Creating “a Little Garden of Our Own”: Constructions of Childhood and Knowledge About Gardening in Frances Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) and Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia (1910)

Abstract

Although there has been considerable previous scholarship on the garden and what it symbolises in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), less attention has been paid to the act of gardening itself within the text. The present article reads this popular children’s novel in conjunction with Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia (1910), which, while well-known in its time, does not have the classic status of The Secret Garden. Drawing on theory about the narrator–narratee relationship in children’s texts, this comparative analysis considers how knowledge about gardening is constructed and narrated in a work of fiction and a work of nonfiction, respectively, particularly in terms of how the child reader is addressed, constructed, and positioned. We investigate how constructions of childhood are linked to the concept of gardening, both mediated through books and the act of reading, and as an activity that children are invited to undertake. Both texts present knowledge about gardening as something which is constructed both through reading and studying and through practical experience. However, while in The Secret Garden, child characters co-construct knowledge more collaboratively, the adult narratee in The Children’s Encyclopaedia more strongly instructs the “young gardener”. The garden in both texts eventually becomes a way to socialise children; however, the act of gardening also allows a temporary freedom from those social roles.

1. Introduction

Colin was on his sofa in his dressing-gown and he was sitting up quite straight looking at a picture in one of the garden books and talking to the plain child who at that moment could scarcely be called plain at all because her face was so glowing with enjoyment.

(Burnett 1911, p. 166)

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden (1911), two neglected cousins, orphan Mary and motherless Colin, bond over reading illustrated books on gardening. The shared pleasure of reading and exchanging knowledge about plants and gardens temporarily transforms the “plain” and bad-tempered Mary into a beautiful child whose face is “glowing with enjoyment”, while Colin, who is considered an invalid, is “sitting up quite straight” on the sofa. None of the illustrated books that Mary and Colin read together are named, but one could well imagine the pair enjoying a text similar to The Children’s Encyclopaedia (1910), the eight-volume bestseller edited by writer and journalist Arthur Mee (1875–1943), lauded by Mee’s biographer as “the wonder book of the twentieth century in the history of book-publishing” and a “modern classic of the children’s world” (Hammerton 1946, p. 121). Though this may have been hyperbole, The Children’s Encyclopaedia was extremely popular and widely disseminated. It was published worldwide, translated into several languages, revised and reissued in print until the 1960s, and published digitally as The New Book of Knowledge in the early part of the twenty-first century (De Oliveira 2018, p. 109). While Mee’s Encyclopaedia does not share The Secret Garden’s classic status today, both texts were influential in their time and long after it. A reading of them in conjunction with each other illustrates how knowledge about a particular topic, gardening in this case, was constructed for children in fiction and nonfiction in this period.

The focus on gardening and the natural world in both of these texts is no surprise given the significance of nature in constructions of childhood at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Access to green spaces, such as parks and gardens, was closely linked to the Romantic conceptualisation of idealised childhood in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. However, these were not simply areas for the Romantic “Child of Nature” to roam free but could also be civilising spaces (Colton 2016). Connections between green spaces and childhood were frequently reflected in Edwardian children’s literature, including Burnett’s works. As Darcy (2009) notes, the “freedom and adventure offered to children by the rambling but securely walled Edwardian garden is central to Burnett’s vision of childhood” and “very much marks her out as a writer of her time” (p. 76). The covers of Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia can also be viewed as metaphorical walls surrounding an expansive Edwardian garden, which offers child readers a cornucopia of knowledge, but in a curated, safe, and manageable form. In the introduction to his work, Mee suggested, in Hardy’s (2019, p. 64) words, that “the childhood virtue of asking questions went hand-in-hand with a beneficent awareness of the natural world”.

Despite potential differences in genre, both works focus on developing knowledge through reading texts, sharing information, and experiencing the garden itself. In the novel, much of the knowledge is constructed through the circulation of information between the child characters, and in the encyclopaedia, there is a more top-down frame with the adult narrator often using a didactic tone to explain gardening best practices. However, both texts use features of narration, such as direct address and shifts in grammatical person, to disrupt these stable categories for who holds knowledge. Using theory about narrative address in fiction and recent scholarship about how children’s nonfiction works, we investigate the child characters and narrator–narratee relationships in the texts. The analysis reveals shifting constructions of the imagined child gardeners and the ways in which they are positioned in relation to knowledge development. We examine intersections between different kinds of learning with a particular focus on how practical skills (doing gardening) interconnect with literacy and reading (acquiring factual knowledge about gardens and gardening) in order to show how both texts use elements of imagination and instruction to encourage child gardeners. We argue that the view of knowledge construction as something that needs to take place both through reading and learning and through practical exploration and inquiry is reflected in Mee’s encyclopaedia and in Burnett’s novel.

