Secret Gardens (The Gold Age of Children's Literature 8)

Catherine Storr, Marianne Dreams

Confined to bed, as a consequence of a long-term illness, a young girl entertains herself by drawing a picture of a house, which she then finds she can enter in her dreams. When she then draws a picture of a boy in the house she creates a companion for herself, Mark, a boy who, like Marianne, is also unwell. Unlike with Marianne, whose illness is never named - it seems more a storybook illness, allowing a long convalescence during the which the story can unfold - we eventually learn that he is recovering from Polio. Not just a creation of Marianne's imagination, he also corresponds to a boy in the real world who is, like Marianne, being tutored by a Miss Chesterfield who passes on news of her companion, whom Marianne otherwise only encounters in dreams.

The narrative follows the interaction between the two children in this peculiar landscape, created out of a child's act of drawing. Marianne gradually fills in the details of the house, and supplies food and games for her new friend. Unfortunately, early on, after an argument with Mark, she also draws a number of rocks with single eyes to keep Mark entrapped. The narrative eventually resolves itself into their attempt to escape these frightening, haunting figures which now people this barren landscape.

Mariano's attempts to help Mark build up his strength and escape, parallels his real world recovery from the effects of polio. It reminds me a little of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, specifically Colin's recovery from his unspecified illness (another storybook malady, more symbolic than real). Thankfully, Catherine Storr never descends to Hodgson Burnett's levels of sanctimoniousness about her character's illness. In place of a narrative informed by Christian science, we have something which feels - what - Jungian? Therapeutic, at the very least. The destination of their escape, a lighthouse - as with everything else, drawn by Marianne for Mark - seems symbolic of recovery, it's light piercing the eternal gloom of the dream landscape and temporarily blinding the nightmarish jailers. And the form those jailers take - rocks with single cyclops eyes - is something literally out of a child's nightmare - Marianne's.

I know almost nothing about Jung's theories, beyond a vague outline, so perhaps I'm stretching my argument here. Although, at the time she wrote her novel, Catherine Storr was married to the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr (her fiction published under her married name), who clearly had an interest in and knowledge of Jung's, as can be seen just from a glance at his bibliography, so there's no reason to suppose that she wasn't familiar with such ideas.

Perhaps it's just that any narrative of recovery, especially one which is couched in such fantastical, symbolic forms, is going to have a therapeutic note to it. It's certainly a powerful tale.

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There's an idea, though I can no longer remember exactly where I first encountered it, that a common trope of English children’s fiction is that of the ‘secret garden’. It derives from the title of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous novel of course, but refers to all the many hidden spaces and worlds which can be found in so much children’s fantasy. It’s close in some ways to Philip Sandifer’s trope of the ‘portal to fairy’ which he deployed in his epic examination of Doctor Who: the notion of a door or portal through which the protagonists pass, exiting the mundane world for one of fantasy and adventure. C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe leading into Narnia, basically, which easily maps onto the Doctor’s Tardis, and no doubt other children’s fantasy. But it’s there in The Secret Garden too, I think. Gardens by their very nature have natural boundaries, the passage through which can easily be freighted with literary, or even religious significance, if we think of the passage from the Garden of Eden in Genesis. Hodgson Burnett’s characters must first discover the means to enter the garden of the novel’s title, passing through an initially locked door into the space where they will achieve their own personal growth and restoration of health.

It appears to be quite a flexible trope. If I remember this correctly, I encountered it in the context of a piece about J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, which definitely works: as we all know Hogwarts is a secret world reached through a hidden doorway in King's Cross station. I’ve also found myself wondering if this isn't a trope that I’m finding within many of the children’s fantasies from the 50s and 60s which I’ve been reading over the last few years. I’m thinking specifically here of Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, The House of Green Knowe (which I didn’t get around to writing about, despite my good intentions). It’s most obvious in Philipa Pearce’s book: Tom literally steps over the threshold of his backdoor at night into a wonderful garden of the past. This actually underlines a significant difference though. What for Hodgson Burnet was a symbol of growth and unification with the world - both social and natural - which exists beyond the child characters’ sense of self has here become much more private, even solipsistic. Although he is sharing it with someone else, the experience of entering this hidden space remains Tom’s private engagement with the past.

In The House of Green Knowe it’s the eponymous house which serves as the magical space, hidden away from a threatening modernity. In order to reach it, the oddly named Toseland initially has to cross the barrier of floodwaters, which for the remainder of his Christmas holidays are the comforting barrier which help keep the rest of the world out, while he explores both the history of the house and his own family history through a series of ghostly encounters. Toseland's relationship with the past, both national and mythic is a sanctuary, keeping not only modernity at bay, but also an evil, storybook gypsy, the narrative's one source of conflict. I call her a 'storybook' gypsy, because that's exactly how she appears to me: a trope which bears little relationship to the real people we call gypsy's, although I am fully aware of the troublesome nature of that. As a gypsy, she is both the cultural and ethnic 'other' which is rejected by the national English past, the past which Toseland and his grandmother have continuity with through their ancestry.

Put like that, it feels like overly harsh with what is after all, a lovely children's fantasy. Yet, that reading is there. Much as I love it, and fully intend to read the other books in the series, I can still recognise that The House of Green Knowe is a deeply consolatory fantasy.

In comparison, both Charlotte Sometimes and Marianne Dreams feel far less consolatory. If anything, they're far more solipsistic, the secret worlds entered through sleep and dreaming. Charlotte Sometimes gestures at an alienating slippage of identity, and the world Charlotte travels back to and becomes trapped in is hardly a consolatory one, mostly dreary and unpleasant, overshadowed by the final stages of the First World War. If this is a secret garden, it is one which is despoilt, and to be escaped from.

