The Humming Room
Page 38
Little Lord Fauntleroy was written in 1885. It was about the conversion of a young street boy through a legacy into a velvet-suited, long-haired young gentleman. It set a standard for rich boys’ dress for a number of years. First serialized in the prominent St Nicholas magazine, the book was wildly successful both as a novel and a stage play, bringing Mrs. Burnett both fortune and fame.
Sara Crewe was also serialized in St Nicholas in 1885 but was not immediately turned into a book. It went from the magazine directly onto the stage. Not until 1905, when friends convinced her to revise the book according to the successful stage play—adding characters and situations that had not been in the original serialization—did Mrs. Burnett make it into a novel.
The Secret Garden was published in 1911. It has been one of the most popular books of childhood ever since.
In 1873, Frances Hodgson married Swan Burnett, a young man who had been crippled in childhood but who went on to become a successful eye specialist. Though always mindful of her mother’s insistence that she cultivate ladylike manners, Frances Hodgson Burnett nonetheless supported her husband during the time he was working to establish himself as an ophthalmologist.
They had two sons: Lionel and Vivian. Vivian was the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy and as a grown man wrote a biography of his famous mother called The Romantick Lady. In 1886, while Mrs. Burnett was travelling abroad after the extraordinary success of the Fauntleroy book, Lionel came down with consumption. She returned home at once to nurse him devotedly, keeping from him the knowledge that he was dying. “It seems to me,” she wrote later in a notebook, “that I must not give you the terror of knowing.”
In 1898 Dr. Burnett and Mrs. Burnett were divorced and she soon married another young doctor, Stephen Townesend, who had helped nurse Lionel during his final illness. Townesend was ten years younger than his famous wife, and desired to become an actor. She treated him more like a son than a husband, attempting to help him in his theatrical ventures with her rather important connections. As Vivian was to write later: “This was one of the few solaces … (she) had … her wish to help her older—disappointed—Stephen boy.” They separated a year later.
During her successful years, Mrs. Burnett was not considered a particularly appealing woman. Some critics accused her of being domineering and self-centered. But she left the literature of childhood richer with her writing, and that is worth a little conceit, surely.
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett Townesend died at Plan-dome, New York, on October 29, 1924. The Secret Garden lives forever.
—JANE YOLEN
Afterword
BEFORE FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT WROTE THE SECRET Garden, most of the literature for children starred grotesquely good little boys and girls. Bad children were never the heroes of a story. Rather they were punished appropriately like the bad sister in the fairy tale, with a mouthful of toads, or reformed. Even Mrs. Burnett’s earlier heroes—the relentlessly courageous little Cedric Fauntleroy and the relentlessly hopeful little Sara Crewe—were such child paragons.
But in The Secret Garden a new child hero emerges. Cranky, demanding, angry, and thoroughly unattractive, both Mary and Colin are anything but likable. And yet, we understand what makes them that way.
Mary is a survivor. She survives her parents’ dismissive behavior toward her. She survives the Indian servants’ submissiveness. She survives the cholera epidemic. And we know she will survive the cold welcome she receives at Misselthwaite. She survives the only way she knows how—by being disagreeable, aggressive, and sly.
Colin, too, is a survivor. He survives his mother’s death and his father’s strange behavior toward him. He survives despite the doctor’s pessimistic diagnoses and detrimental treatment. He survives the servants’ pity and their indifference. He survives in the only way he knows how—by being hysterical, prone to tantrums, and ill.
That Frances Hodgson Burnett can make us like these two thoroughly unlikable children is a large part of the genius that makes this book a classic. We admire and enjoy Dickon, who is as much a nature god as he is a little boy. But we do not love him. Our hearts go out to the impossible pair—Mary and Colin. We root for them to get well, to fix the garden, to “live for ever and ever and ever.”
Some of what makes The Secret Garden work so well must have come from Mrs. Burnett’s life. Like Colin’s father, the gentleman with the unhappy past, Mrs. Burnett spent a great deal of time away from home. Her guilty secret was that she had been holidaying when her son Vivian had become so ill. And though she could not save him, she could save another little boy named Colin Craven. It is that secret guilt and her great need to have the child well, that drives the emotional part of this story.
Also, like Mary, Frances Hodgson Burnett lost a father early and was sent from a beloved home to a new, cold environment. Her solace had been in make-believe and in gardens. So Mary becomes a kind of symbol for Mrs. Burnett’s childhood tragedy. As one critic wrote of her, “It was Burnett’s lifelong habit … to transform her experience into the conventional forms of a story.”
There is another curious element in The Secret Garden. Unlike most of the ordinary books of the day, which had little moral lessons of a decidedly Christian nature, there is something curiously unchristian about the book. Burnett all but deifies nature, and clearly speaks about a kind of life force working in nature. Though she has Dickon sing the “Doxology,” that most Christian of hymns, both and he and his mother speak of the Magic in the earth and the growing things.
Mrs. Burnett was, herself, a most unorthodox Christian, dabbling in such interests as faith healing, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Christian Science. Clearly she is not trying to force young readers onto any such paths. But there is a great magic healing power in the garden itself—and in the seasonal and cyclical plotting of the book. It ends in autumn, with everything—children and garden—awakened. That natural magic also transforms the book and every reader.
—JANE YOLEN
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE SECRET GARDEN
All new material in this edition is copyright © 1988 by Jane Yolen
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eISBN 9781466805736
First eBook Edition : November 2011
EAN 978-0812-50501-6
First Tor edition: January 1990