by Dennis Butts
At this point, any reader who is an aficionado of the melodramatic bestseller will recognise that they are in the hands of an expert. Those forbidden rooms (not unexpectedly) contain a mysterious body that moans in the night; the secret walled garden is overgrown and contains memories of tragedy. But, of course, the rooms and the garden contain the seeds of transformation and happy endings, via several of those satisfying confrontations where the deserving underdog gets the better of apparently superior forces. Burnett wove an immensely, and enduringly, satisfying tale out of fragments of Jane Eyre and Heidi and a dozen less well-known bestsellers, adding a heady mix of contemporary genres such as gardening, spiritual health, feminism, and old reliables like the romantic and the gothic. Her symbolism is laid on with a spade, her characters (although perhaps more subtle than one might expect) are painted with a very broad brush, and her atmospherics read like a handbook for a Hollywood film of the 1930s.
It is very easy to be swept away by the sheer ease of the whole thing, by the artfulness that conceals art. Given the skill involved in their craft, it seems rather unfair that bestselling authors tend to get short critical shrift; and Burnett was a consummate bestselling author. From her first novel, That Lass o’Lowrie’s (1877), she claimed that she never had a rejection: she had a string of international successes, and at her peak was compared favourably with William Dean Howells and Henry James. She also wrote successful plays and was instrumental in changing the international copyright laws in 1888. As time went on, however, critics were less enthusiastic about her work. In 1922, The Bookman called her ‘the high priestess of the omnipotent cult of the second-rate’ although her technical skills were undiminished.
And considerable skills they were; not just in blending the basic elements of human fear and ambition, but in manipulating the readers’ responses by glossing over impossibilities and improbabilities. The prose seems to be simple and unsophisticated, but even a brief look beneath that polished surface reveals the use of a remarkable box of tricks. The world of romance and melodrama must look like the real world: the most effective fantasy is that which doesn’t look like fantasy at all. Let us consider one innocent-looking paragraph.
After a brief stay in London, Mary and Mrs Medlock go by train to the north of England. That seems simple enough, and Burnett could have chosen to ‘cut’ straight from London to Yorkshire. But there is a train journey, and Mrs Medlock fills the first part of it in doom-ridden scene setting, after which Mary (with the aid of a dash of the pathetic fallacy) ‘turned her face toward the streaming panes of the window of the railway carriage and gazed out at the grey rain-storm which looked as if it would go on for ever and ever’ and falls asleep.
The next substantive thing that happens is their arrival at the station near Misslethwaite; but before this there is a paragraph which, at first sight, seems to be unnecessary – but which is in fact a wonderful lesson in the dramatic cutting of corners.
She slept a long time, and when she awakened Mrs Medlock had bought a lunch-basket at one of the stations and they had some chicken and cold beef and bread-and-butter and some hot tea. The rain seemed to be streaming down more heavily than ever, and everybody in the station wore wet and glistening waterproofs. The guard lighted the lamps in the carriage, and Mrs Medlock cheered up very much over her tea and chicken and beef. She ate a great deal and afterward fell asleep herself, and Mary sat and stared at her and watched her fine bonnet slip on one side until she herself fell asleep once more in the corner of the carriage, lulled by the splashing of the rain against the windows. It was quite dark when she awakened. The train had stopped at a station and Mrs Medlock was shaking her . . . The station was a small one and nobody but themselves seemed to be getting out of the train.
Essentially a dark, wet, long journey – but that paragraph encapsulates the best of the techniques of the popular writer, eliding awkward practical questions and giving us a great deal of information that might easily be missed by the modern reader.
The most obvious questions might be, where exactly is, or was, Misslethwaite Manor? Why bother with the journey? What geography is Burnett trying to convey? Most importantly, perhaps, that the Yorkshire of this book is a strange, foreign country within England, where they talk oddly – and it is a long way from London. It is clear enough that it takes from morning till night to get there, a fact that might, but because of Burnett’s sleight of hand I suspect rarely does, alert the attentive reader to the fact that this world is not as naturalistic as it might at first seem. Today a train journey from London to York would take well under four hours. In the days of steam it would have taken around four and a half. Of course, Mary and Mrs Medlock might have had to wait for a connection, otherwise how is it that a main line train that presumably left from King’s Cross, if they were travelling on the Great Northern and North Eastern Railways, or from St Pancras if they were travelling on the Midland Railway, stop at a small country station? But Burnett doesn’t mention a change.
