All In a Garden Fair

In 1883 English writer Walter Besant published his long novel ALL IN A GARDEN FAIR. In Allahabad, India where he was editing an Anglo-Indian daily newspaper, young Rudyard Kipling read this novel about how a French emigre taught a young English country boy to be a writer, short story writer and playwright. As Kipling tells in his unfinished autobiography SOMETHING OF MYSELF, Besant's ALL IN A GARDEN FAIR: THE SIMPLE STORY OF THREE BOYS AND A GIRL instantly convinced the future Nobel Prize winner to depart in 1888 his growing fame as a writer in India and go to London and become world famous. *** The four young people grow up together in a distant London surburb still blessed with its woods and rural ways and walkways. Their economic futures would be bleak indeed except for the fact that the orphaned girl Claire Philipon had been born in 19th Century France to a poet and revolutionary who fled his native country for asylum in England. There he teaches French to unappreciative young women in their school. *** Claire grows up with three boys, Allen, Will and Olinthus (whom all call Tom). M. Philipon sees various degrees of promise in each lad. Two accept his overtures to learn French and read widely with Philipon in French and English classics. Their minds are transformed. When she is 18, all three young men, perhaps three years her senior, propose marriage to beautiful Claire. M. Philipon insists that they wait three years before he will permit his daughter to answer.Meanwhile polyglot Will's London firm sends him to China to manage their Shanghai office. Allen (to whom the overseas appointment had first been offered) resigns from the same firm and takes up a life in London as a starving but budding writer. Tom plunges into speculations in stocks and bonds and makes a quick fortune -- by mysterious means that you will have to read for yourself. No spoilers! *** Most of the novel is taken up with the three year waiting period before either Allen, Will or Tom is permitted actively to court or propose to Chaire. Which, if any, shall the lovely, empathetic, musical young French teacher wed? That is the question. *** In the final few chapters, with decreasing suspense as to the outcome Claire herself narrates the process by which she makes up her mind.Complicating factors are a rich old woman in London who patronizes artists, who takes Allen under her wing and her beautiful young kinswoman who superbly reads aloud at fashionable society soirees poems, stories and a play by Allen as he produces in regular succession? Might she take Allen away from Claire?Most of the prominent male inhabitants of the London suburb where the three boys and the girl grow up are failed, ruined, but once mightly London financiers. They wear their economic rises and falls as badges of honor -- a comic touch. *** ALL IN A GARDEN FAIR is a surprisingly readable albeit neglected classic. Find out why Kipling was right to value it highly and what was author Besant's later reaction when Rudyard Kipling told him that face to face. -OOO-