2. Facts and Wonder in the Garden

While the article explores both texts and the interplay between them, a more general introduction to Mee’s encyclopaedia is necessary because it is not as well-known. Despite its immense popularity during the first half of the twentieth century, The Children’s Encyclopaedia currently does not hold a central place in scholarship on children’s literature. Previous work on Arthur Mee’s encyclopaedia, which has centred on imperialism and English nationalism (see Paulin 2002; Kelen 2012; Coetzee 2021) as well as racist ideology and eugenics in the work (Rodwell 1997), might go some way to explaining why it has fallen out of favour. However, Alexander (2011) suggests that Mee’s work has “had its day” primarily because it is outdated: “unlike classic children’s fiction”, reference books “date with the advance of knowledge” (Alexander 2011, p. 46). Nevertheless, Alexander claims, The Children’s Encyclopaedia has “continuing relevance to studies of nature and development of non-fiction for children” (p. 32). The most extensive study of Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia, Michael Tracy’s (2008) The World of the Edwardian Child: As Seen in Arthur Mee’s ‘Children’s Encyclopaedia’, 1908–1910 was prompted by the author’s recollections of reading the work as a boy in the 1940s and 50s and may be as much a homage as an academic publication. Regardless, Tracy’s (2008) analyses are interesting for the close attention paid to the intended audience of the text, which emerges as English, White, Protestant, and upper- or middle-class.

The Children’s Encyclopaedia is complex in scope. It was originally published in fortnightly instalments between 1908 and 1910, and the 1910 edition consulted for this article consists of eight volumes, to which several different authors and illustrators have contributed. Rather than being arranged alphabetically, the work is organised into different recurring topical sections, such as “The Child’s Story of the Earth”, “The Child’s Book of Bible Stories”, “The Child’s Book of Its Own Life”, and “Things to Make and Things to Do”. No named authors are listed as responsible for the sections under the topic “Things to Make and Things to Do”, though apparently “many writers” contributed. These sections include “how to” articles focused on practical knowledge and skills. Children are, for example, taught how build a cardboard model town, master magic tricks, play outdoor games, sew dolls’ clothes, and keep rabbits. The analysis in the present article focuses on the sub-sections on gardening, namely “A Little Garden Month by Month” and “A Little Vegetable Garden Month by Month”, to compare it to The Secret Garden.

There are many points of crossover between the encyclopaedia and the novel, especially when they are focused on how children learn. While one might assume that the works follow standard genre conventions, they both use genre elements flexibly. Often novels are perceived as creating imaginary worlds and encyclopaedias as circulating facts about the real world. However, children’s nonfiction may be fictionalised to a greater or lesser extent and include narrative features, such as narration. Conversely, children’s fiction may contain factual or nonfiction elements. The questioning of definitions around genre and children’s literature can be seen in recent scholarship, such as von Merveldt (2018) on hybrid forms and Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer (2021) on descriptive picturebooks. In terms of defining nonfiction specifically, Sanders (2018) has observed that while it is typically expected to be “a literature of facts” (p. 34), it is better understood as “a literature of questions”, which invites children to create understanding and engage in the (co)construction of knowledge.

The Children’s Encyclopaedia could certainly be characterised using Sander’s phrase. While the encyclopaedia includes many articles with practical step-by-step instructions for how to do things, Mee also insisted that “this is an encyclopaedia that teaches everything, and not merely a book full of facts” (p. 2). Mee’s biographer referred to The Children’s Encyclopaedia as a “wonder book”, reflecting the view that wonder is not simply a mystical experience but rather a sensory reaction to the world. It even includes a recurring section called “The Child’s Book of Wonder”, which is organised in a question-and-answer format, where questions, such as “What Do the Birds Sing About?” and “Do Flowers Sleep At Night?”, are addressed. Alexander (2011) claims that The Children’s Encyclopaedia is “remarkable for its narrative form” (p. 44) and that it is closer to a “story-book” than a “compilation of factual information”, both in style and organisation. Mee himself described it as “a book to be widely read for its own sake” (Alexander 2011, p. 33).

The idea that dissemination of knowledge for children should appeal to the senses and evoke wonder is not new. John Amos Comenius, author of what is widely considered the first children’s encyclopaedia, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, observed that children “are delighted with Pictures, and willingly please their eyes with these lights … that scare-crows may be taken away out of Wisdom’s Gardens” (Comenius 1659, p. xv). Drawing on scholarship in philosophy and child psychology, Grilli (2020) observes that any “approach to knowledge that is not also aesthetic undermines the possibility of arousing wonder” (p. 23). The view of nonfiction as texts inviting aesthetic engagement and wonder is also portrayed in The Secret Garden in certain passages, like the one introducing this article.

Both the novel and encyclopaedia find particular delight in gardening. In one memorable passage from the novel, where the narration shifts to the second person, we find the narrator exclaiming with joy about the changes taking place in the garden: “Oh! The things which happened in that garden! If you have never had a garden, you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden you will know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass there” (p. 202). The use of the second person makes this expression of feeling more immediate and pulls attention away from the plot and towards gardening as an activity that brings forth wonder. Much of our analysis of the novel revolves around the way the characters construct knowledge for each other; however, this moment indicates the strong narrative presence shaping that construction and illustrates how one can feel about being a gardener.

