Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Frances Hodgson Burnett first encountered the new theories of “metaphysical” healing in 1885 when her friend Louisa M. Alcott, author of Little Women, persuaded her to seek treatment for nervous exhaustion from Mrs. Newman, a leading practitioner of the so-called Boston Mind Cure. Burnett was so impressed by Newman that she stayed in Boston for a month under her care. Later in her life, after the best European doctors proved unable to cure her son Lionel of tuberculosis, she turned increasingly to alternative healers. Two failed marriages to physicians did little to restore her faith in conventional medicine. Her low opinion of the medical profession is expressed in The Secret Garden, in her unsympathetic portrayal of Colin’s uncle, Dr. Craven, who is unable to cure, or even correctly diagnose, his nephew’s largely psychosomatic illness and indeed secretly hopes for the boy’s death. It is Mary Lennox who brings about Colin’s cure by introducing him to the healing power of the secret garden.

  In a 1909 New York Times interview Burnett described her belief in a divine energy that could be channeled by the human mind:

  We are today mysteriously conscious of this strange magic in the air that we will call the beautiful thought. It has so revitalized and stirred our souls that there has been in its most recent evolution a magnetic force that seems to me must almost stir the dead in their graves (Gerzina, p. 259).

  The Secret Garden depicts this “beautiful thought” at work in the cure of Colin Craven. Until he encounters his cousin Mary, Colin is a victim of the power of negative thinking. He has spent his whole life surrounded by people who resent his very existence, blaming him for his mother’s death in childbirth and expecting him to become a hunchback like his father. The pessimistic atmosphere around him provokes an imaginary illness so overwhelming that he is actually unable to walk. Colin’s recovery begins when his cousin refuses to accept his negative beliefs, introducing him to the magic of the secret garden and encouraging him to have faith that, like the flowers in the garden, he too can grow and flourish. Burnett is so determined to propagate her belief in the power of thought to change reality that at one point, near the end of the novel, she even interrupts the narrative to address young readers directly with her explanation of the relationship between mind and body:

  One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body (p. 229).

  For Burnett, the source of healing thought is a God who is always present in the world and cannot be defined by any one set of religious teachings. By the time she wrote The Secret Garden she had largely abandoned the Anglican Christianity in which she was raised. In addition to her interest in Christian Science, she had studied Hindu scripture and dabbled in theosophy, an occult philosophy drawn from both Eastern and Western traditions, first expounded by Madame Helene Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine (1888) and extremely fashionable in the first decades of the twentieth century. Burnett’s diverse spiritual interests are reflected in The Secret Garden. Although Dickon Sowerby celebrates the power of the garden by singing the doxology, a Christian hymn of praise, the children also perform healing rituals inspired by Indian “fakirs and devotees” (p. 184), and Colin recites a mantra similar to those recorded by William James in his description of “the religion of healthy-mindedness” :

  Every morning and evening and as often in the daytime as I can remember I am going to say, “Magic is in me! Magic is making me well! I am going to be as strong as Dickon, as strong as Dickon!” And you must all do it, too. That is my experiment (p. 185).

  The “magic” that brings about Colin’s cure is not specifically linked to Christianity; indeed it has a very pagan association with the seasons and cycles of nature. The divinity in the garden is nurturant and creative, not a lawgiver but a “Joy Maker” (p. 212), having as its priestesses the novel’s two positive maternal figures, Colin’s dead mother, Lilias, and Dickon’s mother, Susan Sowerby. It was Lilias Craven who originally cultivated the secret garden, filling it with the roses and other flowers she loved. Her death in childbirth following a fall in the garden caused her distraught husband to lock up the place and bury the key. Yet, as Susan Sowerby assures Colin, the spirit of Lilias Craven continues to reside in the garden, overseeing her son’s cure: “Thy own mother’s in this ’ere very garden, I do believe. She couldna’ keep out of it” (p. 213). Sowerby herself does not appear in the novel until very near the end, but she is constantly helping the children from behind the scenes. In a letter to the English publisher of The Secret Garden, William Heinemann, Burnett describes Susan Sowerby as “a moorland cottage woman who is a sort of Madonna” and the novel’s “chief figure” (Gerzina, p. 262). It is Sowerby who gives voice, in Yorkshire dialect, to Burnett’s view of God:

  I warrant they call it a different name i’ France and a different one i’ Germany. Th’ same thing as set th’ seeds swellin’ an’ th’ sun shinin’ made thee a well lad an’ it’s th’ Good Thing. It isn’t like us poor fools as think it matters if us is called out of our names. Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee. It goes on makin’ worlds by th’ million—worlds like us (p. 212).

