Unearthing The Secret Garden

It was a lovesome, mystic
place, shut in partly by old
red brick walls against which
fruit trees were trained and
partly by a laurel hedge with
a wood behind it. It was
my habit to sit and write
there under an aged writhen
tree, gray with lichen and
festooned with roses.

—From My Robin (1912),
describing the rose garden
at Maytham Hall

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE power of a garden to tell a story. In the case of The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett recalled her feelings as a gardener and about a particular garden. It was an English garden that she had made and lost, her first real garden. With her always-active imagination and perennial search for material, she wove in people she had known: a gardener, a sick boy, men disabled in body and spirit. She also drew on the person she knew, or at least thought she knew, best of all—herself.

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND
(1849–1865)

She was not born a gardener. The future author of The Secret Garden did not take up serious gardening until she was almost fifty years old. Fortunately, the soil was prepared much earlier. And as bona fide fairy tales go, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s life isn’t bad. Hers is a riches-to-rags-to-riches story, set in the dark city and the pastoral countryside. There are heroes and villains, love and hate, intrigue and adventure.

She was born Frances Eliza Hodgson on the 24th of November 1849 to parents living in the Cheetham Hill neighborhood on the outskirts of Manchester. One might have described them as reasonably well-to-do. Her father, Edwin, was an ironmonger (or so he described his profession on the church registry the day of her baptism), but an ironmonger of a refined sort. His business offered elegant fixtures and fittings for homes of the burgeoning middle class in this, the Cottonopolis of industrial England, and it maintained his family in comparable style.

Frances was the middle child of five, balanced between two older brothers and two younger sisters. She had nurses and maidservants and every expectation of comfort. She had the frequent attentions of a grandmother who loved to read.

Grandmamma brought the plump, rosy-cheeked three-year-old to the local bookseller to select her first book. It was a rhyming alphabet of flowers with color illustrations that popped out from black backgrounds. Looking back, Burnett remembered learning that A stood for Apple-blossom, P for Poppy, and R for Rose. She called it the “Little Flower Book,” though from her description it was probably The Alphabet of Flowers, first published in London in 1850. “Such lovely pictures! So like real flowers!” she wrote of it. “As one looked at each one of them there grew before one’s eyes the whole garden that surrounded it—the very astral body of the beauty of it.”

While teaching young Frances her letters, the alphabet book also taught a language of flowers, full of etiquette and upstanding morals. She felt that “the Violet stayed up all night, as it were, to be modest, that the Rose had invented her own sweetness.” Here’s one example, a lesson in sharing:

U unable to bring, of its

own, any flower,

Prayed V to lend one he might

have, in his bower;

V, like a kind brother, the

VIOLET lent,

Saying, “Humble it is, but

prized for its scent.”

Is it any wonder that Burnett’s adult prose was infused with floral references? Nor is it surprising that she sometimes veered into the Victorian language of flowers. Her ideas about flowers were built up from years in a proper English nursery and schoolroom.

The first childhood garden that Burnett remembered was behind their comfortable home on St. Luke’s Terrace, near the Anglican church in Cheetham Hill. Though a hedge was the only thing separating the rear of the property from the neighbor’s pigsties, it was “the back garden of Eden” for Frances. This paradisal domain was lush with lilacs, rhododendrons, laburnums, viburnums, and small fruit trees. “There were roses in bloom, and a score of wonderful annuals, and bushes with gooseberries and red and white and black currants, and raspberries and strawberries,” she later recalled, “and there was a mysterious and endless seeming alley of Sweetbriar, which smelt delicious when one touched the leaves and which sometimes had a marvellous development in the shape of red berries upon it.” As in other Edens, sadly, the Hodgsons’ tenure at St. Luke’s Terrace was cut short.