Marianne Dreams is harsher still, since it isn't just Mark who needs to discover the resources within himself in order to fully recover from his illness. It's also Marianne who needs to learn to be a better person. It's her initial fit of pique and irritation with Mark which causes her to create the jailers in her dream in the first place. It's very nicely judged. She's never portrayed as a particularly unpleasant child - a bit self-centered, perhaps, but no more than most children can be - instead, her actions are the result of thoughtless anger, the sort of thing which we can all be guilty of at times. Marianne's desire to aid Mark in his struggle then is partly the result of her need to apologise and to atone for her earlier actions.

The magical space in which Marianne and Mark find themselves then, is intimately intertwined with the real, material world. It's a space in which they are both tested and ultimately learn to become better versions of themselves. Here, the 'secret garden' is located firmly within the self. Which is perhaps only to restate how the trope of the secret garden works. In contrast to the 'portal to faerie' as theorised by Philip Sandifer - where the portal is a doorway to a more magical, adventurous world - the 'secret garden' is ultimately always bringing the child characters face to face with themselves.

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (5)

Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

This is one children's book that I know I did try to read when I actually was a child. I forget how old I was exactly, but I know that I was already aware that this was a 'classic', and that therefore it was something I ought to read. Alas, I gave up after only a few chapters, finding it rather boring.

As a consequence, I didn't watch what is apparently a much loved and fondly remembered adaptation for the BBC in 1989. I think one of my brothers must have done, because I do have several memories of scenes from it: a sunlit garden verging on something paradisal, and a young friend to enjoy it with.

In fairness to my younger self, I can understand why I might have found it rather boring. There's very little in the way of plot. Sent away to stay with his aunt and uncle because his brother has measles, young Tom finds himself able to slip back in time when he crosses the threshold of the backdoor at midnight when the unreliable grandfather clock strikes thirteen. Their flat is part of what was formerly a country house in the late 19th century, and it is the lost garden to which he returns each night. What follows is more a series of episodes strung together, as Tom explores the garden and in the process befriends a lonely young girl, Hatty, one of only two people who are able to see him. In the 19th century past, Tom appears as a ghost, unable to leave any mark on the world in which he finds himself. With effort, he's even able to push his way through doors.

The transition back to the past is evoked manner a marvellously eerie manner. We do eventually find a sort of explanation for it, but it's one which is satisfactory only in purely emotional terms. It's simply the narrative means by which two lonely individuals are able to meet and play together, alleviating some of their unhappiness. And that play is threatened not only by the end of summer, but by the fact that Hatty grows older throughout their meetings. Tom never returns to the same time, but drops in on Hatty as grows into adolescence. The later times to which he returns are not the paradise of summer, but an icy winter wonderland of the great frost. Hetty is not only older, but Tom is gradually growing less distinct for her. Several images of the 'thinning' of fantasy to evoke her transition into adolescence. Ultimately we're left with a sense of loss, but it's a very appropriate sense of loss for a children's fantasy since it's only the loss of childhood play which we all experience.

Since that narrative of loss is tied to the transition between an 'aristocratic' 19th century garden and post war reality in which Tom lives, in which the garden has been built over, it's not surprising that some critics have complained that the book idealises that world as a 'lost paradise', obscuring the reality of poverty found elsewhere in Victorian society. It's a view which I have some sympathy with, especially nowadays when we have a popular culture which contains more than it's fair share of representations and pastiches of the Victorian past. Neo-Victorianism is an actual thing, an object of academic study.

On the other hand, I'm a little suspicious of critics who criticise fictions for what they don't contain.  Nor am I convinced that a fictional representation of the Victorian period which does acknowledge the horrors of poverty can't also be idealising. And I'm not sure that the 19th century world to which Tom travels is quite as idealised as some appear to think.

Hatty is an orphan, having been taken in by a considerably unsympathetic aunt who clearly resents the presence of a poor relation in her home. She's left out of the games of her three older cousins, only one of whom appears to have any real sympathy for her. Hatty is eventually lucky; she meets a farmer who is successful and prosperous, and who provides her with everything she could want during their married life together. But it's easy to imagine that life might gone very differently for her if she hadn't been fortunate enough to meet her farmer. And the loss of the garden is explained not simply as the fault of modernity, but as a result of the failure in business of Hatty's cousins who gradually have to sell off their land, eventually losing everything. It's not simply an idealised world that we're presented with here, but rather its a world which is contingent, lodged in time.

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Time slip fantasies appear to have been a popular mode in post war children's literature. Perhaps some of the impulse was a desire to escape from what was perceived as a drab post war world. The feeling of just stepping through a door to enter a vanished past literalises the nostalgic motive in a way which is also very moving. I do wonder too if the engagement with the Victorian past is not also down to the fact that in 1958 the Victorian world must have still felt very close. One consequence of two world wars and an intervening economic slump is that the pace of building would have slowed. There would was less desire or ability to replace older buildings. It was the modernist planners of the 60s and their successors who really began that process. So in 1958, many more people than nowadays would have lived in places which were surrounded by fragments of the Victorian past. Not that that has entirely vanished, even now.

It's something which I recognise and feel quite strongly myself, because I grew up in old houses. Ironically, this was because of a grandfather clock which my parents owned, and consequently all the houses we lived in required ceilings which where tall enough to accommodate the clock. Hence they were all houses built in the later 19th / early 20th century. I suppose now I would see that as a privilege, although at the time of course it seemed perfectly normal. And perhaps it was only because I was a child, but the past could feel very close.