by Ann Thwaite
Mark Twain admired Frances and it was just at this time that he was dreaming up a scheme for himself, Frances, William Dean Howells and one or two others, each to write a long story based on the same characters and roughly the same situations. Unfortunately it came to nothing. Nor did his scheme that they should hire a private rail-road car, complete with cook, and travel all over the country reading from their works. Frances never did any public storytelling. She preferred the hair-curling sessions by the fire with her boys. Writing about it, she said she knew it sounded incredible, but the boys actually enjoyed having their tangles taken out. The reason was that she told stories while she did it. One of these Hair-Curling Stories was later published as “The Good Wolf”—the wolf being an amiable animal, who brought about all sorts of good things for a small boy, “who never wriggles when his hair is brushed”. The best part of this story is the robbers who agree to stop being robbers and be nicer things, such as bakers, hairdressers and pew-openers, and to come back twice a week and tell stories as “The Combined Robbers and Pirates Story-telling Club”.
There was a slightly more realistic criminal in another story of this time, “Editha’s Burglar”, which first appeared in St Nicholas. When Mary Mapes Dodge had started the magazine in 1873, it had been with the intention of providing wholesome entertainment to offset the didacticism which dogged most writing for children. She encouraged Frances to send things to her, and most of Frances’ children’s books first appeared in the pages of St Nicholas. The heroine of “Editha’s Burglar” was a child in Vivian’s mould. She was always asking questions. On this particular day, she has happened to ask her father, “What do you think of burglars—as a class?” When she finds a burglar in the house, she asks him please to burgle as quietly as he can so that he doesn’t disturb her mamma. How sweet, how charming Editha is.
There is absolutely no doubt that Vivian’s charm was genuine and not an invention of his mamma’s. There is plenty of independent evidence. One incident happened in the summer of 1882. Frances was not well that summer. She was burdened with feelings of lassitude and spent a great deal of time in a hammock. They gave her affliction the name of neuritis. Was it really just that she did not want to work? There was no need for her to work. Money was coming in. The play was still running in Madison Square; the novel was still running in the Century. But it was only illness or the appearance of illness that allowed the pen-driving machine to stop.
“Why should one object to being ill?” Bertha asks, revealingly, in Through One Administration. “It is not such a bad idea to be something of an invalid, after all. It ensures one a great many privileges. It is not demanded of invalids that they shall be always brilliant. They are permitted to be pale, and silent, and heavy eyed, and lapses are not treasured up against them . . . When one is ill, nothing one does or leaves undone is of any special significance. It is like having a holiday.”
One day that summer, when they were staying in Massachusetts, the boys were pillow-fighting and romping about while their mother was in bed. They were asked to be quiet and Vivian said, “Oh, we wouldn’t disturb Dearest for the world.” But a little later “they forgot their good intentions”, recorded the witness, “and again became hilarious. Mrs Burnett stepped from her bed and appeared to them in the doorway. ‘Now, Dearest’, said Vivian, ‘if you must spank us, just put your little bare feet right on this,’ at the same time stripping a pillow from his bed and spreading it before her. Dearest said that was quite enough. She just kissed them both and went back to bed.”
It was this summer too—1882—that Vivian, aged five, pronounced himself a supporter of the movement in favour of female suffrage. “I believe they ought to be allowed to vote if they like, because what should we do if there were no ladies? Nobody would have any mothers or any wives . . . And nobody could grow up. When anyone’s a baby, you know, he hasn’t any teeth and he can’t eat bread and things. And if there were no ladies to take care of him when he was very first born, he’d die.”
But he could fight as well as charm. Frances sent the boys to the local school, half a block up 13th Street, the Franklin Public School. It was by no means a genteel establishment and the two boys had to learn to stand up for themselves. One day when they came home from school, Lionel said, “Vivvy has had a fight.” Questioned, Vivian said, “A boy said to me ‘D’you want to fight?’ I said to him ‘I don’t want to fight but I will fight.’ Then I started in and hit him till he hollered.” “The boys in my school knock me down and jump on me because they want me to go Democrat,” Vivian wrote to his mother at the time of the bitter 1884 election campaign, which returned the first Democratic administration for twenty-three years. “But I am still a strong Republican,” he assured her, “Your obedient and humble son and servant, Vivian.” The boys might call their mother Dearest and wear black velvet suits when they had company, but they could be tough too.
There were many stories about Frances in the newspapers at this time. Most of them were friendly enough, many of them almost embarrassingly admiring. But not all. An unintelligent, unsigned piece in the New York Truth for 8th June 1884 has the sub-heading: “Her Novels and Exposition of Disagreeable Types, The Sameness of Her Characters in All Her Books—‘Esmeralda’ a Feeble Play.” And there was one story, which was repeated over and over again, and which finally roused Frances to deny it. The newspaper had declared that Mrs Burnett posed her boys about the drawing-room, with the purpose of impressing strangers. Frances’ denial took this form:
. . . I have, it is true, two little boys. I have also a mantel-piece and a rug, but the four objects are not compatible in the manner described, as the mantel-piece is rather high for the elbows of six and seven, and that even six and seven years of the most careful training have failed to instil into the boys that delicate respect for the truly artistic which would lead them to be on a rug in one position, however distinctly beautiful, for two seconds unless they were chained and padlocked; and to this last device I have not yet, even in my most artistic maternal agonies, had recourse.