The encyclopaedia also expresses the sense of wonder that one can obtain from keeping a garden, and select passages take on a similar awe-filled expression as the novel. For example, when writing about the promise of spring, the text becomes quite poetic:” But with the first breath of spring, life and growth will be stirred into wonderful, silent activity again…” (Mee 1910, p. 2254). Additionally, moments of joy in the activities surrounding gardening are specifically marked: “now there is one delightful occupation we may give ourselves even when the world is white with snow, and that is to secure a seed catalogue, and go through it again and again to decide…what we intend to grow to make our gardens beautiful in the summer that will be coming” (Mee 1910, p. 2254). The sense of anticipation here evokes similar sentiments, such as the one above, in The Secret Garden.

The connection between the cultivation of nature and the curiosity of the child is a major point of crossover in the texts. The garden becomes the central developmental space for the children in the novel, and Mee also explicitly links nature to knowledge construction for children in his work. In fact, in emphasising how he views children’s learning processes, he writes an anecdote which echoes the plot of The Secret Garden. Mee relates the story of “a lonely little girl” who “sets to work with her spade to turn the earth upside down”, “begs Robin Redbreast to come down and be friends”, and “has friends in every flower that grows, in every wind that blows” (p. 1). This girl could have been Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, who is also lonely (at the start of the novel she has neither friends nor parents), and also digs the earth with her spade and talks to a robin. However, Arthur Mee’s little girl is not sullen and contrary, but rather “the gentlest little fairy who ever opened her eyes to the sun”. Nor is she an orphan. In fact, she was a fictionalised version of Mee’s only child, Marjorie, who, as “her little mind grows great with wonder”, overwhelmed her mother with such a barrage of questions about the world that the parent cries out “for a book that will answer all the questions!” “And this”, Mee reveals, “is the book she cried for” (p. 1). As Alexander (2011) notes, Mee granted child readers freedom to “browse and pursue interests through the world of the Encyclopaedia as his or her wonder and imagination are engaged” (pp. 43–44). Children cannot find answers to their questions simply by exploring or by asking their parents—they must also acquire knowledge through reading texts centred on factual and practical information they can then put to use. In the same vein, the novel does not just present the garden as a magical and mystical space. Rather, it is very much focused on learning about gardening and applying that knowledge quite practically. As Darcy (2009) writes, “the garden was much more than a symbol for Burnett, who “had a good knowledge of gardening as an art and a practical activity and a great love of flowers, particularly roses” (p. 76). The implied author of The Secret Garden is someone with knowledge of and a love for gardening, to the point where certain parts of the text are “encyclopaedic” in their explanations of how to tend to a garden.

Given Burnett’s interest in the garden, it is not surprising that the topic has been much discussed in The Secret Garden scholarship. For example, attention has been paid to how the garden itself should be read both symbolically and historically at the turn of the twentieth century. One significant article by Price (2001) shows how nineteenth-century gardeners envisioned the garden as being about “enclosure, imprisonment, instruction, and beautification” (p. 4). Price uses the imperialistic and gendered implications she finds in these ideas to explore the ways in which Mary becomes defined by her role as the conduit for Colin’s development. The perception that Colin takes over the novel is a prevailing one and is clearly summed up by Dolan (2013), who writes that Burnett could not “dream up” a conclusion for Mary that did not “promise subordination” (p. 220), and by McGillis (2011) who calls the novel “deeply conservative in its values and politics” (p. 242). At the other end of the spectrum is Jenkins (2011), who uses a psychoanalytic framework to view the garden as an abject space that breaks apart “binary oppositions” (p. 435) and erases the differences the children might have had by bringing the “magic, the mothering, the joy and the connection” (p. 439) of the garden into the rest of the book. This current article pulls from both these strands of scholarship to consider how the children interact within the garden; however, our focus is less on understanding the space of the garden and more on how the children learn about and perform the act of gardening. This provides a frame for discussing gardening in the novel as it shifts away from the conceptual space of the garden into the practical application of the knowledge of Mary and the other children.

To delve into how gardening is discussed in these texts, it is necessary to first understand how the readers are constructed and how the narratives address the readers. The following section details these narrative features in children’s literature. This discussion will be used as a springboard for analysing the two texts in light of how they show children how to make a garden.

3. Narrative Address and Child Readers

To Wolfgang Iser, the “implied reader” is a construct “firmly rooted in the text” (Iser 1978, p. 34) as well as a role real readers are invited to adopt. The concept has a mental as well as a textual dimension in being not only a pre-structured position built into the text, but also “the reader’s actualization of this potential through the reading process” (Iser 1974, p. xii). The concept of the implied reader has been widely adopted in reader response theory, including in the field of children’s and young adult literature. Though the present article is not concerned with the reader response aspect in the sense of investigating real reader responses to the texts, it adopts the assumption that any text has an in-built “implied reader” or subject position(s) that real readers must actively negotiate when making meaning of the text. As Maria Nikolajeva (2004) has pointed out, children’s literature often offers different subject positions using collective protagonists, who might represent children of different genders, ages, and personalities (Nikolajeva 2004, pp. 171–72). Characterisation, then, is also an important narrative aspect, not least in children’s texts. For the purposes of our textual analysis, we are interested in the ways that the (child) narratee is addressed in both texts, as well as the ways in which child characters offer different subject positions for the reader.

