The Camp Fire Girls at Top ‘o the World

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Another pastime that will remind me of our long Covid year will be discovering and tearing my way through a large swath of Camp Fire Girls novels. While my past reading obsessions included all the adult fiction of Francis Hodgson Burnett (discussed in one of several posts here), the short works and then novels of Edna Ferber (found here), and Judy Bolton Girl Detective (first of two posts here) saw me through the sleepless nights during the early months of the pandemic, it will be The Camp Fire Girls that will bring back memories of recent months.

Illustration from The Camp Fire Girls at Driftwood Heights – none of the illustrations in this series is worthy of note!

I will never think of sitting in the ER at Lenox Hill Hospital waiting for a hand surgeon to work on my broken fingers on Memorial Day without also thinking about The Camp Fire Girls at Driftwood Heights, which I read on my phone throughout that long afternoon.

Reading about these plucky young heroines who are endlessly resourceful while constantly poking at the confines of what a respectable young woman could be at the dawn of the 20th century has provided the right stuff for managing through our own trying times.

I have been tackling this reading project in as organized a way as the acquisition of these aged books allows – most are at or just beyond the centennial of their having been penned, after all. I have been fortunate to find the lion’s share available for free on Project Gutenberg or other free, or virtually free, platforms. (Walmart e-books anyone? Internet Archive.com?) The book I am pulling out today is an exception and in an effort to lay down some tracks for a future reader with the same endeavor in mind I am making some notes here. It had to be purchased in its original form, busted spine, and a bit dear.

This series of books is nothing short of sprawling in scope. There seem to be maybe three main authors (and other lesser entries) over several decades. In an effort to follow story lines I have taken one author, Margaret Vandercook and read all under her name, and then all under her alternate nom de plume, Margaret Love Sanderson. When I have written previously about these novels (oh gosh, here, here and here) it was all the Vandercook novels – which I will label a superior group. I was very sorry to finish reading them and even after two generations of Camp Fire Girls, I could have happily stuck around for a third. They are her earliest efforts and I think she took what she learned about pacing and applied it to the latter series – these teens grow up much more slowly.

The series which I believe she intended to wrap up with one more volume, ends with the primary heroine, Bettina, leaving off the life of Washington debutante to follow settlement house work on Manhattan’s upper east side. These books play constantly with the shifting roles of women and forcefully promotes the interaction between the wealthy and the poor in associations and ways that were clearly still controversial at the time of writing. I would have liked to cap the series with a final book and the last two and my most beloved characters settled with their choice of mate and set on the path of their adult lives, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be. Alas! (Wikipedia sites her as the author of 21 books in the series – /i have found about two thirds – where are the others?)

I actually run (now walk0 past the East Side Settlement House most mornings! This was where Bettina was learning settlement work in the final volume of that series.

Margaret was so prolific I cannot imagine how she had time to eat or sleep between about 1915 and 1921, let alone raise her son alone after her husband died. While pounding out these volumes at an astounding rate, it appears she kept at least three other robust series underway The Red Cross Girls, The Ranch Girls, and contributed to The Girl Scout series as well. I would very much like to get to the roots of her story, but I don’t see anything beyond bare bones in my searches to date. After this frenzy of work in the teens and into the early twenties, she seems to have stopped writing novels, done some magazine work and disappeared, although living until 1958. Re-married? Other pen names?

To further confuse the reader, Margaret had certain character names which she used constantly. Bettys and Mollys (as well as Mollies and Pollys) proliferate. I include lists of the books by story lines I have followed below in the hope that it might prove helpful to someone in the future. I wonder how even she kept it all straight.

The Camp Fire Girls at Top ‘o the World (a great title, right?) is an outlier. Published in 1916 (my volume sweetly inscribed for Christmas of 1918) it introduces a new set of characters (Mollie Wren is our girl and she is of the from a poor, large family model, but with great Camp Fire Girl grit), who are gathered rather randomly from all over the country for a summer at the farm of authoress Julia Allen – not sure it is made clear where, but somewhere called Lakewood, most likely in Wisconsin.

