Monday, December 7, 2015

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Twelve and Thirteen

In which Anne has a very cranky day and finds her personal educational philosophy slipping, but then celebrates a pseudo-birthday by exploring the countryside and learning a terribly tragic story; and in which our narrator wonders whatever happened to Anne's toothache, because she should really get that checked out, seriously now.



Today's cover is from a 1995 Norstedts printing of the Swedish edition of Vår vän Anne. I like that this one shows Anne with (presumably) Davy and Dora, who I have never seen featured anywhere. Heck, they're hardly ever even mentioned when talking about these books, so it's rather nice to see them on a cover. In Sweden, anyway. I also appreciate that Davy looks like he's trying to claw his way out of those fancy clothes that are strangling him.

Unnecessarily complex notes to follow!


10:56 - "by what somebody has called 'a Herculaneum effort.'" Herculaneum was an ancient Roman city that was, like the more famous Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. It was wealthier than Pompeii, and actually better preserved, containing organic remains like wood, food, beds, and even skeletons. The destruction of Pompeii, though, was famously witnessed and described by Pliny the Younger, so it's distinctly the better-known.

Of course, that doesn't have much to do with this quote, which is a malaprop for the idiom "a Herculean effort." I'm not sure who the "somebody" is that Montgomery is attributing this phrase to, though. My best guess comes from an 1894 travelogue called Our Journey Around the World, by Rev. Francis Clark and Harriet Clark, where the narrator says "with a Herculaneum effort, as Mrs. Partington would have said..." Mrs. Partington turns out to be a character created by American humorist B. P. Shillaber in the 1850s who is described as an American Mrs. Malaprop (who, in turn, was from the play The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and who, of course, gave her name to the practice of humorously replacing one word for another, similar-sounding one). The texts the Mrs. Partington are from, though, don't appear to be readily available online, at least not in searchable form, and what I can find does not appear to use particular term. I found other people in the 1800s making this same malaprop, though, so maybe it was just a semi-common joke with no specific source.

12:58 - "plum puffs won't minister to a mind diseased" Ah, okay, this one's easy. Anne here is adapting a quote from Act V, Scene III of Shakespeare's Macbeth:
MACBETH: How does your patient, doctor?

DOCTOR: Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies
That keep her from rest.

MACBETH: Cure her of that!
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon her heart.

DOCTOR: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
One should note that by quoting this, Anne is casting herself in the part of Lady Macbeth, guilt-ridden over the murder of King Duncan.

13:37 - "Every morn is a fresh beginning / Every morn is the world made new." Anne here is caroling the start of the poem "New Every Morning," from the 1889 book A Few More Verses by Susan Coolidge (1835-1905, real name Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, and also author of, of course, Verses). As far as I know, it was never set to music. If it ever was, it most certainly was not whatever travesty I saddled it with.

17:45 - "harrowing." A harrow is an agricultural tool made up of many spikes, discs, or tines which are dragged across plowed soil to smooth it out and break up large clump of dirt, giving it a finer and more finished appearance  that is also better for seeding. This is also where the word "harrowing" comes from, as in "a harrowing experience." Because, well, imagine being dragged through this sucker.

18:17 - "Begone, dull care!" This comes from an old English folk song that dates back to at least the 1600s, and possibly earlier.

19:14 - "It would be too hot to hold some folks." ...yeah, no, I still have no idea what Jane is so "sagely quoting" here, if indeed anything.
 
20:21 - "elephant's ears." I'm not sure which of the various related plants referred to as "elephant ears" they are referring to, but as far as I can tell none of them would be described as "graceful" or "feathery," or appropriate for "picking a big bunch," as they're primarily known for their very large, leathery, heart-shaped leaves rather than their flowers.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Ten and Eleven

In which Davy makes a good deal of trouble due to not being brought up right, and Anne writes a letter to someone we don't care about relating numerous funny, strange, or creative things her students have said; and in which our narrator is pretty sure that if Anne were around today she'd totally have her own Tumblr.