Discussing nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s fiction, Barbara Wall (1991) argues that it is in fact the relationship between narrator and narratee (rather than that between implied reader and implied author) that is “the distinctive marker of a children’s book”. The narrator, then, is the “’voice’ we hear as we ‘listen’ to the story being told” and the narratee is “the more or less shadowy being within the story, whom … the narrator addresses” (p. 4). The implied reader, by contrast, is understood as the presence the text “inescapably calls into being”, or the reader “for whom the real and implied authors have … shaped the story” and who “can be deduced from the totality of the book” (pp. 6–7). Wall stresses that though “the idea of the implied reader is being shaped by the gradual unfolding of the text as a whole, at any and every given moment it is the narratee to whom the narrator speaks” (p. 8).

Wall argues that while Victorian children’s fiction is typically characterised by “double address”, in which the narrator is (self)conscious of the presence of an adult reader, some children’s authors in the first part of the twentieth century developed a “single address” approach, in which the narrator speaks directly to the child narratee, without attempts to appeal to an additional adult reader. The fusion of these two modes, in which the narrator might speak to single, double, or dual audiences, respectively, is referred to as “dual address” (p. 9). To Wall, Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) is an example of a children’s book predominantly using single address, a departure from Burnett’s previous works. The narrator in The Secret Garden, claims Wall, speaks only to a child narratee, but “without sentimentality and condescension” (Wall 1991, p. 175).

Other scholars have suggested that the single address approach, in which a narrator speaks directly to the child, may be an illusion. After all, adults are (with some exceptions) primarily the ones who write children’s literature, buy books for children, and often mediate the reading, and this “hidden adult” (Nodelman 2008) is always addressed, even if only tacitly. Children’s literature may not be “impossible”, as Jacqueline Rose (1984) infamously suggested, but children’s literature is nevertheless characterised by a power imbalance in which children are typically positioned as readers and adults as authors (Nikolajeva 2010, p. 8).

Discussing “the identification fallacy”, that is, the belief that children should be encouraged to identify with one of the characters in children’s literature, Nikolajeva (2011) observes an interesting tension between the narrator and the implied author in The Secret Garden. While the narrator “sets out to shatter the reader’s identification with Mary” in describing her as “disagreeable”, “tyrannical”, and “selfish”, the text “invites readers to consider Mary’s predicament with sympathy”. Therefore, “if readers are able to overcome the aversion expressed by the narrator toward Mary” they will realise first, that she “is not as nasty as the narrator states, and, second, that is she improving much faster than the narrator is prepared to admit” (Nikolajeva 2011, p. 191). In other words, the subject position offered to the reader is neither solely dictated by the reader, nor by the protagonist. Instead, it develops from “an active, dialogical response” to what the narrator says and what readers themselves can infer from the text (Nikolajeva 2011, p. 191).

In present-day children’s nonfiction, Pauwels claims, the first-person narrator emulates the “teacher-pupil relationship well known to most readers” (Pauwels 2019, p. 438). Moreover, while the second-person address may be “problematic” in terms of reader positioning in fiction, it is, in fact, the default in children’s nonfiction (Pauwels 2019, p. 438). This didactic relationship between adult teacher and child pupil is evident in Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia, in which the dominant modes of address are either the first-person I/we or the second-person you. Kelen (2012) has pointed out that Mee’s Encyclopaedia was innovative compared to previous children’s encyclopaedias, in that it was lavishly illustrated, filled with “dialogic invitations to the reader”, and characterised by “a general chattiness of tone” (Kelen 2012, p. 177). Given the different contributors involved in the work, and the variety of topics, The Children’s Encyclopaedia is also complex when it comes to narrative voice and reader address. The sections on “A Little Garden Month by Month” in Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia predominantly use the first-person narrator that Pauwels (2019) considers typical of today’s nonfiction for children. However, rather than the first-person singular I, the prevalent form of address is the plural form, most often the inclusive we—that is, inclusive of the narrator as well as the narratee.

If the “shadowy” figure of the narratee can be revealed by investigating who the narrator addresses, the question of how to deduce the implied reader “from the totality of the book” (Wall 1991, p. 7) remains. Investigating “signs of childness” in children’s books, Peter Hollindale (1997) has pointed to ways in which the implied child reader may be constructed through various strategies, such as the depiction of main characters, narrative voice, authorial voice, language complexity, and vocabulary (Hollindale 1997). In an investigation of the implied reader in children’s nonfiction, Larkin-Lieffers (2010) adopts the definition of the implied reader as a concept created by “the author’s conscious and unconscious thoughts of children” (p. 76). She finds that such “images of childhood” are present both in the visual and verbal text and are connected to societal constructions of childhood in illustrated information books for children. The present study considers narrative voice and reader address. The main focus points are how the narratee is addressed and how the child characters interact with the natural environment.

