by Ann Thwaite
Mere amusement was not enough; it took moral purpose as well to run a successful magazine. Godey’s editor was Sarah Josepha Hale. She sympathized with unpopular causes, such as women’s right to participate in charity fairs or collect funds for the Bunker Hill monument. She steered a careful course between two extremes. One was a belated eighteenth-century view of the elegant female who had wept, fainted and clung through the lesser fiction of the last two generations—the other the contemporary concept of the “new” woman who cultivated her mind, had opinions and pronounced hard words correctly. Mrs Hale printed many sops to her readers but her own message always was “you have a mind; cultivate it. Home is woman’s proper sphere; stay in it. Woman’s influence is profound; use it. Watch your diet, get plenty of fresh air and exercise and wear your India rubbers when it rains.” Women would be better wives and mothers if they used their minds. It was all very well for young girls to love the moon, write in a Lilliputian handwriting and read Byron (though they were not to think of his sins). After twenty-one, a girl should value common sense. The stories in the magazine were romantic, of course. Seamstresses and governesses married the only sons of their mistresses, widows of the town millionaire But young women also gave up everything to go as missionaries to foreign lands or found themselves married to rakes and drunkards, whom they usually reformed. With the opening up of the West, the etiquette columns were no longer so likely to have advice about stepping into a carriage “with measured action and premeditated grace”. There was a new feeling for reality in the air. Frances’ favourite names, Kathleen, Rowena, Clarence and Gerald, were still in abundant use. But Effie and Emmie and Joe had arrived.
The thing that really interested Frances was the column of Answers to Correspondents:
Elaine the Fair—Your story has merit, but is not quite suited to our columns. Never write on both sides of your paper.
Christabel—We do not return rejected manuscript unless stamps are enclosed for postage.
Blair of Athol—We accept your poem “The Knight’s Token”. Shall be glad to hear from you again.
Was it possible that if Frances sent them one of her stories, they would be glad to hear from her again, provided she remembered about not writing on both sides of the paper? She wondered, it had never occurred to her before, how much they paid for stories in magazines.
There were all sorts of problems. Another “answer” bothered her.
March Hare—We cannot receive MSS on which insufficient postage has been paid.
How did one find out what the correct postage was? Herbert had always taken into Knoxville her letters to the Hadfields and the cousins in Manchester, Emily White and Carrie Boond. But she didn’t want him to know she was sending stories to the magazines. He would be sure to laugh and tease her. He was always asking her how she was getting on with her tale of “The Gory Milkman and the Blood-stained Pump”. It seemed to amuse him. Then there was the paper. Airy Fairy Lilian was told to “write in a clear hand on ordinary foolscap paper”. What was ordinary foolscap paper? If the magazine had demanded extraordinary foolscap she would have felt it no more surprising. And how to pay for it, ordinary or extraordinary? The problems were enormous. It was only the real wish, the necessity, of contributing to the family income that made her overcome them.
One day Edwina came in and said: “Aunt Cynthy’s two girls made a dollar yesterday by selling wild grapes in the market.” Aunt Cynthy was the Negro woman who helped with the Hodgson washing.
“It’s a good thing we are not living in Islington Square,” Frances said. “We couldn’t go and gather wild grapes in Back Sydney Street.” Aunt Cynthy’s girls took them to the place where the grapes grew in abundance. They picked all day, sold them in the market, bought paper with the money and had enough left over for the stamps. Frances wrote the story out carefully. It was called “Miss Carruther’s Engagement”. And then she panicked at the thought of the Editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. She imagined him as a mad bull or a tiger with hydrophobia, raging and foaming at the mouth, in consequence of an inadequacy of stamps or a fault in punctuation or handwriting on both sides of the paper. She thought he would return the manuscript with withering comment (“We do not want the hasty composition which needs to be corrected”), or perhaps not return it at all and keep all the stamps.
There was a copy of another less impressive woman’s magazine in the house; Ballous Magazine it was called. Frances decided to try that. The stories were not quite so polished. She was sure hers were better.
This is the letter she sent with her story:
Sir: I enclose stamps for the return of the accompanying MS “Miss Carruther’s Engagement”, if you do not find it suitable for publication in your magazine. My object is remuneration.
Yours respectfully,
F. Hodgson
A Knoxville schoolmaster sometimes called at the house to talk to Frances. Edwina and Edith would crouch at the top of the stairs listening. Edith remembered wishing she could “go to school again and study history and philosophy, just to be able to talk to Mr S. the way Frances did”. So now Frances was engaging in that conversation, “sparkling, polished and intellectual beyond measure”, which she had imagined for the Miss Hadfields in Islington Square. And the schoolmaster had another use. He was pressed into service. He would take the package into Knoxville, buy the stamps with the wild-grape money and lend his address so that the reply would avoid the boys.