Today's cover is from Sterling Publishing in 2008 and makes the unusual choice of showing Anne as a teacher, with her class. I hadn't really realized it before, but it really is a bit odd that so few covers seem to depict her in this way, considering how a big part of this book relates to her teaching and relationships with her students. Here's a fun game: try and figure out which of these students are the saintly Paul Irving, the terrible Anthony Pye, the put-upon St. Clair Donnel, the clumsy Barbara Shaw, and the coquettish Prillie Rogerson! And wonder if the illustrator actually tried to represent the specific children or not! (I really have no idea if they did or did not.)

Notes:

12:59 - "asseverated." Man, the Pyes animadvert, Davy asseverates... Ms. Montgomery, I love you and I love your work, but you need to put down your thesaurus for a while. You can just say that Davy declared, or asserted, or stated earnestly or something.

21:00 - "Thomas à Becket." AKA St. Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of King Henry II in the twelfth century. Though the two had started out as friends, after his election to the archbishopship (... is that a word? That doesn't look right.) Becket had a bit of a change of heart and came into conflict with the king regarding the relative rights of the crown and the church. It got so bad between them that in 1170 Henry said... something. It's uncertain what, exactly, though tradition states it was "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" Whatever it was, it was interpreted (rightly or wrongly) by four of his knights as an order. They found Becket in Canterbury and demanded he come and account for himself. He refused, went in to say vespers, and they killed him. The Catholic and Anglican churches both venerate him as a martyr and a saint.

You might notice something missing from the above account, though: the "à." It's not actually part of his name, and no one's entirely sure why people sometime in the 1600s or so started putting it in there. Some say it was in imitation of Thomas à Kempis for some unknown reason. It doesn't even make sense in Becket's name, because it means "of" or "from" (so Kempis's name actually means "Thomas from Kempen," where Kempen was his hometown.) But Becket wasn't from anywhere named "Becket." One of those weird linguistic mysteries how it really got and stayed there for so long.

21:05 - "William Tyndale wrote the New Testament." Tyndale was a 16th-century English scholar, best known for his translation of the Bible into English at a time when unauthorized English Bibles were against the laws of both the Church of England and England itself. His was also the first English Bible to work directly from Greek and Hebrew texts (rather than working from later translations into Latin), and the first to be printed on the printing press. He later went on to vocally disapprove of King Henry VIII's divorces. For these varied crimes, he was eventually convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. Well, strangled to death while tied to the stake, and then burned.

21:09 - "Claude White says a 'glacier' is a man who puts in window frames!" Claude White is of course looking for the word "glazier."

22:32 - "carded rolls." Carding is a process of basically turning a raw, fibrous material like cotton or wool into a useful form by untangling the fibers, laying them out parallel to each other, and locking them together in a sort of web, using a sort of brush/comb called a card. This creates a sort of mat that can be pulled up off the card in rolls that can then be used to spin out yarn.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Monday, November 30, 2015

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Eight and Nine

In which, as explained handily by the chapter title, Marilla Adopts Twins and hi-jinks ensue when one turns out to be the anti-Paul Irving, followed by the completion of the A.V.I.S.'s first project which is ruined by those damn dirty Pyes.



Hey, it's Lucy Maud Montgomery's 141st birthday today! As is their wont, Google honored her with three Doodles depicting scenes from Anne of Green Gables. My favorite is of course the one where Anne eats her infamous liniment cake, but they're all delightful. Be sure to check out the early sketches at the bottom, including a couple of her (and Gilbert!) in school.

Today's cover comes from the 2009 Puffin Classics relaunch and wow, does it kind of irrationally freak me out. I mean, is it just me or does it look like it was done in Microsoft Paint? It looks like I wasn't the only one not fond of it, because it seems like this (and the matching covers for the rest of the series) was pretty speedily replaced and is now rather hard to find.

Notes!

2:25 - "dashboard." Okay, okay, obviously y'all know the word "dashboard" already, but it's possible you're wondering why it's being used in the context of a horse-drawn buggy. See, this is one of those words that has continued on long after its literal meaning has ceased to be relevant, sort of like how we still use an icon of a floppy disk to mean "save." When horses move quickly on dirt or gravel paths, their hooves would throw — or dash — muck up at the driver and passengers behind them in the cart or carriage or whatever. Thus, a board was placed at the front of the carriage to protect the riders.

