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About This Passage
This passage is the chapter's quietest ethical moment. Burnett gives us the three key terms in sequence — Colin 'magnificently' refusing the nurse, Dr. Craven privately 'alarmed' by the prospect of his own lost inheritance, and the narrator's careful verdict that the doctor is 'not an unscrupulous man, though he was a weak one.' In one paragraph Burnett stages a complete moral transaction: temptation noticed, temptation not acted upon, character correctly named. The young Rajah's imperious register and the adult doctor's interior calculation are placed side by side, and Burnett trusts the reader to see that the child's theatrical arrogance and the adult's silent compromise belong to different moral categories.
'No, I will not have the nurse,' he said magnificently. 'My cousin knows how to take care of me. She made me better last night. A very strong boy I know will push my carriage.' Dr. Craven felt rather ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 19 as a three-movement argument. Movement one: Dr. Craven's visit, during which a reluctant doctor discovers Colin radically changed; Mary's Yorkshire slip; Colin's self-diagnosis about remembering versus forgetting; and Dr. Craven's admission that the new state is better than the old. Movement two: Mrs. Medlock quoting Susan Sowerby on 'children needs children' and on the parable of the orange. Movement three: Colin's first peaceful night, Mary's arrival with the news of spring, the opening of the window, and Dickon's entrance with the lamb, the fox, the crow, and the squirrels. Treat the chapter as Burnett's answer to the question 'what actually cures a child like Colin?'
Discussion Questions
- Colin tells Dr. Craven: 'It is because my cousin makes me forget that she makes me better.' Evaluate this as a clinical theory offered by an eleven-year-old. What does Colin seem to understand about the mechanism of his own illness, and why might Burnett deliberately place this insight in the mouth of the patient rather than a physician?
- The narrator tells us Dr. Craven worried briefly about losing his inheritance if Colin recovered, but 'he was not an unscrupulous man, though he was a weak one.' Why does Burnett name the doctor's temptation AND clear him of acting on it, rather than either hiding the temptation or making him a villain?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Anticipated with strong fear or reluctance; Dr. Craven dreaded the prospect of another tantrum visit
Item 2
In a manner showing vexation or impatience, typically over something one considers an imposition
Item 3
Producing a surprise so complete that one's prior expectations are decisively overturned
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Critical Thinking
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