The One I Knew the Best of All; Little Lord Fauntleroy; A Little Princess; The Secret Garden
THE LIFE AND CAREER OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) embodies these changes: she started out a victorian novelist and ended an Edwardian one. She is remembered now for three novels for children: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1906). The first two of those books represent high-water marks of the victorian cult of the golden child.* Little Lord Fauntleroy was a bestseller on a staggering scale – as one contemporary report put it, “it does not do to say merely that Little Lord Fauntleroy was a great success; it caused a public delirium of joy.” Louisa May Alcott, James Russell Lowell and the prime minister, Lord Gladstone, all praised it lavishly, and it sparked the sort of literary fashion craze not seen since Goethe set the youth of Germany to dressing up in yellow trousers and killing themselves. But it’s The Secret Garden, which went in a quite different direction, that we now regard as her masterpiece.
Her all-but-forgotten memoir shows us the soil out of which her career as a writer grew. The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of the Child (1893) paints a vivid picture not just of her own experience of infancy, but of mid-victorian childhood itself. Burnett, like so many children’s writers, had a remarkable and exact recall of how it felt to be a child. She describes the titular child she knew the best of all, i.e. herself, as “the Small Person” in a way that can be gratingly cutesy; but strip that away and there’s a real toughness to the picture she paints. Already, by the time she writes, childhood itself has moved on – “I have not the remotest idea of what she looked like. She belonged to an era when photography was not as advanced an art as it is to-day, and no picture of her was ever made.”
That indistinctness is generative. She remembers, which seems to me a very modern insight, the experience of childhood not as distinct personhood so much as of being a creature shaped and buffeted by the outside world. The child, in this account of it, is not marked by special goodness or potential wickedness, but by a profound sensitivity to its environment:
I do not remember regarding her as a personality at all. It was the people about her, the things she saw, the events which made up her small existence, which were absorbing, exciting, and of the most vital and terrible importance sometimes […] that strange, awful problem of a little soul standing in its newness in the great busy, tragic world of life, touched for the first time by everything that passes it, and never touched without some sign of the contact being left upon it.
She goes on to write that
even the most child-loving among us should find it difficult to realize constantly that a mite of three or four, tumbling about, playing with india-rubber dogs and with difficulty restrained from sucking the paint off Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, not to mention the animals, is a person, and that this person is ten thousand times more sensitive to impression than one’s self […] One takes a fat, comfortable little body on one’s knee and begins to tell it a story about ‘a fairy’ or ‘a doggie’ or ‘a pussy.’ And the moment the story begins the questions begin also.
Just as children can be hard for adults to see, in Burnett’s phrase, “from the inside point of view,” so are adults hard to comprehend for children. She speaks of a “secret consciousness that she was so little and that the grown-up people were so big that they could not really understand one another’s point of view”: “I do not remember any rebellion against an idea of injustice. All that comes back to me in the form of a mental attitude is a perfect realization of the immense fact that people who were grown up could do what they chose, and that there was no appeal against their omnipotence.”
The intensity and loneliness of childhood fears is vividly painted. The fear of adult authority having been struck into her by the “Keep off the Grass” signs at the park, she asked a policeman whether, if she went onto the grass by accident, he would have to “take her up.” The policeman tells her with a face that “did not bear the ferocity which would have accorded with his awful words”: “Yes, I should have to pick you up and carry you to prison.”
She must have turned pale; but that she sat still without further comment, that she did not burst into frantic howls of despair, causes one to feel that even in those early days she was governed by some rudimentary sense of dignity and resignation to fate, for as she sat there, the short legs in socks and small black “ankle-straps” confronting her, the marrow was dissolving in her infant bones.
It’s a remarkable feat of embodied recall. Her father’s death in 1853, when she was not yet four, as she records it, made far less impression on her than the prospect of being collared for trespassing in the public park. And isn’t that just how childhood, with what to adults seem its distorting-mirror fears and obsessions, really is?
