by Ann Thwaite
The increase in public libraries at this period greatly added to the sales. In 1893 there was only one other book that was in more libraries in America than Little Lord Fauntleroy (it was in 72% of the libraries but Ben Hur was in 83%): it had been a success right from the beginning.
“Mrs Burnett’s juvenile starts with a tremendous rush,” Scribner reported. They had to reprint before publication although the first edition was 10,000.
Frances’ success was sweet and easy. There is a portrait of her and an article about her work in the February 1886 number of the Bookbuyer. If there was no rigid demarcation between adult and juvenile books for the reader, it was very different for the writer—her early novels had left Mrs Burnett “completely exhausted . . . she had entered into the joys and griefs of the men and women she pictured; she had shared their anxieties, suffered and endured all the trials they had passed through; she was possessed by sensations quite beyond her power to govern”. But “in writing for children, Mrs Burnett works easily and rapidly”. Little Lord Fauntleroy she “found it a pleasure to write”. It was not surprising that she tried to repeat her success.
The new book was called Sara Crewe, or, What happened at Miss Minchin’s. It was a story drawing on some of her experiences at the Miss Hadfields’, but set in London. There is no evidence, though it seems probable, that Frances had been to London on her three different visits to England in the 1870s. But the reality did not seem to matter as much as it had in the days when she had carefully researched the backgrounds for That Lass O’ Lowrie’s and Haworth’s. She may well have read Charles Kingsley’s Yeast, with its picture of the plight of the agricultural poor, but she does not seem to realize that the conditions in Erleboro, the village in Little Lord Fauntleroy, could have been due neither to the ignorance and idleness of the workers, nor to the Earl’s neglect. There is no suggestion in the book of the general national situation, of a country suffering from a series of bad harvests, and disease among animals, culminating in widespread outbreaks of foot and mouth in 1883. They were depression years—but Frances was apparently no longer interested in causes, only in effects.
In Washington, Frances’ increased income enabled them to leave I Street, which was going down in the world. She wrote to Kitty Hall in Boston: “We are going into a new house and such a lovely sweet dear of a house—pretty in everything—with charming rooms and hall fireplace (which represents all architectural perfection to me) and shelves over the mantels and inlaid floors and stained glass and all the modern improvements . . . The mere thought of it makes me feel better.” But the house, 1374 K Street, did not last long. Frances made much of the circumstances in another letter to Kitty:
No, my own Kitty, your Fluffy is not “burned to a crisp”— . . . but there are a hundred chances to one that if the fire had broken out in the night while we slept that this might have been the case. We were just beneath it and the whole garret was in roaring flames, and we peacefully reading until a little boy in the street rang our bell and announced to us that we were on fire.
I was in bed—having retired immediately after dinner because I felt very tired. Dr Burnett ran up into the attic—I followed with a pitcher of water, but it was already beyond anything but fire engines and hose. The servants went mad and shrieked alternately, “Oh, my God,” and “Oh, my Jesus Christ.” I went into my Nasturtium room, climbed on a chair, got my manuscript from the shelf, emptied the closet of my clothes, put them on the back of the first man who appeared who was not a fireman—the flames roared—the skylight fell in with a smash—they would not let me stay long enough to get my shoes—I threw my dear Japanese robe (never be without one) over my night-dress and went downstairs—where distracted men and servants dragged me in my bare feet on to the stone steps and shouted at me to go. They clamored so I could not seem to make them comprehend that my innocent little feet were bare and not ready for the street on a cold March evening, even if nightgowns were more popular as promenade costumes than they have appeared to be this winter.
But at last I made myself clear, and a man took me in his arms and carried me across the street to Mrs Nordhoff’s; whereupon it was rumored immediately that Mrs Burnett had with much forethought and presence of mind promptly become insensible, and had to be borne, swooning, from the flames.
How fortunate it was that she was wearing “a beautiful, crisp, clean little nightgown with frills of lace standing right straight out nobly in every direction” and blue satin ribbons. Her rescue had “as wildly romantic an air as if [she] had been Clarissa Harlowe”. Indeed, Frances said there were accusations in the air that she had engineered the whole excitement and set the house on fire herself, but Kitty would know that she would not have chosen such a dull Washington season. She would rather have arranged it at the Halls’ house in Boston, “with a W. B. engagement being played at the Globe”. This is the first mention of Wilson Barrett, an English actor who was a friend of the Halls; the newspapers were later to hint of a close relationship between the two of them.
The letter to Kitty was frivolous but the situation was serious. If the K Street house a few months earlier had made her feel better, it now made her feel worse. There were some good moments. The Washington letter in the New Orleans Times-Democrat not only said some very nice things about Frances (“She does not look over thirty” when she was actually thirty-six) but recorded that when Mary Anderson, the American actress whose success in London was the basis of Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel Miss Bretherton, met Tennyson, the great man had asked her to convey to Mrs Burnett his opinion that a certain passage in Through One Administration was “the finest piece of English he had ever seen”. Unfortunately, to Frances’ dismay, Mary Anderson forgot which passage Tennyson was talking about.
