by Ann Thwaite
In New Market, Frances kept herself sane with a correspondence with Richard Gilder. She was proof-reading the final chapters of the serial of That Lass o’ Lowrie’s.
New Market
Dear Mr Gilder:
. . . If you are sure it will be best all round, leave out that final paragraph. Let me tell you it cost me a pang to write it—for me the book ended with Joan and Derrick in the garden, but I felt as if I must drag the rest in, and I will wager you all the immense profits the book will eventually bring me, that if it is left out I shall be promptly set upon by fifty thousand ghastly people who will ask me why I did not “do something” with Anice, and also if “it isn’t rather incomplete”.
The question suggests itself, however, as to whether I am writing for these people. I would rather not—but must I?
. . . Sometimes I hate that girl, too. She seems too Sunday Schooly. She is not what I meant her to be, but everybody won’t dislike her as much as you do. Thank you for saying I shall not make such a mistake again. I don’t think I shall . . .
And from another letter:
. . . Thank you for the kind things you said. They help me to believe more in myself and when I can do that it makes such a difference. And there is no danger of my becoming vain.
. . . The fact is I work very hard, but just now it is impossible that I should do the work I like best. I don’t mean, you know, to urge that threadbare old plea, “I must live,” I should not consider that necessary, or even desirable, but then you see there are four of us, so the miserable, obtrusive pot must boil.
On 30th October 1876, Mr Scribner sent her a proposal for the publication of That Lass O’ Lowrie’s as a book. “We have read with interest that portion of your story which has thus far appeared in Scribner’s Monthly . . . We will bring out the book in handsome style and bear all expenses attendant to its appearance and will allow you a copyright of 10% on all copies sold after the first one thousand. We ask you not to require any copyright on the sale of one thousand copies in order that we may thus be able to reimburse ourselves for the outlay (a considerable sum) in making the stereotype plates. This arrangement is one we frequently make with an author. Hoping that it will prove satisfactory to you . . .”
The formal contract was sent on 16th January 1877. “The formidable appearance of the document need not alarm you,” Charles Scribner wrote reassuringly, “it is one of our regular forms.” Frances, full of the fact that, at nine months, Vivian had just taken his first steps, sent the contract to Swan in Washington and he intervened to ask the price the book would sell at. He also asked about complimentary copies. Scribner’s said they had “no regular custom in regard to presentation copies but in this case will with pleasure put aside a dozen copies for Mrs Burnett and make no charge whatever for them”.
Scribner’s knew they were on to a good thing. On 22nd March, J. Blair Scribner wrote to his agent, Charles Welford, in England: “I send by post the early sheets of a new novel by a new novelist, one for which we expect a large sale and a decided success—the book will be published by us early in April. The story has been running as a serial through our Magazine and has attracted a great deal of attention. Now we are anxious to see the book published in England and will sell a duplicate set of sheets . . . for half the cost . . . and with the understanding that, should the book prove a success in England, the author is to receive a fair consideration in the profits. It is our opinion that the author has a brilliant future before her. The story is original and powerful and the scene is laid in the Old Country and therefore particularly suited to an English Audience . . . Please give Mr Warne the first chance.” Business was unsatisfactory, “owing almost entirely to the dull times”. They badly needed a best seller.
In March, Frances, still in New Market, wrote to Richard Gilder. She had agreed he should read the final proofs—she had already read them for the serial—and make any cuts that were necessary.
New Market, March 3 1877
My dear Mr Gilder:
I am glad the book is to be published soon. In a few months I suppose I shall have the satisfaction of knowing whether or not I can do work worth money.
Standing as I do upon the low level of those debased persons to whom money must be the first object, I am degradingly anxious to know that.
. . . If you have cut the rest of the story only as you have the chapters already published, it can only have been to their improvement. In writing it, I made the mistake of forcing myself to write when I had nothing to say.
