Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  Eliza and Edwin spent this first married day “looking at the Cathedral”. On their return to Manchester they took rooms at 30 Moreton Street, Cheetham, where on 20th February 1846 their first son, Herbert Edwin, was born. When Eliza was pregnant again they moved to 141 York Street, Cheetham, which now seems to be 141 Cheetham Hill Road. This part of the street was then called York Place. There were three boarding-houses in the terrace and the Hodgsons’ other neighbours included a silk manufacturer, a copper-roller manufacturer, a warehouseman, a dyer, a corn-factor, a wool-draper and a card-maker.

  John George, the second child, arrived on 24th July 1847 and on 24th November 1849, Frances Eliza was born. Not far away, Mrs Gaskell was writing a letter to Charlotte Brontë, congratulating her on Shirley. Her own Mary Barton had been published the previous year; the Manchester operatives Mrs Gaskell wrote of were the same people who were soon to fascinate the young Frances, in spite of her family’s efforts to protect her from them.

  In the 1851 census, Edwin Hodgson had in his employ at the house in York Street, two servants: Ellen Parry, a “house-servant” of twenty-eight from Anglesey, and Elizabeth Mottram, a nineteen-year-old nurse from Frodsham, not far away in Cheshire. According to A Manual of Domestic Economy published in 1857, the total annual wage bill for the two young women was likely to be only £18.15s. and the income of someone employing two servants not more than about £250 a year.

  The others who “abode in the house on the night of March 30, 1851” were the “Fancy Where Ironmonger” head of the house, Edwin Hodgson aged thirty-five, his wife, Eliza, aged thirty-six, and their three children: Herbert Edwin, aged five (“scholar”), John George, aged three, and Frances Eliza, aged one.

  Frances was auburn-haired and always inclined to be plump. A brother once joked that when she fell she bounced like a rubber ball. Later in life she was described by one of the many journalists who interviewed her as “disappointingly short” but with “perfect lips”—“firm, full and well-chiselled”.

  There is no photograph of Frances as a child. In 1892 she said this was because “she belonged to an era when photography was not as advanced an art as it is today”. There were, however, a number of Photographic Studios in Manchester at this time, offering first-class portraits, and their advertisements in the City Trade Directory were alongside Mr Hodgson’s own and those of the hat-lining-cutters, the japanners, the bonnet-box-makers, the heald-knitters, mangle-makers, ostrich-plume-manufacturers, gutta-percha-suppliers and dealers in live turtles. It is probable that Mr Hodgson’s budget did not run to the cost of the new-fangled photographers, even though they claimed to provide their first-class portraits at most reasonable charges. Mr Hodgson was not one for conspicuous expenditure. His advertisement in the Trade Directory was one of the smallest.

  But life was comfortable enough. Travelling to Deansgate on a horse-bus, it was easy to ignore the fact that, not far away, were places that were an offence to eye and nostril, “the homes of vice and poverty which surround the huge palaces of industry and clasp them in their hideous folds”.

  The Directory of 1852 was able to exclaim ecstatically at the sight of eighty-six thousand Manchester Sunday School children, the Hodgson boys almost certainly among them, gathered in Peel Park on 10th October 1851 to greet Queen Victoria.

  “Honour to the Monarch whose auspicious reign is productive of such a blessed sight! Honour to the town that can present it!” But the Queen herself, while gratified by the cheering enthusiasm of the crowds, and their good behaviour, noted in her diary “a painfully unhealthy-looking population”.

  Edwin was determined to give his children a healthy life. The little house in York Street was becoming crowded and the aspect no longer as rural as it had been only three years earlier. The population of Manchester had increased by sixty thousand in the last ten years. The Hodgson family was increasing too. Early in 1852, shortly before the fourth child was born, they moved a mile or so further out along Cheetham Hill Road into a brand-new terrace opposite St Luke’s Church. The house, destroyed quite recently, had the words ERECTED 1852 on the garden wall. It was one of a row of seven, of brick, double-fronted, with rather attractive doorways. Each had two main floors, with basement and attic.