It is a somewhat plot heavy volume – Margaret S. didn’t shy away from plot! A stray Russian girl from a New York factory is thrown into the mix (this isn’t her first Russian immigrant girl character, which makes me think it was part of the culture at the time – my own grandparents showing up on these shores as young adults in those years), a Southern belle and a wealthy New York niece who is a bit older and more sophisticated than the others. Dialect is rendered liberally and sometimes painfully around the Russian girl and Southerner. I won’t give more of the plot than this, but it is an enjoyable ride.

It would appear that this is the only volume produced for these characters and for whatever reason it seems to be an isolated volume. This probably explains its relative scarcity. I would love to find a way to donate this and another hard to find volume (The Camp Fire Girls in Merrie England) somewhere to have them scanned and made available for other completists like myself. Give a shout if you are acquainted with the process.

A sadly insipid frontispiece from The Campfire Girls at Top ‘o the World.

In closing a quick shout out to Jennifer White at whose wonderful eBay guide list to these books can be found at her blog Series Books for Girls and who kindly answered a burning question I had about a missing volume mentioned at the close of The Camp Fire Girls at Drift at Driftwood Heights – The Camp Fire Girls at Sweetwater Ranch – which is a ghost volume that, never published. Her blog Series Books for Girls contains some all important lists including one that appears to be the complete list for the Margaret Love Sanderson books above. The list below is from Wikipedia and is for the Margaret Vandercook ones. (Please note that Wikipedia has the order wrong on the last two volumes – it is correct as below.)

‘The Camp Fire Girls Books by Margaret Vandercook

The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill (1913)
The Camp Fire Girls Amid the Snows (1913)
The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World (1914)
The Camp Fire Girls Across the Seas (1914)
The Camp Fire Girls’ Careers (1915)
The Camp Fire Girls in After Years (1915)
The Camp Fire Girls on the Edge of the Desert (1917)
The Camp Fire Girls at the End of the Trail (1917)
The Camp Fire Girls Behind the Lines (1918)
The Camp Fire Girls on the Field of Honor (1918)
The Camp Fire Girls in Glorious France (1919)
The Camp Fire Girls in Merrie England (1920)
The Camp Fire Girls at Half Moon Lake (1921)
The Camp Fire Girls by the Blue Lagoon (1921)

Socialism, Pacifism and Then War: Politics in the Campfire Girls

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Preemptive apologies for those of you who don’t share my passion for early 20th Century young adult literature, because today I am posting about the Campfire Girls as they head into WWI. Also, a warning that I give away some key plot points so be forewarned if you are reading as a review and perhaps come back later after reading if that concerns you.

I have written about this series before (those posts can be found here and here), but this series is a bit hard to get your hands around because as I can best piece it together several authors were contributing books published at the same time so you think you are reading them in order, but you have picked up another story line. Also, many of the sources have listed the order of the books incorrectly further confounding my efforts to read them in some sort of order. The good news, and there is a lot of good news, is that they are widely available by free download, although I have been forced to read them on a variety of platforms – some decidedly less friendly than others, but after all, free is free. Most are available on the very user friendly Project Gutenberg website.

*Camp Fire Girls, circa 1918. Photo courtesy of Latah County Historical Society.*

My best effort to rectify this was to find one author and follow her and I have been reading the books of Margaret Vandercook, aka Margaret Love Sanderson (warning however, that nom de plume was also used by a Emma Keats Speed Sampson), who was known as The Queen of the Camp Fire writers according to a brief Wikipedia entry, one which is especially useful in correctly listing her books. (Love you Goodreads, but you don’t have it straight and neither does the Wikipedia entry under The Campfire Girls overall.) There are 21 Camp Fire Girls books to her name (although oddly Wikipedia only lists 14) and she also wrote the Ranch Girls, Red Cross Girls and Girl Scout novels.