  Burnett uses the uneducated but wise Susan Sowerby as a mouthpiece not only for her religious vision of a God who transcends creeds and sects, but also for her ideas about child-rearing. It is Sowerby who sends Mary Lennox a skipping rope and persuades the girl’s uncle, the misanthropic Archibald Craven, not to hire a governess but to allow his niece “fresh air and freedom and running about” (p. 95). As the mother of twelve children, she recognizes the importance of physical exercise and the role of unstructured play in developing body and mind. Although her opinions are represented as timeless country wisdom, Susan Sowerby is actually expressing ideas that were progressive and still quite controversial when The Secret Garden was first published.

  During the Victorian age, upper-class children had been expected to behave like miniature adults. Little girls were dressed in tight and confining clothes and trained in domestic virtues and such accomplishments as sewing and playing the piano. Outdoor exercise was viewed as tomboyish and undignified, likely to build unfeminine muscles and bring an unwelcome tan to fashionably pale complexions. It was not until the late nineteenth-century that the kindergarten movement, based on the writings of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), began to challenge these restrictive child-rearing practices. Froebel’s organic theory of child development employed horticultural metaphors to argue that both boys and girls, like gardens, require space, clean air, and brightness in order to flourish; and that young children learn best in an environment in which nature is celebrated but controlled.

  Froebel was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy of childhood, expressed in Émile (1762), and like Rousseau he looked back nostalgically to an idealized agrarian past when people lived in harmony with nature. Burnett, an admirer of Froebel and a supporter of charities that tried to bring his educational methods to inner-city children, also had a romanticized view of the old-fashioned rural poor that finds expression in her creation of the Sowerby family in The Secret Garden. Though the Sowerbys are poor, they are presented as invariably cheerful, healthy, and content with their lot. They appear to accept their lower-class position and yet, unlike the downtrodden and obsequious colonial servants of Mary’s early experience, they have no hesitation in speaking their minds to those of higher rank. Susan Sowerby’s simple country life gives her an instinctive understanding of the needs of children. Her son Dickon, who spends his days outside on the Yorkshire moors, is attuned to the seasons, wise in the ways of animals and birds, self-reliant, resourceful, and honest. He and his siblings are naturally possessed of the qualities that Froebel and Rousseau sought to instill in children. Colin Craven and Mary Lennox, on the other hand, are “a hard, little, unloving girl and a sickly boy” (p
. 117) who must overcome the psychological damage inflicted by their over-civilized, unhappy upper-class families and learn to be more like Dickon.

  At once spoiled and neglected, their parents dead, absent or indifferent, both Colin and Mary have grown up without siblings or friends, attended by servants who indulge their every whim but do not love them, and deprived of opportunities to exercise their bodies or their minds. Both children have been hidden in confined, airless places. Mary, raised in the heat and languor of colonial India and abandoned after her parents’ death from cholera, is described as “the child no one ever saw” (p. 11). Colin, rejected by his father and believed to be a hopeless invalid, never leaves his bedroom in Misselthwaite Manor. Neither child has experienced the fresh air and freedom of the Yorkshire moors, and until they meet Dickon they are entirely alienated from nature and fearful of the outdoors. Mary dismisses the moor as “an endless, dull, purplish sea” (p. 23) and Colin protests, “I hate fresh air and I don’t want to go out” (p. 103).

