The Count
Mary Lennox starts The Secret Garden liking nobody at all. By chapter eleven she can count five people on her fingers.
This is the full summary of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, so it spoils everything, the ending included. I’ll go through it in order and keep Mary’s count as we go.
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred and thirteen. By my count it runs about eighty-one thousand words, in twenty-seven chapters. One content note: the book is of its time, and Mary’s first remarks about her Indian servants, and some of Martha’s about India, are ugly. The story shows Mary having to unlearn that.
Nobody Left
The count starts at zero. Mary is about nine, born in India, sickly and sour. Her mother cared only about parties, and her Ayah gave in to everything, so by six she was a little tyrant.
One hot morning her Ayah does not come. Cholera has broken out, and by the next day her parents are dead and the servants have run away. Mary sleeps through it, and wakes in a silent bungalow with only a small snake for company. Officers find her, and one says there is nobody left to come.
She is sent to a clergyman’s house, where a boy named Basil teases her with the rhyme Mistress Mary, quite contrary. Then she sails to England, to an uncle she has never met, Archibald Craven, who lives at Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire.
On the train, Mrs. Medlock the housekeeper tells her what to expect. A house six hundred years old with near a hundred rooms, most of them locked, on the edge of a moor. A master with a crooked back whose wife has died. Chapter three is a drive in the dark across Missel Moor, and then two rooms she is told to stay in.
Martha and the Robin
Her first friend is a maid. Martha is a Yorkshire housemaid who talks to Mary as an equal, makes her dress herself, and says she is one of twelve children in a moorland cottage. Mary explodes at her, then sobs, and Martha apologizes.
Martha mentions her brother Dickon, who tames wild animals. She also mentions a garden that has been locked for ten years. Mr. Craven shut it when his wife died, and buried the key.
Outside, Mary meets Ben Weatherstaff, a surly old gardener, and his robin. She says out loud, I’m lonely, and finds out it is true. Ben says the two of them are alike, both as sour as they look. Then the robin flies over a wall into a garden with no door.
In chapter five, Martha explains that it was Mrs. Craven’s garden, and that she fell from a branch of her favorite tree and died the next day. That night Mary hears someone crying inside the house, and Martha says it is only the wind. In chapter six, on a rainy day, Mary wanders the closed rooms, plays with ivory elephants, finds a mouse with six babies, and hears the cry again. Mrs. Medlock catches her and sends her back.
The Key and the Door
Chapter seven. Mary notices she has started to like the robin, a boy named Dickon she has never met, and Martha’s mother. She is starting on Martha too. That is a good many people to like, when you are not used to liking.
Martha asks her how she likes herself, and Mary says, not at all. Then the robin hops onto a heap of dug earth, and she finds a rusty key.
In chapter eight, Martha brings a gift from her mother: a skipping rope, bought with two pence of Martha’s wages. Mary stiffly says thank you. Skipping down the walk, she sees the robin on the ivy. A gust of wind lifts the leaves, and under them is a door knob. The key fits. She steps inside the secret garden.
It is a tangle of leafless climbing roses and brown grass, and in the beds are sharp pale green points. She clears weeds around them with a stick for hours. Martha tells her they are bulbs, and Mary asks for a spade. So Martha has her print a letter, asking Dickon to buy tools and seeds. That night Mary hears the cry a third time.
Dickon
Chapter ten, a week of sun. Mary finds Dickon under a tree, playing a pipe while a squirrel, a pheasant and two rabbits listen. He brings tools and seeds. When he asks where her garden is, she panics, then confesses she has stolen one, and shows him the door under the ivy.
In chapter eleven, Dickon walks through it softly and cuts a gray branch to show green inside. That means wick, which means alive. There will be a fountain of roses, he says. He also notices that someone has pruned here more recently than ten years ago, and nobody can say who.
Mary asks him, does tha’ like me? He does. And she says, you make the fifth person. The other four are Martha, Martha’s mother, the robin and Ben Weatherstaff. That is the count. Dickon promises she is as safe as a missel thrush.
Chapter twelve: Mr. Craven is home for a day and sends for her, after Martha’s mother stops him on the moor. He is tired and miserable and admits he forgot her. Mary blurts, might I have a bit of earth? He says take it anywhere and make it come alive, and leaves for the summer. Back in the garden Dickon has left a drawing of a bird on a nest, and the words, I will cum bak.