That the little boys have been beautiful has not been my fault nor their misfortune. Their tendency to pose I have sometimes had reason to regret. I have seen them pose in attitudes replete with grace, suspended by their feet from apple trees with the hyacinthine locks sweeping the dust and having somewhat the appearance of an entirely new species of yellow mop. I have seen them pose upon one foot upon the top of an iron-spiked fence; I have seen them pose on adjacent roofs, their purely Greek countenances aglow with rapt contemplation of the thought that at last they had attained an altitude which a mis-step would cause to result in their being dashed into minute fragments.
. . . A few summers ago, one newspaper announced that Mrs Burnett very sensibly refrained from trammelling her beautiful boys with any unnecessary clothing, and that among her neighbours they were known as the young Arabs. I spent some moments in absorbed reflection upon this paragraph. My beautiful boys and I have but one slight difference of opinion; that is upon the question of what amount of clothing is strictly necessary. My mild arguments have so far usually been refuted by more irresistible ones. Their theory, possibly founded upon their artistic instinct and studious daily contemplation of the antique marbles, is that all clothing is unnecessary, as witness the Apollo Belvedere, and that therefore, the sooner it is left in fragments fluttering in the perfumed zephyrs of the spring upon the fences, trees, tree-boxes, etc., the sooner it is lost in the form of hats, worn into dilapidated disgrace in the shape of shoes, and shorn of its buttons in any guise whatever, the better for all art in its highest and most noble ideals.
. . . That the little fellows have worn velvet and lace, and being kindly endowed by Nature, have so adorned it as to fill a weak parent with unbridled vanity, before which peacocks might retire, is true, but I object to their being handicapped in their childhood by stupid, vulgar, unfounded stories, and I advance with due modesty the proposition that my taste for the picturesque has not led me to transform t
wo strong, manly, robust boys into affected, abnormally self-conscious little mountebanks.
None of the most sentimental stuff about the boys was written when they were actually small children. At this stage, as Frances repeatedly said in Through One Administration, “Sentiment is out”. But the children were a refuge, “the only safe thing”. With them she could try to be herself, that self she often felt in danger of losing. She always genuinely loved playing—building houses, playing marbles or “fish pond”. It was true that when she played with the children on a wet day “the toys all got nice again”. What is less attractive is the way she congratulated herself on this later. Marghanita Laski takes her sternly to task for her “offensive whimsy” and “abominable conceit”. She extracts the piece about Frances playing from the unpublished fragment “His Friend”, written in 1891. “They had an idea that after all their mother was a sort of little girl. She was little to look at and had curly hair like their own; and she used to sit on the nursery floor . . .”
“I readily agree,” wrote Miss Laski, “that this gives one a touching picture of just such a young, pretty little mother as little Lord Fauntleroy’s ‘Dearest’. But, unfortunately, photographs of Mrs Burnett taken at this time show her to have been distinctly matronly in appearance, with one of those tight, forbidding Manchester faces.” Poor Frances. She never did like having her photograph taken, but, in fact, the photographs contemporary with the boys’ nursery days are pleasant enough. The tight Manchester look is there all right in the handsome photograph taken with Lionel and Vivian in 1888—but is it fair to deduce anything from those long-frozen exposures? Nearly all her interviewers speak of the mobility and animation of her face.
There is, incidentally, an exact parallel to the passage quoted from “His Friend” in Through One Administration, emphasizing yet again how closely Frances identified herself with Bertha Amory. But Bertha could never have written “His Friend”; nor could the Frances of the early 1880s. What changed her was the phenomenal success of Little Lord Fauntleroy. It changed everything. Some said it even changed relations between America and Britain. It certainly changed lives and attitudes. One historian has put it like this: “For good or ill, other immigrant Britons left traces on America between the Civil and the Spanish American wars,” such as Alexander Graham Bell, “but only Mrs Burnett could claim so deeply to have affected the emotional health of so many American boys.” Its success, of course, affected Frances even more than her readers. It changed her from being a serious writer, striving to master an art, into a craftswoman who had discovered she had the Midas touch. She had begun something she could not stop. The pen-driving machine was to become a machine for printing money. The more she made, the more she needed. “I always need so much money,” she was to write in 1894, and so it always was.