There came a day when someone carried her into the bedroom where the crimson-draped four-post bed was, and standing by its side held her in her arms that she might look down at Papa lying quite still upon the pillow. She only thought he looked as if he were asleep, though someone said: ‘Papa has gone to Heaven,’ and she was not frightened, and looked down with quiet, interest and respect. A few years later the sight of a child of her own age or near it, lying in his coffin, brought to her young being an awed realization of death, whose anguished intensity has never wholly repeated itself; but being held up in kind arms to look down at ‘Poor Papa,’ she only gazed without comprehension and without fear.
Death, and seeing dead bodies, was nevertheless a feature of midnineteenth-century English childhood in a way that it is not now. Papa was not the last – and the “Small Person” remembers the shock four years later when what she calls “the Strange Thing” comes to a three-year-old classmate, Selina. Again, she saw the body. Again, she was not afraid: “she bent over and kissed her round cheek where the dimples used to play. And the coldness was only the soft coldness of a flower.”
In the “Small Person” are the stirrings of the writer that Frances was to become. At three years old, she reports, “she had begun a lifelong chase after the Story”: “a positively wolfish appetite for books, though no one knew about it or understood the anguish of its gnawings. It must be plainly stated that her longings were not for ‘improving’ books.” In the middle of the nineteenth century, those improving books were still everywhere. She remembers her first book – an alphabet of flowers, with each flower described in a moralizing verse typical of children’s writing of the time (she notes wryly the idea that a bee should be “improving each shining hour” – a line from exactly the poem Carroll sends up in Alice): “I think one rather had a feeling of having been born an innately vicious little person who needed laboring with constantly that one might be made merely endurable.”
In those days, I think, the Children’s Century had not begun. Children were not regarded as embryo intellects, whose growth it is the pleasure and duty of intelligent maturity to foster and protect. Morals and manners were attended to, desperate efforts were made to conquer their natural disinclination to wash their hands and faces, it was a time-honored custom to tell them to ‘make less noise,’ and I think everybody knelt down in his night-gown and said his prayers every night and morning. I wish I knew who was the originator of the nursery verse which was a kind of creed:
Speak when you’re spoken to,
Come when you’re called,
Shut the door after you.
And do as you’re told.
The rhyme and metre were, perhaps, not faultless, but the sentiments were without a flaw. A perfectly normal child knew what happened in its own nursery and the nurseries of its cousins and juvenile friends; it knew something of the romances of Mrs Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth, and the adventures related in Peter Parley’s “Annual.” Religious aunts possibly gave it horrible little books containing memoirs of dreadful children who died early of complicated diseases, whose lingering developments they enlivened by giving unlimited moral advice and instruction to their parents and immediate relatives, seeming, figuratively speaking, to implore them to “go and do likewise,” and perishing to appropriate texts. The Small Person suffered keen private pangs of conscience, and thought she was a wicked child, because she did not like those books and had a vague feeling of disbelief in the children.
Here, stated plainly, is the situation that Burnett and her contemporaries were to work to remedy. Her near-contemporary Kenneth Grahame’s autobiographical stories in Dream Days contrast the joy of a child’s imagination immersed in a fantastical picture book with the “anæmic, night-gowned nonentities that hovered over the bed of the Sunday-school child in the pages of the Sabbath Improver.”
The situation amid which Burnett grew up – infant mortality commonplace; texts for children pious; adult authority remote; “seen but not heard” the rule – was dissolving into what even then had started to be seen as the “Children’s Century.” The literature of this era gives us larger groups of siblings; bigger families became more common as fewer children died in infancy. It shows high spirits and naughtiness celebrated rather than deplored.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, according to The One I Knew the Best of All, was still in infancy when she discovered her gift for narrative, captivating her schoolmates with stories, which she wrote down on scrap paper, slates, and old account books. A vital punctuation point in her childhood was the discovery, when she was seven years old, of a stash of books in her mother’s secretaire. She read Scott, Fenimore Cooper, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her imaginative world is full of adventure and romance. She was to go on to submit stories for magazine publication while still in her teens – a lovely story has it that she earned the money to buy paper and postage for her first submissions by picking wild grapes and selling them.