4. Knowledge About Gardening

As explored above, one main point of connection between the two texts in this article is the way knowledge about gardening is constructed. In this section, we will discuss how knowledge is developed with a focus on the characters and the narratee in The Secret Garden and the narratee in The Children’s Encyclopedia. In terms of commonalities, both texts present gardening as an activity that is not gendered. The “What to do in a Little Garden” sections of Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia are not specifically addressed to either boys or girls and in fact sometimes explicitly invite both: “any boy or girl who already has a garden and has reared his seedlings, may at once set about thinning them” (p. 331). This contrasts with some of the more distinctly gendered activities under the topical section “Things to Do and Things to Make”, such as “The Boy Carpenter Box of Tools” (p. 109) and “How to Make a Girls’ Workbox” (p. 222). Similarly, in The Secret Garden, the space of the garden allows for a freedom that other areas of girls’ and boys’ lives might not. As Lelekis (2014) notes, the children’s activities are not divided along gendered lines: “Mary and the boys alike participate in home-centered activities like gardening” (p. 67). While gender may be or become a rigid construct for these young people, gardening is a way to be outside of those divisions for a time.

The freeing space of the garden does not mean that it is a place without structure or focus. Both texts treat the act of gardening and the skills needed to be a successful gardener quite seriously. In the novel, the children develop their gardening knowledge through cooperation and communal pooling of their respective resources. The encyclopaedia, through a stricter boundary between the adult narrator and the child narratee, treats knowledge construction as a more top-down affair. However, despite their differences, reading them together reveals similarities in terms of how children acquire knowledge, through reading and studying on the one hand, and through practical experience on the other.

There are two main strains of knowledge to consider when thinking about how the child characters in The Secret Garden and the child narratees in The Children’s Encyclopaedia learn about gardening then: direct experiential knowledge and theoretical knowledge from reading and instruction. In the novel, experimental knowledge is represented most clearly by Dickon, who has grown up on the moors and spent his childhood immersed in nature. He has a relationship to plants and animals that he cultivated on his own as he roamed the countryside. Martha, Mary’s maid and Dickon’s sister, succinctly explains how Dickon communes with nature when she says to Mary that “Dickon’s a kind lad an’ animals likes him” (p. 28). Kimball (2002) notes that Dickon can be read as a “magical figure” because he is so in touch with nature that he can “charm the very beasts of the field” and that he can be understood as “a model Romantic child for the other children to emulate” (p. 57). Dickon is certainly a model for the other children in the book, and he comes by his relationship to nature in a mystical way; however, he also has acquired knowledge over time and through hard work, and it is this dedication that often inspires the characters as they take their own interests in gardening. Although they develop their interests in their own ways beyond his tutelage—through reading, for example—he provides a significant part of the foundation for learning about gardening and practicing their craft.

While not as overtly in touch with nature as Dickon, Mary also possesses experiential knowledge and is, in fact, a self-taught gardener. Her interest in gardening blossoms when she discovers the secret garden, but she begins her relationship to gardening before she leaves India. When cholera is starting to spread in the community in which she lives and her Ayah does not come to take care of her, Mary amuses herself by pretending to plant hibiscus flowers in an area of dirt that she imagines as a flower bed (p. 4). Later, after her parents and Ayah have died, she briefly stays with a clergyman and his family before traveling to England. Here, she replicates the same behaviour and makes “heaps of earth and paths for a garden” (p. 9). These scenes can be seen as a way for her to rehearse an activity that will become so important to her development later. She does not have the knowledge or the maturity in these beginning sections to either really garden or to learn from her gardening, but she still turns to gardening when she is uncertain and unsettled.

In contrast, in Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia, there is less sense of a child’s ability to develop independently as a gardener without learning from another source. Rather, the narratee requires explicit instruction from the narrator. The narratee is sometimes imagined as an “inexperienced young gardener” and told how their newness to the field of gardening might affect their hobby. For example, the text gives tips on how to start the process of planting vegetables: “For inexperienced young gardeners the best way to proceed is not to attempt to rear the plants from seed, but to buy a few more plants” (Mee 1910, p. 3400). The combination of the distancing third-person reference and the description of the narratee as “young” and “inexperienced” in explanations of typical gardening mistakes, creates the overall impression that knowledge is being delivered top-down, from an authoritative expert to a young novice.

This instructive position can also be seen when the text describes which tools are most useful in the garden and how to properly use them. Many of the tools are referred to specifically by name and accompanied by illustrations, and lessons in the text describe when to use different tools. For example, the hoe is to be used for weeds, forks instead of spades can best dig up vegetables, and trowels come in handy when planting (Mee 1910, pp. 331, 447, 3826). This focus fits with the pedagogical aims, quoted in the introduction, that Mee had for the encyclopaedia; he was envisioning texts that were not merely lists of facts but which could provide knowledge that was directly applicable to activities that a child might engage in. This clear instruction would be valuable to a child who was focused on improving their skills and knowledge about gardening.

The first-person plural is often used to signal a shared agreement or consent between the narrator and narratee in the encyclopaedia: “Gardening is a splendid hobby, because it gives us plenty to do and plenty to think about, and plenty of wonderfully interesting things to find out” (Mee 1910, p. 331). The use of the inclusive we constructs an understanding of gardening as a wholesome hobby, which invites reflection and exploration, and allows children to find out about plants and nature. This example establishes a scenario in which the child learns alongside the adult, and they have a companionship built through their relationship to the garden. The goal of the adult appears to be to support the child in developing the garden they have envisioned.

