From the November/December 2000 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Future Classics

e’re playing a game with that wonderfully slippery commodity, time, and I can’t think of any book that better expresses the slipperiness than Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. Written in 1958, it’s given all its twentieth-century readers a magically vivid sense of connection with the nineteenth century — and with things that aren’t changed by the years. Like Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe books, it should be given as a bribe to every reluctant young student of history, to counterbalance all those lists of dates. Philippa Pearce brings the past alive not just by turning it into the present, but by having her Tom slide effortlessly between the two; giving this book to a child of the year 2101 would be like reaching a hand across the hundred-year divide, as proof that the divide isn’t really there.

In case you’ve forgotten: Tom, in quarantine for measles, is sent to stay with his aunt and uncle in their apartment, a small part of a converted old house lapped around now by new development. In the central communal hallway there’s a grandfather clock, relic of earlier days, ceremonially wound every week by old Mrs. Bartholomew the landlady, who lives in the apartment on the top floor.

One night, the clock strikes thirteen. Tom, sleepless and lonely, goes downstairs to investigate. He can’t find the light switch, so he opens the outer door at the back of the hallway, to let the moonlight in. The light is bright, and outside the door he sees, not the mean little concrete yard of the present day, but a great wonderful garden. And in the hallway, just for a little, he sees elaborate Victorian rugs and furniture, and is passed by a uniformed Victorian housemaid who can’t tell that he is there.

Night after night he goes back through this door, into the past, into the garden, into the old house. It becomes his world. He meets one person who can see him, a lively little girl called Hatty, lonely and displaced like himself, and they become friends. Tom’s Midnight Garden is the story of this friendship, flickering between the present and the past. It grows and grows, and fills Tom’s life with happiness — until the point when he has to go home.

On his last night, Tom can’t reach the past; there’s no garden outside the door. Out of a dreadful sense of loss, he shrieks in desperation for Hatty, and wakes the whole house. Next morning he is sent to apologize to old Mrs. Bartholomew, the owner-landlady — but he doesn’t need to. “You called a name,” she says, gentle, happy, loving. “Oh, Tom, don’t you understand? You called me: I’m Hatty.”

Now there’s a gift: the discovery that something most precious, stolen by time, has not been lost after all. Tom’s Midnight Garden could be a hand reaching out from the year 2001 to the year 2101, linking that future child to us just as Hatty was linked to Tom. Hey, kid: your world’s different, but back here in the past you have friends.

—Susan Cooper