by Ann Thwaite
As important to Frances’ development as this knowledge of another world was the presence in Islington Square of the Hadfield family at Number 19. Henry Hadfield was a remarkable man and his story, as well as his character and interests, affected Frances. His obituary in the Manchester Guardian in 1887 called him “a well-known drawing master and painter”. “In early life it had been anticipated that he would share in the final disposition of the fortune of his wealthy relative (the founder of Henshaw’s Blind Asylum) but these great expectations were not realized and much was also lost in fruitless litigation.” Hadfield was a drawing master at the Mechanics’ Institute for nearly fifty years. He had a “genuine enthusiasm for popular education and advocated it in days when its propriety and necessity were by no means universally allowed”. The Guardian spoke of “the sterling quality of the man” and recorded the fact that “among those who came within his influence was Mrs Hodgson Burnett”.
Two years after the Hodgsons moved to Islington Square, Henry Hadfield published A Treatise on Perspective and in 1860, when Frances was eleven, a long dialect poem called, “The Triumph o’ Proide or th’ history o’ Jim Boardman an’ Ailse Sidewell, afore an’ after they ’en wed”. It seems likely that he encouraged Frances’ interest in dialect which she was to use with such effect in her first novels, and again, much later, in The Secret Garden.
Frances, Edith and eventually Edwina all went to school in Henry Hadfield’s house where there was a “Select Seminary for Young Ladies and Gentlemen”. Years later Frances was to give a vivid picture of another “select seminary”, attended by Sara Crewe. But the Miss Minchins of Sara Crewe were very different from the Hadfield girls, Sarah, Jane and Alice. When the Hodgsons arrived in 1855, the school must have been new, for even Sarah was only nineteen. There were six other children— George, Susette, Edward, Annie (already referred to as Frances’ best friend), Henrietta and Eliza. Edward was the same age as John Hodgson; Henrietta and Eliza played with Edith and Edwina. The children were in and out of each other’s houses the whole time and it was through the Hadfields that Frances first saw a grander, richer world which was to fascinate her as much as the Backstreet one.
Annie kept Frances well supplied with stories of her cousins at Grantham Hall and sometimes Miss Eliza was actually to be seen, coming to call in her lavender silk frock and lace parasol. When Sarah and Jane were bridesmaids at a Grantham Hall wedding, Frances and some of the other school children went to the church. “I wonder if they like each other very much,” Frances asked, looking at the newly married couple, but nobody seemed to know. Jane and Sarah sometimes went to balls at Grantham Hall. Annie took Frances in to see the pink silk dresses they were to wear on one of these splendid occasions. Frances imagined their conversation as “at once sparkling, polished and intellectual beyond measure, something like grammar, geography and arithmetic set with jewels of noble sentiment and brilliant repartee”. Dancing in their pink dresses, did they lift their dark eyes to their partners and ask “What is Macclesfield noted for?” or “Fifteen from fifty-seven and how many remain?”
The children danced too at their Christmas parties. They danced polkas and schottisches and quadrilles. They ate tipsy cake and Sally Lunns; they drank negus and cowslip wine. Frances looked forward to these parties with rapture. She longed for the party. But then, when she was there, even as she danced and the music and laughter surrounded her, she could not quite believe that this was the joy she had anticipated. She found she was asking the questions: “Is this the Party? Is this really the Party?”
Frances found that it was like this all through her life. What actually happened was never quite as good as it was in her imagination. “One does it all one’s life,” she wrote in 1892. “Everybody dances, everybody hears the music, everybody sometimes wears a sash and a necklace and watches other White Frocks whirling by—but was there ever anyone who really went to the Party?”
Arithmetic was different. At least one expected nothing from arithmetic. “Fifteen from fifty-seven and how many remain?” At least there was a definite answer, even if you got it wrong. Frances often did get the answers wrong. In 1895 she was still getting them wrong. “It is known to my entire world that I cannot add up,” she wrote to Charles Scribner, her publisher. Her teacher, Sarah Hadfield, had put it tactfully: “Frances had no taste for arithmetic. And she had but a poor memory for dates and geographical particulars. Grammatical construction and analysis seemed to present no difficulties and she remembered clearly and readily historical events and incidents. She had a passion for reading and was not deterred by ‘dryness’. Her powers as a story-teller were early developed and at school the children would stand spellbound around her while she improvised for their amusement some story of wonder and adventure.”
The story of “Edith Somerville” went on for weeks. “Tell a little ‘Edith Somerville’ ”, someone would say if Miss Hadfield was a few minutes late for a lesson. It started as a school story but went on and on until Edith Somerville was loved by Cecil Castleton. Drinks of cold water (forbidden in the schoolroom) and green apples were part of these storytelling sessions. When the apple season was over, they chewed raw turnip. Frances hated the flavour of raw turnip but would not admit it. “In life itself,” she wrote years later, “agreeable situations are often flavoured by raw turnip.” It needed that steadiness of purpose which Frances was cultivating to close one’s eyes to the fact that the turnip was not a sun-warmed peach. The situation itself was certainly agreeable. Frances was giving; the audience was happy.