The book was published in the first week of April 1877. On 28th April Mr Scribner wrote to Frances: “We take pleasure in informing you that your story is meeting with very fair success with the public.” And, showing how incredibly fast publishers could work in those days, he added, just five weeks after he had written to Welford, “We have also to inform you that That Lass O’ Lowrie’s has already been published in England by Messrs F. Warne and Co—and we send you by mail a copy of the English edition.” Scribner told Frances that he had said to Warne “if anything is made out of the Book he must share it with the author, otherwise he may not get Mrs Burnett’s next story and she is considered by good judges as the ‘Coming Woman’ in literature”. Warne’s were not, of course, as copyright law then stood, obliged to pay more than the initial sum for the sheets they had bought from Scribner’s—and it seems that they did not, for Scribner, writing to Welford the following October about the English edition of Surly Tim and other Stories, said: “Do not give Warne any particular advantage for he has acted very shabbily about That Lass O’ Lowrie’s. Put them up to the highest bidder.” (Chatto and Windus seem to have won, although there was also a Ward Lock edition.)
In America Scribner’s had ready the third edition of That Lass O’ Lowrie’s, three weeks after the first. The American public loved it. They liked their squalor at a distance. The history of Scribner’s Magazine tells how later, in the nineties, the reading public would permit Kipling a licence they would not tolerate in an American. Certain magazines would publish Arthur Morrison’s realistic stories of slum life in London, but not Stephen Crane’s realistic stories of slum life in New York.
The critics were unanimous in their praise. The New York Herald had “no hesitation in saying that there is no living writer (man or woman) who has Mrs Burnett’s dramatic power in telling a story . . . The publication of That Lass o’ Lowrie’s is a red letter day in the world of literature.” The New York Times, in a column-length review of considerable perception, wrote: “For a first novel, by a young author, as it is said to be, That Lass o’ Lowrie’s is a work of remarkable promise. The tone set in the first chapter is adhered to throughout; the place is a mining village of Lancashire . . . There is no cant in the religion of this book; what lesson it teaches is that good works do not consist in tracts and sage advice, but sympathy and kindliness offered from a footing of equality between giver and receiver.” The theological wars between Craddock and the Rector are “fine pieces of writing, exhibiting a most unusual combination of humour and strength in the author . . . A remarkable point about these characters drawn by Mrs Burnett is their sharpness, their relief. Each is distinct and individual.” The reviewer discovered the weakness in Anice which Frances had expressed in her letter to Richard Gilder: “The difficulty with her characterization is that she is made an admirable character—one to be imitated—whereas, in truth, she is a wretched, dwarfed personality . . . It has a broad North Country dialect which interferes very little with the understanding of the text and after a little becomes positively pleasing.” The Springfield Republican, a much respected paper, called it “wonderfully fresh, clear and strong”, and talked of “the masterly portraiture of one of the finest creatures of fiction—Joan Lowrie”. And, most amazing and exciting of all, the Boston Transcript declared: “We know of no more powerful work from a woman’s hand in the English language, not even excepting the best of George Eliot.”
Frances gave Vivian’s baby carriage to some people
called Snoddy (it can now be seen at the University of Tennessee) and joined Swan in Washington, in a little brick house he had found in M Street, N.W. She wrote to New York:
Washington, April 30 1877
My dear Mr Gilder:
Having read about fifteen reviews, I sat down and gave a sigh of relief. The throwing up of hats I defer until the sale of the tenth thousand.—Until then I can’t afford it, unless I could borrow a hat from some bloated aristocrat with two.
. . . Don’t you wish you could see the sonnet I received the other day, beginning, “Fame sits upon her lofty pinnacle, etc.” Source, Melledgeville, Georgia. Doro alternately reads notices in a sonorous voice and snubs me to reduce me to submission, but secretly he quails before the eagle eye of the “Coming Woman”.
