Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Manchester, at the time of Frances’ birth

  Edwin Hodgson’s advertisement in the Manchester City Trade Directory of 1852

  Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1865

  New York Avenue, Washington D.C., near I Street, in 1880

  Dr Swan Burnett, from a miniature

  Richard Watson Gilder in 1873

  Frances with her sons, Vivian (twelve) and Lionel (aged fourteen), in 1888

  An illustration by Reginald Birch for the first edition of Little Lord Fauntleroy

  Elsie Leslie, the first American Fauntleroy on stage, in the New York production

  Buster Keaton, aged ten, on tour in New England as Fauntleroy

  Mary Pickford, aged twenty-seven, in the first film of Little Lord Fauntleroy

  Freddie Bartholomew in the 1936 film

  The first American production in 1903

  Playbill of The Little Princess

  Millie James as the Little Princess

  Frances Hodgson Burnett in Men and Women of the Day, 1888

  Israel Zangwill, after the painting by Solomon J. Solomon

  Henry James

  Frances to Vivian, and November 1895

  63 Portland Place, London W.1

  Dr Stephen Townsend

  Frances in 1888, her favourite photograph taken by Barrauds of Oxford Street

  Vivian Burnett at Harvard

  Edith Jordan, Frances’ sister

  Mary, Colin and Dickon in the Street Garden, from the first edition illustration by Charles Robinson

  Maytham Hall, Rolvenden, Frances’ English home from 1898 to 1907

  Plandome Park, Long Island, built by Frances in 1908

  Frances in 1921

  Frances turned the anguished experiences of these months, as she turned all her experiences, into a story, but one she never finished. She has been taken to task for the vulgarity of admiring herself in her fictional form. In “His Friend”, Noel’s mother is certainly a marvellous woman. She has the strength to accept without flinching the fact that her son is dying. She can act well enough to disguise the truth from the boy. In front of him “it was as if another creature spoke. Her voice was full of cheer and freshly young; there was not a note of pain in it.” Every time she sees a new specialist, she hopes; but when finally there is no hope, what she wants from the doctor is help in killing pain and in keeping from the boy the knowledge that he must die. She pledges herself with the help of scientific aids and iron self-control and love to keep the secret. There is no suggestion in the fragment of the story published by Vivian in his biography that Noel’s mother ever failed in her self-imposed task. And Lionel’s mother consoled herself in the loss of her son by her success in making his last months free of pain and fear.

  It was natural for her to write about it and some comfort to her to feel she had behaved well. It was a way of assuaging guilt she felt at having been so much away from the boy the year before. There had been a special bond between them, hadn’t there? She had loved him with all her heart, hadn’t she? In the story, the boy is fatherless; the mother widowed just before his birth. It is an indication of how alone Frances felt as she faced Lionel’s death. The story was not published in her lifetime and it seems unfair to criticize her for something undoubtedly written only to ease her heart.

  What is more unsympathetic, more open to criticism, is the way she shared her distress and despair with her young son. Vivian, at fourteen, was surely unfairly burdened with the letters his mother wrote to him from 16 Rue Christophe Colombe, Paris:

  Lionel is reading and I have crept away from him to see if I can snatch a few minutes to write to my far away boy and tell him I received his letter last night and I never forget him and always love him, however deep my trouble is . . .

  It is very difficult to find anything our poor boy can eat. Mamma racks her brains to invent things and takes her own plate to him to coax him into eating something from it—but try as we will, he cannot eat enough, and during the last two weeks has changed very much.

  . . . You know he always wanted me to be near him, but during the last four or five weeks it has seemed as if he could not bear me to be away from him a moment. I sleep in the room opening into his and I ask the nurse to call me in the night if he wants me, and then I go and hold him in my arms and soothe him until he is quiet, because no one else can comfort him now.

