61 pages • 2 hours read
Frances Hodgson BurnettThe Secret Garden
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1910A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 19-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary
Doctor Craven comes to see Colin in the afternoon. He is surprised to see Colin and Mary laughing and looking at pictures in one of Mary’s garden books. Colin announces that he is feeling much better today and intends to go outdoors in his chair in a day or two. The doctor stops on his way out of the house for a word with Mrs. Medlock and remarks that he has never seen Colin so composed. Mrs. Medlock says Mrs. Sowerby told her that children need the company of other children and that Mary and Colin will be good for each other. The doctor acknowledges that Mrs. Sowerby is a wise woman and that he highly regards her ability as a healer.
The next morning, Dickon arrives after breakfast with all his pets–the fox, the crow, and the two squirrels–and a newborn lamb in his arms. Colin doesn’t know what to say, but Dickon lays the lamb in Colin’s lap and tells the story of how he had been standing on the moor at dawn and heard a lamb bleating weakly, and he searched relentlessly until he found it.
Later, the children sit and look at pictures in the gardening books. Dickon tells them the common names of many of the flowers and which ones are already growing in the garden, and Colin cries, “I am going to see them” (132).
Chapter 20 Summary
For the next few days, the weather is poor, and Colin is too unwell to go out, but Dickon comes every day to talk about all the creatures like otters, badgers, and water rats digging burrows to make their summer homes:
The things he had to tell about otters’ and badgers’ and water-rats’ houses […] were enough to make you almost tremble with excitement when you heard all the intimate details from an animal charmer and realized with what thrilling eagerness and anxiety the whole busy underworld was working. (133)
They spend time planning how to get Colin in his chair into the garden without anyone seeing them go in. They all want it to remain a secret.
Playing his boy Rajah character, Colin informs the head gardener that he will be going out into the garden in his chair this afternoon, and the gardener is to make sure no one will see him. No one finds this strange because Colin has always hated for people to look at him. When the interview is finished, Colin asks Mary what you’re supposed to say when you are finished speaking to someone, and you want them to go away. On Mary’s instruction, he waves his hand like a Rajah and tells the gardener he has permission to go, which the gardener finds amusing.
A footman carries Colin down to his wheeled chair. Dickon pushes the chair, and the three children make their way through the manor grounds toward the garden, taking a wandering, roundabout route and watching to ensure no one sees them. When they are sure their secret is safe, Mary brings them to the door in the garden wall. She throws it open. Colin covers his eyes, and Dickon pushes the chair through.
Inside, Colin opens his eyes and looks around, awed by the beauty around him. Mary and Dickon see that Colin looks different in the garden; his pale skin has taken on a flush of life and color. Colin cries out exultantly that he will get well and live forever.
Chapter 21 Summary
The author tells us that the whole world seems to devote itself to Colin’s happiness. Dickon says that although he has seen a lot of afternoons in his life, he’s never seen one as “graidely” (fine or good) as this one. Mary agrees that it is the graidelest one ever, and Colin asks in very broad Yorkshire whether they “think as happen it was made loike this ‘ere all o’ purpose for me?” (140). Mary admires his use of the language, and “delight reigned.”
They place Colin’s chair like a throne under a blossoming plum tree like a fairy king’s canopy while Mary and Dickon work a little and bring him interesting things to look at. Then they push his chair around the garden, showing him everything that grows. They reach the dead tree in the middle of the garden where Colin’s mother had her accident. The branch she was sitting on when it fell is still lying on the ground, and the tree is dead. Colin wonders aloud how the branch came to be broken.
Days earlier, Mary and Dickon had talked about what they should say to Colin about the tree. They concluded that all they could do was try to look cheerful if the subject came up. At the time, Dickon had told Mary that his mother once told him Colin’s mother was probably in the manor house watching over Colin. He suggests that maybe Lilias is in the garden, and she set him and Mary to work and told them to bring Colin to her.
Later, Colin looks up and sees Ben staring at them over the top of the garden wall. Ben is outraged to see them trespassing where they have no business being. Colin tells Dickon to push his chair close to the wall and asks if Ben knows who he is. Stunned, Ben recognizes Colin by his eyes, which are exactly like his mother’s. He answers, “Tha’rt th’ poor cripple” (145). Infuriated to be called a cripple, Colin throws off his coverings, gets out of his chair and stands on his own feet for the first time while Mary whispers under her breath, “He can do it. He can do it” (145).