Her bio is brief, born in 1877 in Kentucky, she lived until 1958. Married for eight years to John Filkin Vandercook who eventually became the first President of the United Press Association, so we will assume he was a writer too. After his death in 1908 she started to write professionally and, man, she was prolific – churning out several of these novels a year. Strangely though, she appears to stop writing abruptly, at least in this genre and as far as I can tell, in the early 1920’s. I wonder if she remarried at that time and no longer needed to support herself and her son? A mention is made of magazine work, articles, poems and stories. Also, perhaps they run longer since as I pointed out the list I am working from appears to be incomplete.

There’s a lot of charm in these books and I really took a bath in the lore and accoutrements of the Camp Fire Girls as outlined in the early books – rings, costumes, poems and all. While this remains a backdrop Vandercook stealthily moves us into other territory and as the century turns from the early and mid-teens to 1918 and beyond she is writing stories that are almost contemporaneous accounts of the country preparing for and entering in WWI. There is a strange sense in reading them one after the other, that perhaps they were written in larger chunks and then parsed into pieces that make up the novels. The story continuity from one to another is seamless and more like the next chapter in a book than a new book in many of these.

Much to my surprise in The Camp Fire Girls at the End of the Trail (1917) Socialism pops up. The Camp Fire Girls have been out west for a volume already (also, we are on the second generation of girls here and Vandercook wised up and they age a bit more slowly in the second half of the series) and the younger brother of one is sent to stay with them to recover from the sort of mysterious wasting diseases that seemed to permeate the pre-antibiotic world. He is portrayed as an usual young man, only about 15 years old, and among his peculiarities it emerges that he is a Socialist.

*Group portrait of Socialist Party members gathered for the Socialist Convention and Eugen V. Debs picnic in Canton, Ohio 1918.*

In the first volume of their time out west there is an effort to address the situation for Native Americans which I think was sincere, if ham-handed and wrong by today’s standards. Socialism, which is addressed in the form of young Billy getting involved with railroad union organizing. Seems Billy had gotten an earful of Socialist propaganda from a Russian immigrant working on his father’s farm in New Hampshire. He finds his way into an enclave of railroad workers and becomes a leader among them – but pushing a non-violent agenda among. It ends badly, with violence, for which he is ultimately blamed, but in a glossing over it is quickly remedied by his family’s wealth and connections. It manages to be both sympathetic and yet illustrate what was probably the more accepted feeling of the day about unions and Socialism. While it seemed a bit surprising, again, these were novels that were addressing the current events of the day in almost real time.

*End paper for Camp Fire Girls at the End of the Trail* *via Project Gutenberg.*

Without ruining the plot, I will just say that his pacifism is treated with some thoughtfulness considering how enthusiastically we are told Americans generally geared up for that war. It is fair to say it is presented as an untenable view, but not without sympathy for his position. Frankly, I was surprised and would have expected these books to be full only of endorsement for our entrance into the war.

Vandercook wasn’t done with this character yet and uses him to address pacifism in the next volume as the country tunes up for entry into the war. Published in 1918 The Camp Fire Girls Behind the Lines still has them in the West, but now near a newly established army training base in the country, somewhere in Southern California. Billy has been joined by his brother who is anxious to enlist. Billy, on the other hand, is a vocal pacifist and decries the military approach to solving the world’s problems. He wiles his way into working at the army base and makes friends with the fellows working there, becoming very popular with them. It would seem he intends to infiltrate them and then convert them to his way of thinking, but again, things take a very different turn in the end.

In case you are wondering, these are just sub-plots in these novels which still very much manage to be about this clutch of Campfire Girls and told from their perspective.

Finally, I found myself at the group of novels which deal directly with the war and takes a slightly smaller group of girls to France to help with the reclamation work which evidently began there even before the war ended. First I will volunteer that I thought this was likely where I would get off this trolley because this seemed like an absurd idea and this sort of girls in the Red Cross thing was profoundly uninteresting to me. (As I said to Kim, these kinds of books going to war is a bit like most series going out west, the beginning of the end.)