A clue to Manor’s location may lie in the possibility of Burnett having borrowed Misslethwaite Manor from a real life great house that she had visited. A reasonable candidate would be Fryston Hall, seat of the Earl of Crewe, who was Secretary of State for India, and where Burnett (who was well-connected socially) stayed in 1895. The platform at Monk Fryston still exists, south of York, but to get there, or to any of the nearby stations would have involved breaking the journey.
Perhaps more intriguing is the lunch-basket, because it raises two questions. Would a senior servant accompanying the niece of a clearly aristocratic family have travelled in anything less than a first class carriage? And even if the carriage wasn’t first class, why did Mrs Medlock and Mary not eat in the dining car? After all, the Midland Railway introduced dining cars from 1882. Luncheon-baskets, on the other hand, had been around a long time, and by the turn of the century the menus had become rather elaborate. They could be ordered in advance and brought to the carriage by a boy, and then returned at another principal station. Neither of these details is mentioned (naturally enough) by Burnett, and the food in Mrs Medlock’s basket is more functional than extravagant.
The lamps being lighted by the guard offer the reader further contextual clues. We don’t find out whether these are gas lamps or oil lamps, but gas lamps replaced oil lamps on the North Eastern in the late 1880s, and on the Midland from the early 1890s. The fact that they are lighted during the day might suggest that the route took them through some tunnels, or merely that the weather is particularly inclement. Finally, Thwaite Station is large enough to have a station-master (but no porter), but small enough to have a ‘little outside platform’ where the carriage waits. Is this the kind of very local station at which an express train from London might stop? (The answer to that is ‘possibly’.)
This is, of course, fiction, and such detective work might seem to be irrelevant – but it points out the gap between reality and fiction which the skilled writer disguises. It also highlights something else about The Secret Garden: that it may well be set rather earlier than 1911, perhaps around 1885, when bonnets such as that worn by Mrs Medlock were more in fashion, and when oil lamps and luncheon baskets were more the norm on railways. And that may suggest that Burnett’s gothic effects are a little less anomalous than they might otherwise appear – perhaps gloomy mansions would have been more common in the 1880s than the 1910s.
Burnett, like many popular writers, might be accused of simplifying or distorting life, and there is no doubt that at times she pushes the envelope of credibility to its extreme. However, her skill is in disguising the fact. It is obvious that we have arrived in the land of romance when, towards the end of the book, the sub-Byronic Archibald Craven hears as in a dream his dead wife calling him back to the garden. But far more often impossibilities or unrealities sneak, as it were, past the reader’s guard. Food seems to be a favourite area for unrealistic embellishment (perhaps not unnaturally in a children’s book).
First appearance in The American Magazine
Thus the mystic moor, the site of beauty and health and freedom surrounding the repressed and repressing Manor, is inhabited by the young Pan, Dickon, and the earth-motherly figure, clad in a blue shawl: his mother, Mrs Sowerby. So persuasive is Burnett’s writing that when the sickly Colin and the now resurgent Mary regain their appetites it is easy to overlook the fundamental improbability of Mrs Sowerby’s munificence:
‘I’ll tell thee what, lad . . . When tha’ goes to ‘em in th’ mornin’s I’ll bake ‘em a crusty cottage loaf or some buns wi’ currants in ’em, same as you children like. Nothin’s so good as fresh milk an’ bread’.
True enough, but the lushness of the symbolism surrounding this Madonna figure cleverly distracts us from the fact that this is a woman with eight (or possibly nine) children and an invisible husband, presumably living at subsistence level on the edge of the moor. Equally, it is easy to overlook the impossibility of the food which the children are served at the Manor, and which they attempt to reject. Colin (in order to maintain the fiction that he is still ill),
made up his mind to eat less, but unfortunately it was not possible to carry out this brilliant idea when he wakened each morning with an amazing appetite and the table near his sofa was set with a breakfast of home-made bread and fresh butter, snow-white eggs, raspberry jam and clotted cream. Mary always breakfasted with him, and when they found themselves at the table – particularly if there were delicate slices of sizzling ham sending forth tempting odours from under a hot silver cover – they would look into each other’s eyes in desperation.
