48 pages • 1 hour read
Mary NortonThe Borrowers
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary
Mrs. Driver begins treating everyone in the house harshly, convinced that either the boy or one of the staff is responsible for the disappearance of certain items from the drawing room. She rifles through the boy’s belongings but only finds some sugar cubes, a dead mole, and a potato knife. As she becomes more and more suspicious, she decides to get up in the middle of the night, hoping to catch someone creeping into the trinket cabinet. Around midnight, as she is making her way through the house, she sees a small flicker of light out of the corner of her eye and hears the faint sound of the door between the kitchen and the main hall being opened. She makes her way into the dark kitchen, where she finds one of the boards out of place and a small box from the drawing room sitting on the floor.
Mrs. Driver pries up the board that the boy has left loose and screams when she sees what she describes as hundreds of tiny people scurrying out of view. Crampfurl hears the screams and comes running but does not believe her when she says she saw either tiny people or “mice dressed up” beneath the floor. Although Crampfurl cannot be convinced, they both begin to rifle through the Borrowers’ exposed living room, finding all of Sophy’s things that have gone missing. Mrs. Driver eventually concludes that they have to call the police.
Chapter 18 Summary
Meanwhile, the boy hides in his bed after narrowly avoiding discovery by Mrs. Driver. Eventually, he decides that the coast is clear and returns to the kitchen to check on the Clock family. He is shocked to find the floorboard missing and all of the Clocks’ possessions piled on the kitchen floor in a heap; Mrs. Driver has taken everything she deems valuable and left the rest as trash. He cries as he calls the family’s names one by one. Eventually, they come creeping out of the dark passageway.
The boy begins to scheme about how he will help the Clocks now that Mrs. Driver knows where they live. He suggests that they live in the dollhouse, but Pod reminds him that they are unable to get down from the high shelf and that once the boy goes back to India, there will be no one to bring things to them. They decide that they must leave the house and go to the badger hole to live with Hendreary, although Homily cannot fathom what or how she will cook and how they will survive without their indoor possessions. The boy agrees to bring them things like tea, coffee, matches, and cooking pots and says he will carry them to Hendreary’s so they don’t have to risk running through the open field. They decide to sleep in the dollhouse that night and then make the trip to the badger hole in the morning. Just as the boy is about to carry them upstairs in a clothespin bag, the door opens, and Mrs. Driver appears. The Borrowers vanish into their passageway. Mrs. Driver rages at the boy, accusing him of stealing everything and putting it into the hole to help the Borrowers. He states that he is also a Borrower and that he will help the Clocks leave the house so that Mrs. Driver doesn’t have to do anything. She scoffs at this idea, telling him that he doesn’t have to help; the Borrowers will be removed by the rat catcher, Crampfurl’s cat, and many other dangerous-sounding forces.
Chapter 19 Summary
The story returns to Mrs. May and Kate. They are just finishing up a quilt, and Mrs. May claims that the story is finished as well. Kate begins to cry, but Mrs. May reassures her, saying that while her brother never saw the Clock family again, she knows there is more to the story.
Mrs. Driver can’t get the rat catcher to come at first, and Crampfurl’s cat is too wild to make a real effort to catch the Borrowers. Instead, all he wants to do is get outside or steal food from the kitchen. The police, meanwhile, are young men whom Mrs. Driver labeled as wicked thieves years before, and they simply tell her that drinking less Fine Old Pale Madeira would result in her seeing fewer tiny people. Eventually, the rat catcher is able to come. He decides to block the entrance to the Borrowers’ hole by the clock and use smoke to drive them out of the gap in the kitchen floor, where his terriers will kill them. The boy watches in horror as they move the clock to find any possible passageways into the hall. He notices that the clock has stopped working.
As the rat catcher, Mrs. Driver, and several onlookers wait in the kitchen for the Borrowers to emerge, the boy slowly backs into the hall, quietly stealing the rat catcher’s pickaxe as he goes. Once he gets to the clock, he swings the axe, tearing a hole in the wainscoting. However, the rat catcher has blocked the area with an iron panel, and he cannot puncture the wall. He runs outside and around the house to the grating that looks into the Clock’s home. He is eventually able to tear the grating in half and remove one side.
Chapter 20 Summary
The boy never sees the Clock family again and has to return to India almost immediately after helping them escape. Hearing this, Kate worries that the Clocks may have died, but Mrs. May assures her that she knows for a fact that the Clocks survived. Even though she never saw them, she went to the house herself a year later, just as Great Aunt Sophy was about to enter a nursing home. Having heard about the Borrowers and the badger from her brother, she decided to collect all of the dollhouse furniture, an assortment of food, and other goods in an old pillowcase and take it across the field, hoping to spot one of the Borrowers. She waited with the supplies on the hillside for hours but saw no one.
Kate asks her how she knows that the Borrowers were there, and Mrs. May says that she could smell hot pot, that the pillowcase disappeared while she wasn’t looking, and that she found the oak apple teapot lying in the grass. She imagines the wonderful life that the family must have built in the rambling badger den. Just as Mrs. May is about to finish her story, Kate tells her that she knows there is still something she is hiding; she thinks Mrs. May found Arrietty’s diary. Mrs. May blushes; she didn’t find the diary, but she did find a different book that Arrietty had written in. Kate exclaims that this is proof of the entire story, but Mrs. May disagrees, pointing out that both Arrietty and her brother wrote the letter “e” in the same unique way.
Chapters 17-20 Analysis
The final chapters of the book move the plot quickly from climax to denouement. As soon as Mrs. Driver notices that things are gone from the drawing room, the suspicious Mrs. Driver goes on the warpath, determined to figure out who is stealing and why. While the boy is a symbol for the good parts of humanity and the ways that the Borrowers have misjudged human beings, Mrs. Driver is likewise an embodiment of all of their most deep-seated fears and confirmation that most humans are indeed unworthy of their trust. Since she is one of the only humans that they have regularly observed throughout their lives, it is likely that these very fears come directly from her actions over the years. Accordingly, she has no empathy for the tiny humans in the floorboards, comparing them directly to mice and seemingly eager to line their corpses up to show Great Aunt Sophy.
These events also reveal Norton’s novel to be something of a coming-of-age story from the human perspective as well, for when faced with Mrs. Driver’s relentless cruelty to the Borrowers, the boy is forced to abandon the blithe illusions of safety that his childish perspective allowed him to indulge in, finally acknowledging that his own recklessness played a significant part in his friends’ exposure to danger. His maturity quickly evolves, and his earnest plans to help them escape exhibit a strong sense of justice and an innate desire to make things right. Ultimately, however, the Clocks are only able to escape because of their innate ability to feel humans approaching; they suddenly disappear before he even realizes that Mrs. Driver is about to enter the room and discover them, and thus, their ability to vanish alludes to the somewhat mythical nature of the story and stands in contrast to the matter-of-fact way in which most chapters are presented. These final scenes also introduce a sense of doubt in the overall veracity of the story, for no one but the boy himself ever truly interacts with the Borrowers. Indeed, the book ends with a suggestion that the brother might have made everything up, as his handwriting and Arrietty’s handwriting were suspiciously similar. By ending the story on this mysterious note, Norton places The Borrowers alongside stories of miniature people that have existed for centuries in European folklore. Like fairies, elves, and other small creatures, the Borrowers seem to reveal themselves only to those who wish to believe in them. Yet throughout the book, Norton also makes it a point to suggest that Borrowers themselves are growing rarer and scarcer, which parallels the decline in belief in mythological creatures that occurred throughout the 20th century with the mundane progression of the modern world.
