Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

First published: 1958; illustrated

Type of work: Fantasy

Themes: Friendship

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century and the late Victorian era

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: East Anglia

Principal Characters:

• Tom Long, a boy who loves the outdoors
• Peter Long, Tom’s brother, sick with the measles
• Uncle Alan, Tom’s uncle, a very reasonable, unimaginative man
• Aunt Gwen, Tom’s aunt, who cooks rich food and means to be kind
• Mrs. Bartholomew, an old woman with a strange clock
• Hatty, an imaginative Victorian girl who loves her aunt’s garden
• Aunt Grace, Hatty’s aunt, who favors her three sons and resents Hatty

The Story

While Tom’s Midnight Garden includes ghostly figures and passages through time, the book’s magic does not depend on the conventions of either the Gothic or the historical novel. The ghosts here are alive, and time past still lingers in dreams and in the figure of an old woman.

Mrs. Bartholomew’s dreams are set against a landscape where houses crowd out trees and Victorian houses are cut up into modern flats. Tom sees his aunt and uncle’s home as empty, cold, and dead, but when Mrs. Bartholomew’s clock strikes a thirteenth hour, he is led to explore the “midnight garden” of her dreams. It is a magical and mythic place, alluring with its paths, great lawn, and towering fir. At first the garden is static, from its gravelike mounds of asparagus to the dark oblong of the pond to the sleeping summerhouse. Dewy footprints tell Tom that he is not alone, and, as he will learn, the child Hatty watches his explorations. On later nights when he meets Hatty, he is introduced to special hiding places, lively names for the trees, and mythic and spiritual images and lore—Hatty’s initial appearance with scepter and orb, apple and sprig; her childish note to King Oberon; the burning bush she claims was grown from a slip cut from the original; her tales of the gardener Abel’s murderous brother. Events of importance occur in this Edenic garden. There Tom satisfies his deep love of nature and shares it with Hatty. There Tom develops a friendship with this little girl. There Tom enters into Hatty’s sorrows when Aunt Grace shows her only cruelty.

Tom comes to feel that Hatty has made the garden into a timeless kingdom. Yet it proves to be a region like the reader’s own world, ruled by time. Mrs. Bartholomew’s clock in the hall shows an angel with a book, pointing to Revelation 10:1-6 and the motto “Time No Longer.” Yet Tom comes to see that Hatty grows older in the garden. As her childhood’s loneliness is replaced by her love for “young Barty,” Tom becomes less distinct to Hatty. At last Tom loses his dream garden, and in his dismay he cries out for his former companion. Mrs. Bartholomew hears him call out her name; the dream-child Hatty, now an old woman, is still his friend. The separations of time are “no more” when “then” and “now” link.

Context

Winner of England’s Carnegie Prize for 1958, Tom’s Midnight Garden is notable for its handling of setting, style, and character. Difficult to categorize, Pearce’s best-known book has won praise for its lyrical and imaginative writing. The book creates a precise dream, a magical Eden in which friendship is born. The author’s achievement is her blending of a realm of mystery with psychological truthfulness and the realism of the daily world. Readers have noted with interest Pearce’s intricate and evocative landscape, and British critics have praised her ability to capture the East Anglian countryside, a region pictured in most of her books.

Philippa Pearce develops a familiar archetypal setting—the garden—in a striking manner, artfully blending theme and landscape. The backdrop strongly reinforces the theme of time and change in several interesting ways. Pearce creates a sense of historical time and place, contrasting the enclosed Victorian garden and open countryside with a cramped modern world of walls and barriers. The secret hours of childhood pass within the garden’s shelter; during Hatty’s childhood the two children play in its bounds, but as she grows older time moves more quickly and the garden gives way to the long sweep of fields and river.

Reviewers immediately connected this haunting tale set in a garden with books for children such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). The bond is clear: a magical, renewing garden; young characters with mythic overtones; a focus on friendship between boy and girl. Critic Sheila Egoff describes Tom’s Midnight Garden as an example of fantasies which stress character and human time, creating an “enchanted realism.” For similar examples, she points to stories such as William Mayne’s A Year and a Day (1976), Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe series, and Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting (1975). Hatty’s unhappy state as ward of her scornful aunt and the comfort she takes in stories and romantic nature may also suggest Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847).