In 1853, when her father died without warning, her mother donned both mourning garb and the mantle of the Hodgson business. Trade gradually diminished, and so did the family’s prospects. As in Jane Austen’s novels, the Hodgsons were forced to retrench on more than one occasion. Eliza Hodgson relocated her family several times in Greater Manchester, slipping stepwise down the social ladder with each move.

Mamma eventually settled the family in Islington Square in Salford. Burnett described it as a place for “widowed ladies with small incomes, and unwidowed gentlemen with large families—people who, not having been used to cramped quarters, are glad to find houses of good size at a reduced rent.” The surroundings were bleak and the air full of “smuts”—ash and soot from the coal-fired factories.

While in its better days Islington Square might have had at its heart a green park, only a paved area with a central lamppost remained. There was one brave bed of flowers in a neighbor’s front garden, growing in stark contrast to what Burnett called the “ugliest, smokiest factory town to be found anywhere in all the North of England.” Just outside the iron gates that marked the entrance to Islington Square was a warren of back alleys, and slum housing that Friedrich Engels dubbed “cattle-sheds for human beings.”

Young Frances was warned to avoid contact with children from the other side of the gates, an admonition that she furtively ignored. From these acquaintances, she learned the Lancashire dialect. She later employed her linguistic ear in writing the dialogue for many characters, including the broad Yorkshire of Martha, Dickon, and Susan Sowerby in The Secret Garden. Its heroine, Mary Lennox, was similarly independent-minded and proud of her ability to speak “a bit o’ Yorkshire.”

Frances always loved a good story. When she was old enough to climb the shelves in her parents’ library, she discovered Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, another book laced with flowers and gardens. It caught her imagination and motivated the acquisition of a new doll named Topsy and the rechristening of another as Eva. The family bookcase also held bound volumes of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, known for its romantic, historic, and gothic fiction. As an adult Burnett recalled vivid details of the magazine’s serialized novels such as The Scottish Chiefs and The Mysteries of Udolpho written by Jane Porter and Ann Radcliffe, respectively. Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and William Thackeray also held valued places in her pantheon of authors.

By now school-aged, Frances and her sisters attended the Select Seminary for Young Ladies and Gentlemen in Islington Square. While arithmetic was a trial, she excelled in reading and spelling. History was another of her strong subjects, both ancient and British, though only “up to the . . . Georges,” where she found the romance ebbed away. She soon started inventing stories of her own, entertaining her classmates with elaborate narratives of thrills and romance whenever the schoolroom went unsupervised.

In her memoir, The One I Knew the Best of All, Burnett wrote that she “adored the stories in which people had parks or gardens, or lived in rustic cottages, or walked in forests, or across moors, or climbed ‘blue hills.’” She gardened in her imagination, transforming the drab Square in her mind’s eye with fantasies of bluebells, harebells, roses, and an ornamental lake with swans. She was always lavish.

Another garden of her childhood imagination has a direct link to The Secret Garden. Behind a vacant mansion in the vicinity of Islington Square was a wall with a green-painted door, a door with a vague air of mystery. On hearing that the house was to be demolished, she opened the door and discovered a lost garden that bears an uncanny resemblance to Mary Lennox’s in the novel. “At least it had been a Garden once,” Burnett remembered, “and there were the high brick walls around it—and the little door so long unopened, and once there had been flowers and trees in it . . . though it was so long ago.” In this abandoned garden room, she concocted a pretend scene: a rose-covered bower, swaths of flowers, avenues of beech, oak, and chestnut. The actual space was rubbish-strewn and choked with weeds. There was one exception, a tiny red flower blooming along the ground, like star-shaped cheerfulness. She thought it might be scarlet pimpernel.

