Part 1
Orphaned by cholera in India, unloved Mary Lennox is sent to a locked-up manor on the Yorkshire moor.
A child nobody wantsMary Lennox is born in India to English parents who barely look at her. Her father is always busy or unwell; her mother wanted parties, not a daughter. Handed at birth to an ayah ordered to keep her out of sight, Mary rules the servants with tantrums. By nine she is thin, sallow, unpleasant, and no one in the household has ever loved her.
Cholera empties the houseOne hot morning Mary is left with a strange servant and overhears whispering: cholera has broken out. Her ayah dies in the night. The house fills with panic, then wailing, then nothing — everyone who can run, runs. Forgotten, Mary spends a day and night alone in the bungalow, watching a small snake glide over the matting. Officers searching the abandoned house are astonished to find a living child. Both her parents are dead.
Journey to MisselthwaiteAt an English clergyman's home the children taunt her with a rhyme about Mistress Mary, quite contrary, and a boy named Basil tells her she is being shipped to an uncle in England. In London she is handed to Mrs. Medlock, housekeeper of Misselthwaite Manor, who warns her on the night train about a six-hundred-year-old house, a hundred locked rooms, and an uncle, Archibald Craven, who will not want to see her.
The walled gardenThey drive miles across the dark moor, and at the manor Mary is ordered to stay in her rooms. Next morning a cheerful Yorkshire housemaid, Martha Sowerby, is amazed that Mary cannot dress herself, and talks of her brother Dickon, who tames wild creatures. Martha lets slip that one garden has been locked ten years, its key buried. Outside, Mary meets gruff Ben Weatherstaff and a robin, and finds an ivy-covered wall with no door.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Words from a colonial household and a cold journey north: disagreeable, cholera, ayah, tyrannical, moor… |
| Literary Elements | Characterization that begins with a child nobody likes, an allusion buried in a nursery rhyme, and foreshadowing planted in a locked door |
| Cross-Curricular | British India and cholera — how an English family’s household in India was staffed and run, and how a waterborne disease could empty it in two days |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chapter 1 | There Is No One Left — Mary Lennox, nine years old and disliked by everyone, is raised in India by servants ordered to keep her quiet. Cholera sweeps the household, her ayah and both parents die, and the survivors flee. Forgotten in the empty bungalow, Mary is found a day later by officers who did not know a child lived there. |
| Chapter 2 | Mistress Mary Quite Contrary — Placed with an English clergyman’s family, Mary is taunted with a nursery rhyme by a boy named Basil, who tells her she is being sent to an uncle in Yorkshire. She sails to England, is handed over in London to Mrs. Medlock, and hears on the train about Misselthwaite Manor and its hundred locked rooms. |
| Chapter 3 | Across the Moor — The train reaches a small northern station in the evening, and a carriage carries Mary for miles over the dark moor. Mrs. Medlock explains what a moor is; Mary decides she dislikes it. At the manor an elderly manservant delivers the master’s orders, and Mary is put in a room with a fire and a supper and told not to wander. |
| Chapter 4 | Martha — Martha Sowerby throws back the curtains on a gray moor and an astonished Mary, who has never dressed herself. Martha talks of her mother, of her brother Dickon and his tame wild creatures, and of a garden locked for ten years since Mrs. Craven died. Sent outdoors, Mary finds Ben Weatherstaff, a robin, and a wall of ivy with no door. |
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
- Officers searching the empty bungalow discover Mary alive.
- A long train journey carries her north through England.
- A housemaid opens the curtains on her first Yorkshire morning.
- Sickness moves through the compound and the household breaks apart.
- Mary stays for a while with an English clergyman’s family.
Picture a low white house in India with the shutters closed against a glaring morning. Inside it a nine-year-old girl has been raised by people who were paid to keep her quiet, and who did it by giving her everything she screamed for. Her mother goes to parties. Her father works and is tired. The girl has never dressed herself, never been told no, and never once been liked. Then, in a single night, a sickness moves through the servants’ quarters and through the house, and the adults who arranged her whole life stop existing. Nobody remembers to come for her. She wakes in an empty bungalow with a snake sliding across the matting and officers shouting in the hall, and she is genuinely surprised to learn that she is an orphan. What follows is a journey in reverse: heat to cold, glare to fog, servants to strangers. Part 1 carries her across an ocean, up the length of England, and out onto a black moor at night, and leaves her at a window in a house with a hundred locked rooms — where a housemaid mentions, quite casually, that one of the gardens has been shut for ten years.
Cholera is a disease of dirty water. It is caused by Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium — a single-celled organism far too small to see — that survives in water and food contaminated by the waste of someone already infected. Once swallowed, the bacteria settle in the small intestine and release a poison that forces the gut lining to pour out fluid. The result is not an ordinary stomach upset but a flood: a grown adult can lose more than a quart of water an hour.
What kills is dehydration. Water and salts leave faster than anyone can replace them, so the blood thickens, the pulse fades, and the skin turns cold. Untreated, severe cholera kills roughly half the people who develop it, sometimes within a day of the first symptom. The modern treatment is plain: clean water mixed with salt and sugar, or a salt solution fed into a vein. With that fluid given in time, fewer than one patient in a hundred dies.
Cholera was endemic in the delta of the Ganges — always present, even between outbreaks — and from 1817 it traveled outward along trade routes, pilgrim roads, and marching armies until it had circled the globe. British India suffered worst of all: official counts record millions of deaths across the nineteenth century. Nobody knew the cause for decades: John Snow, a London physician, traced an outbreak of 1854 to one public water pump, and Robert Koch identified the bacterium in 1883. Until then a household drawing from one well had one defense: to scatter and run. In an English bungalow it meant the children were carried out to the shaded veranda along the front of the house, then sent away with an ayah, the Indian nursemaid who dressed and fed them.
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 1 “Somewhere You Did Not Choose”
Mary is moved from a hot Indian bungalow to a cold Yorkshire manor without anyone asking her opinion. Write about a place you were sent to or moved to without choosing it — a new school, a relative’s house, a trip, a new town. Describe what the place looked and sounded like, what you expected, and how the reality differed. 6–10 sentences. End with one thing that place taught you.
No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 1 Complete!
You finished Chapters 1–4 of The Secret Garden.
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Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.