Michael Klaas

This summer on a stroll through London, I passed by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s home which is marked with one of the fabulous blue plaques that mark English Heritage sites. I hadn’t thought of her work in quite some time. In fact, I hadn’t read The Secret Garden since I was a young boy. But I knew I loved it, and it piqued my interest again because I was contemplating starting a fantasy book club when I returned home, and I wondered if The Secret Garden might be a good pick for an early read. You see, in my memory, The Secret Garden was very much a fantasy story because the garden was magic. It changed people. It healed them.

So, now I have just re-read this novel for the first time in nearly 30 years. And I’m delighted to rediscover that — though the story is not fantasy, of course — it is, indeed, about magic of a very real and attainable sort. And the garden did change people. It did heal them. And I remember what I loved so much about it as a young boy.

This was a rough introduction to Burroughs. It's a bit of a screed and one in which the claims and conclusions don't hold up particularly well to modern scientific scrutiny.

Additionally, Burroughs' sexism and racism are on full display at several points in this work.

In short, it is a critique of the state of natural science writing of its time (the start of the 20th century), and one in which Burroughs takes great umbrage at any claims that non-human animals have a particularly rich cognitive life. He confesses that animals likely do experience base emotions, but fervently argues that they do not think, calculate, consider, or substantially remember anything. They are, to Burroughs, entities of pure instinct.

I appreciate his drive toward skepticism, as I think this is generally a healthy approach to novel scientific questions, but find that he proclaims a state of certainty about his position that he chides his opponents for wielding themselves. Burroughs claims to know the minds of animals while arguing that writers that differ from his position are wrong to make similar kinds of claims.

Of course, in his day, the technology didn't exist to deeply research the kinds of questions that Burroughs is debating here. But modern research finds that he has erred in his level of certitude and the minds and lives of wild animals are varied and complex, even while we still have many questions about just how deep the thinking of many creatures can be.

Interesting little bit of history here, but not a particularly engaging or informative read more than a century after its time.