Other realities could not be avoided. In 1865, Eliza Hodgson gave in to economic facts. She had been trying to run a fine furnishings business in a city careening under the Cotton Famine. It was a perfect storm for manufacturing: overproduction preceding a shrinking world market for cotton goods, then a precipitous drop in raw fiber from plantations in the war-torn American South. Manchester’s main industry crashed. Mills and textile works closed. Vast numbers of people—labor and management—lost their jobs. Bankruptcies were rife. Demand for the luxury goods offered by the Hodgson business evaporated. The family packed up once more, this time for a more radical move. They boarded a ship for a trans-Atlantic crossing and made their way to Knoxville, Tennessee, the home of Eliza’s brother, William Boond.

EAST TENNESSEE
(1865–1873)

William had been effusive in his invitation to his sister. He promised her boys employment in his provisions business, where he sold everything from groceries and dyestuffs to nails and baling twine. As it turned out, Boond’s commercial boom went bust when the American Civil War ended in 1865, just as the Hodgsons arrived. Uncle William did his best, arranging for one of his nephews to work at his rural grain mill and the other in his store on the corner of Gay and Union Streets in Knoxville. For Eliza and his three nieces, he offered a house—a ramshackle log cabin—in the village of New Market twenty-five miles away. At least it was a roof over their heads.

The words “practically starved” are often applied to this period in the family’s history. The boys sent what money they could. Kind neighbors stopped in with extra food to help these genteel, impoverished Englishwomen transplanted to the Tennessee hills. Frances and her sisters started a local school, though their pupils tended to pay in eggs and meat.

Despite all these trials, Frances delighted in the landscape. The skies were vast and blue, and she was surrounded by forest and purple hills. Birds sang. Bees droned. She felt “not a stranger here,” but a part of it. Her memories of these teenage years verge on the transcendental:

To get up at sunrise and go out into the exquisite freshness and scent of earth and leaves, to wander through the green aisles of tall, broad-leaved, dew-wet Indian corn, whose field sloped upward behind the house to the chestnut-tree which stood just outside the rail fence one climbed over on to the side of the hill, to climb the hill and wander into the woods where one gathered things, and sniffed the air like some little wild animal, to inhale the odor of warm pines and cedars and fresh damp mould, and pungent aromatic things in the tall “Sage grass.”

She described herself as something of a dryad—a fairy that lives in a forest.

Language also had its allures. As in Manchester, Frances picked up local dialect and idioms. She pictured the shock of her English cousins if they could hear her “speak American” with phrases like “I guess” and “I reckon.” Grown into a petite young woman with violet eyes and a laughing personality, she acquired the nickname “Fannie.” It was always fun when Fannie was around. “What larks!” she liked to say of her various escapades.

While New Market had neither the romance of James Fenimore Cooper’s Mohicans nor the grace of Southern living as she had visualized it, she took to the new social scene and captivated the locals. Or so they remembered once she was famous. The local doctor’s son, Swan Burnett—two years older than Frances and planning to study medicine—was smitten from the start by this laughing, vibrant English rose. There was romance, or at least flirtation with romance.

Despite these distractions, poverty had no appeal. “Shabbiness as a rule is depressing,” noted Burnett in the draft of one story. With her brothers’ financial contributions, the family moved to a slightly better house, albeit a tiny one. It perched atop a hill with vast views of the Appalachian ridges. Frances called their new address “Noah’s Ark, Mount Ararat.” She filled their home with bouquets of wildflowers she gathered, but she yearned for more. More beauty. More security.

The woodland edge enticed her. A thicket of sassafras, sumac, and dogwood opened onto a small clearing crowned by a natural roof of wild grapevines. Frances called the spot her Bower. She was inspired to write there, scribbling stories on odd bits of paper. In inclement weather, she retreated to a small, unheated attic room, her “Temple of the Muses,” and wrote among the rafters. Her sisters Edith and Edwina acted as audience and cheerleaders.

Writing offered a way out. Her principal object was, as she put it, “remuneration.” There were opportunities; monthly periodicals encouraged submissions from readers. But what of the money for proper stationery and postage? Wild grapes from the Bower supplied an answer. Gathered in quantity and sold at the local market by “Aunt Cynthy’s girls,” who lived at the bottom of the hill, wild grapes were transformed into paper and post, like the magic that her characters would later invoke in The Secret Garden.

