Kate Kellaway is a staff writer on The Observer for which she is also children's books editor. She has four sons and two stepsons.
I found my old copy of The Secret Garden the other day - a buffeted paperback, it looked as if it had seen many weathers - but I picked it up with emotion, as if it were a key to a forgotten place to which I might now be readmitted, as if it might unlock childhood.
The feeling partly helped to define what children's classics are - books that last beyond an early reading, that may be re-encountered at any age. The Secret Garden, A Little Princess and Pinocchio (all about to be reissued by Penguin as classics) each answer to this description. And I have had the sense as I return to them that they are like the Polish proverb which observes: 'Everything changes and nothing changes'.
The Secret Garden was both the book I remembered and a new book. I saw what I would have had no reason to understand as a child: that the book is an allegory for reading itself. There is, I suddenly saw, an affinity between the solitary nature of reading and Mary's lonely, singular character. She enters the garden in the same way that we escape into the book. We become bound together - Mary and the reader - like collaborators - and the secret of the garden and the book turn out to be the same. Take this account of the pleasure Mary has in the garden. It could be a description of what it is to read:
'She could go into it every day and shut the door behind her, and she could make up some play of her own and play quite alone, because nobody would ever know where she was...' And again: 'But she was inside the wonderful garden, and she could come through the door under the ivy any time, and she felt she had found a world all her own.'
A book, too, is private, sustaining - a world in itself. Later, Frances Hodgson Burnett makes the link plainer still: 'It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories.'
Frances Hodgson Burnett promoted the reading of books in the same way that she robustly championed other unambitious pleasures: fresh air, friendship, gardening, porridge. The Secret Garden could be renamed The Book of Appetite, it is written with such gusto. It a sensual book - religious (in a lower-case way) without ever insisting that God take part in the story. But it is pledged to the idea that life must be lived with joy and a child's eyes kept
open to beauty.
There is much energetically lyrical writing: a window is thrown open on a bright morning and the result almost rivals Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem exulting in Spring. There are breakfasts that seem made in heaven: 'home-made bread and fresh butter, snow-white eggs, raspberry jam and clotted cream...' There is, always, magic to be had in little things: the trick is to know where - and how - to look. Mary is in receipt of modest presents: a skipping rope with bright handles, a gardening kit with diminutive tools. I remember feeling rapt and covetous as a child reading about these. Each gift was made to seem like a miracle.
Hodgson Burnett knew that a book was the greatest gift, though, and that however unlikely it might seem, a book could be a child's best friend. Unlikely friendship is one of The Secret Garden's subjects. Dickon, the rustic boy who becomes Mary's friend is an almost Shakespearean figure: a Pan with his pipes - or an Ariel without the wings. It is impressive to see how Burnett always steers clear - sometimes just by a whisker or a wing - of sentimentality. The book is set in Yorkshire - and the use of dialect is intended, I think, to keep sentimentality gruffly in check (a plan occasionally defeated by a sentimentality about the dialect itself). The robin that befriends Mary, although given a few anthropomorphic touches does not altogether defy belief for it is based on sound observation - robins are sociable birds.
The Secret Garden was first published in 1911, just before the First World War and I saw, re-reading, how it belongs to that moment and could not have been written any later. We are in an English Eden. There is no thought of war. There was a fall (a young woman died in the garden) but the woman's son and his friends are not to be expelled for it. Instead, there will be regeneration. Two neglected children - I think of them as the secret children - jaundiced, tyrannical Mary and morbid Colin -come fully into bloom. Mary's curious question covers more than she intends: 'Are all the flowers dead, or do some of them come again in the summer? Are there ever any roses?' And the book does not anticipate an end to paradise. At the beginning of Chapter 21, Hodgson Burnett describes her intimations of immortality:
'One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live for ever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender, solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvellous unknown things happening in the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange, unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.'
It is an extraordinary description of rapture. But perhaps it signifies more than anything that The Secret Garden itself is a book that will go on forever.
Like The Secret Garden, A Little Princess is about the power of positive thinking. Both books could rival any modern self-help manual: better, truer, more subtle. A Little Princess offers the idea that a life may be transfigured by imagination. Sara, its heroine, knows that stories are democratic and 'belong to everybody' and she goes further, implying that imagination can save your life. It is interesting - but no surprise - to learn that Hodgson Burnett has had readers for whom her books really were lifelines.