Very sincerely,
F. H. Burnett
Washington in 1877 had broad avenues but the streets were ill paved. Frances describes it in her novel In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim: “The public buildings alone had dignity; for the rest it wore a singularly provincial and uncompleted aspect. Its plan was simple and splendid in its vistas and noble spaces, but the houses were irregular and without beauty of form; Negro shanties huddled against some of the most respectable.” Frances mentions this characteristic in another story: “In almost every wide street one saw small shabby cottages or tumbledown shanties side by side with the largest and most comfortable homes. It was the means of showing one contrasts in life.” It was like a symbolic illustration to one of Frances’ stories, though, strangely enough, her Washington novel, Through One Administration, is perhaps the only book Frances wrote in which all the characters are in more or less the same social circumstances.
The M Street house looked across empty lots to the British Legation, then a sort of outpost in the sparsely settled area between Washington and Georgetown. The first months in Washington were not good in spite of the reception of That Lass. The house was uncomfortable. Both Frances and Vivian were ill. They had a short holiday that summer at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, but it was rather overshadowed by the vexed question of the unauthorized publication of some of her early stories. Peterson’s, anxious to cash in on the sweeping success of That Lass, prepared several volumes of stories. Frances had retained no rights in the stories and there was nothing to stop them—but she asked that they should make it clear that they were reprinting stories from earlier years. This they did not do, and Frances was unjustly accused by a New York paper of “engaging in the speculative enterprise of selling chaff after wheat . . . ‘Theo’ bears all the marks of a tentative, crude essay and is to That Lass o’ Lowrie’s as a tyro’s stiff pale etching to the broad, glowing performance of an experienced hand.” Frances was much hurt and Scribner’s agreed to circulate a card explaining the position. The statement specifically exonerated her old friend Charles Peterson. “He was my earliest and best friend and to his thoughtful generosity I owe more than I can ever repay.”
“Theo” was, moreover, as Frances told Gilder in a letter in September 1877, “full of the most ridiculous typographical errors—‘Bacon’ for ‘Byron’, ‘wild’ for ‘mild’, ‘viante’ for ‘riant’ etc. etc. It is a pathetic sort of thing to me now. It is such a nice, idiotic, sixteeny little thing. I was a much nicer girl when I wrote that than I am now. I did not know whether to laugh or cry last night when I went over it.” Swan raged at seeing a Peterson advertisement announcing “five new books by Mrs Burnett” on the same page as the one thousand and two novels by Mrs Southworth.
In the following years, 1878 and 1879, Scribner’s themselves issued a number of volumes of the early stories. If the “youthful stories” were to appear in book form, it was surely better that Frances should revise them and make clear how young she had been when she wrote them. “They are the children of her brain,” Swan wrote to Scribner, “and she has a natural affection for them and does not like them wandering around as outcasts. They have done all the harm they are capable of doing her and a revised and authorized edition may undo some of the harm already effected.” Frances herself, in a preface to two of the most interesting “novelettes”—“The Tide on the Moaning Bar” and “A Quiet Life”—called them “these small waifs and strays”. But not everyone was disarmed. In my copy of Earlier Stories, First Series, someone has written in pencil “A decidedly mediocre authoress—her idea of experience is cynical worldliness.”
Surly Tim and Other Stories was published by Scribner’s on 16th October 1877. Frances prefaced them with a note that these were the early stories which she thought “most worthy of preservation” in book form. But her main preoccupation that autumn, as they moved into a more satisfactory house at 813 13th Street, was her new novel, Haworth’s. She was conscious of looking at the critics over her shoulder this time—just as Mrs Gaskell had been when following Mary Barton with North and South. “The difference between this and the Lass,” she wrote to Gilder, “is that then I was simply writing a story, and now I am trying to please the critics. It is a fatal kind of thing and I am trying desperately to overcome the feeling, and perhaps I shall in time. It would do your heart good to see me write and cut out, and brood and groan and get up and lead myself round the room by the bang. Tell my dear H de K [Helena de Kay was Mrs Gilder’s maiden name] that her pet abomination is nearly pulled up by the roots and that it seems likely I shall write Finis to it and the new book at the same time . . .”