However, I learned that there is historical precedent for a small number of self-financed women who actually did this – driving cars (a skill which many of their French counterparts did not possess), bringing first aide, childhood education to a generation of orphans and semi-orphans, and all sorts of similar endeavors – a small but determined league of women did do this work taking on six month hitches at a go. (All of the photos snatched here can be found on Mashable, 1914-1918 Working Women of WWI here. A rather excellent entry about some of this history can be found here on the Morgan Library site from one of their exhibitions.)

Women shoveling snow from the road Paris France

Therefore the storyline was an acceptable one and doesn’t entirely stretch credulity as I originally thought. (Learning these somewhat forgotten bits of history along the way is one of the decided byproducts of reading these books.) Again, these books were written almost in real time so I would think she did know what would be believable and acceptable to her audience. If the idea that the Campfire Girls were establishing their first roots in France this way has any historical reality or not.

Women grease and inspect the signals Gare du Nord Paris France

Perhaps more to the point Vandercook makes these compelling stories and her descriptions of war torn France have the ring of truth and reality. Although well traveled there is no indication that she actually was in Europe during or immediately following the war and I assume it was newsreels and news accounts that informed her writing – and the tales of these women abroad must have captured her imagination.

Women making missiles in a munitions factory England

Not surprisingly, there is a strong underlying patriotism to these stories, as to be expected. Then again though, there are details which we get from this real time account – the feeling of Paris on the day the armistice was declared; the reaction to Wilson as part of the Peace Conference there which is fascinating and wonderful. She writes about a post-war ambivalence between American and French troops which must have been a real issue. of the day. Incidentally, my pandemic pals, the 1918 Influenza epidemic is entirely ignored.

It is a bit painful to read about as their hopes for a lasting world peace is detailed and never suspecting that we would be back at war a scant twenty plus years later. Sadly we know what the future held and that these hopes for a lasting world peace were not to be.

Editha’s Burglar: Book vs. Film, an Unexpected Review

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Just when I thought maybe I had come to the close of authoring my thoughts on Frances Hodgson Burnett I stumbled across a rather splendid DVD of the 1924 film, The Family Secret, issued by the film accompanist Ben Model under the Undercrank name. The disk (which can be purchased here) came out in 2015. We missed it then and I came upon this release while reading a blog post by Ben, via Twitter one morning about a week ago, concerning the short in the same package, Circus Clowns. (Ben’s fascinating blog post can be found here.)

Needless to say, when I realized that The Family Secret was based on a Frances Hodgson Burnett story published in 1888 under the title Editha’s Burglar, I almost spilled my morning coffee and couldn’t wait to get my hands on both the film and the story for comparison. (For those of you who have stuck with me through these several posts on Frances Hodgson Burnett and her adult fiction, you will remember that while discussing the women in her stories I also delved into the early films made of her work, many now lost. For new readers, that post can be found here. The other Hodgson Burnett posts can be found here, here and, yep, here.) The whole disk features Baby Peggy which is a super bonus as well.

The DVD arrived just in time for the commencement of our vacation. A short list had quickly formed for film watching vacation activity – Kim is working his way through the available films of Jessie Matthews with mixed results, and something called Faithless with Robert Montgomery and Tallulah Bankhead, 1933, is up next for me. We reconvene together over the ones good enough to share with the other. There’s also lots of trolling through what’s available on TCM – a trick I only recently taught our tv and we’re having fun with that. (A raucous sounding Jessie Matthews film is issuing forth from the television even as I write this. Sounds like a winner.)

The print quality of the film on the disk is really great, pieced together from a few sources, an Italian print and a Library of Congress one at a minimum, to maximizing all. It is a complicated and twisting melodrama, worthy indeed of Frances Hodgson Burnett (whose short story is credited), complete with separated lovers and a little girl who doesn’t know her father. I won’t spoil the plot, although I have probably already told you enough to figure it out. Baby Peggy was great. I don’t know what I expected, but she really sort of ruins me for other kid actors because she just sparkles on the screen in a way I hadn’t anticipated. She really had something.

This is definitely the print of the film you want and Circus Clowns is a treat too. The disk is topped off with another great short, Miles of Smiles (with Baby Peggy in a dual “twin” role), and some newsreel footage of Baby Peggy as well. All great and worth seeing – scoop up whatever copies are available immediately.

