It is Sowerby who gives voice, in Yorkshire dialect, to Burnett’s view of God:

I warrant they call it a different name i’ France and a different one i’ Germany. Th’ same thing as set th’ seeds swellin’ an’ th’ sun shinin’ made thee a well lad an’ it’s th’ Good Thing. It isn’t like us poor fools as think it matters if us is called out of our names. Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee. It goes on makin’ worlds by th’ million—worlds like us (p. 212).

Burnett uses the uneducated but wise Susan Sowerby as a mouthpiece not only for her religious vision of a God who transcends creeds and sects, but also for her ideas about child-rearing. It is Sowerby who sends Mary Lennox a skipping rope and persuades the girl’s uncle, the misanthropic Archibald Craven, not to hire a governess but to allow his niece “fresh air and freedom and running about” (p. 95). As the mother of twelve children, she recognizes the importance of physical exercise and the role of unstructured play in developing body and mind. Although her opinions are represented as timeless country wisdom, Susan Sowerby is actually expressing ideas that were progressive and still quite controversial when The Secret Garden was first published.

During the Victorian age, upper-class children had been expected to behave like miniature adults. Little girls were dressed in tight and confining clothes and trained in domestic virtues and such accomplishments as sewing and playing the piano. Outdoor exercise was viewed as tomboyish and undignified, likely to build unfeminine muscles and bring an unwelcome tan to fashionably pale complexions. It was not until the late nineteenth-century that the kindergarten movement, based on the writings of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), began to challenge these restrictive child-rearing practices. Froebel’s organic theory of child development employed horticultural metaphors to argue that both boys and girls, like gardens, require space, clean air, and brightness in order to flourish; and that young children learn best in an environment in which nature is celebrated but controlled.

Froebel was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy of childhood, expressed in Émile (1762), and like Rousseau he looked back nostalgically to an idealized agrarian past when people lived in harmony with nature. Burnett, an admirer of Froebel and a supporter of charities that tried to bring his educational methods to inner-city children, also had a romanticized view of the old-fashioned rural poor that finds expression in her creation of the Sowerby family in The Secret Garden. Though the Sowerbys are poor, they are presented as invariably cheerful, healthy, and content with their lot. They appear to accept their lower-class position and yet, unlike the downtrodden and obsequious colonial servants of Mary’s early experience, they have no hesitation in speaking their minds to those of higher rank. Susan Sowerby’s simple country life gives her an instinctive understanding of the needs of children. Her son Dickon, who spends his days outside on the Yorkshire moors, is attuned to the seasons, wise in the ways of animals and birds, self-reliant, resourceful, and honest. He and his siblings are naturally possessed of the qualities that Froebel and Rousseau sought to instill in children. Colin Craven and Mary Lennox, on the other hand, are “a hard, little, unloving girl and a sickly boy” (p. 117) who must overcome the psychological damage inflicted by their over-civilized, unhappy upper-class families and learn to be more like Dickon.

At once spoiled and neglected, their parents dead, absent or indifferent, both Colin and Mary have grown up without siblings or friends, attended by servants who indulge their every whim but do not love them, and deprived of opportunities to exercise their bodies or their minds. Both children have been hidden in confined, airless places. Mary, raised in the heat and languor of colonial India and abandoned after her parents’ death from cholera, is described as “the child no one ever saw” (p. 11). Colin, rejected by his father and believed to be a hopeless invalid, never leaves his bedroom in Misselthwaite Manor. Neither child has experienced the fresh air and freedom of the Yorkshire moors, and until they meet Dickon they are entirely alienated from nature and fearful of the outdoors. Mary dismisses the moor as “an endless, dull, purplish sea” (p. 23) and Colin protests, “I hate fresh air and I don’t want to go out” (p. 103).

In contrast to the measured and stilted language of Mary and Colin when we first meet them, Dickon’s dialect speech is a breathless tumble of active verbs: “Th’ world’s all fair begun again this mornin’, it has.