Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

They took passages on the ss Moravian, a first-class, powerful screw-steamer, owned by the Montreal Ocean Steam-Ship Company, sailing from Liverpool on Thursday, 11th May 1865, for Quebec The journey was four hundred miles shorter and cheaper than to New York, and the Company guaranteed to convey them, at very moderate rates, to most of the principal towns in Canada and the United States, by arrangement with the Grand Trunk Railway Company of Canada.

  The Liverpool newspapers on the day they sailed carried the report of Lincoln’s assassination on 15th April. They also carried the news of a FRIGHTFUL STEAMBOAT DISASTER. Fifteen thousand Federal prisoners had drowned in the Mississippi, following a boiler explosion. More encouragingly, they announced: “General Johnston has surrendered to Sherman and at length the war may be definitely pronounced at an end.”

  What definitely was at an end was Frances’ childhood. She was fifteen and a half and her character was formed. The characteristics she showed then, so she herself maintained, were to stay with her for the rest of her life. She was curious, romantic, buoyant, compassionate, generous, restless and not very wise. Thirty years later she said that she could not see she was much wiser than she had been on that cold spring day when she left England for the first time.

  Chapter Two

  My Object is Remuneration

  1865–1873

  The Hodgson family reached Tennessee in June, after two weeks of travelling by train through Canada and the United States. The inside of the train was plushy and thickly tasselled, with fancy mirrors and brass cuspidors. Not long before, Robert Chambers in his Edinburgh Journal had recorded his disturbance that American railway conductors “affected a dash of the gentleman and, off duty, passed for respectable personages at any of the hotels”. But Frances was delighted with everything, and most of all with the view from the windows of hundreds upon hundreds of miles of American forest—a fertile wilderness such as England had not been since it was a Roman province. In Islington Square there had not been one tree.

  But there was more to Tennessee than trees. Three months earlier, Andrew Jackson, the Military Governor, announced to the people that “the shackles have been formally stricken from the links of more than 275,000 slaves in the state”. The decision was bitterly disputed, of course. One slave-owner spoke of “the nigger” as “that dark fountain from which has flowed all our woes”. If the slaves had to be freed, he wanted a fair price for his belongings and the coloured population removed beyond the limits of the state. He feared for his life if the Freedmen remained in Tennessee.

  In this divided state, it was not only the slave-owners who feared for their lives. While the Confederates controlled East Tennessee, the Unionists had suffered. Some had been executed for bridge-burning, many had been imprisoned and some had died in prison. Unionist property had been confiscated for military use. Cruelties had been committed “to gratify old party and private animosities”. Now the Unionists had their revenge. “I love East Tennessee and I sorrow for her now,” wrote an ex-Confederate to a Unionist friend in December 1865. “Would to God that something could be done to assuage this bitterness and restore East Tennessee to peace and harmony.”

  Ruin and destruction were evident on every hand: burned houses, ravaged land, the detritus of war. The armies had left the land barren. There were deaths from starvation. Many Confederates, even after taking the Oath of Allegiance, were kept prisoner in the North. Those who did return, both Unionist and Confederate, were weakened by war. Amputation, the only cure for infected wounds, was common. In addition to the war casualties, which had reduced manpower sharply, there was a wholesale desertion of rural areas by the Negroes, who thought their new freedom meant freedom from work. How could they settle down and work quietly for men they hated? They longed for their own forty acres and a mule. When there seemed little hope of that, the towns were packed with vagrant Negroes. On 23rd August 1865 the Knoxville Whig commented: “This congestion in cities and towns of such crowds of colored folks, to live in idleness and on rations furnished by the government, is all wrong. It is doing the blacks an injury that will show itself after a while. All sorts of depredations are committed by the blacks.” Released slaves and underemployed soldiers roamed the country in bands. Murders and robberies were so common that few people went out at night. From all over the state came reports of atrocities. A typical one was dated 12th May 1865 (the day after the Hodgson family left England), relating how three men of the Second Tennessee United States Mounted Infantry forced their way into a home in Hardin Country, West Tennessee, violated a mother and her two daughters and hanged them until they were almost dead, in an attempt to find some money they were supposed to have hidden.

