BURNETT

She moved back to England after divorcing her husband Swan and in the mid 1890s she bought Maytham Hall. It had a series of walled gardens and these gave her the idea for The Secret Garden. In this letter she is writing to the painter Mrs Margaret MOSCHELES (1854-1924), wife of the painter Felix Moscheles (1833-1917). The couple often hosted salon evenings with literati / musicians. Mr Dickens, is one of the sons of Charles Dickens the novelist: Henry Fielding DICKENS, K.C. (1849-1933), eminent lawyer and later judge. The readings given by Henry Fielding Dickens of his father’s work were renowned as superb imitations of his father’s famously moving public readings. The Dickens and Moscheles families were closely intertwined by marriage as Henry Fielding Dickens had married Marie Roche (1852-1940), granddaughter of the composer and virtuosic pianist Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870); and Felix Moscheles (1833-1917) was one of the sons of the composer. In Vivian Burnett’s biography The Romantick Lady, Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Life Story of an Imagination (1927), the friendship of Frances Hodgson Burnett with the Moscheles family is touched upon (pp. 242-5), but this reading by Dickens is not.