The Haunted Wood, page 21
The model for Cedric was Burnett’s second son vivian: “if there had not been vivian, there would not have been Fauntleroy,” she told the writer Gertrude Brownell. The illustrations for the book, which probably did more even than the text to foster that sartorial craze, were based on an 1884 photograph of vivian, aged seven, in a velvet suit. By the end of his life Reginald Birch regarded his association with the book as having ruined his subsequent career. Vivian entered the ranks of the children of children’s writers whose lives were blighted by the connection.
More than half a century after the book came out a “bald, squarecut” middle-aged man told a reporter plaintively: “I was a perfectly normal boy – I got myself just as damn dirty as the other boys. I could write a book about what Fauntleroy has been to me. I try to get away from it but I can’t.” He lived with his mother on Long Island into adulthood,* managed her business affairs, and was to write a biography of her (The Romantick Lady, 1927) from which she emerges, as one critic put it, as “aggressively domineering, offensively whimsical and abominably self-centered and conceited.”† When he died of a heart attack after coming to the rescue of a boating accident in 1937, his death was headlined: ORIGINAL “FAUNTLEROY” DIES IN BOAT AFTER HELPING RESCUE 4 IN SOUND: “vivian Burnett, Author’s Son who Devoted Life to Escaping ‘Sissified’ Role, is Stricken at Helm – Manoeuvres Yawl to get 2 Men and 2 Women from Overturned Craft, Then Collapses.”‡
If Frances put vivian into Fauntleroy, it was perhaps an imagined version of herself who appeared in A Little Princess. Its protagonist, Sara Crewe, is left in the care of Miss Minchin’s school for girls in London while her doting father, a well-heeled widower, returns to work in India. To start with, the titular soubriquet is ironic: the other girls are jealous of Sara’s lavish wardrobe and privileges. The obsequious and materialistic Miss Minchin (“large, cold, fishy eyes and a large, cold, fishy smile”; part Trunchbull, part Cruella) treats her with special regard because of her father’s wealth. Sara – who graciously befriends the most hopeless and dim-witted of her classmates, Ermengarde, and Becky the scullery-maid – never puts on airs. But when news comes that Captain Crewe has died, and his riches have vanished after he invested in a friend’s ill-fated diamond mine, her fortunes are reversed.
The little princess is now a penniless orphan. At once Miss Minchin takes her out of school, confines her to a freezing garret, and sets her to work as a drudge. Yet she maintains her aristocracy of spirit: “‘Whatever comes,’ she said, ‘cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. ’”
Accordingly, she is considerate, humble, and solicitous whatever befalls her. Gandhi himself would be tempted to slap her, were he not to suspect that she’d get an intolerable degree of satisfaction from turning the other cheek. Like Cinderella, she makes friends with rats and sparrows. At a climactic moment in the story, hungry and cold, she finds a coin on the ground and goes to a bakery to buy six buns – before, her tender heart moved by the plight of a street-girl more wretched still than her, she gives five of them away. Of course, as the plot unwinds in strongly Dickensian style, it turns out that the diamond mines came good after all and that her father’s guilt-stricken old pal has been searching for her all along. He is – drum roll – living right next door. As in Fauntleroy, Sara is spared the disagreeable necessity of virtue being its own reward in the long run: she’s going to end up rich and happy, as are her humble pals, and Miss Minchin is going to spend the rest of her pinched little life regretting being such a meanie. It’s a touching and well-made melodrama, and its resolution is as richly satisfying as it is ridiculous – but few children will see themselves faithfully represented in Sara.
So Cedric in Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sara in A Little Princess are paragons: children as turbocharged innocents; moral superheroes. They are designed above all to appeal to sentimental adults, and it was sentimental adults who drove the Fauntleroy cult. The child protagonists of The Secret Garden on the other hand are, at least at the outset, horrible.
Mary Lennox is ill-favored in body and in temperament: “everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair, and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.” She’s lonely, neglected by her parents, accustomed to being waited on by native servants, and spoiled rotten. “She was not an affectionate child and had never cared much for anyone.” She thinks nothing of calling her ayah “Pig! Pig! Daughter of pigs!” “because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all.”*
Within the first few pages, both parents are dead and the whole passel of native servants have either been carried off by cholera or run for the hills. Discovered by chance, abandoned and forgotten, in her father’s bungalow, she is packed off to live with her uncle in his vast manor house on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. She shows no enthusiasm for the project, and treats the servants assigned to look after her with the same absurd imperiousness she showed her ayah.
