The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was born in Manchester, England. When she was sixteen years old, she and her family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. She wrote a lot of very popular books for children. Her most famous novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), started a fashion in velvet suits1 for small boys! The Secret Garden (1911) describes how two sad, lonely children find happiness by looking after an abandoned garden. [...]

A Spoilt Little Girl

Mary Lennox was living in India because her father worked for the British government. Why was he there? To answer this question, we must look at the history of India. In 1526 the Moguls – Muslim people from Mongolian and Turkish origins – came to India. They took power from the Hindu people who already lived there. In the next 200 years of the Mogul Empire1 some beautiful art and buildings were created. India became a rich country. [...]

Mary Visits the Gardens

Crying in the Night

When Mary Lennox starts to love gardens and gardening,1 she becomes a nicer person. She also becomes more ‘British’. Most British people enjoy gardens and green spaces. You can see this in London: it has eight big parks and many smaller ones, and has more green space than any other city of its size in the world. The gardens of the big country houses of the British upper classes show different fashions from different periods. [...]

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in the south of London are often called ‘Kew Gardens’. Let’s find out about them. Connect to the Internet and go to www.blackcat.vicensvives.net . Insert the title or part of the title of the book into our search engine. Open the page for The Secret Garden. Click on the Internet project link. Go down the page until you find the title of this book and click on the relevant link for this project.

Dickon

Colin

Wet Weather

I Will Live For Ever and Ever!

Magic

The North York Moors National Park is an area like that described in The Secret Garden.

We have seen from The Secret Garden that there were many differences in Victorian times between the lives of rich people and the lives of poor people. Now, you are going to read about two children who have very different lives.

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