  No one had money—least of all William Boond, Eliza Hodgson’s brother, Grocer, Provision Dealer and Commission Merchant, whose cheerful letter had started the family on their long journey. That letter had been written the year before, when his store had been flourishing on the liberal spending of men who knew they might soon be dead. Now the war was over; spending was reduced to necessities and there were few enough of those. Uncle William said he could employ Herbert, who was now nineteen, but there was no work in Knoxville for John George and nowhere for the family to live.

  Having seen Knoxville, Frances was not altogether sorry. Both armies had swept through it and Knoxville in 1865 was a sad place. Years later Frances described it as Delisleville in her novel, In Connection with the De Willoughhy Claim:

  Delisleville had never been a practical place and now its day seemed utterly over. Its gentlemanly pretence at business had received blows too heavy to recover from until time had lapsed. Its broad-verandahed houses had seen hard usage, its pavements were worn and broken, and, in many streets, tufted with weeds; its fences were dilapidated, its rich families had lost their possessions, and those who had not been driven away by their necessities were gazing aghast at a future to which it seemed impossible to adjust their ease-loving, slave-attended, luxurious habits of the past. Houses built of wood after the Southern fashion, do not well withstand neglect and ill fortune. Porticos and pillars and trellis-work, which had been picturesque and imposing when they had been well cared for and gleamed white among creepers and trees, lost their charm drearily when paint peeled off, trees were cut down and vines were dragged away and died. Over the whole of the gay little place there had fallen an air of discouragement, desolation and decay.

  Uncle William, however, remained cheerful and full of suggestions. He had a grist-mill in Dandridge. John George could work there, and there was a little log-cabin the Hodgsons could have in New Market, just twenty-five miles from Knoxville and only a few miles from Dandridge. It was not what Frances had imagined when she had first heard they were coming to America and she had remembered the plantation life of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with people dressed in white sitting on verandahs covered in vines.

  They left Herbert in Knoxville and went to New Market, hoping for the best. Most of New Market had been intensely loyal to the Government in the war. It was the home of Russell Thornburgh, the senior major of the First Regiment of the Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry. Violent anti-Confederate feeling expressed itself in open letters nailed to trees. This one is dated the very month that the Hodgsons arrived in New Market:

  Spetial Order No 1

  In the Woods near New Market Tenn

  July the 24th 65

  All darned Rebels are hereby notified to lieve at wonce, if found her at the expiration of ten days from the date of this order and no preparation to lieve Thrashing mashiens will sit at wonce enough to thrash all crops with the usual tole hickry withs and cowhides or anything els that may be required on the occasion. We are working by the order that you theving God forsaken helldeserving Rebels issued four years ago Union men and Rebels cannot live together which we find not altogether bogus

  We are vary

  respectively Old Soldier

  Perhaps the empty log-cabin William Boond found for his sister and her family was one deserted by some “God forsaken hell
deserving Rebels”, frightened from their home. It was a simple building in a simple place.

  There was one unpaved street, splashed with tobacco spittle—that “detestable yellow dye which mars everything in this country”. The street was lined with wooden houses, some of boards painted white and some made of rough logs. At one end of it there was a tannery and the Baptist Church, at the other a blacksmith’s and the Methodist Church. There was a narrow winding stream beside the street, and trees everywhere. The surrounding forest and hills shut New Market off from the outside world. A log-cabin was appropriate. It was quite like Fenimore Cooper, except that, whatever anyone else might be up to, the Indians were no longer on the warpath. Frances asked about the Indians and the answers did not sound like Fenimore Cooper. “They gener’ly come a beggin’ somepn good to eat,” one of their neighbours told her. “Vittles or a chaw er terbacker or a dram er whisky is what they’re arter.”

  The New Market villagers might not have victuals to spare for the Indians but they were very good to the Hodgsons. They found it pleasant to talk to people who had nothing to do with old quarrels or current controversies. Their peculiar situation aroused a good deal of friendly gossip, and gossip was the basic entertainment of New Market. The Hodgsons’ situation was peculiar. They were in the meanest and smallest house in the village. It was known that most of the time they had scarcely enough to eat. But “in a community where shoes and even undergarments were not always possible, the girls appeared in the neatest of sprigged muslin dresses, white stockings and ankle-strap shoes”. The normal dress of the New Market girls was an unwaisted and ankle-length sack of coarse linen or, in the winter, linsey-woolsey, with a poncho-type of hole for the head, secured by a drawstring at the neck.