Buggy (PSF)
A horse-drawn buggy, with a dashboard sticking up between the horse and the passengers.

By Pearson Scott Foresman [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

When motorcars first came about, they were mostly made by the same people who made horse-drawn carriages and were pretty much just built with the same plans, only with an engine added.

Sears Model L
Sears Model L motor buggy

By Unknown - advertisement (Gleanings in Bee Culture) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Once it became standard to have the engine in the front, it was only natural that the dashboard remain to separate it from the passengers, as it once did the horses.

1909 Ford Model T T1 Town Car (12703369904)
1909 Ford Model T T1 Town Car

By Sicnag [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

People already knew "the barrier right in front of you when you're driving" as "the dashboard," so the name stuck around. It eventually became a handy and natural place to set things and locate controls and gauges and such, so that today "dashboard" is practically synonymous with "instrument panel," leading to things like the Mac Dashboard. Pretty far from horses kicking dirt into your face!

8:23 - "a 'prunes and prisms' mouth." This is a reference to the lesser-known Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit (1857), where Mrs. General (a governess in all but name, hired to train the young heroines to become proper young ladies) teaches her charges to say this phrase to form their mouths into an attractive shape:
'Papa is a preferable mode of address,' observed Mrs General. 'Father is rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to yourself in company—on entering a room, for instance—Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.'
 It thus became a byword for a prim and affected form of speaking.

14:13 - "coin-spot rug." Also known as a penny rug, these were made from small circular pieces of fabric, cut from scraps left over from clothing and such using coins as templates, sewn together to make a rug, mat, or decorative thingy.

26:42 - "animadverted." Well, this is a word I've never come across before! "Animadvert" just means to comment upon in a critical or unfavorable way.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Monday, November 23, 2015

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Six and Seven

In which Anne and Diana try to bilk the hard-working citizens of Avonlea out of their money with mixed success and Marilla is duped into spending her golden years taking care of young children; and in which the narrator lets slip an Opinion about a character we've only barely met.



Today's cover is from a Grosset and Dunlap edition from 1936, and is a great example of how the fashions of the time were often taken more into consideration than anything actually in the book. I mean, you can't even try to pretend that look anything like 1880s style, or even the styles of 1909, when the book was written. And I suppose you could generously consider her hair to be auburn there, which is at least sort of close to red, but really. You can at least get that right. As it is, this looks a lot more like a Nancy Drew cover than Anne Shirley. Though, come to think of it, Nancy was also published by Grosset and Dunlap in the 1930s. It's quite possible it's the same cover artist, or at least a house style the artists were supposed to conform to.


1:38 - "All Sorts and Conditions of Men... and Women." The title of Chapter 5 is a reference to a line from The Book of Common Prayer, which (for those of us not in the Anglican Church) was a book that laid out prayers and services for specific occasions, like morning prayers, evening prayers, funerals, baptisms, etc. This line is from, appropriately enough, the "Prayer for All Sorts and Conditions of Men," which basically is a sort of all-purpose prayer for any in need of help.

2:47 - "Bliss is it on such a day to be alive." Anne of course properly attributes the source of her altered quotation to William Wordsworth. The poem specifically is the succinctly titled "The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement," and the actual line is "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!" Man, the French Revolution sounds amazing! Really though, I'll stick with the scent of fir.

8:22 - The "vale of tears" that Eliza insists on seeing the world as is an old Christian phrase referring to the idea that the physical world is just a place full of sorrow and sadness that we leave behind when we go to heaven.

25:04 - "a fighting animal." This was a surprisingly tricky one to find out. The most famous quote defining man as a fighting animal is from George Santayana, where he says "Man is a fighting animal, his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts." However, he said this in his book Dialogues in Limbo which was published in 1925, well after Anne of Avonlea. Most other references, like Gilbert here, leave the source as "someone." Eventually though, through an 1880 quoting from "I believe the late Lord Palmerston." Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, was Prime Minister of the UK under Queen Victoria from 1855-1858 and from 1859 until his death in 1865. The quote is from a January 8, 1862 letter to Richard Cobden, a politician whose anti-war views often put him at odds with Palmerston. The full quote reads:
It would be very delightful if your Utopia could be realized, and if the nations of the earth would think of nothing but peace and commerce, and would give up quarrelling [sic] and fighting altogether. But unfortunately man is a fighting and quarrelling animal; and that this is human nature is proved by the fact that republics, where the masses govern, are far more quarrelsome, and more addicted to fighting, than monarchies, which are governed by comparatively few persons. [Emphasis added]
Ah, that explains it! No one ever really makes reference to the "and quarreling" bit, just the fighting. It would take Gilbert's point a little less dramatic if he said he wanted to quarrel with disease and pain and ignorance.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Three to Five

