Frances Hodgson Burnett: Queen of Children’s Literature

The daughter of an ironmonger from Manchester became one of the most influential writers of the Victorian era. Her children’s books were read by millions, and one of her works even changed British copyright law.

A Lost Garden

Manchester in the 1850s was a city of contrasts. The Hodgson family belonged to those who fared quite well. Frances’s father ran a hardware and brassware shop on Deansgate, one of the city’s main shopping streets. Their home on York Street was prosperous enough to afford a maid and a nanny for five children.

Everything changed in September 1853, when Edwin Hodgson suddenly died of a stroke. Frances was only four years old. Her mother, Eliza, heavily pregnant, had to take over the family business. The girl was placed in the care of her grandmother, who instilled in her a love of books by buying her illustrated poetry collections.

Subsequent moves took the family to ever more modest neighborhoods. Their last house in Salford was next to a district so impoverished that Friedrich Engels, who lived in Manchester at the time, described its misery as indescribable. Frances most regretted losing the gardens where she’d played as a child. This motif would later reappear in her most famous work.

A Pen Instead of a Dowry

The American Civil War caused an economic disaster in Manchester. The city depended on cotton, and supplies from the Southern states were cut off.

In 1863, Eliza Hodgson was forced to sell the shop. Two years later, the family decided to emigrate to Tennessee, where Eliza’s brother lived.

Frances was sixteen when she and her mother and siblings arrived in New Market. Before leaving, Eliza made her daughter burn all her youthful writings—perhaps seeing them as needless baggage. She could scarcely imagine that writing would become Frances’s only chance to change her family’s fortunes.

Five years after their move to America, Frances’s mother died. At nineteen, Frances began sending short stories to magazines. She wrote for money—constantly and in bulk. She published in women’s magazines, building a reputation as an author of sentimental tales.

In 1873, she married Swan Burnett, who was studying medicine. A year later, their first son Lionel was born.

Curls That Changed Fashion

The real breakthrough came in 1886. The novel “Little Lord Fauntleroy” was intended for children, but it caused the greatest excitement among mothers. The title character, seven-year-old Cedric, wore a velvet jacket with a lace collar and long curls. Burnett based the character’s appearance in part on her son Vivian, with attire inspired by Oscar Wilde’s wardrobe.

The book sold over half a million copies. Across the English-speaking world, mothers began dressing their sons like the literary lord. Burnett also wrote a stage adaptation which remained popular in theaters for years, competing with adaptations of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

In 1888, the author won a lawsuit in England for the rights to her novel’s theatrical adaptation. The case set a legal precedent that was later incorporated into the British Copyright Act of 1911. Thanks to Burnett, children’s literature gained an unexpected advocate for intellectual property rights.

Secrets and Gardens

Financial success enabled Burnett to travel between America and England. In the 1890s, she bought a house in Britain. It was there that she wrote “The Secret Garden,” published in 1911. The story of the orphaned Mary Lennox, who discovers a hidden garden on her uncle’s estate, is now a classic of children’s literature.

Behind her literary triumphs, however, lay personal tragedies. In 1890, her eldest son Lionel died of tuberculosis. Burnett fell into depression, which she had struggled with throughout much of her life. She divorced her first husband in 1898, and two years later married Stephen Townsend—a marriage that lasted only two years.

She spent her final years in a house she built in Plandome, Long Island. She wrote nearly forty novels and memoirs from her youth, titled “The One I Knew Best of All.”

She died in 1924, at the age of seventy-four. Twelve years later, a statue of Mary and Dickon, the main characters of “The Secret Garden,” was unveiled in Central Park. The garden Frances Hodgson searched for all her life has forever remained in literature.