  . . . He has a mournful little way of calling “Mamma” that would bring me to him if I were dying on my bed. If I move away from his side he says, “Oh! where are you going? Don’t go, Mamma darling.” I think I would never move away at all, but you see I have to spend so much money that I feel very anxious to be able to write something. . . . My poor dear! It is so sad to see him. Yesterday I read your letter to him and he did so admire it, but it made him cry. He said, “He is such a funny boy. I could not write a letter like that.” And then the tears rushed into his eyes and he said, “He is having such fun! I wish I could help Uncle Gimmie make a Nickel-in-the-slot machine. Oh, I wish I could get well! I wish I could get well!”

  . . . Nobody will ever know what Mamma suffers. It is too hard to bear. I have found out that I really truly cannot get away from him to write, so I have made the plan of getting up in the morning very early, when it is quite dark, and everyone else is asleep. I have a fire laid overnight in the room where I write and I light it myself and sit with my feet in Lionel’s fur-lined foot warmer and two dressing gowns over my nightdress and write by candlelight I think after a while that I shall get so used to doing it that I shall not mind. I must write. I buy nothing new for myself at all, and I go nowhere and see no one, but it costs so much to live as I must keep him. Do not think, my darling, that I do not think about you and love you when I cannot write. You are always close to my heart, but I am very unhappy, and I have a trouble that breaks down my strength . . .

  Your

  Dearest

  In spite of the fact that “no one else can comfort him now”, she felt she had to go to London on business in October. It was the need to make money, more and more money, which, was to propel her for the rest of her life and turn her irrecoverably into the pen-driving machine she had already felt herself to be ten years before. “I must work . . . it costs too much to live”. The beautiful apartment in Paris, the “good, quiet servants who do all they can”, the drugs, the nurse, Stephen—the outlay was immense.

  Stephen went to London with her, leaving Lionel in the care of Lisa and the nurse. They were delayed longer than they expected. Stephen wrote explaining: “You will remember the most important of the business matters on which your mother came to London. Well, the man she has to see is not in town, and will not be till early next week. But anyhow it will only be some few days now until Mamma returns. We’ll have a real jinks then. Goodbye, Dearie. Your Stephen.”

  Frances wrote, as usual, as if he were a very small boy: “Every day I am going to add something to the Fairy Box and we will have s’prises all winter.” But Lionel was beyond high jinks and surprises. Frances brought him treasures from London; she ransacked the shops and bazaars for things that might entertain him. She had a model engine made with ‘the pieces left separate and a little unfinished and brought him tools so that he could put them together by himself while he was in bed”. But he had had every wish gratified since he was born—models of vertical and horizontal engines, Remington typewriters, Edison’s talking doll, “purchased that he might extract the internal phonograph”, dynamos, a Naphtha launch. Nothing could amuse him now. “I don’t want anything, darling, only to get well.” He had everything but the one thing he wanted.

  He died in the Paris apartment on 7th December 1890 and was buried in the cemetery at St Germain. The inscription reads simply: “Lionel, whom the Gods loved”. Frances described his death in a letter to her cousin, Emma Daniels, in Manchester:

  It will perhaps seem almost incr
edible to you, as it does to others, when I tell you that he never did find out. He was ill nine months but I never allowed him to know that I was really anxious about him I never let him know that he had consumption or that he was in danger—and when he died he passed away so softly and quickly that I know he wakened in the other world without knowing how he had left this one. I can thank God for that

  . . . I shall never get over it. I suffered too much. But I kept it up to the last. The day before he died he slept softly all day and said he was quite comfortable, only so sleepy.

  . . . The last words he spoke to me were, “God bless Mammie”, when we kissed each other good night. Early in the morning he coughed a little and when the nurse bent over him she saw the end had come. When I spoke to him and kissed him he gave one little sigh and was gone. I have to tell it briefly because I cannot bear to write more.

  . . . His nurse is still with me, and his doctor seems like my brother. I shall never forget them and how they helped my dearest fellow to pass through death itself without fear or pain.