Frances thought it might be good. “I enjoy it very much and seem always ready for it,” she told Gilder. “When I have ten chapters you will see them.” On 23rd October she wrote from the house on 13th Street:
My dear R.W.G.:
. . . You will rejoice to hear that “Haworth’s” progresses gorgeously. I wrote a scene this morning which I believe will make you quiver. And the sole object of my literary existence is to make R.W.G. quiver. I am not afraid of you now as I was in the first six chapters which I wrote and re-wrote five times.
I am stronger than you now, vile tyrant, and have cast off your yoke and trampled it under foot, but I like to try things on you in spirit as upon a many-stringed and sensitive instrument.
I write something and then gloat over it. “Possible effect on R.W.G.?” I say, “He will quiver.” And then I gloat again and proceed. This scene is a queer thing. It is not a loud scene and it wrote itself. Before I knew anything about it a woman came to a certain door and stood there. I did not have an idea of what she was going to say and once I stopped to turn her back. But she walked in herself and said and did some things which caused me to come downstairs afterwards and sing—sing at the top of my voice.
And then on 5th February 1878:
My dear R.W.G.:
. . . I am in a queer sort of mood. (I ought to have begun by saying that Doro sends you the first instalment tomorrow.) After working and going through agonies untold, and raving and tearing and hating myself and every word I ever wrote, I have suddenly walked out into a cool place and begun to soar, and have soared and soared until I don’t think I shall ever return to earth again.
How it happens—how, after loathing a thing and slaving over it and writing every chapter of it over again and over again and over again, and slashing into it, and cutting out of it, I can suddenly stand apart from it in cold blood and say, “It is—stunning,”—I don’t see.
. . . I believe some of it is just terrible. There is a dead man in it who is the most living creature I ever made—just a simple, gentle, working man whose life was a failure and who died and lies out under the grass in a little country graveyard—and who yet lives and lives and lives—!
Gilder responded just as she wished. “Somehow,” she told him, “you are always in tune. It is so grand that when I have been roused desperately by anything, it never passes you by.”
The gossip column of the New York Tribune on 22nd February 1878 told the public they might soon expect a new book. Mrs Burnett “is an industrious and domestic person of whom her husband said enthusiastically, ‘she can do anyth
ing’.” Serialization of Haworth’s was to start in Scribner’s in November. When the proofs arrived, Swan read them “with raptures for the five hundredth time”. If he was jealous of her talent at this stage, he certainly didn’t show it. Scribner was enthusiastic too. He predicted sales of Haworth’s would far surpass even those of That Lass o’ Lowrie’s. He suggested a 12½% royalty on all copies sold, “This is the same copyright that we give to our most popular authors.” Publication in book form in America was fixed for 6th September 1879. Macmillan in England would publish ten days earlier.
Macmillan did not “care about having the illustrations”. Frances was not very keen on them either. Henry James considered illustration an affront to the written word. He would send the illustrated magazines—Scribner’s and later the Century—only what he regarded as his poorer efforts. Frances did not feel as strongly as that. But “the pictures of Murdoch are not at all like him”, she wrote to Gilder. “They are too boyish and conventional. He ought to be dark and tall and gaunt. He seems to me more like you in the face . . .” She suggested, rather naively, that the artist should think of Gilder’s face as he worked on Murdoch’s.
But there were more worrying problems than the illustrations. Macmillan wrote in June to say “some publishers in London contemplate reprinting Haworth’s for the purpose of testing how far an American author’s books can be protected in England. We are of course sorry that any book of ours should be chosen for a test as we are peaceable people and don’t like lawsuits but, if we find ourselves being robbed, we shall do what we can to protect ourselves.” It was decided that, to secure a legal copyright in England, it would be necessary for Frances to stand on the soil of a British dominion on the day of publication. On 31st August, Swan wrote a postcard to Scribner: “We returned from Canada a.m. yesterday. Mrs Burnett will therefore be in the United States for publication here.”