  Certainly 9 St Luke’s Terrace, as it was then called, was a good step up from the house in York Place. Edwin Hodgson was prospering. But the front garden is small (and we know it has not been altered because of that dated wall) and the whole house bore little resemblance to the “imposing mansion ensconced in trees” which Vivian Burnett described in his life of his mother. He called the house “Seedley Grove” but this seems to have been, not Edwin’s house, but a part of Tanners’ Lane, Pendleton, several miles west of Cheetham Hill where Frances stayed later.

  The real joy of St Luke’s Terrace was that it backed on to fields belonging to the Earl of Derby, and that the lake and beautiful grounds of Temple House were close by. Frances’ first memories were of St Luke’s Terrace in February 1852 when she was two years and three months old. The memory can be dated with this precision because Edith Mary had just been born. It is rather fitting that the first memory should be of this younger sister, for Edith was to provide Frances during much of her life with what she most needed—not only love but an audience, not only a friend but an admirer.

  But on this first occasion Frances was the admiring audience and she already knew her own mind. She wanted to hold the new baby. The nurse, not having much confidence in the arms of a two-year-old, held the

  white-robed new baby in her own arms and amiably pretended to place it in the short arms and on the tiny knees while she was really supporting it herself.

  “There,” she said. “Now she is on your knee.” She thought she had made it all right, but she was gravely mistaken.

  “But I want to hold her myself . . .”

  “You are holding her,” answered the Nurse, cheerfully. “What a big girl to be holding the new baby just like a grown up lady.”

  But Frances was not deceived.

  “I am not holding her,” she said. “You are holding her.”

  Looking back on it many years later, Frances said she could still feel this first realization that people who were grown-up could do what they chose—hold babies, come and go as they pleased. Moreover, that they could always stop children doing what they wanted, that there was no appeal against their omnipotence. Another early memory dates from this same month, and it has to do with various important matters, such as a feeling for language and the necessity of not hurting people. A visitor had called to see the new baby.

  “What is your new baby’s name to be?” the lady asked.

  “Edith,” was the answer.

  “That is a pretty name,” said the visitor. “I have a new baby, and I have called it Eleanor. Is not that a pretty name?”

  Frances apparently went through agonies of indecision, before she finally came out with her honest and yet tactful answer. For some reason, she did not think Eleanor was a pretty name.

  She thought it was an ugly name; that was the anguish of it. She could not bear to reveal to the new mother just what she had done. She could not bear to think of the poor new baby saddled for life with an ugly name. The visitor thought she was shy or too small to have any opinions on the subject of names. “Don’t you think it’s pretty?” she coaxed. “Don’t you like it?” Frances swallowed. She already had strong feelings that it was wrong to be unkind. “I don’t think,” she finally muttered, “I don’t think it is—as pretty—as Edith.”

  And everyone laughed and smiled and petted her. No one realized how much thought had gone into the reply. It did not occur to anyone in those days that two-year-olds could think. Children were considered to be “either comic, adorable, tiresome or intolerable”. They

  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 natur
al disinclination to wash their hands and faces. It was a time-honoured custom to tell them to “make less noise”, and everyone knelt down in his nightgown and said his prayers every night and morning.

  The creed went like this:

  Speak when you’re spoken to,

  Come when you’re called,

  Shut the door after you,

  And do as you’re told.

  On this occasion, Frances had spoken, eventually, when she had been spoken to. So she was praised and cuddled. No one had realized she was obeying her mother’s advice in a far more fundamental manner. She had been kind. This was her mother’s constant teaching. “Be kind, my dear, be kind. Try not to be thoughtless of other people. Be very respectful to people who are poor. Never be rude or vulgar. Remember to be always a little lady.”

  There is no one more anxious or concerned to be ladylike than the person who needs to reassure herself that she is indeed a lady. The Revd R. Parkinson, Canon of the Collegiate Church, looked at Manchester in 1841 and wrote: “There is no town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed.” It was immensely important to stay on the right side of the barrier.

