Dating The Secret Garden

[steepholm]

When is The Secret Garden set? It was published in 1911, but I've always got the impression it was set some forty or fifty years earlier. On the other hand, the makers of the Hallmark TV movie version clearly thought it was more or less contemporary, since they added a scene in which Dickon is said to have been killed - tragically young - in the Great War. And a recent post to little_details by someone attempting a sequel assumes the same.

Now I'm trying to figure out why I think it's set earlier, beyond just feeling that its world is obviously mid-Victorian rather than Edwardian. No doubt young English girls were looked after by ayahs in 1911 India, and there's no reason why an Edwardian Mary Lennox should have been taken from the station to to the Manor by anything other than horsedrawn transport. But then there are all the Bronte references, and the total absence of any reference to Dickon's schooling (surely after 1870 he should have been attending a board school, not larking about on the moor all day?). At one point Martha alludes to an anti-slavery motto ("Am I not a man and a brother?") that might have been less current in 1911 than in 1860. But these seem thin pickings, and short of actually picking the book up and having a look for more clues they're all I can come up with.

So, flist, when do you think TSG is set? Can the matter be settled definitively?

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

My instinct was to say Edwardian, but when I thought about it for more than a moment everything suddenly seemed more complicated. Is Hodgson Burnett writing her own 1860s childhood into 1910?

[hafren.livejournal.com]

I don't think the schooling thing is crucial either way. Even after 1870 it seems to have been fairly easy to keep kids out of school if you wanted to, eg on grounds of health, distance or private tuition.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Well, Dickon is almost excessively healthly, and his only tuition is from the birds, flowers and animals (if that doesn't sound too Fotherinton Thomas), but he could well be a long way from school, I guess.

To turn the question around, is there any reason for thinking the book is Edwardian in setting, other than the default assumption that books will be set in the present day?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Fotherington, I meant, of course.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Actually most classics aren't set in the exact present, are they? Most that I can think of are set at least 20 years back- maybe indeed she was thinking of her own childhood.

I don't think Kipling's Josephine, who was pretty healthy before her tragic illness and death at seven, ever went to school.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I thought she was following the grand tradition of nineteenth century authors and setting it in a halcyon version of the time of their youth. All her stories "feel" like an idyllic 1870s or so.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

My default assumption about children's novels with romantic/nostalgic air to them - i.e. just about anything that isn't Determinedly "Relevant" - is that they're set in the author's childhood and not the reader's. Would have to re-read Burnett to consider this particular question; it's been a v. long time.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

My off-the-cuff guess is 1905, but I have no reason to support it.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

For that matter, Wuthering Heights is set in Bronte's past, without nostalgia.

School? Why isn't Dickon in a mill or down a mine? All right, so he's a nature spirit. And there's an Edwardian tradition of sprites and demi-deities moving in a realer sphere--think of Pan in The Wind in the Willows; or for that matter, A Faun in the Cotswolds and Ariel in Mayfair.

I think The Secret Garden is set in a polder world, out of the time and space of Burnett's England. Her childhood was the cotton mills of Manchester, and even that was removed from her by emigration. It's not a memory but an exaltation.

Nine

[fjm.livejournal.com]

There is a description of Mary's clothing (the new clothing) and it is roughly 1890s I think. Go back to the 1870s and the skirts woudl have been floor length even for a child.

Re the school, Dickon is too old. There were dispensations for rural children to leave at 12.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Why isn't Dickon in a mill or down a mine?

'cos it's North Yorkshire, not South :-)

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Her rendition of the accent seems West Yorkshire to me, but perhaps I'm reading too much into stage dialect.

Nine

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, I cannot fit the nature-religion into a mid-Victorian setting. That sort of thing feels Golden-Dawnish, Cecil-Sharpish: all part of the mingling of nostalgia for the never-was imagined villages of Olde England with a vision of a new dawn. It feels 1890s at least to me.

As fjm comments, the little-girlish clothing for a little girl is also late 19th century, or early 20th. Even the lavishness of Colin's picture books speaks to a later decade.

Nine

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's the kind of detail I was hoping to find, thanks. Though I'm not sure that skirts would have been floor length quite that late (at least, if this site is accurate. I'll have a look for more detailed clothing descriptions tomorrow.

Actually I'm not sure how old Dickon is: he may be less than twelve, I think. Mary's 10 or so, if I remember right, and Dickon's maybe a year older? Again, I'd have to check - but as nineweaving mentions, if he's left school it's odd he's not in some kind of employment. Mrs Sowerby could use the money.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I agree that the book itself reeks of fin-de-siecle/Edwardianism. The mysticism, the hints of Dickon-as-Pan, and the nostalgia, as you say, all fit. But as that word implies, it also feels like an Edwardian evocation of a rather older world.

Interesting point about Colin's books. I'll have to look into that. The Religious Tract Society produced some rather splendid-looking illustrated non-fiction books mid-century, with lots of gilt, but I'm not sure whether they'd fit the bill.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

All her stories "feel" like an idyllic 1870s or so.

I get that impression too, though TSG is the only one I know at all well.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I suspect he's a poacher :-) But an awful lot of rural work was catch as catch can and he could well have been intermittently employed.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

As an aside: I always assumed that the description of Janet trying to figure out the clothing in Charmed Life had been pretty much taken from Mary Lennox's first experience of the new clothes.

[(Anonymous)]

I assume it was set in the 1880s/90s as there was a cholera outbreak in India at that time.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you - I didn't know that.