Frances swung from optimism to despair and back to optimism again. She had no idea how much magazines paid. “Suppose it’s only about a dollar. I’m sure it’s worth more but they might be very stingy.” She started to make calculations. “The magazine costs two dollars a year. And if they have fifty thousand subscribers, they haven’t many stories in each number, it would be a thousand dollars!” When the letter came, it was very puzzling. It began by praising the story. Its sole criticism was that it was rather long. It did not say it was rejected, nor that it was accepted, and it said nothing about remuneration. Frances, with the sound business sense she was to show all her life, asked for the story back. She claimed that she never had a story rejected in all her sixty years of writing except for reasons of length. But this story she asked the editor to return. And she then sent it to the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book.
Mrs Hale replied: “Sir, Your story—‘Miss Carruther’s Engagement’—is so distinctly English that our reader is not sure of its having been written by an American. We see that the name [it was the schoolmaster’s] given us for the address is not that of the writer. Will you kindly inform us if the story is original?”
Frances replied: “The story is original. I am English myself and have been only a short time in America.”
Mrs Hale was still not convinced. It was one thing for magazines and book publishers to use English material without payment. It was quite another if a Tennessee girl was trying to get money under false pretences. “Before we decide will you send us another story?”
Frances sat down and wrote a story called “Hearts and Diamonds”. Remembering Ballou’s editor had complained of length, she made the new story exactly half as long. And then, at last: “Sir, We have decided to accept your two stories, and enclose payment. Fifteen dollars for ‘Hearts and Diamonds’ and twenty dollars for ‘Miss Carruther’s Engagement’. We shall be glad to hear from you again.”
“Hearts and Diamonds” finally appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book for June 1868 and the other story the following October. Frances, at eighteen, was a published writer—though the stories appeared under a nom de plume: THE SECOND. The first story appears as five solid pages of print without a single illustration, but it is far from dull. There are some sound, if romantic, democratic sentiments. “I am happy to say I am not ashamed of my forefathers. I believe one of my grandmothers was washerwoman to a nobleman’s wife; in my opinion an infinitely more exciting position than that held by the lady herself. Imagine the fun on scrubbing days!” There are some pleasant interjections fr
om the author, most of them beginning with the word “apropos”. The setting is a “watering place”. When Valerie Belaire vows to make Pendennis Charrington propose to her, the author interposes, “Very wrong and foolish, was it not? Still I have nothing to do with that, I am only telling a story.” It ends with the sentence: “Hearts proved the winning card in this game, at least.”
After this success—thirty-five dollars was a tremendous help to the family’s financial position—there was no stopping Frances from telling stories. What had seemed to be pleasure and self-indulgence now took on quite a different aspect. Part of the cheque (as seemed only right, after all the fashion plates in Godey’s Lady’s Book) went on alpaca—“shiny, silky stuff. Mama, who was an excellent needlewoman,” wrote Edith, “helped us make the frocks. Fannie’s was straw-color with blue scallops and mine was blue with straw-color scallops.”
It was exciting, this summer of 1868, seeing that first story in print. What was not quite so exciting was to sit down to the writing of light romance when nothing romantic ever happened in your own life. Noah’s Ark which had seemed so perfectly situated—with the view of the Allegheny mountains beyond the pine trees—now seemed unbearably isolated. Life was somewhere else. The Party was in another room.
In 1869 the Hodgson family moved into Knoxville itself. John was not often there. His nephew Vivian years later said: “Fate did not deal kindly with him.” To his mother’s horror—the fact was never mentioned in the family—he had taken a job as bartender with John Scherf at Lamar House. Herbert, good steady Bert, was still working for J. Wood, the watch-maker. But John was behind the bar at Lamar House. It was all very well in a story to celebrate the fact that your grandmother was a noblewoman’s washerwoman, but to have a brother pouring drinks at Lamar House was hard to bear. When she was over seventy, Frances recalled Lamar House, “where I think at that time all the balls were given”. But she never mentioned John George. He goes out of the story for ever.
Mrs Hodgson goes out too. She died on 17th March 1870, aged fifty-five. Frances, aged twenty, was left in charge of the family in the roomy but dilapidated house, called Vagabondia, with its yard running down to the Tennessee River. Frances’ occupation in the 1870 census was given as music teacher. Swan Burnett was in Knoxville too now. The Tennessee State Guards were busy suppressing the first Ku Klux Klans and Swan was appointed to the State Guards’ Hospital.
There is a vivid picture of Frances and Swan and of the life in the house on the Tennessee River in Frances’ book Dolly or Vagabondia, which was first published as a serial in Peterson’s Magazine in 1873, but not until 1877 as a book. The story is set in London, in Bloomsbury Place, but there is no doubt that it reflects a good deal of the atmosphere in Knoxville after Mrs Hodgson’s death. The family in the story is a “Bohemian” one—the brother an artist (so much more romantic than a watch-maker). There is a guitar hanging on the wall, and the idea is that feelings of freedom and unconventionality do a great deal to compensate for lack of money.
Bert, like Philip in the story, also had a young wife by this time. The 1870 census records her as Ann, aged eighteen, born in Tennessee. The Crewes in the story, like the Hodgsons, are extremely hard-up. The girls spend a great deal of time unpicking bodices and renovating skirts in order to appear reasonably respectable in the eyes of the Philistines. Claud Cockburn once described the Bohemian in literature as “a kind of cultural bank-robber engaged by the author to attack the intellectual strong-rooms of the bourgeoisie”. The trouble with Frances’ Bohemians is that one feels their Bohemianism is only skin-deep. Given a decent bank-balance, they would happily knuckle down as insiders.
