by Ann Thwaite
It was not only in America that the fashion caught on. Compton Mackenzie recalled “that confounded Little Lord Fauntleroy craze, which led to my being given as a party dress the Fauntleroy costume of black velvet and Vandyke collar . . . the other boys at the dancing class were all in white tops [sailor suits]”. Sir Adrian Boult recorded that the fashion was still raging, “when I was first conscious, somewhere, I suppose, about 1894 or ’95”. In Russia, Elizaveta Fen wished for curly hair like Cedric’s and wore a boy’s black velvet suit and a black velvet hat with a big feather. “People stared when I rode through the village. This rather embarrassed me, but I enjoyed it all the same.”
It was not only Fauntleroy clothes which sold; there were Fauntleroy playing-cards, Fauntleroy writing-paper and toys and models of every sort, wooden, plaster, clockwork and chocolate. There was even a perfume named after him. In December Scribner reported to Frances the extraordinary continuing demand for the book: “It surpasses all our expectations.” All the publishers and theatre managers in America wanted her to write for them. A New York syndicate offered fifteen thousand dollars for a serial. A publisher suggested she went round the world in a yacht “to write letters from strange lands for children”. “A certain newspaperman has offered me,” Frances wrote to Owen Lankester, “four hundred dollars a month if I will let him come to me one day a week to talk over a special department, which is to be devoted to children. I am to do nothing but give my ideas. Would you give a hundred dollars a day merely to talk to me? No, base ingrate, you would not. And, yet, where do you find conversation like mine?”
Not everyone was equally charmed by Frances’ conversation. One newspaper said she seemed to be able to talk about nothing but “shopping, dress, her feelings, a recipe for chapped lips and like subjects”. A number of reporters, to whom Frances had refused interviews, had their revenge by publishing highly critical articles. Frances was beginning to become very wary of the press. They were always getting things wrong, and the more she refused to see reporters, the more inaccurate were the stories they published. In Fauntleroy itself, she gives an amusing account of the different versions in the papers of the affair of the rival claimant. “One paper described . . . Cedric as an infant in arms, another as a young man at Oxford.” As for the claimant’s mother, “sometimes she was a gypsy, sometimes an actress, sometimes a beautiful Spaniard”. Mr Hobbs used to read the papers until his head was in a whirl. He never knew what to believe.
Similarly we never know what to believe when we read the descriptions of Frances in the papers of the period. “Like all children of genius, Mrs Frances Hodgson-Burnett is eccentric and, as the altitude of her almost phenomenal successes heightens, the scope of her vagaries widens until her friends liken her to a sort of modern Galatea. She belongs to the steadily increasing society of grass widows and the fact that marriage with her has been a failure may account for some of her harsh treatment of women.” When Wilson Barrett returned to England after an American tour, this paper claimed “Mrs Burnett gave herself up to despair and would not be comforted”. But her eccentricity seemed to consist mainly in the wearing of Kate Greenaway-style dresses in vivid colours “with mitts of stocking length, her hair frizzed about her head like a misfit halo”.
The Boston Transcript kindly suggested she might rest on her laurels and enjoy, as she obviously did, being lionized by the “cultured circles of Boston”. But the Literary News (February 1889) regretted that Frances was leading the life of her own Bertha Amory. “She now longs more to impress upon the world her personal magnetism, brilliant conversational talents and fascinating ‘woman’s way’, than to retire from publicity, work hard, study and acquire fresh, unused material which she might put into a work that would live after her pretty, reddish-brown hair is white and all her original and often outré costumes have been gossiped about admired, condemned and worn out . . . All careful readers, who twenty years ago felt the fresh talent that had come into the world of fiction and steadily and proudly watched their prophecies of success and good work fulfilled year by year, are saddened to think that for three years past Mrs Burnett’s reputation rests more upon a shrewd legal battle, a success, in frivolous society and the little details of her habits of life that now so freely float around in the papers, than upon any one piece of work calling forth her matured and practised hand. We will not yet give up hope of a writer who has shown so much imagination and industry. Perhaps . . . something will happen to make Mrs Burnett will to write a book worthy to be placed even ahead of That Lass O’ Lowrie’s . . . and Through One Administration.”
These were stern words and near enough to the bone to give Frances considerable pause. Was it true that she was talking too much and not living enough within herself? It was always the danger for a writer who had seen success. It was to be another seven years before she published her next full-scale adult novel; more than ten before she published one which could stand up beside the two books named. She had worked so hard for so many years; now that the need for it was over, with money flowing in from the play and the book of Fauntleroy, it was so much easier to amuse herself. She could not stop writing; she could not write seriously. If she had listened, she might have heard the words she had given Bertha Amory sounding a warning:
You find us very flippant and trivial. That is how we strike you!
After I have been out a great deal—I wonder. But I know I could not be serious, if I tried.
I thought I enjoyed living on the surface.
Sometimes I have been so tired of the feverish, restless way we have of continually amusing ourselves, as if we dare not stop.
One must be amused.
