A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
‘Just on the other side of the wall’. Ah, how often did the young Frances Hodgson Burnett wonder what lay there, when by the sudden death of her father she was plunged from middle-class comfort into years of precariousness like her heroine Sara, the princess of this story (and surely so like the young and indeed older Frances in the strength of her imagination).
For Sara there is much beyond the wall; there’s the rat and his family, the magician and the Indian gentleman and her dear friend Becky the housemaid. Then there are beggars and big happy families and mean Miss Minchin, and Sara is thrown amongst them all, keeping herself going with her stories. Her little attic room, bare though it is, becomes the place of dreams and visions, her refuge and citadel. Here she is the princess, and from here she goes out into the world, most earnestly seeking to be as a princess should be.
But she is even more than a princess, for in her Frances Hodgson Burnett explores how a reality is created. Sara calls the rat she befriends Melchisedec. The Bible Melchisedec was a high priest and bringer of bread, and yes indeed Melchisedec the rat is a bringer of bread to his family behind the wall. But it is Sara who brings the bread to him. Then there is the bringer of magic Ram Dass (meaning servant of god). He is the servant of the Indian gentleman, but he is also in service to Sara, making real her fervent vision. In a way she is god, creating a reality from out of her inner vision, the storyteller who makes her stories become real.
Frances Hodgson Burnett was interested in spiritualism and theosophy. This quest to see beyond the wall might also be seen as a desire to open the third eye, to know the truth beyond illusion. The wall is the wall of the skull’s bone or the boundaries of this world, and Sara’s adventures can be seen as her making peace with the chaos of thoughts and emotions. She is an alchemist, creating a light of diamond purity within the crucible of her inner world.
This was such an interesting period. A year later in 1906 E.Nesbit, who also had connections with theosophy through her acquaintance with Annie Besant, publishes The Story of the Amulet, taking her children through the amulet’s door to Atlantis and then to visit a benign future. Perhaps these two women felt the shadow of the First World War and the urgency of teaching new ways to children while there was still a chance that a different path might be taken.
Through Sara the author spoke to children and taught them the power of the spirit and that what we can imagine we can create (and therefore we must be mindful of what we imagine), and she teaches it still. She encourages the reader to believe in the possibility of beneficial change, the healing of suffering, the value of kindness. And she shows us how. Or the beginnings of how, for this is London and the poverty and unkindness she saw all around troubled her deeply, just as they troubled E. Nesbit. When we leave Sara she is turning diamonds into bread for the beggars of London Town.