In June 1868, Godey’s Lady’s Book published her story “Hearts and Diamonds” under the pseudonym “The Second.” Another story followed in October. And thus, at nineteen years of age, her writing career began. More than a dabbler, she went to work, producing a regular output that continued for the rest of her life. She became a regular contributor to several magazines including Scribner’s Monthly and Harper’s Bazaar, soon publishing as Fannie E. Hodgson.

With regular checks arriving, Frances immediately outearned her brothers, and the Hodgsons moved into Knoxville proper in 1869. They rented a run-down but beloved brick house that the family christened “Vagabondia Castle.” The back of the property dropped down to the Tennessee River, which still flows through the heart of the city. The two brothers and three sisters, now in their teens and twenties, hosted lively parties and musicales. Perhaps there was a modest garden. In a book written decades later, she hinted, “I have made gardens in queer places. [N]ot large gardens and not through spending much money. But still gardens.”

The Vagabondia days were brief. Eliza Hodgson, “Dear Mamma,” died in 1870, aged fifty-five. The siblings dispersed with wedding bells ringing. Her eldest brother, Henry, and both of her sisters married within eighteen months. Frances, still pursued by Swan Burnett, finally married him in September 1873, though only after taking a year and a half abroad in Manchester, London, and Paris to visit friends and relations.

WASHINGTON, D.C., AND BEYOND
(1874–1897)

Their son Lionel was born on 16 September 1874. Six months later the small Burnett family, accompanied by “Mammy Prissy,” their nanny-cook-housekeeper, left Knoxville for Paris, where Swan studied ophthalmology. Her editor at Peterson’s advanced money against the promise of regular story submissions. Still the family breadwinner and soon pregnant again, Frances continued to produce story after story and started on her first novel. She worked herself to exhaustion. To her sister Edith she wrote, “I want my chestnuts off a higher bough.”

A second son, Vivian, arrived in April 1876. Frances was determined, driven by ambitions for herself, her sons, and for Swan. She underscored her drive by adopting a more professional byline. “I never was called Fannie until I came to America & I don’t like it,” she insisted to her publisher. “It is too babyish for a woman & might mean anybody. So if you please ‘Frances Hodgson Burnett’ in future.” She stuck to that throughout her career, despite changes to her marital status.

After returning from Paris, the Burnetts settled in Washington, D.C., where her husband set up his medical practice, and Frances continued to write. And write. Her debut novel, That Lass o’ Lowrie’s, was a bestseller in 1877. Her “Tuesday afternoons”—salons at her home on I Street—were considered excellent entertainment for Washingtonians of an artistic bent.

She doted on her boys and vice versa. They called her “Mammy,” “Dearest,” and, once they’d learned French, intermittently “Cherie.” She continued to write. She wrote at home, sequestering herself in a room on the top floor of their house. The boys sometimes crept upstairs. “[Lionel] is lying on the floor on his back under the table at my feet now & has not stirred for about twenty minutes,” she informed one editor. “That is what in literary houses we call ‘being good’ & is the condition on which he is allowed to stay with me.” In this room of her own—fifty years before Virginia Woolf declared the need for one—Frances found a garden, at least a garden of sorts.

A pair of maple trees grew outside the windows of her third-floor writing den. Their branches touched the sills. Sparrows nested in them and sometimes perched on her window ledge. Many years later, she told a friend that she had “once lived in the top of a tree & shared the domestic life of bird families.”

Trees also seemed to speak to her, and fragrance, always. As money flowed in, she bought the family a more fashionable house near Dupont Circle. She cherished the lindens on Massachusetts Avenue, especially in spring. Turning the corner from the Circle, it was “odorous with the perfume of sun-warmed . . . blossoms.” For her, it remained a haunting memory.