And then finally came what she calls the “first great event of her life.” Manchester’s cotton industry was ruined by the American Civil War, and with it the fortunes of Frances’ mother Eliza. They moved in 1865, when Frances was fifteen, from shabby-genteel Islington Square in Manchester, the home of her childhood – and emigrated to Knoxville, Tennessee. From urban, sooty, built-up Manchester, she found herself in “a curious little village – one unpaved street of wooden houses, some painted white and some made of logs, but with trees everywhere, and forests and hills shutting it in from the world. Then she lived in the Story. Quiet English people, who, driven by changes of fortune, wandered thousands of miles and lived without servants in a log cabin, were a Story themselves.” Her childhood was British but her adult life was American. As she expresses it in The One I Knew the Best of All, it was the acceptance for publication of her first story that marked her arrival in that adult life; “she had crossed the delicate, impalpable guiding line. And after that, life itself began.”
Burnett was a transatlantic writer with a transatlantic life, and you could think of Little Lord Fauntleroy, her breakthrough novel for children (she was already established as an adult writer by that stage), as a sort of kindergarten version of a Henry James plot: an innocent from the new world travels to corrupt old Europe. But instead of that innocent, like Lambert Strether or Isabel Archer, being undone by the moral rot of the old world, the protagonist not only fails to notice the wickedness around him but transforms it by the sheer force of his own goodness. The pendulum has swung a long way from the era in which children were conceived in literature as being in mortal peril of their souls; here, they are effortless redeemers of the corrupt souls of the adults around them.
It is horribly sentimental. Cedric’s physical beauty – his golden curls, his sweet face – is an uncomplicated token of his moral beauty. We hear once of his “loving little heart” and twice of his “kind little heart” in the first six pages alone, and Burnett’s description of Cedric’s dead father Captain Errol hasn’t a scrap of human specificity in it:
He had a beautiful face and a fine, strong, graceful figure; he had a bright smile and a sweet, gay voice; he was brave and generous, and had the kindest heart in the world, and seemed to have the power to make everyone love him.
Cedric is a chip off the old block. Living with his mother (“Dearest”) in genteel poverty in New York, he is beloved of everyone he meets, from the bootblack to the grocer, and he takes everyone as he finds them regardless of rank or station. If he wins a running race against another little boy on the street (of course he wins the running race) his first instinct is to console the loser: “Even in the first flush of his triumphs, he remembered that the person who was beaten might not feel so gay as he did, and might like to think that he MIGHT have been the winner under different circumstances.”
His circumstances change when a lawyer for his grandfather, the excellently named Molyneux, Earl of Dorincourt, turns up in New York to announce that, following the deaths without issue of his two uncles, the little chap is now heir to an earldom and a vast estate. The catch is that he must come to live in a draughty castle with his grandfather – who had long ago cut off his father without a penny after he insisted on marrying Cedric’s low-born and dismayingly American mother. Hating her on principle, the earl insists that though Dearest may accompany Cedric across the Atlantic she must live in a cottage at the bottom of the garden, and he will on no account be so much as introduced to her.
The novel’s running joke, if joke you could call it, is that Molyneux is a selfish, bad-tempered, heartless old ratbag; but Cedric is so incapable of thinking ill of anyone that he is convinced that his grandfather is the best person in the whole world. Everyone loves Cedric on sight, and everyone loathes the earl, but in an amusingly Gruffalo-flavored moment Cedric completely misunderstands this:
As they rode through the market town, he used to see the people turn and look, and he noticed that as they lifted their hats their faces often brightened very much; but he thought it was all because his grandfather was with him.
His earnest devotion, of course, eventually goes on to thaw the earl’s icy heart, and, after a bit of third-act jeopardy involving the appearance of a rival claimant to Cedric’s title (seen off thanks to a blush-makingly improbable coincidence), the story manages to have its cake and eat it. The tyrannical earl becomes no less benevolent than Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol,* and his ingenuous little democrat of a grandson is set up to cop an earldom and a fortune.