Even leaving aside Mary’s brisk orphaning in the opening pages, this is a book deeply rooted in grief, and the trauma of grief. Misselthwaite Manor, as it turns out, is one great galumphing metaphor. Mary’s widowed Uncle Archibald is seldom ever at home, and when he is he barely interacts with his niece or the servants who keep the place running. After the abrupt death of his beloved wife Lilias, he has checked out of ordinary existence. And as Mary learns, among the many walled gardens is the titular secret garden, the one that Lilias planted and tended and where she died in an accident a decade before. Mr Craven buried the key and forbade anyone ever to set foot in the garden again. Thanks to the borderline supernatural intervention of a robin, Mary finds the key – and then she finds the locked gate, hidden beneath a curtain of ivy…
The secret garden itself works in lots of ways. As metaphor, it’s an Eden, one of those special Edens in children’s writing that is (to the adult reader and writer) the lost good place of childhood itself. But it’s also a living symbol of regrowth and replenishment, and a concrete example: it’s a garden, as well as the idea of a garden. Its flora and fauna, its smells and sounds, are carefully and evocatively detailed. The robin* is just one of many avatars of the healing forces of nature in the book. The secret garden (where the robin lives) stands not just for forbidden knowledge, but for self-knowledge. The site of grief is also the site of rebirth.
Mistress Mary went a step nearer to the robin and looked at him very hard. ‘I’m lonely,’ she said. She had not known before that this was one of the things which made her feel sour and cross. She seemed to find it out when the robin looked at her and she looked at the robin.
Another avatar of nature – we could think of him as a pre-school compost of Heathcliff, Mellors, and St Francis of Assisi – is Dickon, the younger brother of Martha, the servant who is assigned to look after Mary. We hear a lot about Dickon before we see him. He’s working class, uneducated, lives, and breathes the Yorkshire moors and can tame and speak to all sorts of animals. And he’s happy: he may not have pots of money, but he has affectionate siblings and a mother who loves him. Dickon befriends Mary and helps her bring the secret garden back to life – a friendship she hoped for but did not expect:
‘He wouldn’t like me,’ said Mary in her stiff, cold little way. ‘No one does.’
Martha looked reflective again.
‘How does tha’ like thysel’?’ she inquired, really quite as if she were curious to know. Mary hesitated a moment and thought it over.
‘Not at all – really,’ she answered. ‘But I never thought of that before.’
When they first meet, Dickon’s unaffected good nature – his identity with nature itself – instantly wins her.
The house has other secrets. Mary, alone in her room, hears crying at night from somewhere else in the house. She’s told she’s imagining it – until, exploring the empty corridors in the small hours, she chances into a room where she meets the other child in the book’s triangular set-up, Colin: Archibald’s neglected, sickly, bed-bound son – whom he can’t bear to look at because he reminds him of his dead wife – is even more unpleasant than Mary. The adults around him have convinced him that he’s going to develop a hunchback and die young, and the servants who tend him have been instructed to keep his very existence a deadly secret. They pander to his every whim for fear of worsening his condition, and in the process have created a monster of resentment, spite, and self-pity.
The arc of the story is of these two children (thanks in part to the catalytic effect of their pet Green Man, Dickon) learning to heal each other, heal themselves, and in due course bring the wintry widower under whose roof they live back to life too. The miraculous return of Colin to health and vigor, and Mary growing fatter and prettier, is down to what they call the Magic.
The meaning of that Magic is at the heart of the meaning of the book. At a climactic moment, when the Doxology is recited in the garden, what seems to be a Christian gloss is put on this resurrection story* – and there are scriptural cadences here and there in the text. Colin’s repeated assertion that “I am going to live for ever and ever and ever” can’t but evoke the New Testament’s promise of eternal life. But the Magic of the book is pre-Christian, almost Lawrentian. When Dickon’s mother Susan is first introduced to the garden, Colin asks her whether she believes in Magic.
‘That I do, lad’ she answered. ‘I never knowed it by that name, but what does th’ name matter?[…] Never thee stop believin’ in th’ Big Good Thing an’ knowin’ th’ world’s full of it – an’ call it what tha’ likes. Tha’ wen singin’ to it when I come into th’ garden.’
There’s a curious and very fin-de-siècle twin track of thinking in this book: a mystical appeal to nature sits alongside a burgeoning sense of the miraculous in science. Colin is determined to conduct a “scientific experiment” on the Magic, and his stated ambition is to be a “Scientific Discoverer” – rather than, say, a soldier or an explorer or a servant of empire. Few protagonists of children’s stories in the previous century aspired to be scientists.
All that psychological acuity makes the book a profound step forward for Burnett. In this, just as in her previous books, it falls to children to show the way to adults. But these children aren’t in a natural state of grace or of superhuman innocence. They have been built, morally, by their experiences – by the experience of being indulged, of being frightened, of being kept indoors; and above all by the experience of neglect. These aren’t plaster saints: they are unsympathetic children, sympathetically understood. The formation of the International Psychoanalytical Association was four years in the future, but Burnett was thinking in a psychoanalytical way.
Indeed, in one remarkable passage she links an understanding of child psychology to a utopian sense, which in the early years of the twentieth century must have been easy to feel, that the world was marching ever faster forward:
In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. […] One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts – just mere thoughts – are as powerful as electric batteries – as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.
