This research highlights the importance of reading classic children’s literature by establishing the genre’s transformative influence on an individual’s development, a unique impact that has a lifelong effect on its reader. By exploring the scholarship of education philosophers such as William Kilpatrick and Vigen Guroian, as well as the essays of classic children’s storytellers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, this research examines the role of classic children’s literature within the development of a child’s healthy imagination, moral code, personal identity, and sense of cultural literacy. The findings of this research conclude that it is classic children’s literature’s ability to cultivate a child’s moral imagination, a term popularized by political philosopher Russell Kirk, that bestows its lifelong, transformative impact on its reader.  

The process in which one develops their scope of imagination, morality, and identity through exposure to classic children’s literature will be metaphorically illustrated through the events of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic tale, The Secret Garden. Mary Lennox’s experiences tending the secret garden will be explored on the levels of the soil, seeds, flowers, and the garden itself to symbolize a child’s imagination, moral formation, personal identity, and cultural literacy.