by Lucy Mangan
And she was an amazing woman. She was born into a well-to-do family in Manchester in 1849 but when her father died of a stroke in 1853 they began a descent into poverty that – despite her mother’s Stakhanovite efforts to keep the family ironmongery business going – eventually forced them to emigrate to America in 1865. A rather incongruous fact considering how firmly associated she is with the quintessential Englishness embodied in The Secret Garden, but fact it be. At sixteen, Frances arrived in Knoxville, Tennessee and would not even visit England for the next twenty-two years.
It was all hands to the pump in the New World – or, in Frances’ case, to the pen. She had always loved making up and enacting stories as a child, and so she began writing some for magazines. She was soon a frequent contributor to the prestigious likes of Godey’s Lady’s Book (the magazine pored over by the Ingalls women in the Little House on the Prairie books), Harper’s Bazaar and Scribner’s Monthly.
In 1873 she married Swan Burnett, a doctor whose medical training she paid for and whom she would out-earn with the success of what she called her ‘potboilers’ ever after. A few years later she published a full-length book set in Lancashire (That Lass o’ Lowrie’s – still a good read, if tha c’n cowpe wi’ t’excruciatin’ phonetic renderin’ o’ t’characters’ dialogue) and began to build a reputation as a romantic novelist. In 1879 she went to Boston and met Louisa May Alcott and Mabel Mapes Dodge, the editor of children’s magazine St Nicholas, which inspired her to try her hand at children’s fiction. Little Lord Fauntleroy began as a serial in Dodge’s esteemed organ in 1894.
Years of prolific writing for adults, extravagant living and – once income allowed – annual trips back to Blighty followed, interspersed with periods of exhaustion from overwork, struggles with depression, and recuperation. In 1890, her beloved oldest son Lionel died of tuberculosis, a loss from which she never really recovered. Amongst other things, it caused her to retreat from her Anglican faith and look for solace in spiritualism and Christian Science. She and Swan unofficially separated and would divorce in 1898. She kept on their house in Washington DC but gradually moved herself back to England, though she continued making trips back across the Atlantic to stay in touch with her other son, Vivien, who was now at Harvard (and inconspicuously dressed).
In England she made her home at Great Maytham Hall, which was exactly what it sounds like – a huge, beautiful country house, in Kent, whose large grounds included several lovely, peaceful walled and rose gardens in which Frances could write. And, in between remarrying (a wrong ’un called Stephen Townsend who was basically only after her money) and divorcing again, she did. Her adult readers got several novels and in 1905 it was the children’s turn. She gave them A Little Princess, an expanded version of a story that she had written a few years before for St Nicholas, called ‘Sara Crewe; or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s’.
I didn’t come to A Little Princess until after The Secret Garden, but I loved it almost as much. It is a much simpler story, in content and execution. Sara is the beloved only child of her widowed father who enrols her at Miss Minchin’s boarding school for young ladies so that she can acquire some education and polish while he goes off to acquire some diamond mines and polish his fortune.
Can you see where this is going yet? It’s great, isn’t it?
Sure enough, father loses his fortune and his life out in diamond-mine country and Sara is left a pauper. From being feted by the awful Miss Minchin and her equally awful pupils, Sara is suddenly cast out. Miss Minchin banishes her to the attic and makes her work as a servant. Oh, the glorious horror of it all! But Miss Minchin has reckoned without Sara’s fortitude and imaginative resources. She pretends that she is a princess disguised as a servant, or sometimes a prisoner in the Bastille and this – together with her friendship with Becky (a real servant girl, with the lumpen, lower-class face and nervy manner to prove it) and the mouse in her garret – gets her through her cold and unloved days.
After many trials and tribulations – and one incredible sequence that pierces me still with the same degree of exquisite agony now as it did when I first read it over thirty years ago, in which a starving Sara finds a sixpence in the slush-filled gutter one bitter winter’s day, buys twelve buns and ends up giving them all, one by painful one, to a beggar girl in the street (‘She is hungrier than I’) – justice is done. Mr Crewe’s friend, complete with her father’s lost fortune which was not so lost after all, turns up to rescue her. And Becky becomes Sara’s personal maid, because this is justice, sure, but 1905-style.
