I am finding it hard to get going with my reading so far. After Christmas I find I go into a slump/hibernation when I feel like doing nothing at all. And these days, being retired, I can do precisely that if I wish to. So I do what I always do when I cannot settle to a new book - I pull down an old loved one from my shelves and do a re-read.
And I chose T Tembarom by Frances Hodgson Burnett. My copy is a lovely old battered one with speckled edges and black and white line drawings. It was published by A L Burt Company whose address is given as 114120 East Twenty Third Street and this edition is dated 1913. I wonder how many people have read this copy? A nice thought to hold when reading.
Having read a biography or two about the author and knowing that her marriages and life was not totally satisfactory, I feel that she created stories with a Cinderella like quality and a happy ending to fulfil a need for happiness that she never achieved. The Making of a Marchioness is another one these lines, poor, lonely and poverty stricken woman achieves a rich and wealthy marriage as well as love; A Little Princess where Sarah Crewe goes from wealth to poverty to wealth and happiness again; The Shuttle, an abused and unhappy wife is saved by her strong sister who also finds love in the doing; The Lost Prince in which the hero comes into his own kingdom and, of course, Little Lord Fauntleroy where a young child redeems the miserable and unhappy life of his grandfather, alone and lonely in his great house.
T Temberom is an orphan in New York. Left alone by the death of his mother who was married to a feckless Englishman, he has nobody to care for him and has to live by his wits. This he does and gradually achieves a second hand society column in a local paper and a room in a boarding house. Here he meets Mr Hutchison, a Lancashire man who has come to the USA with an invention which will make his fortune, only it doesn't and he and his daughter Ann are on their uppers and soon to go back to England. Ann or Little Ann as everyone calls her, is a wonder of virtue, wise advice and motherly instincts who could be a rather irritating character but she isn't, she escapes it somehow. Burnett has the knack of knowing how far she can go with a 'good' person and stops short of making them totally insupportable and nauseating.
T Tembarom falls in love with her and she with him but then the unexpected happens. An English solicitor calls at the boarding house to inform him that he is the last surviving relative of Temple Temple Barholm and the heir to a mighty estate in England. He has to go there to claim his inheritance and Ann refuses to marry him until he has been there a year, seen and met with the cream of society before she will allow him to think of making her his wife.
So off he goes and with him goes a man who he rescued in New York when he discovered him homeless and ill with memory loss and not knowing who he was or where he came from. He was an Englishman so T Tembarom thinks that being at home in his country might help him recover his health and strength and restore his memory.
Then we find out that the heir to the title and estate vanished in disgrace years before, accused of cheating at cards and fled to America and went gold prospecting and his death was reported after a mine explosion in which many perished. He left behind the woman he loved, Joan, now bitter and unhappy and locked into a dreadful hateful relationship with her mother as they both clung to the edges of society, the only way out being a marriage for either of them.
The scene is set: a rough New Yorker inheriting the title, a missing heir, a man who has no recollection who he is, a bitter unhappy woman mourning her lost love, her scheming and malicious mother and the possibility that the missing heir might just be alive after all............
I love this book. T Tembarom is an immensely likeable young man who takes everything thrown at him with cheerfulness and steadfastness, he sticks to his love Ann through thick and thin and the story of his rags to riches career is delightful. While some of the servants despise him for an upstart, those he takes into his confidence and who help him with the everyday etiquette and dress and manners that he knows he lacks, become his devoted admirers and supporters. His easy way with the villagers and his care of their needs endear him to them as well and he is a character very easy to like and love.
This book is sentimental and warm and, of course, you know what is going to happen and what the ending will be but though I have read this many times and am familiar with the outcome, I find myself breathlessly reading the last few chapters and waiting for the denouement with great excitement. I never tire of it and I never tire of reading and re-reading books by this author. I think Frances Hodgson Burnett is a wonderful writer and though she is known and rightly so, for her children's books, I maintain that her adult books are her best. She was writing them long before Little Lord Fauntleroy sent her into JK Rowling territory and popularity.
As I said, sentimental and warm but at the heart of all of her books there are characters who are good and true and who are determined to do the right thing come what may.
I loved it all over again...