In which Anne confesses her bovine misdeed to Mr. Harrison and the two become friends, there is some disagreement about methods of classroom discipline, and Anne has a most tiring first day of school; and in which the narrator tries to remember what he recorded nearly two months ago, itself after a two-month break.



Hey, remember Avonlea? We're going to pick up right where we left off, of course, with Anne trepidatiously heading over to Mr. Harrison's house to confess about accidentally selling his Jersey cow.

Here's this installment's cover, a lovely paper-cut design by Simon and Schuster as part of their Aladdin Classics series. I like how this incorporates various aspects of the book: the parrot Ginger, Anne's Jersey cow, the Avonlea Village Improvement Society. It sets it apart from the vast stretches of "Anne standing in a field" covers, which... okay, we'll be seeing several of them I'm sure, because the pickings are a little slimmer for this than for Green Gables. Simon and Schuster have done similar covers for a few other Anne novels, too!

A few short notes:

 8:31 - "as good a jorum of tea as you ever drank." A jorum is a large bowl or, more likely in this case, jug that is used to serve beverages; usually punch, but sometimes tea. It's sometimes also used to refer to the contents of such a vessel, often implying a great deal of such contents.

23:17 - "shining morning faces." This is a reference to the famous "Seven Ages of Man" speech (aka, "All the world's a stage...") from Act II, Scene VII of Shakespeare's As You Like It:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
Out of context, one might interpret "shining" to mean something like "beaming" or "eager" — which is definitely how Montgomery means it here — but nestled between "whining" and "creeping like a snail unwillingly to school," one wonders if maybe Shakespeare meant that their faces are shining with tears instead. I mean, read the rest of the speech. It's... not exactly optimistic.

28:57 - "slate bottle." This was actually a rather difficult one to find! Eliminating things like this and this still mostly brought up references to ink bottles, which doesn't make sense in this context as it clearly says that the bottle held water, and you wouldn't use ink on a slate anyway. The only (well, first, because then I stopped looking as I'd already gone pretty deep) explicit reference I found is in this 1889-1926 history of Eastling Primary School in Kent County, England, where a former student recalls "how happy she was when she... was given her own slate, her own water bottle with a hole in the cork, and a rag to clean her slate." I mean, you could probably have figured out that it was basically a very low-tech water spritzer for cleaning slates from the context and a basic knowledge of how slates work, but it's nice to have confirmation.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Monday, November 9, 2015

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin," by Robert Browning

In which it is important to pay your rodent-exterminating musicians lest he leads your children into a mountain forever, and in which the narrator pretends he has some sense of poetic rhythm.



Hey hey, everyone! One of the creepier classic children's stories out there has always been "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," what with the stealing all the children away and piping and such, so that's this year's choice for our (slightly belated) Halloween story. As I discuss in the probably overlong intro, the story is inspired by a circa 1300 stained-glass church window in the town of Hamelin, Germany, and the earliest written record of the town from 1384 which states "It is 100 years since our children left." The actual cause is unknown (Plague? Drowning? Landslide? Children's crusade? Mass emigration?), as is what the piper represents. He might've been an actual person leading them away (like an emigration recruiter, or a crusade leader), or a symbolic figure of death or the devil. The rats were added to the story a few hundred years later.

1592 painting based on the Hamelin window, which was destroyed in 1660.
 Illustrations and notes after the jump!

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters One and Two

In which we catch up with our red-headed heroine, learn of her plans to improve society, meet her new cranky neighbor, and watch her get into trouble over a cow; and in which the narrator has to remind himself which of these voices were done in the first book, and for those that were, what they sounded like.