However, it is clear that the “shared” values expressed through the inclusive we are, in reality, dictated by the (adult) narrator. In other words, there is little scope for the child reader to disagree that gardening is “a splendid hobby”. This is particularly evident in statements where the narration shifts between the singular and plural: “I think we may say that every one of our little plots should boast its rose-tree, one at least, and another if we can spare the space for it” (p. 1816). The overarching ideology the narratee is here made to agree with can be linked to Colton’s (2016) discussion of parks and gardens as civilising spaces for children. Gardening is a beneficial activity and a desirable part of childhood. It is physical, but also aesthetically and intellectually engaging, and it channels children’s energies into something productive, reflecting a distinctively Protestant work ethic in reminding readers, for instance, that “there is always work that may be done” in a garden (Mee 1910, p. 876) and that even while enjoying the sight of a thriving garden “we may not be idle” (p. 3514).

When the narration focuses on precise instruction in terms of making a productive garden, there are also several shifts to a second-person address, e.g., “You have already been told to pull off the pods from the sweet peas, but it should be added that this requires careful doing” (Mee 1910, p. 1287). A similar shift can be observed when the narratee is addressed for added emphasis to the instructions being given. The following quote mixes the inclusive we with a second-person voice to highlight that the narratee should be paying attention to these instructions: “What we want to do is to make the roots go as deep as possible in search of moisture, and therefore, you see, we should give sufficient water to penetrate the soil to a sufficient depth” (p. 867). The second-person voice emphasises even more than the other forms of narration that a key purpose of this section is education and that the narrator is there to instruct a child who needs tutelage to have a successful garden.

The main difference in instruction in the two texts is that in the novel the child characters have more agency when it comes to building their knowledge about gardening. While there are echoes of this adult/child relationship in the instruction about gardening in The Secret Garden, the learning is much less direct because Mary often uses information said in passing to build up her own knowledge. This is done in part because the garden is a secret, but it also points to Mary’s determination to grow her own knowledge through practical experience. Once at Misselthwaite, Mary learns from Ben Weatherstaff, a gardener at the mansion, and from Martha, the maid. Mary takes scraps of information she has received and tests out how she can implement them in the garden. She uses her knowledge to find that some plants in The Secret Garden appear to be alive. She remembers Martha mentioning that snowdrops can spread and occasionally stops digging to “imagine what it would be like when it was covered with thousands of lovely things in bloom” (p. 78). The narrator here definitively states that Mary “did not know anything about gardening”; however, instead of taking this at face value, the reader is invited to understand how Mary combines her interests with the information she has gleaned from the adults. In other words, there is a tension here, such as the one discussed by Nikolajeva (2011), between what the narrator says about Mary and how text allows space for the reader to understand and sympathise with the character.

Although knowledge from adults must often be learned indirectly, the children in The Secret Garden are comfortable directly sharing information with each other and learning on the level of the peer. Dickon is the main impetus for this. He instructs Mary about how to bring the secret garden back to life and teaches her how to find out if the plants that appear dead are still alive, or, as Dickon says, if they are “wick” or not (p. 90). Dickon knows how to cut the branches to determine if they are alive and how to prune the parts that have already died. This is an explicit act of knowledge exchange; Mary watches Dickon and soon thinks that she “could tell too” (p. 91). While the adults in the novel discuss whether Mary needs a governess or not, the children follow a path with a different focus on learning. They teach each other about how to cultivate the earth and share in that process.

Even though Dickon is a central purveyor of knowledge, he is also quick to acknowledge what Mary has learned on her own. He admires how she has begun to cultivate the plants, especially as she has said that she had little knowledge of what to do in the garden. Dickon with surprise notes, “Why, I thought tha’ didn’t know nothin’ about gardenin’” (p. 92) when he sees her weeding. Although these exchanges are brief in the book, they work to show that knowledge does not just flow from Dickon to Mary. Mary also learns on her own, as exhibited above, and is ready to receive the knowledge provided by Dickon. The repeated mentions of her lack of knowledge can be related to the narratee, who most likely is also unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the manor gardens in the northern English countryside. That the narratee is an outsider is addressed in instances in the text where the narration interrupts itself to explain a word or term a character local to Yorkshire uses. For example, early in the text, Mrs. Medlock thinks to herself that Mary is a “marred-looking young one”, and then the reader is told that “Marred is a Yorkshire word and means spoiled and pettish” (p. 14). This metalinguistic explanation, which would not have been out of place in a reference work, is offset with parenthesis to indicate that it is an aside for those who would not understand Mrs. Medlock without clarification. Imbedded is the implication that the narratee is not from Yorkshire. The narratee throughout the text, including the gardening scenes, is invited to develop their knowledge alongside of Mary and share in the joy of her accomplishments as she sees her hard work in the garden come to fruition.