  In contrast to the measured and stilted language of Mary and Colin when we first meet them, Dickon’s dialect speech is a breathless tumble of active verbs: “Th’ world’s all fair begun again this mornin’, it has. An’ it’s workin’ an’ hummin’ an’ scratchin’ an’ pipin’ an’ nest-buildin’ an’ breathin’ out scents” (p. 124). His words imitating the fertility and profusion of nature, he is a conduit of vital energy. It is Dickon who buys Mary her first packet of seeds and teaches her how to cultivate the secret garden. Mary, in turn, arouses Colin’s interest in the outside world by telling him about Dickon and the garden. She encourages her cousin to begin the process of healing by emulating Dickon’s love of the moorland air:

  That’s fresh air.... Lie on your back and draw in long breaths of it. That’s what Dickon does when he’s lying on the moor. He says he feels it in his veins and it makes him strong and he feels he could live forever and ever. Breathe it and breathe it (p. 152).

  Colin, who never wants to meet anyone because of self-consciousness about his supposed handicap, is first won over by Dickon’s tame animals, a fox, a crow, two squirrels, and a newborn lamb; and then by Dickon himself: “I would never have let him come to see me if he had not been an animal charmer—which is a boy charmer, too, because a boy is an animal” (p. 184).

  As Mary and Colin recover, they become more and more like Dickon, even to the extent of imitating his Yorkshire speech and consuming Susan Sowerby’s pails of fresh milk and cottage buns rather than the food at Misselthwaite Manor. The children gain happiness and vigor as they grow to share Dickon’s understanding of nature. Their progress can be measured in their changing attitudes toward the moor. From her initial impression of the land around Misselthwaite as bleak and empty, Mary learns that:

  Thousands of lovely things grow on it and there are thousands of little creatures all busy building nests and making holes and burrows and chippering or singing or squeaking to each other. They are so busy and having such fun under the earth or in the trees or heather. It’s their world (p. 115).

  The moor is Dickon’s world too, out of bounds to Mary and Colin, who never actually play there. Burnett knows that her upper-class hero and heroine cannot participate directly in the primitive pastoral life represented by the Sowerbys. Instead, following Froebel’s theory of child development, she allows them to grow up in the natural yet controlled space of the garden. As Dickon observes, the secret garden is not all “clipped an’ spick an’ span” (p. 87); there is plenty of room for “runnin’ wild an’ swingin’ an’ catchin’ hold of each other” (p. 87). But nature’s exuberance is disciplined by weeding and pruning, and contained within walls. Colin and Mary learn about planting and “nest-buildin’ ” (p. 126) as a prelude to healthy adult sexuality, but they must also be trained in restraint and decorum in order to take their places in upper-class society.

  In view of her progressive ideas about education and her openness to alternative medicine and new forms of spirituality, Burnett is surprisingly conservative in her representation of social class. Like the moorland breezes that carry the scent of gorse and heather into the secret garden, Dickon is an ambassador from a simpler, less civilized, and more openly sensual world. His unselfconscious friendliness seems at first to transcend class boundaries. As Mr. Roach, the head gardener, observes, “He’d be at home in Buckingham Palace or at the bottom of a coal mine” (p. 159). But it is only in the enchanted space of the garden that Colin and Mary can meet with Dickon in full equality, and even there, through references to the invalid boy as a king or rajah, we are subtly reminded of Colin’s future position as the owner of Misselthwaite Manor and Dickon’s employer. As the novel progresses, it is Colin who increasingly becomes the main focus of both Mary’s and the narrator’s attention. A true product of the industrial age, Colin goes beyond Dickon’s simple acceptance of the magical healing power of nature, thinking instead of ways to harness and employ it: “I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us—like electricity and horses and steam” (p. 184). Unlike Dickon, who lives in a timeless present, he plans a future as a scientist and athlete in the world beyond Misselthwaite. In the final chapter, Colin, followed by Mary, runs out of the garden and into his father’s arms, leaving Dickon behind.