All right, despite six Beatrix Potter stories in a row I've still got to shake off some of the doldrums that, to be honest, Frankenstein rather left me in. I need someone happy. I need someone bright, and joyous, and who celebrates life. I need... Anne Shirley. Come to think of it, Anne Shirley practically is the anti-Victor Frankenstein. You just know that every single bad thing that happened in Frankenstein would've been averted if Anne had been there to take responsibility and show the creature some kindness on a boat ride upon the Lake of Shining Waters.

What, these are the things I think about.

ANYWAY, we are indeed going to head back with the second Anne book, Anne of Avonlea, published in 1909. It seems that Ms. Montgomery's publisher's were so impressed with her that they asked for a sequel to Anne of Green Gables (1908) as soon as she signed the contract for it, and they actually had to delay Avonlea's publishing because Green Gables was still selling so well!

Unfortunately, it looks like there weren't any illustrations in the first edition of this, and none in the public domain that I can find, so as with the first book I'll fill in with various editions' covers. We'll start with the cover of that first edition, done in a similar style to the original. Like the cover of Green Gables, the illustration on this one is by George Gibbs. Unlike Green Gables, George Gibbs was properly credited on the title page for both this illustration and the frontispiece, seen below.

Some short notes:

8:38 - The disagreeable Mr. Harrison doesn't want to contribute to the reverend's salary before hearing him sermonize because he doesn't want to buy "a pig in a poke." First, a "poke" is an archaic word for a bag. It goes back to the same root word as "pocket," which, with the -ette diminutive suffix, meant "little bag. Anyway, back in medieval times, pigs were relatively scarce but dogs and cats were pretty common. So, con men would sometimes tie, say, a cat up in a bag and sell it to someone claiming that it's nice fresh pig. The savvy customer would know enough to check before buying by opening it up and letting the cat out of the bag and yes, this is probably where that phrase came from as well. Basically, it all boils down to "Buyer beware."

17:26 - Mrs. Lynde references an — in her eyes, at least — unsavory man who is often "in consumption." And... really? Have we not had to define "consumption" yet? Huh. Well, "consumption" referred to a disease that wasted the body away, usually specifically tuberculosis.

18:38 - Mrs. Lynde says such things, especially about "Yankees" with "a decided can-any-good-thing-come-out-of-Nazareth air." This is a reference to the Bible passage John 1:46, where Philip tells his friend Nathanael "Hey, wanna meet this cool guy, Jesus of Nazareth? He's totally the Messiah!" (I'm paraphrasing.) Nathanael responds with the quoted bit, letting us know that at the time Nazareth was not a very highly-looked upon place. It also tosses a little bit of irony into Mrs. Lynde's attitude (as if there wasn't enough already), because of course according to the Bible and thus probably according to Mrs. Lynde a very good thing did, in fact, come out of Nazareth.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Friday, July 10, 2015

"The Tales of Jemima Puddle-Duck, Two Bad Mice, and Mr Jeremy Fisher," by Beatrix Potter

In which more adorable anthropomorphic animals are, respectively, too foolish to be trusted with important stuff, terribly destructive with no negative consequences, and never going fishing again.



I know, I said we were going to start a new book this time around. And we will! But, after posting the last trio of Beatrix Potter stories, an old college friend of mine specifically requested that I read "The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck," presumably for her children (though I'm not one to judge if not). Heck, why not? And, like last time, since they're so short I tossed in a couple of bonus ones as well. So, Kathy, Miri, and Jack, I hope you enjoy. And the rest of you too, I guess.

The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck

 

Frontispiece - Jemima thought
him mighty civil and handsome.

Monday, July 6, 2015

"The Tales of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, and Benjamin Bunny," by Beatrix Potter

In which adorable anthropomorphic animals are threatened with grisly deaths in a trio of short morality plays involving a variety of produce.



All right, full disclosure, I was planning on reading a totally different story for you this time around, but then I found a beautiful hardcover collection of Beatrix Potter's complete tales and I was all "HOW DID I NOT KNOW BEATRIX POTTER'S STORIES WERE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN?" and I decided I had to read some of them. Also, the story I had planned had serious English accents, and that sounded hard.