In spite of such compliments and the tremendous success of Fauntleroy, Frances was not happy. There was a sad and perhaps revealing poem in the August 1886 number of the Century. These are three of the twelve stanzas:
I laughed at Love!
“The merriest jest of all,”
I said, “a gay, light bounding ball,
Which gathers wit at both its rise and fall
And never flies our grasp beyond recall:”
I did not know.
“Laughed thou at love?
The day will come for tears,
For pangs and aching longings, heavy fears,
For memories laying waste all coming years,—
Dead hopes, each one a living flame that sears,—
Then wilt thou know!”
“I mock no more
Great Love, but hear my cry;
Give me the pang, the woe, the bitter sigh,
Hear me, in pity, hear me, lest I die.
Let me bear all, so Love pass me not by,
Since Love I know!”
There was another poem written at this time. It appeared in the Century in May 1887. “If” is a poem of love that is over, of the barriers of pride and reserve that prevent communication, of how consistently we deceive ourselves, how little we know the results of our behaviour, how little we show of what is in our hearts.
If he had known that when her proud fair face
Turned from him calm and slow
Beneath its cold indifference had place
A passionate, deep woe.
If he had known that when her hand lay still,
Pulseless so near his own,
It was because pain’s bitter, bitter chill
Changed her to very stone.
If he had known that she had borne so much
For sake of the sweet past,
That mere despair said, “This cold look and touch
Must be the cruel last.”
If he had known her eyes so cold and bright,
Watching the sunset’s red,
Held back within their deeps of purple light
A storm of tears unshed.
If he had known the keenly barbed jest
With such hard lightness thrown
&nb
sp; Cut through the hot proud heart within her breast
Before it pierced his own.
If she had known that when her calm glance swept
Him as she passed him by
His blood was fire, his pulse madly leapt
Beneath her careless eye.
If she had known that when he touched her hand
And felt it still and cold
There closed round his wrung heart the iron band
Of misery untold.
If she had known that when her laughter rang
In scorn of sweet past days
His very soul shook with a deadly pang
Before her light dispraise.
If she had known that when in the wide west
The sun sank gold and red
He whispered bitterly, “ ’Tis like the rest;
The warmth and light have fled.”
If she had known the longing and the pain,
If she had only guessed,
One look—one word—and she perhaps had lain
Silent upon his breast.
If she had known how oft when their eyes met
And his so fiercely shone,
But for man’s shame and pride they had been wet—
Ah! If she had but known!
The warmth and light had certainly fled; there was no doubt about that. Frances had finished Sara Crewe but she was still thinking about London. Perhaps the Party was there. She had money now—plenty of money. “I had nearly six hundred from England a few days ago,” she wrote to Kitty, and there was more coming. Why shouldn’t she and Kitty take Lionel and Vivian (his hair by now cropped short) to England for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations? It was an irresistible idea, whatever Swan said.
Chapter Five
The Gratitude of British Authors
1887–1889
In May 1887, Frances, Kitty Hall and the boys—now eleven and twelve—sailed to Southampton on the ss Ems. In London, they took lodgings at 23 Weymouth Street, W.I. The city was en fête. Flags decorated the streets. Paper banners in windows proclaimed GOD BLESS HER. VICTORIA THE GOOD. THE MOTHER OF HER PEOPLE. The shops were full of marmalade jars inscribed “1837 to 1887. Victoria the Good”, and underneath, “Peace and Plenty”. But it was only a year since the unemployed had rioted in the centre of London: Henry James, returning from a visit to Robert Louis Stevenson in Bournemouth, had found Piccadilly littered with the glass of smashed shop-fronts. James wrote to his brother of the “immense destitution . . . Everyone here is growing poorer—from causes which I fear will continue.”
There would have been scenes to remind Frances of Islington Square, Salford, if she had ventured into the backstreets. In later years, she was to see plenty of the sadder side of London life but in 1887 she was happy enough to look only at its party face. Kitty Hall knew London well and had many friends there. Her sister, Daisy, was in London this year too, singing “in oratorio and drawing room concerts”. Frances met their close friends, the Lankesters. Ray Lankester was Professor of Anatomy at Oxford and not in London a great deal, but Frances was immediately attracted to his younger brother, Dr Owen Lankester, “a splendid, big man with a boyish pink-and-white round face” and “ever-present good humor”. He was to become her “dear, big, immense Owen”.
Also this year, Frances met Israel Zangwill, who was to become an even closer friend. Zangwill was, at this time, only twenty-three, fourteen years younger than Frances. He had not yet published Children of the Ghetto, which established his reputation. It was many years before he was to become leader of the Zionist movement. They had first started talking when fellow members of a party visiting Madame Tussaud’s. It is not surprising to find Frances visiting the waxworks. She was a tourist, after all, and she had the boys with her to be entertained and instructed. Moreover, one of her early stories, “Smethurstses”, is about a man who owns a waxwork show. Madame Tussaud’s was an obvious place for her to spend an afternoon. But what was Zangwill doing there? Whatever the answer, it was certainly the scene of their first meeting and she said he had “rescued” her from her own fright in the Chamber of Horrors.
