Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

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