His republican, salt-of-the-earth pal the grocer Hobbs, indeed, sells up in New York and opens a shop in the village next to the castle, where, the closing pages of the novel inform us, he “became in time more aristocratic than his lordship himself, and he read the Court news every morning, and followed all the doings of the House of Lords.” As Burnett herself once said spryly in a letter: “I want to be a duchess myself. I think it would be nice.” A kind heart, the book seems to tell us, is a treasure above noble breeding and inherited wealth; but if you can get all three so much the better.
Its tactful negotiation between American republicanism and British pride in the class system (or, perhaps, between American fascination with the British aristocracy and British resentment of it) earned the love of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Long before Pottermania, there was Fauntleroy-mania. It was the best-selling novel of 1886, and by 1893 only Ben-Hur was in more American libraries. There was merch – you could get Fauntleroy playing cards, writing paper, chocolate, and even a Fauntleroy perfume. And, as often in this period, its reach was magnified by the success of stage productions. The first of these came in 1888 after Burnett fought and won a consequential court battle to make it impossible for dramatists to adapt works of fiction without the permission of their authors.
Most bizarrely of all, there was a craze for dressing little boys in the so-called “Fauntleroy Suit” – a black velvet suit with a lace-collared shirt, as depicted in Reginald Birch’s illustrations. The earliest photograph of A.A. Milne shows him, in 1886, aged four, done up in full Fauntleroy get-up. Not surprisingly, the little boys forced into such suits had mixed feelings about the matter. In Davenport, Iowa, an eight-year-old boy was reported to have burned down his father’s barn in protest at having to wear a Fauntleroy suit. According to Burnett’s biographer Ann Thwaite,* the New York press reported that one Stephen Crane (the Red Badge of Courage man?) generous-spiritedly gave two little boys some money and told them to get their curly locks cut short, causing the mother of one to fly into hysterics and the other to faint dead away.
The journalist Irvin Cobb (1876–1944) described it this way in his memoir: “A mania was laying hold on the mothers of the nation. It was a mania for making over their growing sons after the likeness of a beatific image. Little Lord Fauntleroy infected thousands of the worthy matrons of America with a catching lunacy, which raged like a sedge fire and left enduring scars upon the seared memories of its chief sufferers – their sons, notably between the ages of seven and eleven.”†
The model for Cedric was Burnett’s second son vivian: “if there had not been vivian, there would not have been Fauntleroy,” she told the writer Gertrude Brownell. The illustrations for the book, which probably did more even than the text to foster that sartorial craze, were based on an 1884 photograph of vivian, aged seven, in a velvet suit. By the end of his life Reginald Birch regarded his association with the book as having ruined his subsequent career. Vivian entered the ranks of the children of children’s writers whose lives were blighted by the connection.
More than half a century after the book came out a “bald, squarecut” middle-aged man told a reporter plaintively: “I was a perfectly normal boy – I got myself just as damn dirty as the other boys. I could write a book about what Fauntleroy has been to me. I try to get away from it but I can’t.” He lived with his mother on Long Island into adulthood,* managed her business affairs, and was to write a biography of her (The Romantick Lady, 1927) from which she emerges, as one critic put it, as “aggressively domineering, offensively whimsical and abominably self-centered and conceited.”† When he died of a heart attack after coming to the rescue of a boating accident in 1937, his death was headlined: ORIGINAL “FAUNTLEROY” DIES IN BOAT AFTER HELPING RESCUE 4 IN SOUND: “vivian Burnett, Author’s Son who Devoted Life to Escaping ‘Sissified’ Role, is Stricken at Helm – Manoeuvres Yawl to get 2 Men and 2 Women from Overturned Craft, Then Collapses.”‡
If Frances put vivian into Fauntleroy, it was perhaps an imagined version of herself who appeared in A Little Princess. Its protagonist, Sara Crewe, is left in the care of Miss Minchin’s school for girls in London while her doting father, a well-heeled widower, returns to work in India. To start with, the titular soubriquet is ironic: the other girls are jealous of Sara’s lavish wardrobe and privileges. The obsequious and materialistic Miss Minchin (“large, cold, fishy eyes and a large, cold, fishy smile”; part Trunchbull, part Cruella) treats her with special regard because of her father’s wealth. Sara – who graciously befriends the most hopeless and dim-witted of her classmates, Ermengarde, and Becky the scullery-maid – never puts on airs. But when news comes that Captain Crewe has died, and his riches have vanished after he invested in a friend’s ill-fated diamond mine, her fortunes are reversed.