Though the address in The Children’s Encyclopaedia is more top-down, with an adult, expert narrator addressing a child, novice narratee, the garden is also presented as a space that children share in. For example, the plural we, at times, seems to exclude adults: “Either we may sow the seeds at the present time, or we may buy the plants, or beg them from grown-up friends” (p. 3071). Furthermore, in another example, when the reader learns about what to do in the garden at the end of May, there is a discussion about buying small plants for the garden, and it is stated: “If we have not sufficient material to fill our plots, a shilling or so expended will go a long way to help us” (p. 658). It is perhaps no accident that the slippage in the use of we happens in reference to money in both examples. This can be seen as an instance of what Wall (1991) has referred to as a double address. There is a nod here to an adult reader who understands that while the child is encouraged to work without adult supervision in their “little garden”, they are financially dependent on adults, though they may use their juvenile charm to “beg” for favors. This becomes clear in the following example, where, in the context of trying to persuade the narratee to invest their pocket-money in bulbs for the garden, the narration shifts from the inclusive we to the first-person narrator addressing the narratee in the second person: “It may help you if I show what five shillings will produce in bulbs for autumn planting during the next few weeks” (Mee 1910, p. 1509). After presenting their case, the narrator exclaims: “There! with numbers such as these, who would not save up pocket-money to have a fine show of bulbous plants?” (p. 1509). The encyclopaedia, then, has a stronger focus on the role of the adult even when the narration centres on children working together.

The discussion of the costs of gardening also shows how the narratee is positioned. Five shillings is not an insubstantial amount of money for “pocket money”, and this ease with access to funds or resources is repeated in other parts of the text. While the child addressed is not assumed to have unlimited funds, there is a presumption that they are middle or upper-middle class. The encyclopaedia recognises that “young gardeners often have to dispense with” greenhouses and hot-beds but must instead follow the seasons when tending to their crops (p. 3176). The narrator suggests alternatives, e.g., “boxes, pants, or pots” (p. 563) for those whose gardens are too small. The narratee addressed in the “little garden” sections, then, is not imagined as a child living on an estate with unlimited space and funds. However, they are still clearly distanced from the “rough-and-ready way” of people in “cottage homes”, as is evident from the passage on lining the windows with newspaper to protect potted plants from frost in the winter: “This is the method often employed in cottage homes, and as long as it is effective, it matters not that it is a homely and rough-and-ready way. It is far better than letting the plants suffer” (p. 2254). That Dickon comes from one of these cottage homes is worth remarking upon here. Class differences do not go unnoticed in The Secret Garden. Even if Mary and Colin are slow to recognize the fact that they cannot ask Dickon and his family to contribute so much to the gardening activities without reimbursement, they do figure it out (p. 219) and take on more of the burden of the costs. Although class is present in the text and reinforced by the ending, the differences are elided in the space of the garden.

Despite their class differences, the child characters in the novel are put on a more even footing through their gardening project. The openness to where knowledge comes from amongst the children even allows Colin—who has barely ever been outside—to contribute to the collective nature of the cultivation of the secret garden. Colin’s knowledge is theoretical—it comes primarily from the books he has read about gardening. While he has not always used this information to his own benefit—once throwing a fit after sneezing near the roses because he had read about catching a “rose cold” (p. 122)—after Mary has begun to befriend him, they explore his books together, and Colin shares what he has learned through reading for a more positive end. The novel explicitly mentions that among the books they enjoy on rainy days are books about gardening. These books are “full of pictures”, and Colin and Mary use them to discuss the secret garden (p. 149). Colin already knows many of the flowers that are growing or that can be grown in the garden. For example, he points out that the “long spires of blue ones” are called delphiniums and would work well in the garden (p. 166). Mary notes that they are currently growing there, and that Dickon has told her that delphiniums are “larkspurs made big and grand” (p. 166). Once Dickon and Colin have met, all three children pore over the gardening books together. Dickon recognizes the flowers “by their country names” (p. 175) and shares that information with Mary and Colin. Instead of using their knowledge as a point of division, the children work to meld their different perspectives. The narratee can identify with any of the children in these examples and still feel as if they have something to contribute to the endeavour. The garden is truly collaborative here.

These details about flowers and plant names are reminiscent of several passages from The Children’s Encyclopedia, in which the narrator discusses the Latin names of plants and explains terminology related to gardening, as in the following passage:

Let us take the case of the Dianthus family. This includes our lovely carnations and the red and white pinks, and also the sweet-williams and many others well worth growing. This relationship of plants to one another is one of the things you may well study; and I do not think you will do better than to turn to the pages of some good catalogue.

(Mee 1910, p. 1816)

It is notable here that the narrator shifts to the first-person-singular I and encourages the narratee you to “study” the relationship of plants and to draw on “some good catalogue”. Gardening, then, is not only a hands-on endeavour; it is also necessary to build knowledge and plan, especially outside of the growing season. Like the novel, the encyclopaedia encourages the reader to balance experiential knowledge with information from other sources. The main difference is that the encyclopaedia mostly casts this as an individual task while the novel views it as a communal activity.

