Tom's Midnight Garden

''Tom's Midnight Garden'' is a children's fantasy novel by Philippa Pearce. It was first published in 1958 by Oxford University Press with illustrations by Susan Einzig. It has been reissued in print many times and also adapted for radio, television, the cinema, and the stage. Pearce won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject. In 2007, for a celebration of the Carnegie Medal's 70th anniversary, a panel named ''Tom's Midnight Garden'' one of the top ten Medal-winning works and the British public elected it the nation's second-favourite.

Premise

Tom is a modern boy living under quarantine with his aunt and uncle in a city flat, part of a converted building that was a country house during the 1880s–1890s. At night he slips back in time to the old garden where he finds a girl playmate, called Hatty. Hatty is a princess or so she says.

Plot summary

When Tom Long's brother Peter gets measles, Tom is sent to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen. They live in an upstairs flat of a big house with no garden, only a tiny yard for parking. The former grounds of the big house have been sold for building and are occupied by modern houses. The elderly and reclusive landlady, Mrs Bartholomew, lives above them. Because Tom may be infectious, he is not allowed out to play, and he feels lonely. Without exercise he lies awake after midnight, restless, when he hears the communal grandfather clock strangely strike 13. He gets up to investigate and discovers that the back door now opens on a large sunlit garden.

Every night the clock strikes 13 and Tom returns to the Victorian era grounds. There he meets another lonely child, a girl called Hatty, and they become inseparable playmates. Tom sees the family occasionally, but only Hatty (and as is revealed later in the book, the gardener) sees him and the others believe she plays alone.

Tom writes daily accounts to his brother Peter, who follows the adventures during his recovery – and afterward, for Tom contrives to extend the stay with Aunt and Uncle. Gradually at first, Hatty grows up and passes Tom's age; he comes to realise that he is slipping to different points in the past. Finally she grows up at a faster rate, until she is an adult and is being courted by an acquaintance of hers who is nicknamed "Barty." At this stage in the book, the season in the old garden tends to be winter. Tom ingeniously obtains ice skates by having Hatty conceal her old pair in his room, where he subsequently finds them and joins her skating on the next night.

On the final night before Tom is due to go home, he goes downstairs to find the garden is not there. He frantically tries to find it, but crashes into a set of bins from the present–day courtyard, waking up several residents. He shouts Hatty's name in desperation, before his Uncle Alan finds him and puts the events down to Tom sleepwalking. The following morning, Mrs Bartholomew summons Tom to apologise, only to reveal herself as Hatty, having made the link when she heard him call her name. The events Tom experienced were real in Hatty's past; he has stepped into them by going into the garden at the times she dreamt of them. On the final night, she had instead been dreaming of her wedding with Barty.

After taking Tom home, Aunt Gwen comments on the strange way that Tom had said goodbye to Mrs Bartholomew when he left: he hugged her as if she were a little girl.

Themes and literary significance

The book is regarded as a classic but it also has overtones that permeate other areas of Pearce's work. We remain in doubt for a while as to who is the ghost, there are questions over the nature of time and reality and we end by believing that the midnight garden is a projection from the mind of an old lady. These time/space questions occur in other books by Pearce, especially those dealing with ghosts. The final reunion between Tom, still a child, and the elderly Hatty is, many have argued, one of the most moving moments in children's fiction.

In ''Written for Children'' (1965), John Rowe Townsend summarised, "If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children's literature since he Second World War... it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book". He retained that judgment in the second edition of that magnum opus (1983) and in 2011 repeated it, in a retrospective review of the novel.

In the first chapter of ''Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children's Fiction'', Margaret and Michael Rustin analyse the emotional resonances of ''Tom's Midnight Garden'' and describe its use of imagination and metaphor, also comparing it to ''The Secret Garden'' by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Researcher Ward Bradley, in his review of various modern stories and books depicting Victorian British society, criticized ''Midnight Garden'' for "romanticizing the world of the 19th-century aristocratic mansions, making it a glittering 'lost paradise' contrasted with the drab reality of contemporary lower middle class Britain.(...) A child deriving an image of Victorian England from this engaging and well-written fairy tale would get no idea of the crushing poverty in the factories and slums from where mansion owners often derived their wealth".

Time slip would be a popular device in British children's novels in this period, although this device arguably started with Mark Twain's adult satirical comedy ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'' (1889), followed by Rudyard Kipling's children's book ''Puck of Pook's Hill'' (1906, with a succession of slips back into Britain's past), and Margaret Irwin's ''Still She Wished for Company'' (1924, combining ghosts and time slip), and Elizabeth Goudge's ''The Middle Window'' (1935, with a time-slip back to the era of Bonnie Prince Charlie). Time-slip was a popular theme in paranormal discussion, such as the Moberly–Jourdain incident, also known as the Ghosts of Petit Trianon or Versailles. This was an event that occurred on 10 August 1901 in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, involving two female academics, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924). Moberly and Jourdain claimed to have slipped back to the last days of pre-Revolutionary France, reported in their later book ''An Adventure'' (1911).Other successful examples of time-slip in children's books include Alison Uttley's ''A Traveller in Time'' (1939, slipping back to the period of Mary, Queen of Scots), Ronald Welch's ''The Gauntlet'' (1951, slipping back to the Welsh Marches in the fourteenth century), Clive King's ''Stig of the Dump'' (1963, with a final chapter slipping back to the making of Stone Henge), Barbara Sleigh's ''Jessamy'' (1967, back to the First World War), and '' Charlotte Sometimes'' by Penelope Farmer (1969, back to 1918).

Allusions

The historical part of the book is set in the grounds of a mansion, which resembles the house in which the author grew up: the Mill House in Great Shelford, near Cambridge, England. Cambridge is represented in fictional form as Castleford throughout the book. At the time she was writing the book, the author was again living in Great Shelford, just across the road from the Mill House. The Kitsons' (in past, the Melbournes') house is thought to be based on a house in Cambridge, near where Pearce studied during her time at university. The theory of time of which the novel makes use is that of J. W. Dunne's influential 1927 work ''An Experiment with Time''.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

* Dramatized by the BBC
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