****

This time Google Books provided the short story in question rather than Project Gutenberg and it is a story that is appropriate for children as well as adults. I probably would have been better to have read the story first, but it didn’t work out that way. The version I downloaded provided very good original illustrations, by Henry (Hy) Sandham and I offer samples below. (I always select the option to include the illustrations if any when downloading, but they are rarely as good or as plentiful as these engravings.) I didn’t know his work, but Hy Sandham, 1842-1910, was a Canadian painter and illustrator.

I am a tad confused about the letter that appears at the opening of the book and which I offer in its entirety below. Elsie Leslie is identified as the inspiration for Editha although what that has to do with Jordon Marsh (which I believe was affiliated with the Boston based department store) or what was written to Frances Hodgson Burnett I cannot say. The letter seems to always be included with the short story and Jordon Marsh is the publisher of the elegant, fully illustrated 1890 edition of the book. Elsie Leslie was the first child to portray Editha in a one-act stage version two years after the original publication.

March 25 1888

Dear Mr Jordan Marsh & Co

Mamma has left it for me to deside if I will let you have my picture for your book I think it wold be very nice. wont it seem funny to see my very own picture in Editha like the little girl that used to be in st Nickolas. I think mrs Burnet writs lovely storys I wrote her a letter and sent it away to paris and told her so and asked her if she wold hurry and write another story just as quick as she could I am looking for an anser everyday. I like to write letters but I like to get the ansers still better I am going to play Editha in boston for two weeks and I will ask my mamma to let me come to your store and see all of the butiful things I used to come every day when I was in boston last winter

your little frend
Elsie Leslie

72 West 92 Street
New York City

(Written by Elsie Leslie Lyde, the original Editha, eight years old.)

The play adaptation was written by Edwin Cleary and, from what I can tell from a (rave) review of 1887 which dates it to before the 1888 copyright of the Hodgson Burnett story – it is beyond my sleuthing to untangle what this means and if she adapted his play or the other way around, although the easiest guess is that perhaps the story was first published in a magazine under a different copyright, the thread of that tale now lost to us.

Interesting in her own right is Elsie Leslie (the Lyde somehow gets dropped in her professional moniker), who at age six was already three years into her stage career when she took the role of Editha which solidified her star billing. According to Wikipedia she is propelled into further stardom in her stage production of Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and becomes America’s first child star, highest paid and most popular child actress of her day. William Merit Chase even paints her in the garb from Little Lord Fauntleroy. I have used a photo of her from the collection of The Museum of the City of New York to illustrate today’s post.

She doesn’t seem to make it into early film (an adult return to the stage in 1911 was not resounding), but was evidently a great correspondent and maintained contact with people from her stage career through her life. Wikipedia sites letters to and from her that can be found in the collected correspondence of such luminaries as Mark Twain, Helen Keller and Edwin Booth. Married twice, she was a great beauty, traveled the world with her second husband, lived to the age of 85 and in general seems to have lead a rollicking good life.

****

The bottom line is the short story is lovely with a very simple plot which is purely about Editha, a rather extraordinary small child, and a burglar in her home whom she convinces to burgle very quietly so as not to wake and upset her rather fragile mother. Instead Editha and the burglar have a conversation (he a snack as well, helping himself to the well-stocked larder including a very large glass of wine) where she also convinces him to take her bits of jewelry rather than the things of value which belong to her parents as it would make them very sad. He takes those, and also appears to pile up the family silver, although not much note is taken of that. The dramatic arc of the story is Editha meeting up with said burglar in prison later.