Her sister Edith, always the listener, the receiver, recalled, “She was just like her own Sara Crewe. These stories were very romantic. Someone in them would be forlorn, sickly or miserable—pitiful in one way or another. And there would be someone else, who was brave and strong and helpful. The strong one would have to go through all sorts of trials and tribulations. But in the end things would come out right for everybody in a fairy tale sort of way.” Frances always wanted everything to come out right for everybody. And in her stories she could make that happen.
In life you often had to learn to put up with things as they were. But she was already discovering in herself a strength of character, a toughness which she said, in a letter to Israel Zangwill in 1895, was the thing she had cared for most all her life—“the refusal to be overpowered by circumstances”. In this letter, she recalled an incident left out of the autobiography of her childhood. “An insensate person in authority struck me across the upper part of my arm with a riding whip and, after regarding the livid cut in the soft flesh for a moment or so, I looked up at the person who had done it, and laughed.” She was eight at the time.
There was something else she did not mention in her book. “I shall not touch upon that,” she said in a letter to her editor, E. L. Burlingame, in 1892. “That” was “the only really sentimental episode of her life”. At nine years old she had apparendy fallen “in love with a man of thirty who regarded her as a nice little kitten”. This was probably the William Henry Ball mentioned in her son’s book. “He was willing to discuss books with her. He aroused in her an admiration that was akin to adoration.” The interesting thing about Frances’ own reference in her letter to Burlingame is the use of the word “only”. Sentimental was of course not a derogatory word. But she did not show the stories she was writing to William Henry Ball.
At first she wrote them down on her slate but was annoyed at having to rub them out when she got to the bottom. Then she searched for paper. She found some old notebooks, belonging to the young Welsh cook, Mary Bury. They still kept a cook, for Mrs Hodgson was occupied with the business and her mother-in-law was getting very old. There was also a general servant, an Irish girl, who had too much to do. The “governess” referred to in Frances’ book about her childhood seems to have actually been a lodger. Hannah Hartley is down as “visitor” in the 1861 census, but she was there a long time.
The cook’s notebooks were useful, though she would not part with them until
they were greasy. Frances’ words jostled with the shopping lists. “Sir Marmaduke turned his anguished eyes upon her, and cried in heart-wrung tones: ‘Ethelberta—my darling—oh, that it should be so!’ ONIONS 1d. SHOULDER OF MUTTON 10s.” Frances never showed anyone the written-down stories. She was particularly keen to keep them away from the boys, who thought writing stories was the silliest possible way of passing the time, even for girls who could not play cricket.
She also wrote poetry and that had to be hidden even more carefully from the boys, though their father was reputed to have written poetry, as well as letters to the papers signed Pro Bono Publico or Irate Citizen. The poetry still came as a shock to Mrs Hodgson. The first poem of all is lost. Frances remembered it was about church bells. There were plenty of possibly appropriate rhyme words—Bells, Shells, Tells, Sells and Ring, Sing, Fling, Wing—which made the whole thing surprisingly easy. A verse of the second poem survives. Frances was alone on a Sunday evening, her mother was at church with the boys, Edith and Edwina asleep upstairs. She was about ten.
Alone—alone! The wind shrieks “Alone!”
And mocks my lonely sorrow,
“Alone—alone!” The trees seem to moan,
“For thee there’s no bright tomorrow.”
There were no trees and the only sorrow was that tomorrow was Monday and school again. But Frances was rather pleased with the verse, as she was so often to be pleased with what she had written. Yes, she definitely liked it. But, try as she might, she could not write a second verse in the same vein. She decided to make it funny. She had been reading humorous poems in Punch, and really it was rather funny to be trying so hard to think of something sorrowful.
When her mother got home, she showed the poem to her and she laughed a lot at it, thinking it was something Frances had copied out. Mrs Hodgson did not laugh very much these days, but she stood there, in the mourning she still wore, and laughed. When she discovered Frances had written the poem herself, Mrs Hodgson was amazed. None of the other children she knew wrote poetry. How extraordinary it was, and how clever.
Two other childhood poems survive. One carries the note “Composed by Fannie E. Hodgson at the age of twelve” and shows that Frances was not over-awed by Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary, which she always kept in her desk at school to offset the effects of arithmetic:
King Jove had given a dinner
To his courtiers handsome and bold,
And as his friend, Bacchus, had sat by his side,
He took too much wine, I am told.
For such a sweet Goddess attended him
So brightly bewitching and clever,
A sort of compound of Venus
Aurora, Clyte and Minerva . . .
And so on, for verse after verse.
The other poem is worth quoting in full, for it commemorates a controversy and is attractively personal. “The Illuminations” celebrated the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark on 5th March 1863. Frances was then thirteen. She sent these verses to her cousin:
My dear Emily White—did you see the sight?
On that day of joy to our nation.
Did you go into town and see Feathers and Crown
On the night of the Illumination?
We went in a cart, which I assure you looked smart
On that day of joy to our nation.
There were blossoms and favours near the hearts of young shavers,
On the night of the Illumination.
We nearly got teemed, ok, how Carrie Boond screamed!
In that vast deal of conglomeration.