I will be honest. You can come to A Little Princess in a mood that leads you to find it faintly sickening. The legacy of the Victorian love of sentiment regarding childhood is sometimes too plain to see. The testing of Sara’s magnanimity and patience is constant and her saintliness sometimes verges on the absurd. The baker who watches Sara give away all her buns is so uplifted by her example that she employs the beggar girl as her assistant on the spot, FFS.
And yet, and yet – it is lovely. Overall, it stays on the right side of the line – charming, not preachy, with an earnest, not pious heroine whose chosen survival tactics read, especially to someone of an age at which he or she is acutely aware of children’s very real powerlessness, as bravery not passivity.
But it is undoubtedly The Secret Garden that is Hodgson Burnett’s masterpiece. The seed of the tale of lonely Mary and Colin, upon whom nature and the gradual gathering of friends slowly work miracles, was sown at Great Maytham Hall but its full flowering took time. It was published in 1911 to good reviews (most along the simple lines of Outlook magazine’s ‘a more delightful mystery for the child mind could not be imagined than that of this long locked up, deserted, almost dead garden’, though one did say that ‘The Secret Garden is more than a mere story of children; underlying it there is a deep vein of symbolism’) but no great fanfare. When Hodgson Burnett died in 1924 it was – unlike Little Lord Fauntleroy – barely mentioned in her obituaries.
But fate, as Sara Crewe will tell you, is a funny thing. Over the years, Cedric’s star faded and The Secret Garden’s has only risen. It was a book children loved and kept passing on to their own children in turn. Thus it survived until 1949 when a beautiful illustrated edition was published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hodgson Burnett’s death. Buoyed by and resonating with the post-war atmosphere of optimism – and what was a blasted Europe but a giant garden just beginning to put out new shoots again? – it was granted a second more public lease of life and entered firmly into the cultural consciousness, from where it is frankly unlikely to be dislodged.
It is a book that lends itself brilliantly to whatever sociocultural concerns the age happens to be gripped by. The religiously inclined can see the story of Mary, her character remoulded gently but firmly as she digs and prunes the forgotten garden, as a lament for our lost prelapsarian innocence. Or, if you are still shaking your metaphorical fist at the Industrial Revolution, a paean to England’s bucolic golden age. Alternatively, if you’re a Freudian, I’m sure you can interpret it in all sorts of ways unsuitable for this book.
Many have seen the garden as a symbol of motherhood – Mary nurtures it and brings it back to life and it does the same right back to her. Or perhaps it’s a story of exile and homecoming, or the journey through grief.
It was written when the bereaved Hodgson Burnett had become interested in Christian Science and various forms of spiritualism that perhaps offered her more comfort than more inflexible, established religious doctrines did, and perhaps the magic that Mary, Colin and Dickon come to believe is at work in the garden is her attempt to depict or grasp hold of them. But I suspect that for most children the characters’ faith in the garden’s magic reads, as it did to me, as a simple appreciation of the wonder of nature. That plants push up through the earth at certain times of year, bloom and fade in unison without any outward instruction is, when you first become aware of it, utterly extraordinary. A rose is always a miracle, but you only appre
ciate that when you’re young. You don’t need to reach for an external God looking down and orchestrating everything. But you might just reach for a trowel.
I actually did. The Secret Garden was one of the few books that inspired me to get off the sofa and do something to try and bring some of the glory of that imagined world into the real one. I hadn’t had a doll’s house or a knackety-kneed owl or a vortex-friendly garret to try other things out in, but I had a garden. My mother was thrilled. I was DOING something! Bending at the waist, moving limbs, using muscles we had all presumed atrophied long ago. She bought me seeds, a little bag of compost and showed me how to dig it into the soil to prepare the ground for sowing.