Griffith Donne, who is certainly Swan Burnett, is not a Bohemian. He is patient, jealous, longing to marry. His idea of bliss, like that of T. Tembarom (another unlikely hero, fifty years later), is a little house in the suburbs. Reading Griffith’s words, one seems to be overhearing Swan talking to Frances. “It was just the very thing we should want if we were married. Six rooms and kitchen and cupboard and those sort of contrivances . . . There is a garden of a few yards in the front and one or two rose bushes. I don’t know whether they ever bloom but, if they do, you could wear them in your hair . . . And, by the way, I saw a small sofa at a place in town which was the right size to fit into a sort of alcove there is in the front parlour—a comfortable, plump little affair, covered with green—the sort of thing I should like to have in our house, when we have one.”
Dolly, like Frances, is not in the least interested in green sofas. Dolly’s weakness, like Frances’, “lies in wanting everybody to like her—men, women and children; yes, down to babies and dogs and cats . . . She can’t help doing odd things and making odd speeches that rouse people and tempt them into liking her.” Dolly, like Frances, knows that “nervous headaches are useful things”. Griffith, like Swan, has to wait for seven years before he persuades the girl he loves to marry him. Swan had waited four when he went away again—to Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York. He began to specialize in what was to be his life’s work, the study of the eye, at this time combined with the study of the ear.
On the surface, life in Vagabondia was pleasant enough. Knoxville, five years after the end of the Civil War, was a very different place from the decaying, discouraging small town they had first seen on their arrival from England. Edward Dicey, the English journalist who was soon to become editor of the London Observer, gives a picture of small-town American life at this period. “Probably there is as much scandal and gossip here as in the Old World country town but there are not, as yet, the social divisions which exist with us. If you inquire the names of the owners of the handsomest houses, you will find that one, perhaps, began life as a stable boy, another was a waiter a few years ago in a hotel of the town and a third was a bricklayer in early life. On the other hand, some of the poorest people in the place are persons who were of good family and good education in the Old World. This very mixture of all classes . . . gives a freedom, and also an originality, to the society in small towns, which you would not find under similar circumstances in England.”
Frances seemed to enjoy Knoxville’s small pleasures as much as anyone. There was music-making and sing-songs round the piano—Bert played and so did Frances. A cousin, Fred Boond (was he William’s son?) played the bass viol. Charlie Haynes played the violin and Frank Bridges, the flute. Pleasant Fahnestock, who married Edith, was an indifferent performer on the clarinet. There was boating on the river; there were picnics, church socials, those “balls” at Lamar House, candy-pulls and parties. But it was hardly stimulating intellectually. The census reveals that Fahnestock was a carpenter and Bridges a house-painter. Perhaps they would one day own the handsomest houses in town but for the moment there was always, for all of them, a nagging shortage of money. And, unlike the characters in Dolly, none of the real inhabitants of Vagabondia or their friends had rich relatives waiting in the wings. The only way out and up was by hard work.
Frances worked. She had stories published at this time in every magazine in America, “except Harper’s, Scribner’s and the Atlantic. I was not sufficiently certain of my powers,” she wrote years later, “to send anything to them. It would have seemed to me a kind of presumption to aspire to entering the world of actual literature.” Her stories at this time were pot-boilers in the literal sense. Her object was remuneration and nothing else. But she wrote so much (“five or six little ten or twelve dollar stories a month”) that she was able to start putting some money aside for a visit to England.
Swan, in New York, received the full impact of her frustration with life in Knoxville. She was calling him Jerome at this time.
My dear Jerome:
. . . There is a very strong feeling deep in my heart, telling me that something must be done to raise us all a little from the dust, and the very strength of that feeling lies in the fact that I am sure, sure, sure I must do it. You have no need to smile. Nobody else will do it, because nobody else cares a cent whether we d
rag through our wretched lives as shabby, genteel beggars, or not. We are not shabby, genteel beggars, says Bert, when I fire up a little—but we are shabby, genteel beggars, I say. We are not respectable people in our own eyes, whatever we may be in any one else’s. I would as soon be a thief as feel like one, and I do feel like one . . .
Respectability doesn’t only mean food and a house—it means pretty, graceful things; a front street not close to the gas works; an occasional new book to provide against mental starvation; a chance to see the world; a piano and fifteen cents spending money (not to be squandered recklessly of course). “Man cannot live by bread alone,” said the minister to his drunken old parishioner. “No,” said the apt non-convert, “He mun hae’ a few wedgetables,” which is my opinion. What I want is a “few wedgetables”.
What is there to feed my poor, little, busy brain in this useless, weary, threadbare life? I can’t eat my own heart forever. I can’t write things that are worth reading if I never see things which are worth seeing, or speak to people who are worth hearing. I cannot weave silk if I see nothing but calico—calico—calico. It is all calico, it seems to me. Ah, me! Ah, me! see what a tangled skein of thread for one poor little woman to unwind.