Anyway, not too much to say that I didn't go over in the intro, except that with these stories ("Peter Rabbit," specifically) Potter essentially invented merchandizing. Very shortly after "Peter Rabbit" was published, she patented a Peter Rabbit doll and board game. A wide variety of officially licensed toys, games, books, decorations, dishes, etc. followed, making her and her publishers a zillion dollars.

Now, Potter's illustrations are just as famous -- if not even more so -- than the actual stories, and they are quite numerous. I'll be splitting them up by story, and much like with the Oz books they're so numerous that time-stamping them is practically pointless, so I won't bother. Heck, even just captioning them I practically copied all of the text. The few notes that I deemed necessary are time-stamped, though, and in their proper places.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit 

 

Frontispiece - His mother put him to
bed, and made some camomile tea;
and she gave a dose of it to Peter!

See the rest after the jump!

Friday, June 5, 2015

Frankenstein Bonus Text: Introduction to the 1832 Edition

In which Mary explicates and perhaps embellishes upon Frankenstein's origin story.



And one final parting shot from Frankenstein before it lumbers off into the sunset! As mentioned way back when we started this book, Shelley rewrote large portions of the original 1818 version for an 1832 edition, and wrote this new introduction for it. I read us the 1818, but feel I should toss this in as well. For an introduction, it's got a surprising number of notes:

4:43 - She mentions that Lord Byron is writing the third canto of Childe Harold, by which she means Childe Harold's Pilgramage, a long, semi-autobiographical narrative poem about a disillusioned young man who broods across the world trying to forget his world-weariness. You can read it here, and see quite literally the invention of the Byronic hero.

5:10 - Here we begin a recounting of the "volumes of ghost stories translated from the German into French" that inspired to story-telling contest that led to Frankenstein. The volume to which she refers is Fantasmagoriana, by an unknown author, published in France in 1812. The French edition was subsequently translated into English by Sarah Utterson in 1820 as Tales of the Dead, which can be read here. She recounts (with variable accuracy) The History of the Inconstant Lover, published in English as The Death-Bride, and "the tale of the sinful founder of his race," which refers to the story The Family Portraits.

5:37 - "in complete armor, but with the beaver up." This is an explicit reference to Horatio's description of the ghost of Hamlet's father, a line that will continue to cause amusement in high school English classes unto eternity. "Beaver," of course, refers to the helmet's visor.

6:23 - Shelley says how Byron published his ghost story as a fragment "at the end of his poem of Mazeppa." Mazeppa (which can be read here) is an 1819 poem of Byron's telling the story of the Ukranian Cossack Ivan Mazepa, most of which is taken up by the hero being tied naked to a horse that is let loose. The "Fragment of a Novel" itself, one of the very first vampire stories in English, inspired Polidori to write the enormously popular and influential novella The Vampyre, which really set the stage for every vampire story to come after it.

6:52 - Polidori's own story for the contest was apparently never published, but recounted here as being about a skull-headed lady punished for looking through a keyhole. Shelley says she "was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry." This refers to the tailor who peeked at Lady Godiva's famous nude ride through Coventry to make her husband cut back on the town's taxes. The tailor was rewarded by being struck blind and immortalized in the phrase "peeping Tom."

7:55 - She refers to "Everything must have a beginning" as "speak[ing] in Sanchean phrase," referring to the way Don Quixote's famous sidekick Sancho Panza spouts off proverbs.

8:28 - "Columbus and his egg." Huh, this one seems like something I should've heard of before this. It refers to an apocryphal story about Christopher Columbus, where he responds to criticism that anyone could've made his discovery, and would have eventually anyway, by betting them they couldn't get an egg to stand on its end. They couldn't, and he did by tapping the end to break the shell a bit, flattening it enough to stand on its end. Thus, a brilliant idea that seems simple and obvious after you see someone else do it. Of course, Columbus himself didn't really discover the Americas, so there's that too.

