Frances Hodgson Burnett - Two Little Pilgrim's Progress - 1895

"Two Little Pilgrim's Progress: a story of the city beautiful" by Frances Hodgson Burnett and ill. by W. Macbeth - Frederick Warne, London - 1895 first UK edition, ten thousand - 18cmx15cm - condition: very good copy, in original decorated binding, with all illustrations present, minor rubbing to edges

The story follows 12-year-old orphans Meg and Robin, who live on their Aunt Matilda’s farm. Their obsession with The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan helps to keep their spirits up. When they hear of the Chicago World Fair, they decide to make their own pilgrimage there, sneaking away from the farm with some money they saved from doing extra work. They take an inexhaustible supply of boiled eggs. In Chicago, they find beauty and kindness everywhere, resulting in a fairytale ending which seems to say that if you are kind and hard-working then good things will happen to you in this life, not just the next.



Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (24 November 1849 – 29 October 1924) was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).

Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1853, when Frances was 4 years old, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in New Market, Tennessee. Frances began her writing career there at age 19 to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines. In 1870, her mother died. In Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1873 she married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. Their first son Lionel was born a year later. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their second son Vivian was born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington, D.C. Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o' Lowrie's), was published to good reviews. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer of children's fiction, although her romantic adult novels written in the 1890s were also popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and ;Little Princess.

Beginning in the 1880s, Burnett began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her elder son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she settled in Nassau County, New York, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery.

In 1936, a memorial sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh was erected in her honor in Central Park's Conservatory Garden. The statue depicts her two famous Secret Garden characters, Mary and Dickon.