preachment). Like a fantasy, it presents chimerical events (the boy’s ability to foretell the winners of horse races, the whispering house). Like a fairy tale, it sets the scene with simple words like those in a Mother Goose story: “There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. . . . There were a boy and two little girls. They lived in a pleasant house, with a garden, and they had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighbourhood.”  
....... 
Publication Dates
.......“The Rocking-Horse Winner” first appeared in Harper's Bazaar magazine in July 1926. Hutchinson & Company then published it in London later in the same year in a collection entitled Ghost Stories. In January 1933, Martin Secker published the story in London in another collection, The Lovely Lady. Viking Press in New York published The Lovely Lady later in the same year. 
Setting
.......The action takes place in England in the years just after the First World War. The places include a home in an unidentified locale in or near London; London's Richmond Park; a car traveling to a home in Hampshire County, southwest of London; and Lincoln Racecourse in Lincoln, Lincolnshire. The narrator mentions major races in England well known to readers of the story when it first appeared in 1926. These races included the Grand National Handicap Steeplechase at the Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool; the Royal Ascot at Windsor, west of London; the Epsom Derby at Epsom Downs in Surrey, southeast of London; the St. Leger Stakes at Doncaster in South Yorkshire; and the Lincoln, at Lincoln Racecourse in...