The little princess is now a penniless orphan. At once Miss Minchin takes her out of school, confines her to a freezing garret, and sets her to work as a drudge. Yet she maintains her aristocracy of spirit: “‘Whatever comes,’ she said, ‘cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. ’”
Accordingly, she is considerate, humble, and solicitous whatever befalls her. Gandhi himself would be tempted to slap her, were he not to suspect that she’d get an intolerable degree of satisfaction from turning the other cheek. Like Cinderella, she makes friends with rats and sparrows. At a climactic moment in the story, hungry and cold, she finds a coin on the ground and goes to a bakery to buy six buns – before, her tender heart moved by the plight of a street-girl more wretched still than her, she gives five of them away. Of course, as the plot unwinds in strongly Dickensian style, it turns out that the diamond mines came good after all and that her father’s guilt-stricken old pal has been searching for her all along. He is – drum roll – living right next door. As in Fauntleroy, Sara is spared the disagreeable necessity of virtue being its own reward in the long run: she’s going to end up rich and happy, as are her humble pals, and Miss Minchin is going to spend the rest of her pinched little life regretting being such a meanie. It’s a touching and well-made melodrama, and its resolution is as richly satisfying as it is ridiculous – but few children will see themselves faithfully represented in Sara.
So Cedric in Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sara in A Little Princess are paragons: children as turbocharged innocents; moral superheroes. They are designed above all to appeal to sentimental adults, and it was sentimental adults who drove the Fauntleroy cult. The child protagonists of The Secret Garden on the other hand are, at least at the outset, horrible.
Mary Lennox is ill-favored in body and in temperament: “everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair, and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.” She’s lonely, neglected by her parents, accustomed to being waited on by native servants, and spoiled rotten. “She was not an affectionate child and had never cared much for anyone.” She thinks nothing of calling her ayah “Pig! Pig! Daughter of pigs!” “because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all.”*
Within the first few pages, both parents are dead and the whole passel of native servants have either been carried off by cholera or run for the hills. Discovered by chance, abandoned and forgotten, in her father’s bungalow, she is packed off to live with her uncle in his vast manor house on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. She shows no enthusiasm for the project, and treats the servants assigned to look after her with the same absurd imperiousness she showed her ayah.
Even leaving aside Mary’s brisk orphaning in the opening pages, this is a book deeply rooted in grief, and the trauma of grief. Misselthwaite Manor, as it turns out, is one great galumphing metaphor. Mary’s widowed Uncle Archibald is seldom ever at home, and when he is he barely interacts with his niece or the servants who keep the place running. After the abrupt death of his beloved wife Lilias, he has checked out of ordinary existence. And as Mary learns, among the many walled gardens is the titular secret garden, the one that Lilias planted and tended and where she died in an accident a decade before. Mr Craven buried the key and forbade anyone ever to set foot in the garden again. Thanks to the borderline supernatural intervention of a robin, Mary finds the key – and then she finds the locked gate, hidden beneath a curtain of ivy…
The secret garden itself works in lots of ways. As metaphor, it’s an Eden, one of those special Edens in children’s writing that is (to the adult reader and writer) the lost good place of childhood itself. But it’s also a living symbol of regrowth and replenishment, and a concrete example: it’s a garden, as well as the idea of a garden. Its flora and fauna, its smells and sounds, are carefully and evocatively detailed. The robin* is just one of many avatars of the healing forces of nature in the book. The secret garden (where the robin lives) stands not just for forbidden knowledge, but for self-knowledge. The site of grief is also the site of rebirth.