She wrote to the boys in Washington to tell them of the success of the New York first night. The people shouted and shouted for her and she went out twice with Elsie and each time the curtains had to be raised twice. “Elsie is a dear child and we are very fond of each other. She has a flat in the house I am in and she comes to see me every day and calls me Dearest.” But Frances said that she longed “to be home in quiet Washington—I am tired of noise and rattle”.
At some moment between the Boston and New York productions, she had managed to rush down to Washington and buy a house. She spent Christmas in the K Street house, repaired after the fire, where Swan had lived his lone life during the eighteen months of her absence. But early in 1889 they moved—Swan as well—to a twenty-two-roomed house at 1770 Massachusetts Avenue, “the most beautiful avenue in Washington”. On 31st January, Frances wrote to Scribner: “I have been so busy with, workmen of all kinds and with the new play I am writing, which is to be produced shortly, that I have not had a moment even to think of the new book.”
She had bought dark carved furniture, rich rugs, brocades and tapestries in New York. She was as interested in matching things, in the colour schemes, “as if it were a doll’s house”. One room was all in a deep “crushed strawberry” colour; her Den was “golden yellow and golden brown and crimson, the nasturtium colours”. But she was not to spend much time in it. By February she was away again, for there survives a good letter from twelve-year-old Vivian, dated 9th February 1889:
Dear Mama [not “Dearest”, for he was feeling justifiably aggrieved],
I am very glad to have written to you but I am very sorry you will not write to me. This, I think, is the third letter I have written without receiving one from you. Please tell me the reason. Lionel and I are having fine times with Henery Valentine printing cards, a specimen of which I enclose. We are doing a great deal of printing: printing cards, advertisements etc. Henery Valentine is our canvassing agent, he goes to the people’s houses and shows them specimens of our work which generally makes them order some cards. One man had found a business card and came to our house and asked for the printers. He was a very good costumer as he gave us an order for two hundred cards, for which we charged him one dollar and twenty-five cents. We have had other costumers, paying costumers to but none payed as much as he. Lionel, in his relations to the Po
st, managed to scrape together a great deal of work. The old press that you gave us Christmas before last is the one we print with. There is one thing that has survived a year under our rough treatment. We have been writing compositions in school all this week. Miss Morgan says that she is surprised at the way the school spells. Mr Powell the school suprintendent, seems to be very much intrested in our school, especially in the compositions. Miss Morgan reminded me last night that she had received a letter from you and that she was going to answer it. This letter is for Liza and you and I hope she and you will forgive the combination. I hope you are getting well although I have no means of knowing. Now I will say goodnight and with many kisses.
V.B.
“I hope you are getting well although I have no means of knowing.” It sounds as if Frances had gone back to Boston again, in search of mind-healing, or to get away from Swan. “When one is ill, nothing one does or leaves undone is of any special significance.” On 6th March, Lisa Chiellini, writing to thank Scribner for a cheque for 7,276.61 (six months’ sales), said that Mrs Burnett was “seriously ill”. It was much easier to be ill and run away. The huge house on Massachusetts Avenue was a monument to her worldly success, just as Jem Haworth’s had been. Fauntleroy was still running in both London and New York and netting her one thousand five hundred dollars a week. But the dust-covers were over the furniture in her splendid new rooms. What use was a bedroom with pink roses and loops of ribbon without love?
If she had longed for quiet Washington, when she had it she did not want it. Lionel chose to stay there with his father. But in the early spring of 1889, Frances returned, with Vivian and Lisa Chiellini, to London.
Chapter Six
Death and the Doctor
1889–1892
In Manchester, the previous autumn, Frances had visited the Hadfields, with whom she had always kept in touch. Two of the daughters, her old teachers but no longer teaching, were running a boarding-house without a great deal of success. Now, with her Fauntleroy money, Frances really could play the Fairy Godmother role: she felt blessed by one herself. Now she could wave wands and change people’s circumstances. She took a lease of 44 Lexham Gardens, just off the Cromwell Road. It had four stories, plus attics and basement, a pillared portico and a view down the length of a rectangle of grass, bordered by plane trees. She furnished it from Liberty’s and handed it over to the Hadfields to run, with Frances herself as their star boarder.
There were others who needed her help. She wrote to Owen Lankester from an address in Oxford Street, Manchester:
I found my poor little cousins of the “unfortunate family” needing my attention very, very much. When I look at their poor little shabby clothes and their poor little shabby house and see how they live and then reflect that I disdain the second best box at the theatre and that my simplest garment must be running over with lace and tied with satin ribbons, I feel as if I was a criminal. They are such good little things—and you know I am such a bad little thing—and yet, it was I who was given a gift which makes my life a brilliant, successful thing and gives me a thousand friends on every side . . . The contrast is too strong and I keep saying to myself, “Why did you deserve to be the one blessed by the Fairy Godmother? Why should you have everything and they nothing?”—because I have everything—but one thing. I feel as if I want to devote every moment to them, to change their lives somehow, to sweep away the cobwebs and let in the sunshine and make things more hopeful.
You can’t think how poor they are and what a dreary place they live in. I want to find a brighter house for them and I have been walking hours, looking in clean little streets at tiny bay windows, and I have also been buying all sorts of things—none of which you would have lectured and berated me for buying, I am sure.