The Boy in the Room
Chapter thirteen is the turn. On a rainy night Mary follows the crying through a tapestry door into a room with a four-posted bed. In it is a boy with an ivory face and huge gray eyes. He is Colin Craven, her cousin, also ten.
He is sure he will die young. No servant is allowed to talk about him, and his father cannot bear to look at him, because his mother died when he was born. Colin wants the secret garden opened at once, and Mary, frightened, argues that a garden is better as a secret. He agrees. She sings him to sleep with a Hindustani song.
In chapter fourteen, Martha is terrified, but Colin orders everyone to let Mary visit, like a young Rajah. They laugh together about Dickon until Dr. Craven and Mrs. Medlock walk in, astonished.
Chapter fifteen is spring. Mary slips out at dawn. Dickon is already in the garden with a fox cub named Captain and a crow named Soot, the robin is building a nest, and the gray walls are turning green. Mary tells Dickon about Colin, and they agree that he needs this garden.
Hysterics
Chapter sixteen is a fight. Mary spends the day with Dickon instead of Colin, and Colin threatens to keep Dickon out of the house. She calls him Mr. Rajah, says he isn’t going to die, and storms out while the nurse laughs.
In chapter seventeen, that night, he screams himself into a fit, and the nurse begs Mary to go in. She shouts at him. Then she looks at his back and says there is not a lump on it, only hysterics. When he is calm she describes the garden, and he sleeps.
In chapter eighteen Mary speaks Yorkshire to him, and then asks, can I trust you? She tells him there is a door under the ivy, and that she has been inside for weeks. In chapter nineteen, Dr. Craven finds Colin laughing and leaves puzzled. Spring has come, and Dickon brings a newborn lamb, the fox, the crow and two squirrels into Colin’s room.
Into the Garden
In chapter twenty, Colin orders the head gardener to keep every man away from the Long Walk. Dickon wheels him to the door, and Colin covers his eyes until they are inside. Then he cries, I shall get well! I shall live forever and ever and ever!
In chapter twenty-one, the robin saves them from a question about a dead tree with a broken branch. Then Ben Weatherstaff appears on a ladder above the wall, furious. He calls Colin a poor cripple. Colin throws off his rugs and stands.
In chapter twenty-two, Ben confesses that he used to climb the wall once a year to prune the roses, until his rheumatism stopped him two years ago. Mrs. Craven had asked him to look after them. That is the pruning mystery solved. Colin digs with a trowel, plants a rose, and is standing when the sun goes down.
Magic
In chapter twenty-three, Colin calls what he feels Magic, and holds a scientific experiment. The four of them sit in a circle under the plum tree, and he chants that the Magic is in him. Afterward he walks around the whole garden.
Chapter twenty-four is all about secrecy. Mrs. Sowerby sends milk and currant buns, Dickon teaches exercises he learned from a wrestler, and Colin and Mary groan and complain around Dr. Craven so nobody guesses.
In chapter twenty-five, Colin keeps the curtain pulled back from his mother’s portrait. In chapter twenty-six he realizes, I’m well. Dickon sings the Doxology, Mrs. Sowerby walks in, and Colin tells her he wishes she were his mother too.
The Last Chapter
In chapter twenty-seven, Mr. Craven, wandering Europe, feels alive for the first time in ten years. He dreams that a voice calls to him from the garden, then gets a letter from Susan Sowerby, and goes home. He hears laughter behind the garden wall, and Colin runs out of the door into his arms.
Colin takes him in, tells him everything, and then walks back across the lawn with him while the servants stare. That is the ending, and my ending video goes through it.
The Final Count
Here is my count. The word Magic does not appear in the first seven chapters. It shows up ninety-five times in the whole book, and forty-six of them are in chapter twenty-three, the chapter called Magic. The robin is named one hundred and thirteen times.
In my reading, which is opinion, the book is about things coming alive when someone looks after them: a garden, a girl, a boy, a father. I give it four and a half out of five, with the Yorkshire dialect and those slow middle chapters holding it back.
If this helped, subscribe, and tell me in the comments which of the five people on Mary’s count is your favorite.