8:59 - "Dr. Darwin." Shelley here mentions the great Dr. Erasmus "grandfather of Charles" Darwin, referring again to his influence on her writing here. Here, though, she specifically mentions the experiments "spoken of as having been done by him" where a piece of vermicelli was preserved in a glass case and spontaneously reanimated. It seems that this is actually a mish-mash of a couple of different things Darwin wrote about in The Temple of Nature, the most pertinent being about dried vorticella (a kind of very simple single-celled organism) coming back to life. "Vermicelli" does in fact literally mean "little worms," but is only ever used to refer to a type of pasta, so... yeah. If this whole thing seems vaguely familiar to you, you probably are remembering this scene from the Mel Brooks classic Young Frankenstein, which is of course a direct reference to this introduction and not anything resembling actual science. (Those of you who listen all the way to the end of the recordings may have noticed that I'm a HUGE fan of Young Frankenstein. If I ever get around to it, I actually have some thoughts on it I may share here.)

Geez, I think these notes are longer than the introduction itself. Anyway, something a little lighter next time!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Three, Chapter Seven

In which Victor vows vengeance, pursues to the perilous pole, is saved by the stranded sailors, and all are awfully angsty.



And that concludes Frankenstein! It took us a while, but we made it. I admit, this last bit especially is a bit of a slog (sorry it's so long, I really just couldn't make another all-Robert-Walton installment), with us returning to the framing story we don't really care about and everyone talking about how miserable they are. What really sort of gets me in this section (as you can probably tell from my interjection at one point) is how both Walton and the monster sort of lionize Victor, and bemoan his sad fall due to persecution from the creature. Yes, Victor had a tragic downfall, but it was of his own making. He's not the hero of this story. No one is, really, nor is anyone truly the villain (notice I never used the "iconic villain debut" tag in this book). And I'm not talking about "oh, his actions had terrible consequences that he couldn't possibly have foreseen," because he created a giant, sentient, intelligent creature and then just abandons it. How could something bad possibly come from that?

ANYWAY. This final cover comes from a 1934 edition published by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, with cover and illustrations by Lynd Ward (1905-1985). Ward was a very influential artist, best known for his engraved wood illustrations, particularly in his series of "wordless novels" that strongly influenced the development of the graphic novel. He also illustrated hundreds of children's books, won the 1953 Caldecott Medal for his book The Biggest Bear, and of course illustrated a number of classics, such as Frankenstein here.


Man, look at that! I love the art deco / German expressionistic look of this. It's like Fritz Lang directed this book cover. Also, hee, monster butt. I really wish I could've used his illustrations in my posts, because they're just magnificent, really. Check out Victor and the monster on the glacier! The monster running among lightning trees! William's murder! Victor with his chemistry equipment! Hey, wait, that looks a lot... oh, Airmont Classics. You plagiarizing scamps. (UPDATE: I forgot to link to the main site, where you can see a whole bunch more of the illustrations from this edition! DISCLAIMER: The guy who compiled the site is an author on an apparent crusade to prove that not Mary but Percy Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a position I do not support.)

Just a couple of quick notes in this one, as most of the being miserable was fairly straightforward. At 6:36, Victor pursues the monster into Tartary and Russia, where Tartary was a large chunk of central and northern Asia that included Mongolia, Siberia, Turkestan, and Manchuria, among other regions. This is of course where the Tartars we met in "Sleepy Hollow" came from.

At 33:38, Walton's letter from September 12th recounts how the ice broke up on September 9th. Well, the text actually says "September 19th" there, which was presumably a typesetting error in the 1818 edition due to the printer assuming that it was supposed to be the date of the next letter and thus should have a later number. It was corrected in later printings, so I figured I'd just change it myself rather than leave it weird and confusing.

Last, 48:21 the monster talks about Felix driving him from his door "with contumely," which basically means "with insulting and humiliating treatment."

And that's a wrap! We're going to lighten things up a bit with our short story interlude, as well as our next book. Stay tuned!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Monday, April 20, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Three, Chapters Five and Six

In which Victor is self-centered to the point of missing the obvious, gets married, and the obvious happens.



And the monster has hit the fan! Well, he hit Elizabeth, actually, something which the monster's killing of others dear to him and and threats to take away all that he loves completely failed to tip Victor off to the monster's next move. Seriously, Victor, it's not all about you.