  “Death is always sudden, however long one waits,” Frances wrote, years later, remembering. She had suffered so much, she would never forget it. She was quite sure of that. Stephen had made himself indispensable, just as he had during her own illness after the accident the year before. Lionel had certainly loved him. Stephen was always gentle and loving with Lionel. But there is a revealing passage in the notebooks Frances kept in the months after Lionel’s death, notebooks which record her deeply disturbed mind, her attempts to reassure herself that Lionel could still hear her:

  Do you remember how you comforted me with your arms round my neck that day Uncle Stephen was so cross to me? He was always sweet to Boy, though, wasn’t he? I forgave him all for that “Never mind, darling,” you said, “we are always friends. We are two staffs that always stand together.”

  With the one staff taken away, Frances collapsed: “There is only one place where I want to go and I think I shall reach it—it is where Lionel lies among his flowers at St Germain.” But Kitty Hall took her to the Hotel Bellevue at Cannes and on to the Grand Hotel des Anglais at San Remo, “a great gay hotel with a concierge in gold buttons, and white marble steps”. There is a vivid picture of this time in the title story of the collection Giovanni and the Other. Lionel is called Leo and Vivian Geoff.

  “Sometimes I think Leo seems even more real than Geoff.” Frances occupied herself with reading Revelations. “If Leo had gone to Africa, I think I should have read about Africa. As it is, I read over and over the parts of those last chapters which tell about the City, the City that has streets of pure gold, like unto clear glass. It always seemed like a beautiful fairy story, until Leo went away. And then I was so hungry for him—it seemed as if I must have something real to think of, so I began to read, and imagine . . . I can’t help trying to make it a place that would not seem too dazzling and strange and solemn for a boy to like . . . I try to remember more about the green pastures and the river of crystal than about the walls of jasper and sapphire, and emerald, and the streets of gold. But somehow I love the gates made of great pearls, and always standing open.”

  Frances’ belief in an after life never wavered. There were those comforting words of Longfellow’s:

  “Dust thou art, to dust returnest”

  Was not spoken of the soul.

  She certainly did not imagine the dead as conventional angels with harps and wings, or as spirits lifting tables and throwing things about. She had had some experiences of seances in Washington and had never been very impressed. But she was quite sure Lionel was still Lionel, real, himself, able to look over her shoulder and help her. This feeling she conveyed most strongly in In The Closed Room, published in 1904, a work that looks like a children’s book but is not. The small girls in the frontispiece playing together with the dolls and the dolls’ tea-set are, at the end of the book, both dead. The message is that those we love are never far away when they die. The mother is comforted because the child is not “millions and millions and millions of miles away”, as it had seemed to her in her first grief. Frances never wrote of the death of a child in one of her real children’s books—though there are plenty of off-stage deaths of parents. Cedric’s father is dead; Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox are both orphaned; so are the two little Pilgrims. Colin’s mother is dead; so is Marco’s, in The Lost Prince. There is not a complete set of parents in any of the books. But she never uses the death of a child to bring easy tears in the way, for instance, that her friend Kate Douglas Wiggin had done in The Birds’ Christmas Carol, published in 1887.

  “One night when I was lying awake at Cannes,” Frances wrote, “after I had left him in Saint Germain, it came to me suddenly, why, that prayer has been answered.” This was the prayer she had prayed when carrying the baby Lionel. “It does not matter what was done to me but he is happy.” Her feelings, often so alien to ours eighty years later, were closely in key with her time. Why Weepest Thou: A Book for Mourners (1888) contains verses called “The Lambs Safely Folded” which show exacdy the same anguished resignation:

  I laid him down

  In those white shrouded arms, with bitter tears;

  For some voice told me that, in after years,

  He should know naught of passion, grief, or fears,

  As I had known.