In Adeline Yen Mah's autobiography for children, A Chinese Cinderella, she describes reading A Little Princess (borrowed from a friend). She loved it so much that she copied the whole book out by hand so that she might have her own copy. It was more than a good story, it was a talisman. It offered moral support and helped to see her through her own punishing experience of childhood: she identified herself with Sara and could emulate her stoicism.
A Little Princess is a tale of riches to rags (and back again). It is about moral courage and veers between the luxurious and the austere. A Little Princess and The Secret Garden have grown out of the same soil. Mary and Sara are both exotics, recently arrived from India. They are orphaned (Hodgson Burnett is ruthless about disposing of her heroines' parents).
They are inward, self-sufficient children. Like Mary, Sara has to face loneliness and overcome it. And like Mary, she makes unlikely friends: sparrows, rats and an unpopular, dim but loyal classmate. She could make a friend out of a stone. Sara is more virtuous than Mary - in richness and in poverty (although Mary improves). She is better looking too (although Mary improves).
A Little Princess is essential reading for girls. It is easy to fall in love with Sara on the strength of her appearance alone, the strange prettiness that 'makes you want to look at her again' and the green eyes which it may not be safe to admire. I used to adore the life that Sara gave to her dolls (she pretended that, in her absence, they could speak and move) and the exquisite decadence of their wardrobes (down to their lace-trimmed underclothes).
But what you get from a children's classic will depend partly on the age/stage at which you read it. And I can now see, divertingly, that the book makes useful reading for parents. It contains much bracing opinion. Hodgson Burnett understands child and parent psychology to a remarkable degree. She writes glancingly about the burden of parental over-expectation. She also looks into the difficulty of making certain children compliant (the flailingly inconsistent Miss Amelia shows what not to do in Chapter Four). She understands emotion perfectly and can pack volumes of psychological wisdom into a line. Sara's great weapon is her ability not to lose her temper: 'There is nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in - that's stronger.' What a mother Frances Hodgson Burnett would have made.
Both books are about transformation. In A Little Princess, there are moments (like the miracle with the buns) that seem almost bibilical. And while Hodgson Burnett stretches belief a little with her idea of the aerial furniture removals (the attic is refurnished while Sara sleeps, the furniture all lowered through the skylight) who could resist the idea of this overnight change? It is the opposite of the more common, deflating conclusion: I woke up and it was all a dream.
Of the three books, Pinocchio is the only one I had not read - except in a debased version - as a child. Carlo Collodi's original was a revelation. And it, too, is about transformation. Like Colin in The Secret Garden, Pinocchio is spoilt, imperious and demanding. At the beginning of the book, he insists that his peas be peeled for him. But, unlike Colin, he is no invalid. He is a hyperactive loner - and his naughtiness should not come as a surprise; he is a chip off the old block (his 'father' is involved in a disgraceful fight at the beginning of the book).
Collodi understood that children love reading about mischief (it is to Hodgson Burnett's credit that she manages to make good behaviour seem so attractive - an effect that is much harder to pull off). Pinocchio may have some good intentions - he means well by his father - but they do not survive his wish to see a sneezing fire-eater.
The sneezing fire-eater detains us too. The book is full of such surreal delights. To take one example: the poodle coachman with 'a kind of umbrella case, made of blue satin, to put his tail in when it was raining.' Or the carriage itself 'the colour of fresh air' - or the cushions 'lined with whipped cream'. This is poetry on wheels.
If The Secret Garden is about the joy of freedom (there is no school to depress its plot), this book is about the perils of liberty. When Pinocchio goes to Playland where you never have to study, it turns out not to be as ideal as he hoped. In Pinocchio's adventures, there are pitfalls everywhere, so that as a reader one feels as if one were at a pantomime and longs to shout out a warning: 'BEHIND You!'
But Pinocchio is no good at looking behind him: he is growing up. And so are Mary and Sara. Each of these marvellous books is a sentimental education; they all suggest that children are resourceful and can survive even the worst childhoods. On the other side of the garden wall, these books seem to be saying, there is light.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess
Carlo Collido, Pinocchio
Related titles:
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Oscar Wilde, Complete Short Fiction
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