That may seem plausible to a twenty-first century readership (and may even have seemed quite normal to an American author, writing on Long Island), but at the turn of the twentieth century such food would have been considered positively unhealthy for British children – too rich, too indigestible, too debilitating to the character. Yet in the context of the book, the situation seems quite plausible: never mind the facts and probabilities; never mind awkward changes of trains; we are convinced that this magical world is much closer to our own than it actually is through the skills of the bestselling magician!
13. Did Beatrix Potter Really Suffer from ’Flu in 1909?
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Mr Tod (1912)
The account of the clash between Beatrix Potter and Graham Greene is an old one, but various aspects of the affair continue to be puzzling.
Many readers will remember that in January 1933, in the monthly periodical The London Mercury, the young up-and-coming novelist Graham Greene wrote an enthusiastic and perceptive article about the animal fantasies of Beatrix Potter, referring to her works as ‘great comedies’ and praising her ‘delicate irony’, memorable dialogue and beautiful economy. Greene calls many of her works masterpieces, and says that ‘she is an acute and unromantic observer, who never sacrifices truth for an effective gesture.’ Although the whole article may possibly have been intended as satire, his attitude towards Potter seems to be wholly one of admiration.
However, after discussing what he calls the ‘vintage years in comedy’ in Potter’s books, from 1904 to 1908, Greene suggests that with the publication in 1908 of The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck a significant change took place in Beatrix Potter’s art:
At some time between 1907 and 1909 Miss Potter must have passed through an emotional ordeal which changed the character of her genius. It would be impertinent to inquire into the nature of the ordeal. Her case is curiously similar to that of Henry James. Something happened which shook their faith in appearances.
Greene suggests that the crucial text to demonstrate this change is The Tale of Mr Tod, which was published in 1912. ‘With the publication of Mr Tod . . . Miss Potter’s pessimism reached its climax’, he wrote. Although he praised her ironic style in the story of the fierce battle between the brutal fox and the repulsive badger, Greene emphasises the horrifying atmosphere of the tale: ‘Mr Tod marked the distance which Miss Potter had travelled since the ingenuous romanticism of The Tailor of Gloucester in 1902.’
When Greene’s article was republished in his Collected Essays in 1969, he added the following intriguing note:
On the publication of this essay I received a somewhat acid letter from Miss Potter. She denied that there had been any emotional disturbance at the time she was writing Mr Tod: she was suffering however from the after-effects of flu. In conclusion she deprecated sharply ‘the Freudian school’ of criticism.
Two questions seem to arise from this sharp and amusing exchange between the two formidable writers. Do Beatrix Potter’s later books, from 1907 onwards, for example, and particularly The Tale of Mr Tod, represent a significantly new and darker period in her art? And, if so, what caused it?
There seems to be no question that the later books do contain dark and pessimistic elements. Jemima Puddleduck is tricked by the cunning fox who devours her eggs in the tale of 1908. The Flopsy Bunnies are captured by Mr McGregor, and rescued from an evil fate just in time in 1909. Mr Brock, the badger, prepares to cook and eat the young rabbits until Mr Tod intervenes in 1912, and Pigling Bland is sent to market in 1913.
The whole tone of The Tale of Mr Tod seems to be defined by the description of Tod’s home:
The house was something between a cave, a prison, and a tumble-down pig-stye. There was a strong door, which was shut and locked. There were unpleasant things lying about, that had much better have been buried; rabbit bones and skulls, and chickens’ legs and other horrors. It was a shocking place and very dark.
