Before You Begin

Before you begin.

A great yellow fog has swallowed London whole, and a man who calls himself Antony Dart walks into it to buy a pistol. He has money, position, and a name the whole financial world knows by heart — and he means to be dead before tomorrow. Then a single dropped sovereign rings on the pavement of a bridge, and a small bundle of rags stirs and looks up at him with sharp black eyes and a shock of red hair. "Are yer goin' to do it?" she asks. "Yer would be a fool if yer did." From that moment the fog leads him somewhere he never meant to go.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is loved the world over for Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden — stories in which a hidden goodness waits in the most unlikely places for someone brave enough to believe in it. The Dawn of a To-morrow is her shortest and most daring variation on that theme: a slim, fierce London novel that takes the same hope down into the gutter, into a slum called Apple Blossom Court, and tests it against hunger, despair, and death itself.

What keeps the book alive after more than a century is the cast Burnett found there in the dark: Glad, the ragged street-child who has never owned a name and refuses to stop expecting good luck; Polly, the frightened country girl undone by love; the starving young inventor who turned thief; and old Jinny Montaubyn, the battered ex-dancer whose strange, unshakeable faith — "There is no death" — turns out to be the most powerful thing in the story. Burnett wrote it at a time when she herself was searching for a faith she could hold onto, and that searching gives the little book its heat.

What follows is an illustrated companion to that one foggy London day. Step into the gallery, meet the people Antony Dart was never meant to find, and see how a tomorrow begins.