I can’t help but feel that if a film had instead been made of the original story Baby Peggy would still have been my pick to play her. I believe Baby Peggy could have pulled off the role that way as well, based just on the character of the little girl. I end by saying that I was anxious to compare one of her original stories to what was contemporaneously being made from and inspired by her work and I accomplished that here. To my amazement, very little of the plot survives and instead only the plucky spirit of the character Hodgson Burnett created.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, Part 3: The Women

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

A still from A Lady of Quality, 1913, probably a lost film

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Back to my summer reading adventure and the third installment on the adult novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. (If you have been on vacation and missed the first installments they can be found here and here.) Today I give you another favorite aspect of her writing, the women characters of her books. I have illustrated this post largely with film stills from the various movies made from her books, sadly mostly lost as of right now, as they started to turn up in my research. As an aside, it is worth noting that the first two books I mention below, were best sellers in the years they were published, plays (often adapted by her) as well as early films proliferated from Hodgson Burnett’s work. The books mentioned below are all available for download via Project Gutenberg for free.

Unlike Edna Ferber, who I have offered up as sort of an heir to Hodgson Burnett’s work (I fantasize about a meeting between them, and would be very curious to know if they ever did meet. I imagine the handing of a certain literary baton over lunch in a mutual city somewhere around 1917), Burnett writes about men more, fleshing them out further than Ferber when she did, although somehow a woman generally lurks around and is pivotal to the plot.

For example, T. Tembarom is a man (in fact the unfortunate name of the man) and the main character of the book by the same title. He is in every sense delightful and I loved the few weeks I spent in his head this July. It is hard to write about this book without spoiling the plot (and I urge you to read this book if you are the least interested), but suffice it to say it is a rags to riches story of a type – hard working orphaned boy who has both charm and grit and makes his way off the street and up onto the nascent rungs on the ladder of journalism. There are unexpected turns of event (and thoroughly, utterly, unlikely ones, but that didn’t bother me in the least), and he manages them and all quite adroitly. However, this character and the plot ultimately are entirely driven in his actions for the woman he loves who, by way of a refreshing literary change, is attractive although not beautiful and most of all very wise and, most interesting of all, has an excellent head for business.

Very smart women with good business sense are a theme in Burnett’s books. T. Tembarom notwithstanding, these women are generally unusually beautiful and frequently have a more or less unlimited pocketbook. This does not make them less interesting and in fact makes the most enjoyable plot points possible in The Shuttle. This, my second favorite novel to date, begins with a bit of melodrama concerning a young heiress marrying a rogue of a titled Englishman who more or less locks her away, abuses her and isolates her from her American family. Her younger and very different sister (who clearly today would cheerfully run multi-national corporations if not whole countries) comes to her rescue quite literally – while making an entire village love her and ultimately finds happiness with one of them. I would love to see the 1918 Constance Talmadge version, lobby card set shown below. It is not clear if it is a lost film or not however.

While these books illustrate the first sort of independence for women of the early part of the last century (contrasting the much more liberated American woman against her British counterpart) they also do a splendid job of embracing that made dash toward the modernity of that period. In my mind this is a lovely race, especially in the United States, headlong into the future during this period. It is a moment when developments like photography give way to moving pictures, and train and liner ship travel becoming prevalent and widely available to a broader part of the population. Cars and bicycles also liberate, literally and figuratively, and everything happens, faster and faster, bigger and better, until about 1918 when the influenza epidemic and WWI knock everything for a loop and it all stops more or less on a dime – or at least this power morphs into war energy and a new period begins, infinitely less hopeful than the previous one.

I remember once standing in front of a Georgia O’Keeffe early charcoal drawing at the Whitney and thinking what it might have been like to be in New York City on a day in 1916, seeing this drawing at a gallery and perhaps later in the day hitting a movie theater later and seen Fatty and Mabel Adrift or perhaps The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (I had just been watching films from 1916 and I can’t remember exactly what film I was thinking of), and how you would have felt like you had indeed entered a new, great, modern age. You were thinking, We are so lucky to live right now! These books and their storylines try to capture some of that enthusiasm and energy. And yet, Frances Hodgson Burnett is careful not to ignore all reality in favor of the vision of a promise land. There are impoverished characters who cannot and will never rise from poverty, the facts of what money cannot buy are recognized, and all not cast aside as some honoring of the old ways and tradition is also embraced.

Georgia O’Keeffe drawing from 1915, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and possibly the one I was looking at that day.

