Basil Crawford
Basil Crawford is a minor but memorable figure in Mary Lennox's early life, appearing only during the weeks she spends with his family in India after she is orphaned. He is the child who, through a single act of teasing, gives Mary the nickname that comes to define her initial character and who first supplies her with the unsettling information about the strange uncle and the desolate house that will become her new home.
Identity and Introduction
Basil is a little boy with "impudent blue eyes and a turned-up nose," a description that immediately marks him as cheeky and self-assured. He is one of five children of the English clergyman with whom Mary is placed after the cholera epidemic kills her parents. The Crawford household is poor and crowded, the children wearing shabby clothes and constantly quarreling, a chaotic environment that stands in stark contrast to the isolated, servant-attended life Mary led as a Mem Sahib's daughter. Mary, disagreeable and unused to other children, hates Basil from the start.
The Nickname and Its Origin
Basil's most significant action occurs when he finds Mary playing alone under a tree, making heaps of earth and paths for a pretend garden. When he offers a suggestion—to add a heap of stones for a rockery—Mary responds with her characteristic imperiousness: "Go away! I don't want boys. Go away!" Rather than retreat, Basil retaliates by dancing around her and singing the nursery rhyme "Mistress Mary, quite contrary, / How does your garden grow? / With silver bells, and cockle shells, / And marigolds all in a row." The other children quickly join in, and from that day forward, they call her "Mistress Mary Quite Contrary" both when speaking of her and to her. The name sticks, and even the adults, like Mrs. Crawford, use it pityingly, acknowledging that while it is naughty of the children, "one can't help understanding it." This episode is the first time Mary is confronted with a peer who will not submit to her will, and the nickname encapsulates the sour, stubborn disposition she has cultivated.
Revealing Information about Misselthwaite Manor
Basil also serves as the source of Mary's first, frightening knowledge about her future guardian. He tells her, with seven-year-old scorn, that she is being sent to her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, who lives in "a great, big, desolate old house in the country" that no one visits. He adds the crucial, terrifying detail: "He's a hunchback, and he's horrid." Mary refuses to believe him and sticks her fingers in her ears, but the information lodges in her mind, coloring her expectations of Misselthwaite Manor and her uncle long before she arrives. Basil's casual cruelty in delivering this news, combined with his earlier teasing, establishes him as a representative of the hostile, unkind world Mary has always known, a world from which the secret garden will eventually offer her an escape.
Narrative Role and Significance
Basil Crawford appears only in a single chapter and is never seen again after Mary leaves his house. His role is entirely functional: he provides the story with its enduring thematic nickname for Mary and plants the seed of dread about her new life. The rhyme he sings, however, gains a profound ironic resonance as the novel progresses. The "contrary" Mary, who initially has no garden at all, eventually becomes the creator and guardian of the most beautiful garden in the story, one filled not with cockle shells but with living roses, crocuses, and daffodils. Basil's mocking song thus becomes a prophecy that Mary transforms through her own growth and effort. He is a catalyst for her initial misery but also, unwittingly, for the narrative shape of her redemption.
