For my `Christmas Classic’ this year I’m choosing Mistress Masham’s Repose, a novel for children by T.H.White. It was first published in 1946 and was dedicated to White’s goddaughter, the splendidly named Amaryllis Garnet. White is best known for his Arthurian sequence The Once and Future King but Mistress Masham’s Repose is set in the 1940s and features the Lilliputians, a race of tiny people created by Jonathan Swift in his early 18th century novel, Gulliver’s Travels. Mistress Masham’s Repose has rarely been out of print. You can get it as an ebook or a cheap paperback but this is a novel that really deserves to be bought as a beautiful hardback. My favourites are the original American edition with illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg or the later Folio Society edition illustrated by Charles W. Stewart.

The heroine of this story is a ten year-old orphan called Maria who lives in a vast house called Malplaquet which was built by her aristocratic ancestors. Malplaquet and its gardens were once magnificent but after Maria’s parents died in an accident there turned out to be no money to maintain the estate. There are only a few habitable rooms in Malplaquet and nearly all of its 365 windows are broken. Maria lives in a dry corner of the house with her governess, Miss Brown. There is only one servant left to look after them – the kindly cook, Mrs Noakes, who inhabits the kitchen with her fat collie dog. Maria detests her cruel governess and mistrusts her guardian, the local vicar, Mr Hater, but she has one friend in an elderly Professor who lives in a cottage in a distant part of the grounds.

One summer day, Maria gets a respite from boring lessons because her governess has one of her frequent headaches. Maria decides to play at being a pirate on a lake in the grounds. She uses a leaky punt to get across to the overgrown island in the centre of the lake and fights her way through brambles to the Folly known as Mistress Masham’s Repose. No-one has reposed in this once elegant building since the death of Good Queen Anne – or so Maria thinks. When she reaches the Folly, Maria is surprised to find it surrounded by neatly mown grass and even more surprised to discover a tiny baby inside a cradle made from a walnut shell. When Maria picks up the baby she is attacked by five-inch high woman who is obviously the mother. When more small people emerge from the Folly, Maria retreats but she takes the mother and baby with her, wrapped in her handkerchief.

Maria hides the tiny people in her bedside drawer overnight but begins to feel guilty about how frightened they are of her. She decides to show her find to her friend the Professor who immediately guesses that these must be Lilliputians. He points out that Maria is imprisoning free individuals who must not be treated as toys. He persuades her that the only right thing to do is to let her captives go. Maria returns the mother and baby to the Folly but this lonely child is determined to get to know the Lilliputians. She brings them presents and promises to keep their existence a secret. Eventually the Lilliputians and their leader, the Schoolmaster, accept Maria as their Female Mountain and teach her about their history and the ingenious ways they survive. The friendship between Maria and the fiercely independent little people does not always go smoothly but they slowly develop mutual respect.

Maria’s frequent walks in the ground haven’t gone unnoticed by her guardians. When Miss Brown finds some exquisite presents from the Lilliputians in Maria’s room, she wonders if the girl has found a hidden treasury. She and Mr Hater have long been searching for such a place, which they believe may contain a parchment that is the key to Maria’s lost family fortune. The governess and the vicar plan to steal that fortune and put increasing pressure on Maria to reveal her secrets. Maria endures being imprisoned in her room but when the avaricious Miss Brown captures one of the Lilliputians things go from bad to worse. Soon the freedom and safety of Maria and of all the Lilliputians is at risk. Can Maria and her friends find a way to defeat the forces of greed and save Malplaquet from ruin?

White’s Mistress Mashams Repose is one of those rare books which can be enjoyed, in different ways, by readers of all ages. It doesn’t have a complicated plot and by modern standards the pace is slow. Its main attractions lie in the fascinating details about the history of Malplaquet and the lifestyle of the Lilliputians, and in the developing character of the heroine, Maria. Malplaquet itself almost counts as a leading character in the story. It seems to be based on two real great houses which can still be visited today – the absurdly grandiose Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire and magnificent Stowe House in Buckinghamshire. Stowe was once the seat of Earls and Dukes but during the 20th century it became a boarding school where White was a teacher for several years. He then moved into a primitive cottage in the grounds and lived there very much as the reclusive Professor does in the story.

