The Edwardian Child in the Garden: Childhood in the Fiction of Frances Hodgson Burnett

Abstract

The English spring of 1901 was exceptionally cold; Frances Hodgson Burnett spent it at her much-loved country home, ‘Maytham’ in Kent, which she rented from 1898 to 1908 and which contained the garden she loved most. In 1901, at the start of the Edwardian period, she was 52 years old and already a highly successful writer, having published over 50 novels and plays in the preceding 20 years. Although in her own lifetime and beyond, her most famous work was Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), today Burnett is best known for her classic Edwardian children’s novels, A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). Since The Secret Garden is such a rich text for what it reveals about her attitudes to childhood it will be addressed in some detail here. However, although Burnett’s most enduring books have been for and about children, like other children’s writers of her day, she also wrote for adults. Thus this essay will consider some of her adult fiction in the context of its representation of the child, in particular In the Closed Room (1904) and The Shuttle (1907).