Metro Pulse/Secret History/His Wretchnedness at Times

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The two most mysterious members of Frances Hodgson Burnett's family

by Jack Neely

I've written a couple of times before about the author Frances Hodgson Burnett. She was once a familiar face on Gay Street: a local piano teacher who occasionally sent stories to magazines for publication. Many Knoxvillians today profess never to have heard of her, which is not all that surprising, because she hasn't been in town much in the last 125 years.

But to millions around the world, she's still one of the two or three most famous people who ever lived here. Her books have been in print for over a century. By some accounts, she's best known for a book called Little Lord Fauntleroy, but I've rarely met anyone who has read the thing, and no one who has liked it much. In recent years, her legacy has rested much more on another, better novel, The Secret Garden, which is on the shelves in most of the decent bookstores of America and Britain and has been the basis for at least four major motion pictures. Another novel, misnamed (I think) A Little Princess, is almost as successful.

Anyway, to some visitors and newcomers, especially those who happen to be female, she's one of the few Knoxvillians whose name can raise a spark of interest and get folks thinking that maybe this city's heritage has more to it than chain restaurants.

That's by way of introduction. This column's not really about her but about the family she left here.

Born in England, they'd all moved to Knoxville at the end of the Civil War with their widowed mother, Eliza Hodgson. After their mother's untimely death in 1870, the five children had her buried in a single grave in Old Gray, in a less-stylish section of the Victorian cemetery. It's never seemed quite proper that a mother of five should be buried by herself. As it turns out, she's not.

Frances Hodgson and her brothers and sisters lived parentless in a downtown house they called Vagabondia. She married local physician Swan Burnett and began writing novels. When the writer left in 1877, her two brothers stayed in Knoxville, at least for a while. One of them, John Hodgson, was a bartender at the Lamar House Saloon: it occupied roughly the same space in that old building as the Bistro does today. The other, Herbert Hodgson, led a brass band, Knoxville's busiest dance and ceremonial band of the 1870s.

Both the male Hodgsons seem to fade from view thereafter; until recently, I never knew much of what became of them.

Some years ago, working on a story about Maynard Baird, Knoxville's premier jazz bandleader of the 1920s, I blundered across an odd clue. An apparently successful jazz musician and songwriter in Knoxville in the 1920s went by the name of Herbert Hodgson. One of his songs, "Down in Tennessee," got recorded in 1925. He made some recordings at the Brunswick/Vocalian St. James Hotel sessions, ca. 1929: songs he apparently wrote, called "Sorry," "Just for You," and "Loving That Girl."

Hodgson is not a common name here, and the fact that a popular Knoxville musician of the 1920s might have exactly the same name as a popular Knoxville musician of 50 years earlier seemed an unlikely coincidence. It also seemed unlikely that it could be the same person: that the brass-band-era Herbert Hodgson might have dabbled in jazz, then the most modern music, in his 70s. It would be about as easy to picture Ralph Stanley joining a hip-hop posse. I figured the jazz-age Herbert Hodgson would remain a local enigma.

Later I ran across a notice of an ignominious end for Frances's other brother, John. The newspapers of November, 1904, carry his obituary. The former bartender had turned to carpentry, and at age 53 was living alone in a one-room shack in the dangerous part of downtown when he died of meningitis. "He was a man of genial disposition, in spite of his wretchedness at times," went the frank Sentinel obit. He apparently had alcohol problems, and his wife had left him. The New York Times, which was then run by Adolph Ochs, who likely knew Burnett in Knoxville, published a plea that she send money to Knoxville to bury her brother. The wealthy author suggested her brother be buried at Old Gray, where they'd buried their mother 34 years earlier. But John Hodgson has no stone at Old Gray today.

Then, out of the blue, I heard from a scholar named Gretchen Gerzina. She teaches English at Vassar and is working on a new biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Unlike previous biographers, she went to pains to track down the other members of Burnett's family.

Ms. Gerzina learned that Herbert Hodgson, Frances's musical brother, moved to Norfolk, Va., probably around 1880, and spent the rest of his life there with his family. He never had a son named Herbert, but Gerzina had also learned something about a 20th-century Herbert, or "Bert," Hodgson, a songwriter in Knoxville and New York, who apparently claimed to be a nephew of Frances. He was born in 1888; she even found a photograph of him as a boy, holding a cat in what may have been a play of some sort.

In a 1949 News-Sentinel interview, Bert Hodgson doesn't offer much about his jazz-age songwriting career and doesn't say a word about the identity of his father, but he does claim to be the nephew of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the late author. He knew his aunt well, mainly from trips up north. She had him promise her that he would never be a writer, but he admitted he'd done a little scribbling, early in the century, when he had a local newspaper column called "Fireside Murphy." I've never seen it, but I envy his title. He was a strong advocate for Burnett's legacy, which he thought was underappreciated in her American hometown. Remarking on the fact that New York had built a monument to her, he said, "Looks as if they think more of her than we do."

Prof. Gerzina is convinced that our Bert Hodgson was a son of the errant John Hodgson. The year after his father's death, Bert pops up in the city directory as a 17-year-old with a job. He showed a talent for working with machines and eventually ran a Clinch Avenue firm called Hodgson Machinery. He later gave up songwriting and ran modest-sounding businesses like the Auto Hotel, an early car lot in an alley where the State Street Garage is now. He was living in Island Home when he died in 1965, at the age of 77. He and his wife are buried at Greenwood.

His likely father John Hodgson's current whereabouts were a mystery I didn't solve until last Friday. The barkeep doesn't have a headstone anywhere in Knoxville, and I'd been through the official Old Gray records without finding his name. But on an obsessive jag, I pored over a book called OLD GRAY CEMETERY SINGLE GRAVES 1879-1930. Under the H's, there's a handwritten notation: Hodsons John Nov 14 - 1904 buried in grave with his Mother Eliza Hodsons.

So Mrs. Hodgson hasn't been all that lonesome all these years. The fact that John Hodgson was buried without a headstone, and without even a plot, may be a testament to his famous sister's regard for a brother gone wrong.