Our charger so fleet rushed down a back street
On the night of the Illumination.
Some very fine day I will step up your way,
At least, if to it you agree.
With two tales I’ve been writing, full of murders and fighting—.
So I hope you’ll be glad to see me.
The controversy was over the spending of public money on illuminations at a time when Manchester was still “wrestling with gaunt distress”, as the Manchester Courier put it. The papers were full of the meetings of Relief Committees. On the day of the wedding, two hundred and eighty-six individuals were new applicants for relief in Salford. A man was sent to prison for three months for stealing rags.
The war in America was having a disastrous effect on the cotton industry, dependent as it was on the shipments of raw cotton from the Southern States. The previous year, 1862, no fewer than 52,477 people in Manchester, and a further 16,663 in Salford, were receiving relief. The number of work-people without jobs was more than twice the number still in employment. The cotton famine was said to have destroyed one half of Manchester’s principal industry.
It seemed to Frances that for years and years everyone had been living under the shadow of a cloud spoken of as “the war in America”. “All the human framework of the great, dirty city depended upon it for bread, all the middle classes for employment, all the rich for luxury.” The papers reported terrible stories from America. People who had hardly heard of America before became familiar with the names of the bloody battlefields.
There were terrible stories from closer to home, too. And then, in the midst of “the Lancashire Distress”, as it had been called, they decided to celebrate Prince Edward’s wedding. Fifteen members of the City Council voted against the expenditure of public money on illuminations, but it was approved by a majority of twenty-six. There were strings of lights a hundred yards long, ten-feet plumes and mottos (such as GOD BLESS THEM) picked out in lights. The Wholesale Fish Market in Great Ducie Street had the words LONG LIVE THE PRINCE AND PRINCESS in letters three feet high.
“In the evening the illuminations were very brilliant and pretty general—though some persons and firms preferred, on the present occasion, to devote what would otherwise have been expended on illuminations and fireworks, to entertainments for their employees . . . We are sorry to say that in the crowd of persons who flocked to see the illuminations, one man was killed and several injured—entirely in consequence of their own impudence and eagerness.” The Manchester Courier confirmed more staidly Frances’ description of the “vast deal of conglomeration”. It was all very well for the employees enjoying their alternative entertainments. The unemployed looked up at the bright lights and were not fed.
Things were still very hard in the winter of 1863. John Ward, a mill-worker from nearby Clitheroe, wrote painstakingly in his journal: “It has been a very poor time for me all the time owing to the American war which seems as far off being settled as ever. The Mill I work in was stopped all last winter during which time I had three shillings per week allowed by the relief committee which barely kept me alive . . . My clothes and bedding is wearing out very fast and I have no means of getting any more . . . If things do not mend this summer I will try somewhere else or something else, for I cant go much further with what I am at.”
Mrs Hodgson was beginning to feel the same. The middle classes, who had flourished on the cotton trade, had built themselves fine houses and bought candelabra and silverware, plated goods and door furniture made by Edwin Hodgson’s of 62 King Street. Now no more houses were being built. Between 1861 and 1864, 1,193 petitions were filed in Manchester Bankruptcy Court. Three hundred and thirty-eight mills disappeared for ever. Mrs Hodgson’s account books were more and more discouraging. Frances often found her looking tired and depressed, as she took off her black bonnet on returning from King Street. Years after, Frances recalled how her mother’s hands trembled, as she took off her bonnet and said, “I am afraid I am not a good business woman.” But she did not go bankrupt. She sold the business to Penman and Butt, who, long afterwards, were still flourishing at that address.
Islington Square was dirtier and more depressing than ever. The big houses at one side of the Square, which had stood empty for years, were being demolished to make way for smaller ones. The Hadfields moved out to pleasanter air at Strawberry Hill. Mrs Hodgson took a smaller h
ouse at 1 Gore Street, Greenheys, Chorlton on Medlock. She was glad to be listed in the Directory as a “householder” at last. She had not enjoyed her years as an “ironmonger”. But the interest on the proceeds of the sale of the business was not really sufficient to live on. They would have to try “somewhere else or something else”.
Then the letter came from America. William Boond, Eliza Hodgson’s brother, had gone to Tennessee years before. He suggested that the family join him. He had a dry-goods store in Knoxville. The Knoxville Whig of 16th November 1864 carries his advertisement—“William Boond, Grocer, Provision Dealer and Commission Merchant, Corner of Gay and Union Streets”. He had prospered during the war. He believed he could find work for the boys. It was a cheerful letter and it came at a cheerless time.
It was several years since the peak period of emigration to America, but the war had stimulated rather than suppressed interest in the New World. John Ward of Clitheroe was not alone in following every move in the Civil War and in the election of November 1864. The violent effect of American affairs on the economy of Lancashire at least made America seem nearer. The new screw-steamers were crossing the Atlantic in between ten and fourteen days. The prospect did not seem too daunting, though the Hodgson children had travelled no further than Rhyl, and Eliza no further than York, on that honeymoon visit exactly twenty years before. A poet in the Illustrated London News had compared going to America with going to Heaven. All sorts of joyful things would await them “once landed on that other shore”. It seemed possible.