“I have everything—but one thing.” It was impossible to have all three: love, admiration and money. Frances never really made up her mind which she valued most. At this point, she had a great deal of admiration and a great deal of money, but love was elusive. She could win it perhaps with good deeds. But in spite of this feeling that she wanted to devote every moment to the unfortunate family, she did not stay in Manchester for long. She soon installed herself comfortably in Lexham Gardens to enjoy the London season. There were all sorts of attractive invitations—to festivities looked forward to with almost as much eagerness as the long-ago parties in Islington Square. Surely this dinner, this reception, would make her really feel at last that she was at the Party.
There were also rehearsals of her new play Phyllis, “a domestic drama”, which opened at the Globe Theatre on 1st July 1889. It was not a success, this adaptation of her novel The Fortunes of Philippa Fairfax. Clement Scott in The Times condemned its construction. Even worse, the actors forgot their lines at the first performance, and ruined the final act. It was a pity they forgot so many, Scott said, for those they did remember were quite good. The Spirit of the Times in New York, commenting on the London production, was even more scathing: Mrs Burnett “should let experienced dramatists do this sort of work for her while she writes more stories. It is quite as absurd for her to make her own plays as it would be for her to make her own dresses. They do not fit and what she saves in wages she loses in time.”
Frances was hurt. But if she needed admiration and flattery to salve her wounds, there was plenty available. She began seeing a great deal of the young man she had first met at the Grosvenor Gallery two years before—the young man whose nice eyes and lovely demeanour she had recalled in a letter to Owen Lankester. His name was Stephen Townesend and his story was also one well calculated to appeal to the Fairy Godmother in Frances. “You know my forte,” she once said to her sister, Edith, “is to believe in people, not when things are going right for them, but when they are going wrong.” So it had been when Swan was penniless and obscure; so now it was with Stephen Townesend.
Stephen had been born on 15th October 1859, almost exactly ten years after Frances. He was the youngest son of the Revd George Fyler Townesend, who had been for the past twenty-seven years Rector of St Michael’s, Burleigh Street, Strand. His grandfather was a Canon of Durham Cathedral and one of the founders of Durham University: a considerable theological scholar, a polemicist and a poet, whose entry in the DNB is a long and impressive one; his own father was an independent minister. All three of them had published sermons and had been learned and serious gentlemen. Townesend sons were expected to take up a profession, and acting was not considered a suitable one. Stephen’s interest in the stage seems to have been aroused when he was a boy at St Paul’s School, and Irving and Ellen Terry were occasional visitors at the Rectory. It would have been difficult for Stephen to avoid the influence of the theatre. He was surrounded by theatres. He lived a stone’s throw from the Queen’s (where Irving and Ellen Terry had acted together for the first time), from the Lyceum, the Savoy, from Drury Lane, from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. But the Rector’s son could not go on the stage. It was outrageous, unheard of, impossible.
Frances later described the situation like this: “A strong-willed father and a weak-willed mother made him suffer tortures until he at last gave way.” Certainly Stephen’s father was strong-willed. There is a portrait of him in Stephen’s novel Dr Tuppy. (“How clever of Stephen,” said his mother. “It’s just like George!”) Canon Tuppy is a “narrow old Tory and rigid churchman”, irascible, eccentric, storming around to Bow Street police station to complain of the language of the costermongers and the braying of the donkeys and of the children who rang his doorbell, in spite of the notice DO NOT RING. Mrs Townesend, like Mrs Tuppy, was undoubtedly weak-willed, but she was “the dearest little woman in the world” and only made Stephen suffer because she could not stand up for him to his father.
Stephen finally agreed to become a medical student but nothing could stop him acting. He and Owen Lankester and eight other students founded the Amateur Dramatic Club of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The first performance, “with a row of candles for footlights”, was in Janu
ary 1883. Stephen was the life and soul of the Club—leading actor, producer, performing original sketches at the Nurses’ Meetings. In spite of the diversions, he took his M.R.C.S. in 1883, studied physiology at Edinburgh and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1887. He went to China as a ship’s surgeon, and worked briefly at hospitals in London and Birmingham—all the time nourishing his ambition to become a professional actor. His dislike of the profession he had been forced to take up was accentuated by his fierce opposition to vivisection. (“He insists on discussing it. That’s why the chaps rag him so and think he’s crazy. Of course, he never ought to have gone in for Medicine . . .”) Stephen’s feelings were shared by many, including Queen Victoria, Irving and Ouida, but not by his fellow doctors.
In 1888 Stephen wrote the history of the Bart’s Dramatic Club, together “with a few hints to Amateurs on the Art of Acting and Stage Management”. It included the following passage:
Every character will generally be found to present at least three phases, all of which have to be sketched to the audience in distinct colours. First, there is the side a man presents to society at large—in his daily intercourse with his fellow men, perhaps he is “Such a charming fellow, you know”. Then there is the side he reserves for his family and his closest friends, “Such a bear, my dear”. Lastly what he really is, to himself and to his God. And what this side of a man is generally only God knows.