  It was also extremely important to stay on the right side of the law. Frances was peace-loving and pleasure-loving. She liked to do what was right and to please everyone. Throughout her life she wanted most to please. She could not bear to offend. One of the most vivid memories of her childhood again made her feel how little adults remember what it is like to be a child, something she never forgot.

  One day Frances was sitting on a bench in a park studded with notices saying KEEP OFF THE GRASS. She was three and just learning to read. (She had learned her capital letters, with her brother Herbert’s help, from the advertisement columns of the newspapers.) She was so small that she was worried she might fall through the back of the bench and on to the forbidden grass. A policeman came to sit beside her and she plucked up enough courage to ask him a question.

  “If anyone treads on the grass must you take them up? Would you have to take me up if I went on it?”

  “Yes,” said the policeman solemnly. “I should have to take you to prison.”

  “But,” Frances said, “I am so little I might fall through the back of this seat. If I was to fall through on to the grass, should you take me to prison?”

  How much it mattered to her must have shown on her face but the policeman stuck to his facetious point “Yes,” he said, “I should have to pick you up and carry you at once to prison.”

  Frances did not say anything more but at night, for a long time afterwards, she awoke shivering with terror. Only on one other occasion in her childhood was she teased so cruelly by an adult. She never forgot that either. It was four years later. She and her best friend, both regular admirers of new babies, saw one particularly attractive specimen taking the air in the arms of an elderly person, who noticed their admiration.

  “Are you so very fond of babies?” she enquired. On being told that they were indeed, she calmly offered to give them this one, assuring them that its mother had more than enough already. Frances gasped at the thought of such a riotous superfluity of new babies and fell for the proposal. The elderly woman promised to return with the baby and some of its clothes and equipment the following evening. They were to meet her at a certain corner at quarter past seven. The little girls waited and waited in a fever of anticipation but they never saw the elderly woman or the baby again. One hundred and twelve years later, someone who had known Frances said to me, “She never was a good judge of people.”

  The Keep off the Grass incident made more impression on the child than the death of her father. How close she had come to prison! She woke trembling in the night. Her father’s death was much less frightening. He died that same year, on 1st September 1853, of apoplexy, they said. Frances was not yet four. She was taken in to see him, laid out on the crimson-draped four-poster bed. “Papa has gone to heaven,” someone said and she looked down at him with interest and without fear.

  His death, of course, made a great difference to their lives. He died intestate. Eliza Hodgon, pregnant with the fifth child, signed the deed of administration as his relict. It was witnessed by her brother, John Clegg Boond, warehouseman, and her mother, Hannah. “The Personal Estate and Effects of the intestate were under the value of five thousand pounds”—all the evidence suggests that it was probably considerably under.

  The fifth child, a third daughter, was born on 6th January 1854 and christened in St Luke’s Church on 8th March. She was called Edwina, after her father, whose trade before his death was given in the church register as silversmith. Mrs Hodgson, recovering from the shocks of death and birth, decided to run the family business herself. Other women did it and so would she. There was a Margaret Rogerson in the 1854 Directory, “basket, skip and hamper manufacturer”, and another woman, Anne Cowburn, who had taken over a “carriage manufactory”, and thanked “the Nobility, Gentry and Public generally, of Manchester and its vicinity for the liberal patronage and support received since the death of her Husband.”

  The two servants were busy with the house, the new baby and two-year-old Edith that spring of 1854. John and Herbert were at school and Frances was left more and more to her own devices and to the occasional attentions of her grandmother. It was her grandmother who bought Frances her first book. Which grandmother it was, is not clear. Hannah Boond lived not far away and Mary Hodgson, Edwin’s mother (born in Stafford in 1782), at some stage came to live with her son’s family. Frances’ description of the book-buying grandmother has much in common with that of Miss Alicia Temple Barholm in a book she wrote fifty years after her grandmother’s death. Grandmamma “had silver-white hair, wore a cap with a full white net border” and carried sweets in a silver snuff-box. They bought the book in a tiny shop with a window crammed with toys and delights in glass jars.