Mistress Mary went a step nearer to the robin and looked at him very hard. ‘I’m lonely,’ she said. She had not known before that this was one of the things which made her feel sour and cross. She seemed to find it out when the robin looked at her and she looked at the robin.
Another avatar of nature – we could think of him as a pre-school compost of Heathcliff, Mellors, and St Francis of Assisi – is Dickon, the younger brother of Martha, the servant who is assigned to look after Mary. We hear a lot about Dickon before we see him. He’s working class, uneducated, lives, and breathes the Yorkshire moors and can tame and speak to all sorts of animals. And he’s happy: he may not have pots of money, but he has affectionate siblings and a mother who loves him. Dickon befriends Mary and helps her bring the secret garden back to life – a friendship she hoped for but did not expect:
‘He wouldn’t like me,’ said Mary in her stiff, cold little way. ‘No one does.’
Martha looked reflective again.
‘How does tha’ like thysel’?’ she inquired, really quite as if she were curious to know. Mary hesitated a moment and thought it over.
‘Not at all – really,’ she answered. ‘But I never thought of that before.’
When they first meet, Dickon’s unaffected good nature – his identity with nature itself – instantly wins her.
The house has other secrets. Mary, alone in her room, hears crying at night from somewhere else in the house. She’s told she’s imagining it – until, exploring the empty corridors in the small hours, she chances into a room where she meets the other child in the book’s triangular set-up, Colin: Archibald’s neglected, sickly, bed-bound son – whom he can’t bear to look at because he reminds him of his dead wife – is even more unpleasant than Mary. The adults around him have convinced him that he’s going to develop a hunchback and die young, and the servants who tend him have been instructed to keep his very existence a deadly secret. They pander to his every whim for fear of worsening his condition, and in the process have created a monster of resentment, spite, and self-pity.
The arc of the story is of these two children (thanks in part to the catalytic effect of their pet Green Man, Dickon) learning to heal each other, heal themselves, and in due course bring the wintry widower under whose roof they live back to life too. The miraculous return of Colin to health and vigor, and Mary growing fatter and prettier, is down to what they call the Magic.
The meaning of that Magic is at the heart of the meaning of the book. At a climactic moment, when the Doxology is recited in the garden, what seems to be a Christian gloss is put on this resurrection story* – and there are scriptural cadences here and there in the text. Colin’s repeated assertion that “I am going to live for ever and ever and ever” can’t but evoke the New Testament’s promise of eternal life. But the Magic of the book is pre-Christian, almost Lawrentian. When Dickon’s mother Susan is first introduced to the garden, Colin asks her whether she believes in Magic.
‘That I do, lad’ she answered. ‘I never knowed it by that name, but what does th’ name matter?[…] Never thee stop believin’ in th’ Big Good Thing an’ knowin’ th’ world’s full of it – an’ call it what tha’ likes. Tha’ wen singin’ to it when I come into th’ garden.’
There’s a curious and very fin-de-siècle twin track of thinking in this book: a mystical appeal to nature sits alongside a burgeoning sense of the miraculous in science. Colin is determined to conduct a “scientific experiment” on the Magic, and his stated ambition is to be a “Scientific Discoverer” – rather than, say, a soldier or an explorer or a servant of empire. Few protagonists of children’s stories in the previous century aspired to be scientists.
All that psychological acuity makes the book a profound step forward for Burnett. In this, just as in her previous books, it falls to children to show the way to adults. But these children aren’t in a natural state of grace or of superhuman innocence. They have been built, morally, by their experiences – by the experience of being indulged, of being frightened, of being kept indoors; and above all by the experience of neglect. These aren’t plaster saints: they are unsympathetic children, sympathetically understood. The formation of the International Psychoanalytical Association was four years in the future, but Burnett was thinking in a psychoanalytical way.