Both Owen Lankester and Israel Zangwill became regular visitors to the Weymouth Street drawing-room on Tuesday afternoons. Frances had taken the rooms for only three months but she immediately filled them with interesting things—including Liberty hangings and “greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery” bits and pieces which displayed her awareness of the aesthetic revival. It was at a soiree at the Grosvenor Gallery that Owen Lankester introduced Frances to Stephen Townesend. The young men had been medical students at Bart’s together. Frances did not meet him again that year and she forgot his name, but she remembered him— “the one with the nice eyes and the lovely demeanor”.
The sun shone on the Jubilee pageant. Frances would undoubtedly have preferred to have seen the Queen in crown and robes of state, but the glimpse of the formidable old lady in the jewelled bonnet was impressive enough. “The procession itself thrilled her,” Vivian recorded, “perhaps more greatly than it did the boys. It was seen under the most favorable circumstances—from well-placed seats just opposite one of the minor palaces, in front of which played the mounted band of the Royal Horse Guards. Certainly all that was English in her rose up as the members of the Royal Family passed.” The boys, being Americans, thought it more appropriate to be cooler. They were staunch republicans, after all—though they probably did not go as far as the eight-year-old E. M. Forster, watching the same procession, who had been rebuked by his great-aunt for saying that he did not like the Queen.
London was full of Americans that summer. Henry James said it was “fast becoming an American city”. He had gone to Italy, partly to escape the ones who wanted to hold on to his coat-tails, thirty of them at least. Vivian thought that James and Frances first met this Jubilee summer but it seems unlikely, for James did not return to his rooms in De Vere Gardens until 22nd July, and by then Frances was packing for Suffolk.
She was again unwell. There is a letter to Austin Dobson—the only English writer to appear in the newly revived Scribner’s Magazine. He had invited the boys to spend an afternoon with his children: he had five daughters and five sons, and Vivian and Lionel had already met Cyril and Bernard—“such sweet gentle little fellows”, Frances called them. She wrote, “I wish that I were able to go with them but I am feeling really ill. Yesterday I was obliged to remain in bed all day and send for the doctor. Today I feel very weak and forlorn.” Crossing the Atlantic had not improved her health.
But the doctor thought “bracing air” might help. Frances, Kitty and the boys, with a London girl called Millington as maid, stayed at a hotel in Southwold on the Suffolk coast. There was not much to do but gaze at the sea, write letters, and browse in Miss Chicksby’s circulating library, “where one could buy toys and drinking-mugs inscribed in gold letters A PRESENT FROM SOUTHWOLD. When they had read their way through the odd volumes of Miss Braddon, and works by the author of The Heir of Redcliffe (“three volumes at a time for sixpence a week”), they moved on to Elm Farm, Wangford. Kitty and Frances walked in the lanes enjoying the wild flowers, talking to the tinker’s children, leaning on gates and calling the sheep. “My friend and I used to call upon them by . . . uttering all sorts of queer little sounds, in the hope of hitting upon the one which would attract their attention . . . We always managed to bring them huddling together in a woolly mass round the gate, where they stood and stared at us with their unmeaning, clear amber eyes and silly gentle faces uplifted. We used to wonder if we did not look as silly to them as they did to us, but we both agreed it would be very difficult to decide what a sheep was thinking about, or if it was thinking at all.”
The boys were happy—rabbiting with the farmer, hay-making, learning Suffolk songs from the young shepherd. They were furious when it was time to leave Suffolk for Italy. “They began their journey in silence, leaning back in their corners of the carriage, their arms folded and tears in their eyes.”
; Florence was an obvious choice for the winter for several reasons. Kitty Hall had spent much of her childhood there. Her friends, the McNamees, were running a pensione in the villa which had once belonged to Trollope, and they promised Frances could have the very room in which Trollope had written. Then also Frances had heard of a wonderful school, “whose master, a fine old Frenchman, had prepared boys for colleges in England, in France, in Germany and America”. They stopped off in Paris on the way and showed Vivian the house where he had been born.
Florence was wonderful. Frances wrote at great length to Owen Lankester in Wimpole Street:
. . . I walk up and down white marble stairs, surrounded by colonnades with arches and white pillars—I occupy a suite of huge rooms just vacated by an English countess—I have a piazza of my own, big enough for a ballroom, and I lean over massive balustrades of stone to look into a garden full of orange and lemon and magnolia and cypress trees, and oleanders, and roses, and oleafragrante, and fountains, and ancient medallions, and Russian boar hounds, and servitors who say “Buono giorno, Signora,” and who are called Lisa and Pasquale and Carlo and Vittorio and Luigi and Assunta, as if they were part of an opera.