White clearly enjoyed inventing a colourful history for Malplaquet which involves famous figures from the 17th to the 19th centuries, so we hear for example that Charles James Fox once lost £144,000 in the Card Room while wearing scarlet shoes and a blue-powdered wig, that the Duke of Orleans used to shoot larks with the corks from champagne bottles in the Gun Room and that the Earl of Chesterfield was once locked up in the Menagerie for two days by mistake. White was writing at a time when the glory days of the great English country houses were long gone and many were falling into ruin. The decaying and haunted house of Malplaquet with its wildly overgrown gardens is a romantic setting in which you feel that anything might happen.

The central premise of this novel is that the sea captain who rescued Gulliver in Swift’s novel later found his way to war-torn Lilliput and captured thirteen of its people along with some of their miniature sheep and cattle. He carried them back to England and displayed them for money until the captives managed to escape the drunken captain during a visit to Malplaquet, where they have since lived in hiding for centuries. It is not neccessary to have read Gulliver’s Travels to enjoy Mistress Masham’s Repose since the Lilliputians explain everything to Maria in perfect 18th century prose. These Lilliputians are wiser than the ones in Swift’s novel (which satirized contemporary European society) because they have endured a senseless war and many other hardships and are now led by the sensible Schoolmaster rather than ruled by reckless and egotistical monarchs.

As with other books about tiny people, such as Mary Norton’s Borrowers series, much of the fascination comes from the details of their lifestyle. These resourceful Lilliputions have survived by domesticating rats, eating insects, weaving spider-silk, wearing armour made from beetle-wings attached to mouseskins and fishing for pike from a miniature frigate. Charming as all this is, White makes it clear that because these people remember being brutally enslaved they are determined never to live under any kind of tyranny again. Maria has to learn that though she may own the land the Lilliputians live on, she doesn’t in any way own them, and that even giving lavish gifts which they cannot reciprocate is a form of tyranny.

For the most part, the characterization in Mistress Masham’s Repose is not naturalistic. The cast list is firmly divided into bad and good characters. Cruel and hypocritical Miss Brown and Mr Hater are deliciously horrible people with no redeeming features, so we can all enjoy Maria’s spirited attempts to foil their evil plans. This grotesque couple are balanced by three good authority figures – the wise but impractical Professor, the earnest and eloquent Schoolmaster and, later in the story, a dim but good-hearted Lord Lieutenant who represents the forces of Law and Order. Mrs Noakes the Cook is a rather stereotyped loyal servant but she is given two important roles in the plot. She is the only source of affection for motherless Maria and she is the person who galvanises the absent-minded Professor into action when Maria goes missing. Maria herself seems remarkably real. She is a desperately lonely child who makes frequent mistakes when trying to befriend the Lilliputians. She has favourites among them and involves one of these in a dangerous game for her own amusement. At one point Maria is banished by the Lilliputians but they eventually allow her good intentions to outweigh the misunderstandings. I feel that there is a lesson for our intolerant times here.

Maria matures during the story as she repents her misdeeds and learns from her mistakes. This is partly due to her unusual relationship with the Professor. Children are mainly told what to do by adults but the Professor only uses reasoned argument to suggest possible courses of action. When I first read Mistress Masham’s Repose as a child I was fascinated by the serious way that the Professor discusses ethics with Maria. This was unlike anything I’d come across before, either in literature or real life, and I still find it remarkable. However, I mustn’t make this novel sound like a dreary improving read since much of it is delightfully funny. The final chapters are full of exciting episodes and I wouldn’t be recommending Mistress Masham’s Repose as my December book if it didn’t end with a gloriously happy Christmas homecoming for Maria. I wish all of my readers an equally happy Festive Season. Until next year…

Geraldine