Graham Greene is not the only critic to have suggested that some kind of personal disturbance may have affected books like Mr Tod. John Goldthwaite, in his remarkable book The Natural History of Make-Believe, argues that as Beatrix Potter grew up she began to rebel against the restrictions of her conventional and cramped middle-class life and role as a dutiful daughter with no very attractive future prospects. Her attempts to become a painter or a serious scientific observer seemed to have led nowhere, and she resorted to a life of day-dreams. In 1890, Goldthwaite suggests, she had the practical idea of putting her day-dreams to good use as picture-cards, and then as picture-books. These picture-books often portray escapes and rescues from The Tale of Peter Rabbit onwards. Her feelings of frustration were then tragically intensified when her fiancé Norman Warne died suddenly from leukemia at the end of August 1905, months after their engagement.
Thus Goldthwaite argues that The Tale of Mr Tod, with all its details about prisons and confinement, reflects deep levels of anxiety on the part of the author. Beatrix Potter was still unmarried at the time of writing it, and duty-bound to the stewardship of her ageing parents. However, in 1909 the unexpected happened: Beatrix met William Heelis, a lawyer, and they became engaged. With the property she was buying in the Lake District, and the prospect of marriage, a real escape was in sight for her at last. Thus, Goldthwaite argues, she now felt free to publish Mr Tod with its high-spirited, and not unsympathetic, depiction of violence and criminals. Goldthwaite even suggests a parallel between Beatrix and the axe-murderer Lizzie Borden who killed her parents. He observes that ‘[w]hen Potter finally released it [Mr Tod] to her publishers late in 1911, she had reached the moment in her life when escape to Sawrey and a husband seemed certain at last. Her long service to her parents was coming to an end.’
Compared to Goldthwaite’s psychological interpretation of Mr Tod, Marxist critics might relate its darkness to the culture of Edwardian Britain at this time. In The Strange Death of Liberal England (1936) George Dangerfield argues that, despite its image as a Golden Age, the years leading up to the First World War were ones of enormous social turmoil. The militancy of Trades Unions, the violent tactics of the Suffragette Movement, and the unrest in Ireland all threatened to erupt into civil war. One has to be careful not to brush aside too briskly the suggestion that such events might be reflected in animal fantasies written for children. B
eatrix Potter was a life-long conservative, and became actively involved in politics during the General Election of 1910, when she was so strongly opposed both to Free Trade and the proposed increase in Land Tax that she published a leaflet and coloured posters in order to promote her views. She was disappointed by the re-election of the Liberal Government, and took no further political action for the rest of her life. Readers of The Tailor of Gloucester (1902) and The Tale of Ginger and Pickles (1909) can point to her depiction of the economic difficulties of small village shop-keepers as demonstrating an awareness of social realities. Ginger and Pickles, we remember, have serious cash-flow problems; and, once they close their shop their rival, Mrs Tabitha Twitchit, exploits her monopolistic position very promptly and puts her prices up. But, it has to be said, apart from these minor episodes one has to look very hard for any other socio-economic references in the Tales.
Beatrix Potter really did suffer from ’flu and its after-effects during this crucial period, as she told Graham Greene. In 1909 she bought Castle Farm, but needed to lay on a water supply to her new property. During an inspection in bitter weather that winter she caught cold, and, on going back to her London home, developed influenza. ‘Her illness was prolonged and left her weak’, wrote Margaret Lane, her biographer, in The Tale of Beatrix Potter (1968). ‘Depression settled on her and was hard to shake off’, for she had to reveal to her parents that she had received a marriage proposal from William Heelis, the lawyer who was handling her property arrangements. Her parents reacted badly to this news, and for some time Beatrix was depressed and in poor health, at around the time The Tale of Mr Tod was being prepared for publication. This looks like conclusive support for Beatrix Potter’s remarks to Graham Greene. The problem is, however, that there is some evidence that Beatrix Potter might have been written The Tale of Mr Tod much earlier. When she sent the manuscript to her publishers in November 1911, she told them, ‘I wrote it some time ago.’ According to John Goldthwaite, Mr Tod was actually begun in May 1895, partly based upon an Uncle Remus tale by Joel Chandler Harris. It is, therefore, possible that The Tale of Mr Tod was actually written, although not actually published, before Beatrix Potter suffered from the attack of ’flu and its after-effects.