Abstract :
Imperial British India is the point of origin for protagonists in both
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) and Rudyard Kipling’s The
Jungle Books (1894–1895), two influential children’s stories in which late Victorian
notions of childhood education and nature converge with those of national and
imperial identity. In Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox, orphaned in
colonial India, is restored to health only as she is ‘‘schooled’’ in the English
countryside. Kipling, meanwhile, finds the imperial setting a fine and fitting place to
raise his hero Mowgli. In both cases the young protagonists develop physically,
spiritually and socially in classrooms of nature outside or parallel to mainstream
culture. This paper follows the different ‘‘escapes’’ offered characters in these
works, while tracing the contours of class structure, gender, family relations, educational
standards and imperial identity as experienced in the last decades of the
nineteenth century.