Indeed, in one remarkable passage she links an understanding of child psychology to a utopian sense, which in the early years of the twentieth century must have been easy to feel, that the world was marching ever faster forward:
In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. […] One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts – just mere thoughts – are as powerful as electric batteries – as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.
To flourish, children need food, and a connection to nature, and the society of other children – and, no less than gardens need tending, they need parental love. It was not enough, The Secret Garden says, for adults (as Mary’s parents had) to pursue their own pleasures and leave their children to the servants. As one character remarks tartly: “Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery, Mary might have learned some pretty ways, too.” Dickon, speaking of Colin, says: “he wishes he’d never been born. Mother, she says that’s th’ worst thing on earth for a child. Them as is not wanted scarce ever thrives.”
Burnett’s own two children did not want for love. Indeed, she perhaps channeled the love that was absent from her first marriage into coddling her two boys – and even into their teenage years she spoke and wrote to them as if they were under ten. She was always, like Cedric Errol’s mother, “Dearest.” vivian Burnett may have been scarred by having been the original of Little Lord Fauntleroy – but he, at least, lived. The decisive trauma in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s life was the death from consumption of her older son Lionel in 1890.
Lionel was only fifteen when it became clear that he was dying. Frances’ response was to drag him from their home in Washington all over Europe in futile search of a cure, to “wrap him in makebelieve” so that he would not know he was dying, and to divert his attention with toys and games and gadgets. She wrote to a cousin afterward:
He was ill nine months but I never allowed him to know that I was really anxious about him, I never let him know that he had consumption or that he was in danger – and when he died he passed away so softly and quickly that I know he wakened in the other world without knowing how he had left this one. I can thank God for that… I shall never get over it. I suffered too much. But I kept it up to the last. The day before he died he slept softly all day and said he was quite comfortable, only so sleepy… The last words he spoke to me were, ‘God bless Mammie,’ when we kissed each other good night.*
Neither her marriage to Swan Burnett nor her conventional Christian faith survived the loss of Lionel. She dabbled in theosophy and Christian Science in the early 1880s and led a separate life from her husband (they eventually divorced in 1898), making a disastrous marriage with her long-term protégé Stephen Townsend. The death of Lionel, I suspect, is what made the exploration of grief in The Secret Garden so much richer and more poignant. Colin’s miraculous recovery from illness can be seen as a species of magical thinking: the wish-fulfillment version of Lionel’s real-world decline and death.
* The 1905 publication date, appearing to make it belong to the era of The Secret Garden, is misleading. A Little Princess was the revised and expanded version of a story, “Sara Crewe, Or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s,” that was originally published in book form in 1888 after being serialized in a children’s magazine the previous year.
* Oscar Wilde’s fable “The Selfish Giant,” published just two years later, has a similar if more expressly Christian trajectory.
* Thwaite, op. cit., [p].
† Irvin Cobb, Goin’ On Fourteen, Being Cross-sections Out of a Year in the Life of an Average Boy (George H. Doran, 1924, [p].
* “Names Make News,” People, 15 May 1933.
† Marghanita Laski, Mrs Ewing, Mrs Molesworth and Mrs Hodgson Burnett (Arthur Barker, 1950), [p].
‡ New York Times, 26 July 1937.
* It’s clear that abusing the help is disapproved of, here, though the undifferentiated “dark” and “ashy” faces of the servants – they’re colonial set-dressing more than people – will mar the book’s opening a little for the modern reader.
* An important character in his own right. Eccentrically, Burnett even writes a few pages of the story from his point of view. That might not have survived a modern editor.
* There’s even the possibility, far-fetched but not wholly implausible, that the passage in which Mr Craven hears the laughter of children in the locked garden may have been a source for T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.”
* Letter to Emma Daniels, quoted in Thwaite, Beyond the Secret Garden.