  The Queen of 1880 had maintained that twelve months’ strict mourning was the correct period for the death of a child, but by 1889 there was some restlessness about the etiquette of death. An article on “Mourning Clothes and Customs” in Woman’s World declared that many customs no longer met with general approval. It even suggested the adoption of black armbands but the Victorians, with a Queen who fetched Albert’s shaving water every day, and wore black during the forty years of her widowhood, were not ready to discard their mourning clothes. It seems certain that Frances, like the bereaved mother in In the Closed Room, wore “garments heavy and rich with crape” and a “long black veil”. For many years she used writing paper edged in black—“middle” width, correct for the mourning of parent or child.

  In the San Remo hotel the rooms she shared with Kitty Hall were “hung with old brocades and pictures and fans, such as one sees in the shops for antiquities”. However short a time she stopped, and she was always stopping briefly and moving on, she made her rooms belong to her: “I see that in each room there is a glow.” In San Remo they were “filled with flowers and there were many pictures of a boy, who is dead”. “Sometimes one wishes to be quite silent, one cannot speak at all, but sometimes one must go over it all again, one cannot help it,” she wrote.

  Frances returned to London, to the house in Lexham Gardens, in the spring of 1891. There were things she had to do. Most important was her feeling that a “short life is not wasted if another’s is built upon it”. There was Stephen’s life to be saved from waste, his career to be made. And there were countless unhappy children in London for whom she might do things in Lionel’s name. In her story “Giovanni and the Other”, Frances wrote of the bereaved mother: “She has a strange wish that he should seem still to live on earth and do things for other boys . . . Her plans are sensible in spite of her fancies.” Frances’ own fancies, imagining Lionel at the prow of a boat gliding over sapphire deeps, did not stop her making the most practical plans for doing good in his name.

  There were two particular London charities which attracted Frances—one was Invalid Children’s Aid and the other the Drury Lane Boys’ Club. Before Lionel’s death, Frances had taken an interest in St Monica’s, a children’s nursing home at Brondesbury. In an article published in Scribner’s Magazine she described London streets swarming with children, ill-fed, ill-clothed, uncared-for. She wrote of the prevalence of spinal and hip diseases among them; of sick children lying on rough boards under dirty sacking in the richest city in the world, of crippled children, fed on dry bread or, if they were lucky, “strange things from the cook-shops with sips of gin or beer”, unable to play, unable to move, with
nothing to do. Through Invalid Children’s Aid, Frances visited some of these children, taking them the sort of trifles she loved herself—“brilliantly artistic wooden dinners on tiny platters with very green vegetables and very juicy wooden rounds of beef”, donkeys with panniers and nodding heads, dolls in scarlet bodices with the announcement “My clothes can be taken off”, threepenny picture books for children who had never heard of Little Boy Blue, and oranges and spongecakes and penny bunches of flowers. “Everything is new to them but pain and poverty.”

  Frances visited St Monica’s during her brief time in London when Lionel lay dying in Paris. After his death, she took some comfort in arranging a memorial corner in one of the wards. She endowed a bed in Lionel’s name and hung his portrait above it. On the Japanese cabinet beside the bed she put books and Lionel’s own musical box and other trinkets which might amuse a sick child; at the foot of the bed a palm in a blue pot. She arranged that the bed should always be available to Invalid Children’s Aid. At St Monica’s she once had the chance of meeting Princess Mary, who had just become engaged to the Duke of Clarence (she later married the Duke of York and became Queen of England). Frances managed to interest the Princess in Invalid Children’s Aid. “It ended by her becoming the Patroness,” she wrote to Vivian, “and as she is the only young Princess who is a Patroness of a Society, it is very helpful to them.” Frances, more secretly than Daisy Ashford’s Mr Salteena, was inclined to be “very fond of royalties”, and was delighted with a letter from the Princess, but in fact her support seems rather tardy and unimaginative: “I will do my very best to help this excellent charity, and I hope next November” she wrote in May, “to be able to send a grant of clothing from the Surrey Needlework Guild. Would you kindly let me know whether books and toys would be acceptable?” Frances’ own visits to St Monica’s continued for many years.