Chapters 19-21 Analysis
The author frequently mixes Christian and pagan images and symbols because she believed that the Christian god was a unified mind or spirit present everywhere, especially in nature. Sometimes, a character in the story may represent more than one mythological person or deity. Mary and the garden, for example, are both symbols from Christianity. Dickon represents both Pan and Puck, but in Chapter 19, he also resembles the biblical Jesus. Dickon’s search for the lost lamb is like the biblical story of the Good Shepherd, who searches ceaselessly for a lost sheep until he has found it. The image of the lost lamb applies just as well to Pan, who is also a god of shepherds.
The theme of chapter 19 is rebirth and resurrection. Dickon, embodying the nature god Pan, has pronounced the arrival of spring—the season of rebirth and new life, symbolized by the lamb. By opening the curtains in Colin’s room, Mary allows life to enter his prison for the first time, and as Colin breathes the air of the living world, she tells him that, according to Dickon, breathing the air will make him feel as if he will live forever. This hints at the Christian belief in resurrection to eternal life, but the natural world also represents eternal life and eternal rebirth through the changing seasons.
As she does each time she visits him, Mary recounts for Colin everything that has sprouted in the garden since the last time she was there. This has become a ritual between them. By naming things and talking about them, Mary makes them more and more real to Colin, symbolically drawing him closer to the living world. When Colin, looking at the pictures of flowers, says, “I am going to see them” (132), he is stating his intention to leave his prison. It is essential that it be Colin’s choice and that he not simply be rescued by Mary and Dickon.
Mrs. Sowerby appears again in the role of the wise woman in the conversation between Mrs. Medlock and the doctor. Mrs. Medlock and the doctor are not particularly likable or sympathetic characters. They find Colin tiresome, and they are not affectionate or friendly toward either of the children. The fact that they like and respect Dickon’s mother makes them more interesting and likable themselves. It also shows Mrs. Sowerby to be much more important in the community than we have previously seen. The children see her through their relationship with her as a mother, but she has a much wider network of influence in the adult community.
The author reinforces the theme of underworlds and resurrection by describing the burrowing creatures like otters, badgers, and water rats as part of an underworld. However, it is a very different underworld from the one where Colin lives. Otter, Badger, and Ratty are characters from Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, published two years before The Secret Garden first appeared in The American Magazine. The author had certainly read Graham’s book and included a fond reference to its characters, and the tone of this passage is also very similar to that of Graham’s story.
Colin’s boy Rajah persona is an improvement over his tantrums. He still treats servants rudely, but, unlike his tantrums, the effect is funnier than frightening or annoying. Mary is teaching him how to control and direct his will. Mary learned through trial and error from her interactions with people like Martha and Ben. Now she teaches those skills to Colin as a mother might teach a child.
Rather than taking Colin directly to the secret garden, Mary and Dickon take him through a metaphorical labyrinth of garden paths. Mary had to find her way through the maze of Misselthwaite Manor to find Colin. Now she and Dickon must guide him through another labyrinth to find his way back to the living world. When they finally reach the door, Mary opens it for Colin, and Dickon pushes him through. When Mary first found the door, she had to open it herself. Here Mary leads and guides Colin much like a mother.
Some readers interpret Colin’s entrance into the garden as representing the biblical resurrection of Christ. Mary acts as his mother, bringing him into the sacred space resembling the Garden of Eden, and when he arrives, all nature seems to rejoice at his resurrection from the underworld. The Christ symbolism is reinforced by the author’s allusion to Colin as a king when she says that delight “reigns” and again when she describes the plum tree as a king's canopy. Colin seems to take control of the garden, issuing commands, being waited on by the others, and asking whether the others believe this day might have been made entirely for him.
In The Secret Garden, however, the “delight” that reigns is not the joy of a heavenly reunion; instead, it is the mother’s contentment of watching a son come home. The plum tree provides shade and comfort, but what Colin desires most is not to lie in his chair but to stand on his own two feet and to have the strength to dig in the earth and cultivate the garden himself.
Dickon remarks that Lilias might have been watching over Colin all his life. He also wonders if she inspired the children to restore the garden. This is the author's first hint that Lilias’s spirit might be alive in the garden. Previously, the garden belonged entirely to Mary and then equally to Dickon. The fact that Lilias enters at this point in the story draws a line between Mary’s story and Colin’s. Colin’s entry into the garden signals the end of Mary’s quest. She has successfully restored the garden, transformed herself, and brought Colin back to life. After this, the story becomes that of Colin reuniting with his father and his mother’s spirit.
The scene in which Colin stands for the first time illustrates the power of positive thinking. In the past, Colin has spent his energy on helpless tantrums and hysteria. This time, instead of throwing a tantrum when Ben offends him, Colin takes all that energy and uses it to do something worthwhile—standing upright.
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By Frances Hodgson Burnett