To flourish, children need food, and a connection to nature, and the society of other children – and, no less than gardens need tending, they need parental love. It was not enough, The Secret Garden says, for adults (as Mary’s parents had) to pursue their own pleasures and leave their children to the servants. As one character remarks tartly: “Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery, Mary might have learned some pretty ways, too.” Dickon, speaking of Colin, says: “he wishes he’d never been born. Mother, she says that’s th’ worst thing on earth for a child. Them as is not wanted scarce ever thrives.”
Burnett’s own two children did not want for love. Indeed, she perhaps channeled the love that was absent from her first marriage into coddling her two boys – and even into their teenage years she spoke and wrote to them as if they were under ten. She was always, like Cedric Errol’s mother, “Dearest.” vivian Burnett may have been scarred by having been the original of Little Lord Fauntleroy – but he, at least, lived. The decisive trauma in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s life was the death from consumption of her older son Lionel in 1890.
Lionel was only fifteen when it became clear that he was dying. Frances’ response was to drag him from their home in Washington all over Europe in futile search of a cure, to “wrap him in makebelieve” so that he would not know he was dying, and to divert his attention with toys and games and gadgets. She wrote to a cousin afterward:
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.*
Neither her marriage to Swan Burnett nor her conventional Christian faith survived the loss of Lionel. She dabbled in theosophy and Christian Science in the early 1880s and led a separate life from her husband (they eventually divorced in 1898), making a disastrous marriage with her long-term protégé Stephen Townsend. The death of Lionel, I suspect, is what made the exploration of grief in The Secret Garden so much richer and more poignant. Colin’s miraculous recovery from illness can be seen as a species of magical thinking: the wish-fulfillment version of Lionel’s real-world decline and death.
* The 1905 publication date, appearing to make it belong to the era of The Secret Garden, is misleading. A Little Princess was the revised and expanded version of a story, “Sara Crewe, Or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s,” that was originally published in book form in 1888 after being serialized in a children’s magazine the previous year.
* Oscar Wilde’s fable “The Selfish Giant,” published just two years later, has a similar if more expressly Christian trajectory.
* Thwaite, op. cit., [p].
† Irvin Cobb, Goin’ On Fourteen, Being Cross-sections Out of a Year in the Life of an Average Boy (George H. Doran, 1924, [p].
* “Names Make News,” People, 15 May 1933.
† Marghanita Laski, Mrs Ewing, Mrs Molesworth and Mrs Hodgson Burnett (Arthur Barker, 1950), [p].
‡ New York Times, 26 July 1937.
* It’s clear that abusing the help is disapproved of, here, though the undifferentiated “dark” and “ashy” faces of the servants – they’re colonial set-dressing more than people – will mar the book’s opening a little for the modern reader.
* An important character in his own right. Eccentrically, Burnett even writes a few pages of the story from his point of view. That might not have survived a modern editor.
* There’s even the possibility, far-fetched but not wholly implausible, that the passage in which Mr Craven hears the laughter of children in the locked garden may have been a source for T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.”
* Letter to Emma Daniels, quoted in Thwaite, Beyond the Secret Garden.
“Oh! my Daddy, my Daddy!”
E. NESBIT
The Story of the Treasure Seekers;
The Wouldbegoods; The New Treasure Seekers;
Five Children and It; The Phoenix and the
Carpet; The Story of the Amulet; The Railway
Children; Wings and the Child; The Magic City
EDITH NESBIT (1858–1924), DESCRIBED BY HER BIOGRAPHER Julia Briggs as “the first modern writer for children,” shared with Burnett that extraordinary ability to remember what it was like to exist as a child. “There is only one way of understanding children,” she wrote in 1913 at the peak of her success. “They cannot be understood by imagination, by observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory. Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children.” Even in her youngest days, she said, she had prayed “fervently, tearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought and felt and suffered then.”*
She might be forgiven for having wanted to forget. Edith Nesbit’s own childhood was one of griefs and terrors. Her oldest brother (she was her parents’ fifth child in as many years) died at the age of four a year before she was born. Her father died of consumption when she was only three. And when she was only twelve years old her elder sister Mary, too, succumbed to consumption and died on the eve of her wedding.
Edith was raised, then, by a twice-widowed single mother (with a teenage daughter from her first marriage) in straitened circumstances in south London. She had a vivid imagination as a child and was terrified of the dark and haunted by the idea of the walking dead – a fear cemented by her encounter aged nine with the mummified bodies preserved in the church of St Michel in Bordeaux, which she called “the crowning horror of my childish life.”
Those terrors fed into the horror stories she wrote as an adult and found their way in gently comic form into her children’s fiction – in The Phoenix and the Carpet, Jane is terrified by her brother’s talk of “dungeons, and chains, and knobbly bare human bones” – but the worlds she creates in her writing for children are fundamentally deeply benign. She makes childhood anew – a version of childhood to which, as Noël Coward (who knew her a little at the end of her life) put it, she devoted “her extraordinary power of describing hot summer days in England in the beginning years of the century.”