For a few days all was well. But the thing about gardening, it turns out, is that it is very slow. Very, very slow. Slow even for a child who was usually so inert she was technically a mineral. You have to dig for ages and then you scatter the seeds and instead of just turning the page to find them bursting into bloom, fuck all happens for months. No robins come to visit you. Or sex gods. Just your mother and your sister, who are out every five minutes to see what you’re doing and explain how you’re doing it wrong. I began to understand why you needed a secret garden.
And you have to do it all out in the fresh air. There was nothing to redeem the experience at all (Mum rejected the idea of hollowing out the apple-tree trunk so that we could try roasting eggs, with a firmness that was surprising even for her) so I returned to the sofa and the book, in which seasons and events unfolded quickly, pleasingly and reliably. I would not make the mistake of trying to find contentment in real life again anytime soon.
E. Nesbit
Next on my canon-run came Edith Nesbit. I suspect, given how often I still mix them up, that I thought they were the same person. In fact, they do have many similarities. Like Hodgson Burnett, Nesbit was a sociable, extrovert, unconventional woman (Hodgson Burnett with literary and Edwardo-hippy types, while Nesbit favoured the Fabians whose formal society she and husband Hubert Bland co-founded). They were both wildly imaginative since youth and prolific producers of potboilers and other hackwork (which here does not mean bad – neither of them ever produced anything unreadable – but simply done to a brief, for a particular market, not wrenched from the heart), writing at least as much for money as out of natural desire and inclination. Like Hodgson Burnett, Nesbit was less strait-laced than we generally think of late-Victorian ladies (let alone our favourite children’s writers) and only got away with several extracurricular activities – including a relationship with a lover ten years younger than herself, Oswald Barron, who inspired The Treasure Seekers and to whom the book is dedicated – because of her wealth and status. She also had to deal with an unsatisfactory husband – though Bland was much worse-behaved than Swan or even Stephen. He carried on several affairs, including one very long one with their good friend and housekeeper Alice Hoatson. She got pregnant twice and Nesbit adopted both children. She was much happier in her second marriage. In a letter to a friend at the age of fifty-nine she said she finally knew ‘what it was to have a man’s whole heart’.
But this is all faintly distressing. Let us stop letting daylight in upon magic and turn to the books. The Railway Children was the one I revered beyond all else.
The comfortable, complacent world of Roberta (Bobbie, or Jenny Agutter forever if you saw the film at a formative age), Phyllis and Peter is suddenly shattered when their father is mysteriously forced to leave them. They must abandon their lovely house in Edwardian suburbia and go to live in a small cottage in the country near a railway line. As this is 1906 and Sunday lifestyle supplements have yet to be invented, this counts as a Bitter Blow rather than Living the Dream.
The children must learn a new mindset (‘Jam OR butter, dear – not jam AND butter. We can’t afford that sort of reckless luxury nowadays!’ counsels their mother, whose superb cheeriness and pluck are the tools with which we truly built the empire), and seek out new friends and entertainments.
As luck would have it, it is not only lifestyle supplements but the Health and Safety Executive, paedophiles and tabloid scaremongering that have yet to be invented, so the children are free to wander up and down the railway line, befriending all the people they come across. These include Bernard Cribbins – I mean Perks, sorry, that film really did get to me – the stationmaster, and the Old Gentleman, a regular commuter on the 9.15 a.m. down train. When Bobbie, the eldest of the children, eventually discovers that their father left them because he was falsely accused of selling state secrets to the Russians and sent to prison, it is the Old Gentleman she asks for help and who eventually succeeds in proving Mr Railway-Children’s innocence.
The arrival of the vindicated Mr R-C at the railway station has been made famous by the film – Jenny Agutter’s cry of ‘Daddy! Oh, my daddy!’ is still capable, nearly forty years on, of pulverising all hearts within a three-mile radius – but the ending of the book (a version of which is used in the film but you are still sobbing too hard to appreciate it) is sweeter still. Bobbie leads him back to the house and tells him to ‘Come in! Come in!’, and the narrator turns the reader, with exquisite Edwardian politeness, gently but firmly away.