  Mrs Hodgson had, of course, brought their wardrobes from Manchester, and not only their clothes but several barrels of treasured household effects. The floorboards might be bare and the table rough, but Mrs Hodgson still had some fine linen and silver from more prosperous days, and she would not sell it. John came down from the mill once a week, bringing corn-meal, hominy, bacon and molasses. Herbert sent as much as he could from Knoxville, but they were often hungry—and grateful when Mrs Jenkins, from down the road, thought they might like a taste of some “biskits” she had just baked, or Bill Peters passed the time of day and presented Mrs Hodgson with some cuts from a pig he had just slaughtered. Frances remembered such acts of kindness all her life. “New Market was full of graduating angels of a simple gentle kind,” she wrote in a letter in 1922. “I am sure they are all in Heaven now.”

  Their nearest and kindest neighbours were the local doctor and his family. The Burnetts lived in “a wooden structure, fairly comfortable in a primitive sort of way”, which stood across a clearing from the Hodgsons’ cabin. Dr John Burnett was the only doctor for many miles. He would ride off to his patients among the hills, his saddle bags full of medicines and instruments. He was often away for days at a time. In his scant leisure, he liked to read and he liked to talk. He was a kindly man, warm and approachable. It may well be that the devoted Southern fathers of Frances’ stories Esmeralda and Louisiana owe something to John Burnett. He had four children: three girls, Joe, Ann and May, and a boy, Swan. Swan was also a reader but mainly, until Frances came, of his father’s medical books. Seven years before he had been walking in the fields and slashing at the heads of corn with his knife, when it had slipped and wounded his leg. After that he always limped, and read because he could not run. Now he was eighteen. Frances introduced him to Dickens and Tennyson and Thackeray, and he began to love her.

  In some moods, later on in life, Frances spoke of “those awful starving days in New Market” when they “went without—food, clothes and fire”. In other moods, and more often, she remembered the good things. Swan Burnett did not count for much, the limping, pale, adoring boy, but there was a great deal that was good, that first summer in Tennessee. They rarely saw a newspaper. It was only when Herbert managed the occasional journey from Knoxville that they heard of the violence and lawlessness that were sweeping the State. There was only one train a day and it was rare for anyone to get off or get on. The girls used to go down to the station sometimes to see the train go through. One day a Unionist private soldier leaned his prison-clipped bald head out of the window and said, “Say, gals, don’t you want a lock o’ my har.” Frances never forgot his face.

  But for the most part the outside world was outside, beyond the hills. All you could see were the hills and the forests and the vast clear blue sky. A field sloped upwards beyond the log-cabin. There were green aisles of tall, broad-leaved Indian corn, and beyond the cornfield, the forest. “There is a wide, wide distance—a distance which is more than a matter of mere space—between a great, murky, manufacturing town in England, and the mountains and forests in Tennessee—forests which seemed endlessly deep, mountains covered with their depths of greenness, their pines and laurels, swaying and blooming, vines of wild grape and scarlet trumpet-flowers swaying and blooming among them, tangled with the branches of sumach and sassafras.” Frances stopped pretending in the old way. “There was no need to pretend. There were real things enough” She still wrote but the stories took a new tone. “Sir Marmaduke Maxwelton was less prominent, and the hair of Edith Somerville flowed less freely over the pages. Hair and eyes seemed less satisfying and less necessary. She began to deal with emotions . . . In Islingon Square she had imagined—in the forests she began to feel.”

  Frances spent a great deal of time in the forest, but she and Edith knew how worried their mother was and that they must try and earn some money. They tried everything in those early days. Embroidery—and people didn’t want it. Music lessons—and people thought them too young. Chickens—and they wouldn’t hatch, and when they did they died of the gapes. There was the awful problem, too, of having to sit on the hen to make her sit on the nest. They tried setting goose eggs and only one hatched and that wasn’t a goose. It was a gander, and a plank fell on it and killed it. Late in 1865, soon after her sixteenth birthday, Frances set up her own “Select Seminary”. Actually it was not very select. She would take any pupils who were available. She managed to attract eight children, who paid their fees in cabbages, carrots, beets, potatoes and eggs.

