ABSTRACT
Tom’s Midnight Garden in fact depicts several characters’ experiences in keeping alive good feelings in a state of loneliness and loss, and the relationships between them through which these are brought alive. The beauty and mystery of the garden, with its flowers, trees, secret places and long history in which tracings and carvings can be left, is contrasted with the mean little dustbin yard which is all that remains. The garden has associations to a pre-pubertal Garden of Eden, except that to Abel it is Tom that appears as a spirit of evil, tempting Hatty into danger. In The Secret Garden another bereaved little girl finds a locked garden in which her new guardian’s wife, the mother of a child she discovers in the house, has died in an accident. A number of evocative metaphors enable the narrative of Tom’s Midnight Garden to communicate states of mind which could not be described for children in more literal ways.