  “In a life founded and formed upon books,” Frances wrote, “one naturally looks back with affection to the first book one possessed.” It was called The Little Flower Book. A stood for Apple Blossom, C for Carnation and R for Rose. Each page was divided into two and, under the picture of the flower, splendidly coloured on a black background, there was an appropriate verse. In children’s books in those days, of course “no well-regulated person ever mentioned the poppy without calling it ‘flaunting’ or ‘gaudy’ ”. The violet was modest, the rose sweet.

  It was not only in her book that Frances liked flowers. She writes in her autobiography of her childhood of “that enchanted garden which, out of a whole world, has remained, throughout a lifetime, the Garden of Eden”. In his book, Vivian Burnett takes this to be the Hodgsons’ own garden. But Frances said, “I do not know with any exactness where it was situated. I imagine it was a comfortable countrified house with a big garden round it and fields and trees before and behind it.” This was certainly not 9 St Luke’s Terrace, Cheetham Hill Road. It seems that in this year after Edwin’s death, Eliza felt she could no longer keep on the house. The family moved temporarily to Seedley Grove, Tanner’s Lane, Pendleton. There were Cleggs in Seedley Grove in the 1854 Directory. Eliza’s mother had been a Clegg and it is likely that the widow and her five young children (Herbert, the eldest, was only just eight) took refuge with better-off relatives while trying to find a house they could afford.

  They were there for less than a year but it was an important year for Frances. She discovered the garden that was to be with her for the rest of her life. It was certainly one of the ingredients of “the Secret Garden”, though there were other and more important ones. The second garden which contributed to that book written fifty years later, she was to see later in Salford. It was a poor, abandoned garden behind a “little green door in a high wall . . . It had been a garden once—and there were the high brick walls around it—and the little door so long unopened, and once there had been flowers and trees in it.” Frances “bent down and looked the weeds in their f
aces and touched them tenderly. ‘Suppose they were roses and pansies and lilies and violets.’ ” Frances imagined everything carpeted with flowers and wondered whether “the long dead Garden—the poor, old forgotten, deserted garden—did it know that suddenly it had bloomed again?” The third garden was at Rolvenden in Kent.

  Frances once told a story of Watts, the painter. “He had painted a picture of Covent Garden Market, which was a marvel of picturesque art and meaning. One of his many visitors, a lady, looked at it rather doubtfully. ‘Well, Mr Watts,’ she said, ‘this is all very beautiful, of course, but I know Covent Garden Market and I must confess I have never seen it look like this.’ ‘No,’ replied Watts. And then, looking at her thoughtfully, ‘Don’t you wish you could!’ ”

  Frances, herself, had this ability to transform things beyond their reality. She could make the Salford garden bloom again in her imagination. She could remember the Seedley Grove garden, flooded with perpetual sunshine and filled with the scent of roses and mignonette and new-mown hay, apple blossom and strawberries. She never remembered it in winter—perhaps she was not there in winter.

  There was a jungle of flowering shrubs there and a warm, scented alley of sweet briar, which led down to the Rimmers’ cottage. The Rimmers were important too. Frances’ contact with Emma Rimmer was her first real contact with the outside world, the world beyond the family, with its stress on ladylike behaviour and the keeping-up of appearances. There was nothing ladylike about Emma Rimmer. She lived in a whitewashed cottage beyond the garden of Seedley Grove. Mr Rimmer kept pigs and Emma knew all about pigs. This meant a great deal to Frances; she always cherished the acquaintance of people who knew about things. Years later, when asked what characteristics she considered the cause of her success, she replied, “The fact that I was interested in everything in the world—from emperors and prime ministers to swineherds and cats and dogs and every smallest blade of grass that grows.”