‘He goes in and the door is shut. I think we will not open the door or follow him. I think that just now we are not wanted there. I think it will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away. At the end of the field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and the harebells and Gipsy roses and St John’s Wort, we may just take one last look, over our shoulders, at the white house where neither we nor anyone else is wanted now.’
I had long been banned from reading books at mealtimes – at breakfast I would hungrily read and re-read the cornflake packet instead – but because I was now permanently immersed in a book at all other times and had effectively withdrawn from family life (and all other sorts, but it was family with which she was mainly concerned) Mum had issued a decree: I could only do it downstairs. I was to be within the sphere of family activity even if not part of it. Which meant, in effect, that I could only read in the sitting room, because that was the only place – the clue was in the name – that you could sit. (Though even there, not if the sofa cushions had recently been bumphled. You had to give it an hour or two, until the bloom was off the recently plumped rose.) I’d like to say I protested, but I’d met my mother before and knew it would just be a waste of valuable reading time. So I took up near-permanent residence on the sofa, moving to the armchair by the window at bumphling times and on the odd occasions when the sofa was fully occupied by people wanting to watch telly.
It didn’t really matter. At that age, once I was reading, my concentration was total, my immersion in the book complete. A few sentences was all it took for the world to fade away and fiction to assume reality. Short of my sister dragging me off by the hair to play snap or hide and seek with her every so often, I was as happily isolated as I had been up in my room, but my mother’s sense of decorum was satisfied.
But I must have escaped the sitting room occasionally because I remember reading that final paragraph of The Railway Children for the first time up in my room, lying on my bed in front of the window one late afternoon, tilting the book to catch the last of the light as the sun went down. It was the perfect setting for a perfect last page. I went downstairs in a haze of happiness. Probably to be shouted at for absenting myself without filling in the relevant permission slips, but it was totally worth it.
Despite my ongoing disagreement in this matter with Mum, I identified keenly with Bobbie, the ceaselessly vigilant and responsible oldest sister, because I felt very much that of my mother’s two offspring, I would definitely be her chosen confidante at a time of familial distress. I had just got glasses and felt they gave me an air of gravitas with which my sister’s ability, fully developed even at the age of six, to identify, dissect and solve any practical, physical or emotional problem within thirty seconds simply could not compete. Yes, were our father to be wrongly accused of espionage and nationa
l treachery, she would come to me. I would tell her to let him serve his time – as a fellow introvert, I could imagine nothing nicer than a stretch of solitary confinement somewhere with three guaranteed and silent meals a day – and she would go away comforted, and I would be her favourite. Dad’s too, when he found out how well I had arranged things for him. I could make a go of genteel poverty and manage without buns for every tea, as long as I was guaranteed a happy ending before the deprivation became too unmanageable.
It was all very satisfying. The Story of the Treasure Seekers did not please me half as much, even though it was set just down the road in Lewisham. I read it, liked it, but not enough even to pursue the family through the two sequels – an admission that pains me greatly to make as it is so clear to me now that from almost its opening line the volume of the Bastables’ adventures is (as well as being formally innovative, as the first time such a book had been written in the first person) a comic masterpiece. ‘There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking,’ says the narrator, soon revealed as Oswald despite his attempts at omniscient neutrality, ‘because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins “Alas!” said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, “we must look this last on our ancestral home” – and then someone else says something – and you don’t know for ages and ages where the home is or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it.’ It’s Teddy Robinson and Plop all over again. At the time I thought Oswald was a bumptious fool (and to be honest, I would still love to read a book that opens with Hildegarde looking her last on the ancestral home), but now the whole thing has me hysterical, as well as in awe of Nesbit’s deftness in keeping the comedy rolling while shooting it through with shafts of sadness. ‘Our mother is dead,’ says the narrator in that same opening paragraph. ‘And if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her you only show that you don’t know very much about people at all.’ Wonderful.