Also, Burnett’s world had not quite developed into the world of Edna Ferber (or even Georgia O’Keeffe for that matter) and while the stage is set, poised for the emancipation of women, it has not yet occurred. Women are still dependent on fathers and husband’s for their financial security and their role in society, all society really, is still circumspect. You might push the boundaries here and there but in the end you were still only where first your family money could get you, and then your husband’s fortune. If you were a smart woman with an excellent head for business you applied it via the men in your life and in your advice to them. Men were your only conduit into the broader world, especially that of business. Your choice of a husband being your most important decision about your future – the push and pull of love versus financial well-being is a frequent part of many of these plots.

Finally, I will round out with a mention of yet another female character which drives a narrative, that of a girl named Glad, the protagonist of the novella, The Dawn of a Tomorrow. This is a very different type of story and takes up the Spiritualism vein mentioned in last week’s post. (It can be found here.) While the narrative of the tale is told from the perspective of a middle aged man, it is Glad, a filthy street urchin, who drives the storyline forward. The man in question is saved from suicide by Glad (portrayed above at top and here below, by a much cleaner and more beautiful Mary Pickford in the 1915 film version; one still from the internet and the other from Mary Pickford Rediscovered, by Kevin Brownlow, from the Kim Deitch library) who eventually takes him to meet an equally poor elderly woman who lives in the same slum. However, this woman has a strange, spiritual and somewhat mystical sensibility which imbues all who meet her with a sense of well-being and hope for the future, despite their wretched living circumstances and this is the turning point of the entire plot.

The Pickford film version (rumored to be extant in a Swedish archive) seems to somewhat bastardize the story, perhaps making Mary/Glad the only dominant female character, pushing everyone else (as to be expected) into secondary roles. The film was remade in 1924 with a different lead and that one appears lost. The Pickford film has glowing period reviews and I very much hope it becomes available.

If you have stuck with me through this third post about Frances Hodgson Burnett and her adult novels, perhaps you will not be entirely disappointed to hear that there will be another (final?) post. That one will tackle the love Burnett lavished on her descriptions of clothing and fashion of her day which has driven me to the internet for illustration and explanation more than once.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, Part 2: the Grown-up Books

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

I just purchased this gorgeous volume of Hodgson Burnett’s auto-bio of her childhood

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Returning to last week’s post (find it here) on the author Hodgson Burnett, largely known for her children’s fiction, I have been exploring her adult work which pre-dates as well as running concurrently with her now more famous work for children. I have been reading them via Project Gutenberg, a resource for free, online publications, generally those obscure or early works that have fallen out of copyright. I am enjoying supplying you all with the sumptuous covers of these books since I have not seen them myself before.

Burnett was born in Manchester, England, but moved to Tennessee when she was about 15. Like many of her novels and short stories, she moved between these two worlds, annual trips when funds allowed later in life, although she appears to have lived the larger portion of her life here in the United States – dying in Nassau County, New York and buried there. Her personal fortune also bounced between extremes, although ultimately her writing secured her and her family’s financial security.

Without knowing a lot of the details, the dramatic episodes of her life must have made up some of the color and storylines of her writing. She lost an adult son to consumption which plunged her into a prolonged depression which had already been a feature of her adult life. Her other son also fell quite ill but she was able to nurse him back to health. While her writing is not obsessed with this sort of Victorian illness, people are consumptive or die of other wasting illnesses – however, in all fairness, that was the real world she lived in.

Eventually she divorces her husband, marries another man, but that marriage only lasts two years. (The details of this are a tad torrid and somewhat like one of her stories – he’s an actor who may have been blackmailing her, she ends up in a sanatorium with a nervous breakdown after fleeing to England.) Somewhere in there, in the 1880’s she also finds religion – a theme which does permeate her writing but only occasionally a key element. Her interest in Christian Science, Theosophy and Spiritualism do color her later works. In particular The Dawn of a To-morrow, a short novel or even really a novella, is one of the few that goes deeply down a rabbit hole of religious subject (with a heavy dose of Spiritualism), but in a way no less entertaining than her other stories. (I was riveted reading it on the subway a few weeks ago.)