  It did not last long. In 1866 William Boond’s business finally closed down and Herbert, now twenty, got himself a better-paid job with Knoxville’s leading jeweller, watch-maker and mender. John was tired of Dandridge; he wanted to go to town too. The whole family moved to a frame-house a few miles outside Knoxville on the Clinton Pike. The daughter of their Knoxville doctor described the house like this: “It was a planked-up arrangement with crude windows and doorways that were practically covered with morning glory vines. It was the ordinary cabin home but it was neat and home-like and nestled among pines.” Swan Burnett was sad that they were leaving New Market but he was, in any case, due to begin his studies at the Miami Medical College, Cincinnati, Ohio. From there, he wrote adoring letters to the house on Clinton Pike and Frances answered them, imagining as she wrote, not Swan, but one of the heroes of her own stories with a more romantic name. (For some reason she never could accept Swan’s name and never used it.)

  Frances spent more and more time out of doors during the summers of 1866 and 1867. Though closer to Knoxville, the new home was even more deeply rural than New Market. It was very small and perched on a small hill, as if some flood, receding, had left it there. They called it Noah’s Ark. “One stood on the little porch of Noah’s Ark and looked out over undergrowth and woods and slopes and hills, which ended in three ranges of mountains, one behind the other. The farthest was the Alleghenies . . . There were no neighbours but the woods. There was no village. The town was too far away to be often visited by people who must walk. There was nothing to distract.”

  Frances made herself a place she called the “Bower”, in among the sassafras, sumach and dogwood. A wild grapevine made the roof. The floor was moss and grass and pine-needles. For one of
the few times in her life, perhaps, as she lay there, she was really happy. She didn’t feel that she was missing anything. She felt she was at the Party, that this was what life was all about. She wrote there and she read there, a new book when she could get hold of one, which was rarely. She got to know the small animals and insects and the bright birds—but there was no one to tell her what they were called. There had been only sparrows in Manchester. She gathered wild flowers, but she did not know their names. She felt herself under a strong personal obligation to Christopher Columbus—although, when she wrote, she still wrote of England and of its people.

  And she couldn’t spend her whole life in the Bower. She had to come home for dinner and for bed. Money seemed scarcer than ever. Everything was wearing out. John, mysteriously, was bringing home less than ever. Frances exaggerated their predicament until she made them all laugh. “I laugh instead of crying,” she used to say. “There is some fun in laughing and there is none in crying.” But the sprigged muslins were shabby and laughing made them feel even tighter under the arms. Someone lent Mrs Hodgson a copy of Godey’s Lady’s Book and Frances, Edith and Edwina pored over the coloured engravings on fold-out sheets. They could not imagine Bert or John wanting a shooting scene embroidered on their handkerchiefs and they were not taken with the designs for a pen wiper (“finished off in tassels of brown silk soutache”) or the “square in Guipure Netting, suitable for doyleys”—but the vandyke lappets and fernando mantles were delightful. They longed for the latest fashions, although the voluminous skirts over waist-pinching stays would not have been very comfortable for bird-watching. And it was some consolation for their deprivation to read of the increase in the number of deaths by burning “by the fashion of wearing crinolines”.

  There was no chance of starting another school. There were no children near enough at hand; and, anyway, was it really fair to set yourself up as a teacher if your arithmetic was so bad? Frances went on reading Godey’s Lady’s Book. This was the dominant woman’s magazine of the time and claimed to provide “honeyed delights for a lady’s vacant hours”. It is worth examining in some detail, for its values and standards were to have a considerable influence on Frances and her early writing. “A new spirit was at work in middle-class America. A new prosperity” (and even Tennessee was rapidly becoming more prosperous) “was feeding aspirations for what was popularly called culture, a notion vaguely associated with the printed page.” American publishing was flourishing, with more and more steam-power presses in use. There was no international copyright, so publishers could print any British writer they fancied and not pay him a single cent. It was not only the long dead who were produced in vast cheap editions. Beside the “Beauties and Gems” and “Pithy Extracts” from Shakespeare, there were uniform volumes of Scott and Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton on every bookshelf.