The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio

id="ulink_88a65e1f-14c9-5886-83a1-94646bbff75d">During the 1870s, the decade during which Burnett entered “the actual world of literature,” the major American literary magazines were reshaping themselves. Harper’s Monthly had built its reputation (and circulation) by publishing the major Victorian realists in serial before passing the full manuscripts to their book publishing arm for circulation in volume form. In contrast the Atlantic Monthly published New Englanders; according to Arthur John some 60 percent of the Atlantic’s contributors during the 1860s were from New England, notably Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier.² That split allegiance in the American literary magazine industry presented a problem for Josiah Holland, the founding editor of Scribner’s Magazine, who set out to provide a venue to publish American authors in direct competition with Harper’s, which relied on English authors for much of its content. When Holland found that American writers were hard to find, new writers yet to emerge and established writers loyal to other publishers, he looked abroad. “He personally solicited novels from Charles Kingsley and George Eliot; he authorized the American journalist and diplomat William James Stillman to act as agent for Scribner’s in England, commissioning him to seek contributions from John Ruskin, Thomas Hughes, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and other eminent Victorians” (John 14). The upshot is that American literary taste was continuing to be shaped by the aesthetic practices of English authors even as publishers were searching for ways to foreground the work of American authors, creating a state of literary uncertainty; American literary magazines were venues for a continuing tradition of Anglo-American literature that was being destabilized by unevenly emergent regional American writing. That uncertainty about literary authority contributed to the embrace of Burnett’s early English novels: she could be advertised as a new voice in American letters while at the same time writing in an English tradition, her novels set in England, her themes identifiable as part of a familiar genre, her characters’ speech regional, English dialect. Consequently reviewers located her work in an Anglo-American tradition, comparing Burnett to Dickens and Eliot, anchoring her among the “eminent Victorians” even as they praised the freshness of her work. That sense of freshness through the familiar, however, captures a tension that can be felt throughout her career while it marks, I suggest, the particular quality of her originality.

      If American literary publishing in the 1870s was in a state of uncertainty, characterized by anxiety about the center of literary authority in American letters, the shock in 1880 of George Eliot’s death to the Anglo-American literary field exacerbated that anxiety. As Martin Hipsky has pointed out, the literary field in Britain for women became polarized toward the end of the nineteenth century: “Given the lopsided binary ‘serious’ versus ‘frivolous’ novel-writing roles, any aspiring young woman writer of the time must have felt powerfully the limited possibilities of the literary field” (28). Because the “serious” side of that binary was identified profoundly with the work of George Eliot, her death stimulated the ambitions of many British women writers. Hipsky puts the point this way:

      [I]n the years following George Eliot’s death, the list of those who [tried] to match Eliot’s level of achievement is a long one […]. Patriarchal ideologies notwithstanding, the flourishing career of such a ‘consecrated’ and belaurelled predecessor, well within living memory, served as a powerful encouragement to ambitious women romance writers coming of intellectual age in the 1880s and 1890s. (28)

      Burnett’s place among those so encouraged by Eliot’s example and absence is complicated for a couple of reasons. First, her first two novels were published during Eliot’s lifetime, one even having been reviewed alongside a work of Eliot’s. Any comparisons between her work and Eliot’s, then, were living comparisons. Upon Eliot’s death, among some reviewers in England and America, Burnett became the figure identified as inheriting Eliot’s mantle. Second, the void left by Eliot’s death was felt more by Burnett’s reviewers than by Burnett herself. Rather than Burnett looking to fill the space in the literary field left vacant by Eliot’s death, Burnett’s early reviewers placed her there, a lofty eminence from which one could only fall. Burnett’s literary career we might say was formed on the bedrock of the Victorian novel before being shaken by uneven and unpredictable forces in the Anglo-American literary field after 1880. Then by the time of the Great War, there was no bedrock of any sort on which to continue to build a literary career, only fragments of stone. With all the flux in the American literary publishing industry accelerated by generational changes at the highest levels of what we might crudely call the literary workforce, and with historical and technological changes in the Anglo-American world that we today associate with high modernism, Burnett’s most intimate literary antecedents have fallen by the critical wayside, visible only in side-long glances in the contemporary reviews and later literary scholarship.

      Consider in that latter regard how gingerly Ann Thwaite in her 1991 biography addresses the relation between Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s. The first reference to Gaskell and Burnett occurs when Thwaite notes that on November 24, 1849, the day Francis Hodgson was born, “Not far away, Mrs Gaskell was writing a letter to Charlotte Bronte, congratulating her on Shirley. Her own Mary Barton had been published the previous year; the Manchester operatives Mrs Gaskell wrote of were the same people who were soon to fascinate the young Frances” (3). That brief passage captures in miniature a typical strategy when Gaskell’s and Burnett’s names are linked in the scholarship: the happenstance of Manchester residence is raised in order to suggest that they saw similar things, in this case factory operatives. The implication then is that any overlap in literary engagement with working-class life in Manchester at mid-century is a result of place; literary influence is not part of the equation. A more interesting example can be found when Thwaite discusses the death of Burnett’s father and the family’s financial decline: “Mrs Gaskell’s great ‘prevailing thought’—‘the seeming injustice of the inequalities of fortune’—was already evident to the small Frances” (13). Here Burnett’s experience puts her in the place of Gaskell’s working-class characters, generating a parallel perception and foreclosing any later literary connection. When Thwaite approaches the possibility that Burnett’s literary imagination may have been stimulated by Mary Barton, she is careful to overwhelm that possibility by tying Burnett’s inspiration for That Lass O’Lowries to her memory of the Junoesque factory-girl alluded to earlier, to a series of articles on Lancashire coal mines published in the Manchester Guardian during Burnett’s visit to Manchester as a young woman, and perhaps to “Kay-Shuttleworth’s pamphlet on ‘The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester,” but, she avers, “[M]ost of the material for That Lass O’Lowries undoubtedly came from real life.” Burnett, Thwaite notes as an aside, may have been “stimulated by the Reverend William Gaskell’s ‘Lectures on the Lancashire Dialect’ which had been appended to later editions of Mary Barton” (46) when she had her working-class characters speak in dialect. That’s as close as she comes to suggesting a direct link between the two novels. The material for That Lass O’Lowries, it seems, had to come from anywhere but its most obvious source, the Lancashire working-class novel most identified with Manchester, Mary Barton. Thwaite, like Burnett, seems hesitant to go there, the influence too deep for delving.

      In her 2004 biography of Burnett, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina explains the relationship between That Lass O’Lowries and Mary Barton with similar caution:

      Although there is something reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, in which a working girl is wooed by the wealthy son of a mine [sic, factory] owner and only finds strength when she works to clear the name of a neighbor accused of the seducer’s murder, Frances created in Joan a strong woman immune to traditional seduction and reluctant to marry into a rank above her. (66)

      If the imprecise parallel between the heroines of the two novels is the main ground of comparison, then indeed That Lass is “something reminiscent” of Mary Barton, but the narrative materials in both novels have much more in common than Gerzina acknowledges. Gerzina suggests, however, a deeper connection when she observes that with That Lass “reaping strong reviews, and the new book Haworth’s [also an industrial novel] well under way, Frances was making