  One of the most striking features of The Secret Garden, and one that lies at the heart of its lasting appeal, is the extraordinary contrast between the psychological realism of the development of the two central characters and the fairy-tale setting in which they appear. While Mary and Colin are convincing and recognizable portraits of spoiled and troubled children, the characters that surround them appear to be drawn from nineteenth-century romance and fantasy. Dickon is a highly idealized figure, at once both a “common moor boy, in patched clothes and with a funny face and a rough, rusty-red head” (p. 80) and a “Yorkshire angel” (p. 146), a version of Pan or the Green Man, complete with his pipe and animal familiars. As much as the roses and the robin, he is a part of the magic of the secret garden. Similarly, his mother, Susan Sowerby, is both an overworked peasant woman and a Pre-Raphaelite Madonna:

  With the ivy behind her, the sunlight drifting through the trees and dappling her long blue cloak, and her nice fresh face smiling across the greenery she was rather like a softly colored illustration in one of Colin’s books (p. 210).

  Other minor characters, such as Mrs. Medlock, the sour and secretive housekeeper, and Colin’s father, the misanthropic Archibald Craven, would be at home in the Gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The Craven’s family home, Misselthwaite Manor, is furnished with all the requisites of Gothic gloom: tapestry-covered walls, suits of armor, family portraits, hidden corridors, and deserted chambers.

  In atmosphere and setting, The Secret Garden owes much to the Victorian romantic novels that Burnett devoured as a child. In particular, the novel has an obvious debt to the writings of the Brontë sisters: Burnett’s friend Ella Hepworth Dixon described it “a sort of children’s Jane Eyre”(Gerzina, p. 262). The secrecy surrounding Colin Craven and his mysterious screams in the night is reminiscent of Bertha Rochester; Archibald Craven is a sexless version of the morose and brooding Edward Rochester; and the plain-featured and fearless orphan Mary Lennox has much in common with Jane Eyre herself Elements from Withering Heights are also present, though heavily sweetened and domesticated. Burnett frequently refers to the Yorkshire wind as “wuthering,” and in Dickon she creates a benign equivalent of the wild, moorland child Heathcliff. By naming a minor character, the local athlete Bob Haworth, after the Yorkshire village in which the sisters were born, Burnett acknowledges and even signals The Secret Garden’s many echoes of the Brontës.

  The novel’s Gothic background only serves to emphasize the contrasting realism of the central characters. Colin and Mary stand out from their nineteenth-century setting as two very modern children whose experiences can resonate with and offer reassurance to contemporary readers. Their unattractive b
ut convincing tantrums and selfishness set them apart from the child heroes of Victorian novels, including Burnett’s own Cedric Fauntleroy. While Victorian victims and orphans are typically restored to fortune through the intervention of adult benefactors, the recovery of Colin and Mary, though aided by Susan Sowerby, is brought about by their encounter with another child, Dickon, and their discovery of the magic of the secret garden. Victorian novels for the young promote passivity and obedience, but The Secret Garden assures its readers that even the most unhappy and damaged of children can learn to form healthy friendships and create beauty and order in their lives.

  The early chapters of the novel, which was originally titled Mistress Mary, trace the emotional growth of Mary Lennox with the precision of a psychological case study. While her self-absorption and lack of sensitivity to others is plausibly explained by parental neglect coupled with spoiling by her Indian servants, we also learn, in the very first chapter, that Mary is attracted to gardens and gardening—a sign that she is capable of appreciating nature and therefore, in Burnett’s terms, of redemption: “She pretended that she was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth” (p. 8). After her arrival at Misselthwaite, Mary’s first positive attachment is to a robin. Like many disturbed children, she finds it easier to relate to animals than to other humans. When she meets Ben Weatherstaff, the lonely and ill-tempered gardener, Mary forms her first friendship and begins to learn about herself by seeing her own characteristics mirrored in others. As Weatherstaff points out, “Tha’ an’ me are a good bit alike.... We was wove out of th’ same cloth. We’re neither of us good lookin’ an’ we’re both of us as sour as we look” (p. 35). It is Weatherstaff who provokes Mary’s curiosity about the hidden garden. Just as the old gardener’s grumpiness offers her a mirror of her outward behavior, so the neglected and uncultivated garden reflects the child’s inner life: