wick

Wick is a Yorkshire dialect word meaning alive, lively, or full of vital energy, and it becomes one of the most charged terms in The Secret Garden, marking the moment when a thing or a person crosses from apparent death into vigorous, undeniable life. The word first appears when Dickon Sowerby, kneeling beside a gray, lichen-covered tree in the secret garden, takes out his knife and cuts through a branch that looks lifeless. He shows Mary Lennox the moist green wood inside and explains, "When it looks a bit greenish an' juicy like that, it's wick." The distinction is absolute: dry wood that breaks easily is "done for," but any trace of green signals that the root is still sending up live shoots. Mary immediately adopts the word, crying out in her whisper, "I'm glad it's wick! I want them all to be wick." The term thus becomes the password of the garden's resurrection, applied not only to the rosebushes but to the children themselves.

The Word as a Threshold

Wick operates as a threshold concept: it does not admit degrees. A branch is either wick or dead; a child is either wick or an invalid. When Mary first hears the word from Dickon, she is still a thin, sallow, sour-faced girl who has never known what it is to be hungry or to run for pleasure. But as she works in the garden, digging and weeding and skipping, she begins to feel the same green surge that the bulbs feel underground. Martha Sowerby notices the change and tells Mary that her hair, once flat and stringy, "has got some life in it so as it sticks out a bit." Mary replies, "It's like me. It's growing stronger and fatter." She is becoming wick without yet having the word to describe herself.

The Garden's Wickness

As spring advances, the garden itself becomes the supreme example of wickness. Dickon shows Mary how to test each unpromising bough: he cuts through a "lifeless-looking branch" and when Mary sees "the least shade of moist green" she cries out joyfully. The word accumulates force through repetition. By the time Colin Craven is brought into the garden, the rosebushes "look as wick as wick can be." The phrase is almost tautological, as if wickness were a quality that could intensify itself. The garden, which had seemed a gray tangle of dead wood, is revealed to be pulsing with hidden life, and the children who tend it absorb that life into their own bodies.

From Invalid to Wick

Colin's transformation is the most dramatic application of the term. He has spent his life lying on a sofa, convinced that a lump is growing on his spine and that he will die. When he first stands up, defying Ben Weatherstaff, he is described as "as straight as an arrow" and "as straight as any lad i' Yorkshire." The word wick is never directly applied to him in the text, but the logic of the garden's resurrection is exactly the same: the green life that was hidden has pushed through. Colin himself recognizes the parallel when he says, "There couldna' be bigger Magic than that there." The Magic he speaks of is the same force that makes a plant wick, and he has become wick himself.

The Word's Narrative Significance

Wick is more than a dialect curiosity; it is the novel's central metaphor for health, growth, and the refusal to die. It belongs to the Yorkshire speech of Dickon and Martha, the language of the moor and the cottage, as opposed to the formal, fearful language of the Manor. To learn the word is to enter into a different relationship with the world, one in which life is not a fragile exception but a stubborn, pushing force. Mary, who begins the story unable to dress herself and ignorant of hunger, ends it knowing exactly what it means for a thing to be wick. The word, like the garden, has come alive.