But before we come finally face to face with Little Lord Fauntleroy, we should look a little longer at Frances in the early 1880s. She was in her early thirties; she was considered one of the most important writers in America—though this was admittedly not long after the time when Trollope felt able to dismiss the whole of American fiction as “trashy beyond all description”. An article in the July 1883 issue of the Century called “The Native Element in Fiction” listed Frances as one of those “who hold the front rank today in general estimation”, and “had their visible beginnings in the five years following 1870”. The others were William Dean Howells, Henry James, George Washington Cable and Constance Fenimore Woolson. The Century critic said Frances’ ball scene in Through One Administration “would draw tears from a piece of Canterbury flint”. But he decided that she “sympathizes with people in humble circumstances, not, it would seem, because they are misunderstood or particularly unhappy in their lives, but because their surroundings are not what she herself would like”. It was not wholehearted praise but it is something to be included in a short list of the most important writers in the United States. It is something of a responsibility. Had she in fact reached the height of her powers with Through One Administration? Was there anywhere to go but down? Or to stop altogether? She wrote very little for three years and she made sure that her next book could not be compared with her last.
One newspaper at this time recorded that Mrs Burnett “lives quietly and pleasantly in Washington. Although professionally literary, she is so domestic that those unacquainted with her writings would not suspect the fact. Her graceful fingers show no trace of ink. She is very simple and unaffected in manner and strikingly bright and original in conversation. Personally she is plump—almost too plump for her short stature. She wears her hair braided behind and frizzed in front to cover what she calls a horrid great forehead, which really is too square and too projecting for beauty. Her nose is good though rather large; her jaw and mouth are firm with pretty teeth and a cordial charming smile. Her eyes are large, intense, expressive. She seems to have no jealousy or envy, to be wholly unconventional and everyway free and large. She gets pleasure from all kinds of occupation and all kinds of people.”
The Cincinnati Enquirer was more flattering about her looks. It declared she had a slight and supple figure, “with a girlish grace of face and figure . . . Her eyes are large, brown, soulful . . . the face, so full of genius, is crowned by a luxurious suit of hair, which fringes in long rings about her intellectual forehead. In colour it is auburn. It is coiled in a loose mass at the back of her superbly poised and classical head. In conversation Mrs Burnett is animated and brilliant. Her language is well chosen and is after the manner of Thomas Carlyle, its resemblance lying in the use of good, strong, short Anglo-Saxon words. She uses her hands in expressing her meaning and very small, shapely hands they are. Her toilets are generally, of some neutral tint, black being her favorite color. This she illuminates with bright harmonious tints and about her shoulders there is usually wound a lace or netted silk fichu. Her manners are easy and affable.”
It was at about this time that Frances began to be called “Fluffy” by her friends. It seems to have derived from her fluffy fringe (the hair “frizzed in front”) and her taste for frills and furbelows and fichus. As Vivian said later, the nickname “was a betrayal of her real character”, but it stuck, and Frances must have liked it; she used it herself, often signing her letters with it, and even with variations such as Fluffina.
The Boston Herald described the house on I Street. “Her home is tasteful and at once recognizable as the abode of culture—comfortable rather than luxurious. On the third floor is the ‘Den’ fitted up in answer to her own fancy with heavy hangings and dark, rich walls. In the centre of the room stands a large table, upon which is a handsome antique covering. Here is ample evidence of work—piles of manuscripts, books, letters etc . . . In the Den are cosy easy chairs, each with character and history. An open fire, a rack and an old brass tea-kettle indicate agreeable possibilities. Everywhere there is something suggestive in the way of relic or souvenir. It is a very personal place and each article has to its owner’s mind a pleasant association—paintings, drawings, bric-à-brac, flowers, an old piano . . . A small circle frequently passes the evening with music and conversation . . .”
There is very little recorded of these years 1882, 1883 and 1884. There was apparently very little to record. Frances was unable to write—and so she was ill. Or she was ill and so she was unable to write. They called it a “nervous prostration”. Her admired toughness, “the refusal to be overpowered by circumstances”, seemed to have deserted her. Each summer she went to Lynn on Massachusetts Bay with the boys. In 1884, when they went back to school, she went to Boston and stayed at the Vendome Hotel, Commonwealth Avenue. She had become interested in mind-healing, of which there was a great deal of talk at the time, particularly in Lynn, where the founder of Christian Science had lived for a number of years. The first Church of Christ Scientist had been established in Boston in 1881. In 1884 Mary Baker Eddy and her husband were living in Columbus Avenue, Boston. People spoke of the extraordinary cures she had made.
Fran
ces knew that there was not much wrong with her physically. There was a great deal about mind-healing which appealed to her. Although she had been brought up in Manchester to attend Anglican services regularly, she had long since given up membership of any church. But she had a strong religious sense and a continuing desire to see some purpose in life. Her Bible was well used and marked in many places with notes and the dates on which particular texts had helped her. Often she wrote out passages. The following passage from St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians she copied many times: “Be careful for nothing; but with prayer and thanksgiving let your requests be made unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your minds and hearts through Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, think on these things.”