The Secret Garden — Chapter 19

About This Passage

Burnett stages an entire ethical transaction in a single paragraph: Colin's theatrical refusal in the imperious register Burnett has been calling 'Rajah,' the doctor's briefly honest self-interest, and the narrator's careful moral verdict that weakness is not unscrupulousness. The adverb 'magnificently' is ironic — Colin is ten years old and bedridden, but performing the imperial register the novel has linked throughout to his bitten fear. The narrator's double-negative gift to Dr. Craven — 'not an unscrupulous man, though he was a weak one' — is Burnett's precise taxonomy of adult moral failure: most adults are not wicked, they are merely weak, and the difference matters morally.

Narration Prompt

Describe Chapter 19 as Burnett's working demonstration of the novel's theory of cure. Begin with Dr. Craven's expectations and the reversal he encounters — a boy sitting up, requesting fresh air, refusing the nurse. Account for Colin's own self-diagnosis ('it is because my cousin makes me forget that she makes me better'), Mary's Yorkshire slip and Dr. Craven's laughter, Mrs. Medlock's transmission of Susan Sowerby's orange parable, Colin's first peaceful night and his waking image of tight strings that loosened themselves, and the chapter's climactic reversal in which Dickon and his creatures enter the sickroom rather than Colin leaving it. Throughout, pay attention to Burnett's distribution of diagnostic authority — not to the London physician, but to the child patient, the working-class mother quoted twice removed, and the lamb.

Discussion Questions

1. Colin articulates his own clinical theory: 'it is because my cousin makes me forget that she makes me better.' Evaluate this as a child's formulation of what modern psychology calls attentional regulation, and analyze Burnett's reasons for locating diagnostic authority in the patient rather than in the physician. What does this assignment of authority say about her novel's epistemology of illness?
2. Burnett describes Dr. Craven as 'not an unscrupulous man, though he was a weak one,' and stages a small interior drama in which he briefly considers his lost inheritance and then does not act on the thought. Analyze the moral architecture of this passage. Why is a weak-but-decent doctor rhetorically more effective than either a saintly or villainous one, and how does this align with Burnett's broader practice of distributing moral authority away from credentialed professionals?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide