In some recent criticism of books for children from the late Victorian and Edwardian period,
there is a tendency to set up an opposition between fantasy and realism when discussing their
representation of nature. This criticism often focuses on what is perceived as a general
tendency on the part of children’s writers in this period to idealize and romanticize childhood by
depicting children or childlike figures leading an idyllic life in a rural environment. Because such
representations do not appear to reflect the realities of emerging democracy in what had
become a complex industrial and urban society, they are seen as backward looking and as
evading the “truth.”
Jacqueline Rose, for example, in her book The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of
Children’s Fiction (1984) maintains that children’s fiction perpetuates a notion of childhood and
of the relationship between children and the natural world that runs right through from Rousseau
to Alan Garner. This notion, she argues, projects onto the child an idea of childhood innocence
and instinctive contact with the nonrational, nonverbal world of nature that is what adults want
children to have. Writing of Alan Garner’s later work, she remarks:
The child is placed in a rural community of ironsmiths, stonemasons and
agricultural labour. Here—in moments of recognition uncontaminated by industry or
literacy—the child reads off from the land, the earth and the sky its own truth and a
nature which would otherwise perish. . . .
In Rousseau, education preserves nature in the child, and it recovers nature
through the child. In much the same way, literature for Garner gives back to
children, and to us, something innocent and precious which we have destroyed. . . .
(44–45)
[End Page 211]
For Rose, there can be no such thing as children’s fiction, because this idealizing is not a
true representation of what childhood is like, but an adult remaking of it in its own image, which
constitutes a kind of oppression.
The view that children’s books, by their very nature, cannot deal with realities is also
expressed by Humphrey Carpenter in the “prologue” to Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden
Age of Children’s Literature (1985), though he approaches it from a different angle to Rose: “All
children’s books are about ideals. Adult fiction sets out to portray and explain the world as it
really is; books for children present it as it should be” (1). Furthermore, we find that as
Carpenter’s popular and readable (if controversial) study progresses with chapters on individual
authors, the mixture of literary criticism and biography he employs conveys the strong
impression that the classic writers of children’s books were not idealizing but evading the “real”
world in their work. Almost every one of his subjects—which include Charles Kingsley, Lewis
Carroll, Richard Jefferies, Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, James Barrie, and A. A. Milne—is seen
as turning to writing as an escape from some inadequacy or unhappiness in his or her own life.
It is this, as much as any desire to explore their created worlds, that appears to interest
Carpenter about these writers.
He says, for instance, of Grahame, “He wished to revisit childhood because of the
possibilities it offered of Escape” (120). What Grahame apparently wanted to escape from was
his wife Elspeth, who “poured out, in the bad poems she wrote in large quantities, her
resentment at his coldness and neglect of her” (152). In his endeavor to escape, Grahame
created The Wind in the Willows, which Carpenter considers a fine achievement because, “Of
all the Victorians and Edwardians who tried to create Arcadia in print, only Grahame really
managed it” (155).
Again, New Historicism has rightly drawn to our attention the importance of studying the
text in relation to its cultural context and the conditions of its production and consumption. In a
New Historicist reading, texts such as The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden can also
become somewhat suspect, because they are seen to perpetuate myths about Englishness in
their representation of nature and country life. Mitzi Myers has defined what a New Historicism
of children’s literature would ideally do. It would, she says, “integrate text and socio-historic
context, demonstrating . . . how extra-literary cultural formations shape literary discourse” (42).
Much of this has already taken place in the criticism of children’s books; what has not so often
been considered is the next part of Myers’s agenda, which is to demonstrate “how literary
practices are actions that make things happen—by shaping the psychic and moral [End Page
212] consciousness of young readers but also by performing many more diverse kinds of
cultural work . . .” (42). “Kinds of cultural work” does not have to be taken as negatively as it
often is, and I have it in mind to argue that my two chosen texts may well “make things happen”
in a positive way.
We should remember, in approaching the representation of nature in children’s books of
the late Victorian and Edwardian period, that it has an immediate and real as well as a mythical
element. Raymond Williams has pointed this out in The Country and the City, where he argues
that despite the tendency of each generation to site the mythical lost Golden Age in the previous
generation, there were also those who had “lived” that history, and to whom any change was
very real. Those who lived through nineteenth-century England knew from their parents and
grandparents and through their own experience what it was to undergo a process of
unprecedented and decisive change, as the culture rapidly became an urban and industrial one
rather than a rural one. Williams provides us with this telling information: “At the beginning of the
century, a third of all workers were employed in agriculture; in mid-century, a fifth; by the end of
the century, less than a tenth” (226).
In this sense, a hundred years ago people (including writers) were actually closer to rural
life and its customs than we are. A reading of any late Victorian/Edwardian writer who cares to
describe the countryside for whatever reason testifies to their greater and more intimate
knowledge of the landscapes and the flora and fauna of the English countryside. Such
knowledge, born of close contact with the natural world, is rarely found—except among
specialists and enthusiasts—in the later twentieth century.
By looking at how the concept “nature” is employed in The Wind in the Willows (1908)
and The Secret Garden (1911), I hope to show that it involves something more than an idealized
projection of lost childhood by adults who, it is sometimes inferred, turned to children’s books
because they were emotionally and psychologically crippled. That turn-of-the-century children’s
writers should have produced Arcadian visions as a means of escape from personal
unhappiness or inadequacy or as a substitute for loss of religious faith is entirely possible, but
does not mean that those works are therefore a personal indulgence or that they do not also
represent the world as it is, as well as how it might be. In these texts, I would argue, the real as
well as the ideal is much in evidence; in fact, the two are inextricably connected.
Apart from their closeness in dates of publication, these two texts are rarely considered
together, since they belong to different genres. The Wind in the Willows is a fantasy set in a
rural Arcadia, with animal characters [End Page 213] and, particularly through the character of
Toad, a self-parodying and absurd element. It has no really coherent narrative structure, being a
series of episodes in a somewhat picaresque mode, but does have thematic coherence. The
Secret Garden, on the other hand, is a realist “novel” overlaid with elements of romance and
fantasy, rather like a children’s version of Jane Eyre, to which, incidentally, the book owes a
great deal. The plot and characterization show coherence and development.
However, what the two texts do have in common is their creation of alternative worlds,
enchanted places, be it a secret garden or the Riverbank. They are also alike in celebrating a
life close to nature and in investing the natural world with moral significance and with a
quasi-religious mysticism. They are both texts that, in their different ways, derive much from a
Romantic tradition in their representation of childhood and nature; this is rather different from
saying that they are “romantic,” which implies nostalgia, sentimentality—an absence of real
feeling—and, more importantly, a convolutedness and insincerity in the texture of the writing.
The natural world is not represented in these texts simply with a rapturous and idyllic
celebration of its joys. In The Secret Garden, Mary travels across the moor to her new home in
midwinter and in the dark; as she makes the journey, the landscape matches her own emotional
state:
On and on they drove through the darkness, and though the rain stopped, the
wind rushed by and whistled and made strange sounds. The road went up and
down, and several times the carriage passed over a little bridge beneath which
water rushed very fast with a great deal of noise. Mary felt as if the drive would
never come to an end, and that the wide, bleak moor was a wide expanse of black
ocean through which she was passing on a strip of dry land.
(21)
The insecurity and fear that the child feels is mirrored in this desolate, uninviting
landscape that seems like a sea to Mary—as it is also mirrored in the Gothic mansion that
marks the end of her journey. The idyll of spring and summer is to come much later, well over
halfway through the book, and only reaches its pinnacle close to the end.
Similarly, in the The Wind in the Willows, the more sinister side of nature is shown as
Mole, like other animals of the Riverbank, experiences “the terror of the Wild Wood”:
There was nothing to alarm him at first entry. Twigs crackled under his feet, logs
tripped him, funguses on stumps resembled caricatures, and startled him for the
moment by their likeness to something familiar and far away; but that was all fun
and exciting. It led him on, and he penetrated to where the light was less, and trees
crouched nearer and nearer, and holes made ugly mouths at him on either side. . . .
[End Page 214]
Then the faces began.
It was over his shoulder, and indistinctly, that he first thought he saw a face: a little
evil wedge-shaped face, looking out at him from a hole. When he turned and
confronted it, the thing had vanished.
(46–47)
This kind of animated description is not unlike that which Thomas Hardy employs in The
Woodlanders (1887), where the cruel and primeval face of the natural world is also shown. Even
the Pan figure in “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” though he is referred to as “the Friend and
Helper,” is a mixture of the beneficent and the fearful sides of nature, with his horns and “the
stern, hooked nose” to offset the “kindly eyes” and the “half-smile” (129). Thus, we are reminded
of this dark side of nature in both texts, and even in happy times it is there in the background, as
a way of defining subsequent happiness, much as the idea of death defines life.
There is also a sense of danger and insecurity associated with the world outside the
secret garden and the Riverbank. It is as if the moor in The Secret Garden and the Wild Wood in
The Wind in the Willows, with their semiwild landscapes, mark a boundary beyond which it is not
safe to go. Beyond the moor is “abroad,” which is represented by India where Mary has known
sadness and the climate is apparently unfavorable to health, and by Europe where Mr. Craven
wanders aimlessly and unhappily in the beautiful but alien landscapes of Switzerland and
Norway. In the context of the novel, these are places that are not “home,” and the unhappiness
of those who live in or visit them is contrasted with the contentment of the 12 Sowerby children,
who are sometimes short of food but “‘tumble about on th’ moor an’ play there all day, an’
mother says th’ air of th’ moor fattens ‘em’” (30). The Wild Wood, too, while it is depicted as
terrifying, can be coped with by the use of “‘passwords, and signs, and sayings which have
power and effect, and plants you carry in your pocket, and verses you repeat, and dodges and
tricks you practise’” (52). The Wide World, however, “‘where it’s all blue and dim’” (14), is strictly
out of bounds and a taboo subject; when Mole raises it, Rat tells him never to refer to it again.
Danger is associated also with Rat’s “call” to the sea and to the faraway places of the South.
When Mole comes home to find the entranced Rat on the point of “going South,” he notices that
Rat’s eyes are “glazed and set and turned a streaked and shifting grey—not his friend’s eyes,
but the eyes of some other animal.” Rat then collapses, “his body shaken by a violent shivering,”
and has “an hysterical fit of dry sobbing” (174). In fact, throughout The Wind in the Willows, the
lure of travel and the excitement of its potential danger are set against the pleasures and
familiar comfort and comradeship of “home,” and an interesting tension is maintained between
them. [End Page 215]
Although both these books (in their very different ways) contain elements of fantasy,
many features of their setting and characterization are based solidly in observable reality. Some
of the descriptions owe much to the naturalist’s notebook in their detail of the flowers, birds,
insects, and animals that inhabit the surrounding natural environment. The appearance and
habits of the robin in The Secret Garden, who “flirted his wings and tail and tilted his head and
hopped about with all sorts of lively graces” (93) are an example of this, while in The Wind in the
Willows Grahame’s knowledge of the flora and fauna of the Riverbank and the habits of the
small animals who live there is extensive. This detailed knowledge of the English countryside
and rural life provides a foundation for other things that Burnett and Grahame want to convey
through their representation of nature.
In both texts, many passages have the flavor of Richard Jefferies’s writing in their
suggestion of the life-enhancing qualities of the natural world. In The Secret Garden, Colin’s first
realization that he really is going to get well coincides with the arrival of spring in the garden and
brings with it obvious connotations of regeneration and renewal:
Colin leaned back and lifted his face to the sky. The arch of it looked very high
and the small snowy clouds seemed like white birds floating on outspread wings
below its crystal blueness. The wind swept in soft big breaths down from the moor
and was strange with a wild clear-scented sweetness. Colin kept lifting his thin
chest to draw it in. . . .
(214)
And, of course, there is the famous opening to The Wind in the Willows, in which Mole is
drawn by the powers of spring to abandon his underground home:
Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him,
penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent
and longing. . . . Something up above was calling him imperiously. . .
(7)
But both texts, and particularly The Secret Garden, go further than this,
suggesting that closeness to the natural world can promote physical, emotional, psychological,
and spiritual health. Everywhere in The Secret Garden there is evidence of this moral
imperative. Occasionally, this is over-didactic, as in the last chapter, where the narrator steps in
to “lecture” the child reader on the importance of the garden and outdoor life to the moral
development of Mary and Colin, but in general the message is embodied in the “showing” rather
than the “telling.” There are frequent references in the text to the physical benefits of the fresh
(usually cold) air [End Page 216] of Yorkshire and the outdoor exercise that turns Mary into a
new person with a healthy appetite and a joy in living. When she is walking and running in the
gardens of Misselthwaite Manor in winter, we are told that “she was stirring her slow blood and
making herself stronger by fighting with the wind which swept down from the moor” (44). The
benefits of the wind are also mental; it has “begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain
and to waken her up a little” (48). We see this idea of intellectual sharpness resulting from
physical and spiritual health more fully developed in Colin, who declares once he is getting well
that he is going to be a scientist and discover the source of the “Magic” that he believes has
been worked on him. He will, he says, “find out thousands and thousands of things” (278).
Burnett implies that the wonders of nature and the wonders of science are not far apart—a view
typical of the time.
In The Wind in the Willows there is less obvious didacticism, but the book
nevertheless has a kind of message to convey that is similar to Burnett’s—that to live close to
the natural world is to live the good life, a life filled not only with the joy of aesthetic satisfaction
in contemplating the beauty of nature, but with comradeship and poetry. When Rat is devastated
after his temptation to go South, Mole restores his sanity by talking of the familiar natural events
around them:
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The original 1908 edition of The Wind in the Willows included no illustrations
except this frontispiece by Graham Robertson.
. . . the Mole turned his talk to the harvest that was being gathered in, the
towering wagons and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon
rising over the bare acres dotted with sheaves. He talked of the reddening apples
around, of the browning nuts, of jams and preserves and the distilling of cordials, till
by easy stages such as these he reached midwinter, its hearty joys and its snug
home life, and then he became simply lyrical.
By degrees the Rat began to sit up and to join in. His dull eyes brightened,
and he lost some of his listless air.
(176)
After this, Mole gives Rat some paper, and he begins to compose poetry; this,
we are told, will cure him. The link between the joys of nature, the life of the imagination, and
the poetic spirit is often made in The Wind in the Willows. In The Secret Garden the link is more
one between nature’s joys and healthiness of mind and body, but if one thinks of Rat’s abnormal
state as a sickness, then clearly both books are propounding the ability of nature to heal and
inspire and hence to promote a sense of well-being.
The most frequently criticized episodes in both these books are those that deal
with the point at which the natural world interfaces with the supernatural, where a kind of
Pantheism is represented. In The Wind in the Willows, this is most pronounced in the chapter
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (though there are intimations of it earlier). In The Secret
Garden, [End Page 217] it is seen mainly toward the end of the book, from about chapter XXI to
its close in chapter XXVII, but particularly in chapter XXIII, “Magic.” Humphrey Carpenter says of
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” that it is “an error of judgement on a grand scale,” that “though
it is fine enough in structure, one feels that it is often shakily executed,” and that it comes near
to “collapse” (169). Neil Philip takes much the same view of the quality of the writing in this
chapter and in “Wayfarers All,” and concludes,
The poetic prose of these chapters, and their pallid Edwardian paganism,
are the only elements of the book with which I am entirely out of sympathy, but
these chapters were important to Grahame, and have been to many of his readers.
(309)
I think that Carpenter simply overstates his case, and that what Philip has to say
suggests that he realizes that the problem with the two chapters to which he refers lies as much
with the preconceptions of an educated late twentieth-century readership as with the writing
itself. Engaging with the language that is generally used to describe nature in a spirit of religious
reverence seems to be as problematic for late twentieth-century readers as engaging with the
language of death-bed scenes in earlier Victorian fiction. We are not as comfortable as were the
Victorians with public displays of emotion, or with the religious spirit in life or in literature. Neil
Philip’s comment above acknowledges this problem. The same discomfort is felt by many when
reading some of D. H. Lawrence’s rhythmic and rhapsodic prose; like the writing in The Wind in
the Willows and The Secret Garden, it attempts to express the nonrational rhythms of human life
at its point of intersection with the natural world. In fact, if one looks closely at it, the language of
most of “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” is rather restrained and consists of descriptions of the
landscape charged with atmosphere and a sense of expectation, as elsewhere in the book:
The line of the horizon was clear and hard against the sky, and in one
particular quarter it showed black against a silvery phosphorescence that grew and
grew. At last, over the rim of the waiting earth the moon lifted with slow majesty till it
swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings. . . .
(125)
The problem lies perhaps with the sense of awe and mystery being somewhat
broken by the actual appearance of Pan. Like the appearance of God in Milton’s Paradise Lost,
it rather deflates things, and it is in the [End Page 218] description of Pan’s appearance and its
aftermath that the language is most clichéd and the sentiment mawkish:
For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to
bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of
forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and
overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the
after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be
happy and light-hearted as before.
(130)
However, that Grahame means this scene to be taken seriously and in a
religious sense is unmistakable; the language above has biblical cadences, and we are told that
“the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship” (130). The scene
is also clearly a culmination of the various mysterious instinctual callings the animals have
experienced, as when Mole is called back to his home and “the summons reached him, and
took him like an electric shock” (83). Something we get from such episodes is a perceived
notion of the immense and fearful power of the natural world—which does not support the view
that Grahame was representing a cozy and leisured Arcadia. The fantasy has something to say
about reality and is altogether tougher and more risky than many readings of the text suggest.
Although the final scenes in The Secret Garden do not contain Pan in
person, the spirit of Pan is there in the references to “Magic” and to “Th’ Big Good Thing,” and in
the ritual scenes the children enact in the garden each day:
Every beautiful morning the Magic was worked by the mystic circle
under the plum-tree which provided a canopy of thickening green leaves after its
blossom-time was ended. After the ceremony Colin always took his walking
exercise. . . .
(262)
And the religious connotations are there also when Mary observes Colin
on one of these occasions and thinks that he “really looked quite beautiful. . . . He held his head
high as if he felt like a sort of priest and his strange eyes had a wonderful look in them” (246). To
reinforce the pagan overtones of their worship, there is the sudden appearance of Mrs. Sowerby
in the garden, rather like the ghost of Mrs. Craven and something of a Mother Earth figure. She
is described “with the ivy behind her, the sunlight drifting through the trees and dappling her long
blue cloak” (281). She has a “nice fresh face” and “wonderful affectionate eyes” (281). This
idealized description is in accord with her role as a prime moral force in the book. A similar role
is fulfilled by her son [End Page 220] Dickon, who, Pan-like, surrounds himself with animals,
plays a pipe, and is very much at one with nature. He does not, however, embody the cruel
element of paganism that is also part of the Pan myth.
Strong beliefs about the role of the natural world in developing a healthy
mind and body and ensuring spiritual peace inform The Secret Garden, but the message rarely
involves preaching, nor does it patronize the child reader. As John Rowe Townsend has
commented,
There is something about The Secret Garden that has a powerful
effect on children’s imaginations: something to do with their instinctive feelings for
things that grow, something to do with their longing for real, important, adult-level
achievement. Self-reliance and cooperation in making something are the virtues
that Mary and Colin painfully attain. These are not Victorian virtues. The Victorian
ideal was that children should be good and do as they were told.
(66)
This Arcadia has been of the children’s own making; realism and fantasy
have gone hand in hand. We should, perhaps, be prepared to use a bit of historical tolerance
about the manner of expression in children’s texts of this period, or even try to clarify for
ourselves the difference between “bad” writing and writing that late twentieth-century readers
are not easy with.
Although undoubtedly children should engage with the culture in which
they live and not be “required” to read texts such as these because, rather like Shakespeare’s
plays, they are perceived to be the acceptable face of our cultural heritage, it would be a great
loss if they were to be dismissed altogether as not dealing with the realities of life now. Both The
Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden suggest that there are possibilities for a better life,
but do not ignore or underestimate the difficulties of achieving or maintaining it. In this sense,
they may be seen as inspirational and liberating for us at a time when it has become vital to
foreground our relationship with the natural universe and our need to connect with it, if we are,
in the future, to have any “green worlds” at all.