Frances Hodgson Burnett referred to herself as a writing machine (a sentiment shared by Louisa May Alcott who also wrote for her family’s security) and she was wildly prolific. She wrote for the magazines of the day including Godley’s Lady’s Book, Scribner’s Monthly, Peterson’s and Harper’s Bazaar among them. Once she started writing for children, those stories resided in magazines and compilations in addition to novels. Stories such as A Little Princess and Little Lord Fontleroy appeared first as short stories under similar but different titles, and then once their popularity was clear, grew into their longer novel formats.

Both the juvenile and adult works were turned into plays and then films. A clutch of her early novels were adapted to movies in the mid-teens but sadly now appear to be lost – there are a few I would be very curious to see. The ones that are known to exist are going onto my must-see list to dig up including The Dawn of Tomorrow (1915 and a real weepy), The Flame of Life (1916, based on A Lady of Quality) and The Fair Barbarian (1917, one I just finished reading). Films based on her books are still being made today, in several languages.

Like Edna Ferber (who I raved about in my post Fervor for Ferber which can be read here) Frances Hodgson Burnett revels in character development. Also like Ferber she zips between the various classes, detailing both with equal capacity. It is, in a sense, the divide between classes and their interaction that moves most of her stories. In Britain, social mobility, even with money, is notwithstanding. You are either born of a class or you are not and money (or to some degree lack thereof) does not really change that. People of the working class who come into money are still of a different class. Titled people, even if impoverished, still hold their social standing at least in a sense.

However, Burnett was documenting a world that was rapidly changing, an evolving society which allowed for more financial mobility. A number of her stories concern the invasion of waves of hugely wealthy Americans in Great Britain. Two of my favorite books take on this theme, The Shuttle and T. Tembarom. (Please note that, in my experience, somehow the books of hers with the least appealing titles turn out to be the best. As it is hard to get descriptions of the more obscure books I think this is helpful to know.)

Americans of all classes invading England once a thriving liner industry was established and the cost of that trip diminished as frequency and demand increased. Even the American working class was saving up and able to make the trip to Europe and England. Suddenly there they were, everywhere – riding bikes, touring and taking in the historic sights, marrying impoverished gentry and renovating their lands and historic homes. I had not been aware that this kind of travel expansion was happening in 1907 and that the American working class was taking full advantage of it – nor that it was a boon financially to Europe and England, although shook their tree socially as well, so to speak. Evidently the large influx of newly minted American money was without question sought after, while the brash personalities barely withstood. Newly minted millionaires were evidently mad for titles and married their progeny off to titled Europeans and Brits for this sole purpose.

A Fair Barbarian takes on a young girl visiting a relative, her father’s sister, in a small town in England. The father has made millions in silver mining in Montana. The elderly aunt almost faints when she hears that the girl spent part of her youth in a silver camp called Bloody Gulch. As a young woman of the upper class England wouldn’t even say the word bloody the aunt pleads with the young woman never to say it again. The young woman, understandably, looks confused and explains that it was the name of the place; it was not she who named it.

One of my favorite characters was teased out in The Shuttle (1907). Not a main character, but a very well defined one, of an ambitious, fast talking, young typewriter salesman who had been orphaned and fought his way to modest success selling typewriters, allowing his bicycle trip through England. He is critical to the plot in one book and is referred to in another and is completely delightful. At first English gentry don’t know what to make of brash Americans like these (the typewriter salesman speaks with the most amazing American slang of the day), but they turn out to be such very likable people that most warm to them over time as the stories unfold. The theoretical social mobility and unconsciousness of the modern American at the turn of the century was standing England on its ear.

Even Hodgson Burnett and her gilded rags to riches stories did not believe that total social mobility was possible in her time, in either country. Nor did she ignore the impoverished who would not find an economic foothold to hoist them up the ranks. It is clear that it was only a few who fortune would favor.

I plan to round off my enthusiastic commentary on Frances Hodgson Burnett in a subsequent post, with a nod to her female characters who, even when they are not the main ones, control the action and storyline of every one of her books. Stay tuned.