The Secret Garden — Chapter 2

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct Chapter 2 as a series of transfers: the English clergyman's crowded bungalow where Basil names Mary from a Mother Goose rhyme; the London hotel where Mrs. Medlock assumes custody; the Yorkshire-bound train where Misselthwaite and Archibald Craven are delivered in hearsay; and the closing image of gray rain on the window as Mary falls asleep. Attend to how Burnett shifts registers between nickname, appraisal, legend, and weather.

Discussion Questions

1. Basil invents 'Mistress Mary Quite Contrary' from a nursery rhyme whose subject — a garden — is the novel's eventual plot. Examine the layered irony of letting a seven-year-old boy plant the book's title theme in a taunt. Is this proleptic design for the alert reader, or naturalistic detail? Defend your reading by considering how a 1911 children's-novel audience would have heard the rhyme.
2. Mrs. Medlock describes Misselthwaite through a structure of addition followed by cancellation: six hundred years old, nearly a hundred rooms 'shut up and locked,' pictures and fine old furniture, then the abrupt 'But there's nothing else.' Consider how this inventory trains the reader to hear 'nothing' as provisional, and how it prepares the formal ground for a novel in which a locked garden will turn out to be the thing that is not nothing.

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