Given the difficulty that Colin and Mary have with getting along with others at the beginning of the text, there could have been tension around the building of collaborative knowledge during their garden project. However, they, along with Dickon, are so invested in working on the garden that they are focused more on blending their ideas than being competitive or territorial. They create a community that deals in both information about and practice in the garden. Understanding these scenes as a way for the children to synthesise their knowledge is similar to the arguments that Jenkins (2011) makes about the way that The Secret Garden “challenges competition and celebrates the ‘Other’” (p. 427). This can be seen through the erasure of the divisions between the children in the sections of the book when all three are focused on creating the garden. One of the clearest ways that these divisions are broken down is in terms of gender distinctions. In particular, Mary is never treated as if she cannot do the same things that Colin and Dickon can when it comes to working in the garden. Additionally, in terms of class, Dickon stands out more in these sections because of his relationship to nature than because of his class status. There is a sense that the freedom of the children’s relationships will shift as they grow up and Colin becomes the owner of the manor. This forthcoming change is suggested when we reach the end of the text and the last words are “Master Colin” (p. 255), which is quite a contrast from the beginning of the novel starting with a description of Mary. However, in the most central passages of the text, the children are enjoying the garden as a liberating space which breaks down divisions.

The gardening sections in the encyclopaedia recognise that readers have individual preferences; this constructsa narratee that has some manner of choice and agency in how to create “a little garden” of their own. The narration remarks, for instance, that it “is not to be expected that one reader will grow all the plants mentioned in these articles, but some will have a fancy for some sorts, while others will choose different ones” (Mee 1910, p. 3176). In this respect, “the little garden” is a liberating space in which children are invited to construct knowledge about gardening while creating a physical garden. However, the information in the encyclopaedia is carefully curated to be appropriate for the narratee. In many cases, the narrator directs the narratee’s attention and manufactures consent through use of the inclusive we and modal verbs related to duty and obligation: “we certainly ought to put in a few early-flowering Japanese chrysanthemums” (Mee 1910, p. 447, added italics). As discussed above, the narrator also addresses a novice narratee, who must be reminded that “there is a right way to plant and also a wrong way”, that “young gardeners often plant too deeply”, and that “the hoe may become a dangerous tool” if used on weeds growing close to “young plants” (p. 447). The “little garden” is a way to direct children’s energies towards an activity that is considered particularly wholesome and healthy. These may not be the walled gardens of the manor but are nevertheless civilising spaces, in which “young gardeners”, much like those “young plants”, can grow and develop safely and appropriately.

5. Conclusions: “A Little Garden of Our Own”

Both the encyclopaedia and the novel present knowledge about gardening as something which is constructed through practical experience and through reading and instruction. The Secret Garden presents knowledge about gardening in ways that are, at times, reminiscent of The Children’s Encyclopaedia, for instance in terms of detailed instructions for how to garden, gardening tools and how to use them, and the names and descriptions of flowers, including Latin names. In The Secret Garden, literacy and learning from books is linked to class, with Colin, the future master of the manor, as the representative of this kind of knowledge building. However, it is evident that staying inside and reading about the world is not enough, nor is it a healthy way to develop as a child. As Martha says: “’Mother says there’s no reason why any child should live that gets no fresh air an’ doesn’t do nothin’ but lie on his back an’ read picture- books an’ take medicine’” (Burnett 1911, p. 122). The message conveyed both in The Children’s Encyclopaedia and in the novel is that children need to go out into the garden and carry out the work. However, literacy is also necessary. As is noted in a different section of The Children’s Encyclopaedia: “the education of the children must be attended to. If it were not, they would grow up quite unable to read the CHILD’S ENCYLOPÆDIA, as you are doing, and that we can never allow” (Mee 1910, p. 323). In other words, both the novel and the encyclopaedia reinforce the view that theory and practice go hand in hand.

Despite points of convergence regarding the kinds of knowledge that are needed, there are differences between the texts when it comes to the ways in which knowledge is constructed and who is seen to hold knowledge. The Secret Garden shows how the children collaboratively co-construct knowledge about gardening, while in The Children’s Encyclopaedia, the adult narratee more strongly instructs the “young gardener”. In the novel, the three child characters rely on each other, and on each character’s type of knowledge, to develop the physical garden, their practical skills about gardening, and their knowledge about gardens and plants. As the more dynamic characters, Mary and Colin, in particular, need to combine their different approaches to reach their potential. The encyclopaedia presents a more top-down construction of knowledge, in which the inclusive we assumes an agreement between the adult narrator and child narratee. However, there is slippage in the mode of address, particularly in cases where we seems to exclude adults.

In The Secret Garden, the three central child characters enjoy freedom from gender roles and the separation of the social classes while planning and making their garden. The narratee in the encyclopaedia is similarly offered “a little garden of our own” (Mee 1910, p. 331). The garden becomes a personal space for “young gardeners”, where they are temporarily free to experiment and to choose what to plant and how to organise it, albeit within the constraints afforded by available space and funds. Both texts construct gardening as a wholesome, joyful activity and an important and appropriate part of childhood but also, in the case of The Secret Garden, as an important part of personal growth and maturation. While temporary spaces of freedom, then, the gardens in both texts become ways to socialise children.