Anyway, now that the, uh, spoiler has occurred, I can share the more dramatic and violent of the covers. First up:


This French-language edition is from Le Scribe of Brussels in 1946, and depicts Elizabeth's murder in a manner highly inspired by the movie, with the castle and the neckbolts and what-not. Notice that this edition was written by Ann Mary Shelley, I guess. Apparently, the title page gets a little closer with May W. Shelley. Don't... don't know what's going on there, Belgium. Oh, and the cover artist is uncredited. So.


This one,by Lion Press in 1946 also with no artist credited, shows the immediate aftermath, with a sexy, lipsticked, cleavage-baring Elizabeth very prettily being dead without a mark on her. Meanwhile, the monster is not especially Karlovian, but does appear to be having a "my god, what have I done" moment that is not especially apparent in the book. Though, to be fair, neither is the cleavage.

Only one note this time around: at 16:42 we hear about Victor and Elizabeth purchasing their house in Cologny, which is a municipality of Geneva that is home to the World Economic Forum.

...I'm sorry, I thought that note would be more interesting. Anyway, one more installment!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Monday, March 30, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Three, Chapter Four

In which Victor discovers the identity of the murdered man, falls ill — again — for a couple of months, is found innocent, and is picked up by his dad.



So... is it just me, or are you all kind of rooting for bad things to happen to Victor now? Am I a bad person for feeling this, or is Victor just sort of insufferable? Maybe a little of Column A, a little of Column B? All right then.

Today's cover focuses on Victor, walking in the Alps, just as he first meets the monster whose shadow looms over his shoulder:


This 2007 edition is from Sterling Publishing's Unabridged Classics series, all of which have covers by Scott McKowen. McKowen works in a scratchboard style, which is nicely evocative of old-school woodcuts and such. He's best known for his work illustrating theatrical posters, many of which can be seen here along with much of his other work, and is also well-known in geek circles for illustrating the covers to Marvel Comics' 1602, by Neil Gaiman.

Notes after the jump!

Monday, March 23, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Three, Chapter Three

In which Victor changes his mind, re: monsters, creating another, and the monster vows revenge, whereupon Victor gets lost at sea and ends up in a land of terrible accents; and in which the narrator apologizes for his terrible accents.



Things are heating up now! Someone's dead! I wonder if the monster had anything to do with it. Probably! No notes this time around, thankfully after last time, so two covers for you here, both from Classics Illustrated:


Yes, LOOK AT THIS THING! The lightning font! The perspective that makes it look like the monster is Godzilla-sized! The armpit lightning! Man, this is just fantastic. This is the original line drawing cover of Classics Illustrated number 26, with cover and interior art by Robert H. "Bob" Webb and Ann Brewster. It was first published in 1945 under the banner of Classic Comics, but since this specific cover cost a full fifteen cents and is under the Classics Illustrated banner (the changed the name in 1947), it's probably from the 1951 reprint.

Around 1953, CI decided to update their look by replacing the line drawings with painted covers, and this included replacing the covers of reprints of back issues, leading to this one:


 Here we get to see a scene not usually depicted on covers: the monster being pursued across the polar wastes by Victor in his dogsled. See him back there? He looks like he's waving! Anyway, this cover first appeared in September 1958 and was by Norman Saunders, who you might remember from his saucy "Famous Fantastic Mysteries" Time Machine cover.

That wraps it up for now! Come back next time for Victor's Irish adventure, apparently!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Three, Chapters One and Two

In which Victor drags his heels on fulfilling his promise to the creature, and he and Henry travel to Britain; and in which the narrator assures you that that was the whole two chapters.



Well, not a whole lot happened here, besides Victor ultimately secreting himself off the coast of Scotland to finish his work. Lots of notes, though, mostly about people and places Victor and Henry see and discuss on their journey. But first, our cover!


This edition, issued by Tor in 1989, features a cover by well-known fantasy artist Boris Vallejo. More of his work can be found on his official site, though his work tends heavily to the "half-naked barbarians" end of the spectrum, and later into "completely naked fantasy ladies," so maybe don't check it out at work. Anyway, this cover shows the trend from the late 20th century of veering away from Karloff's monster into representing him somewhat more how he's described in the book, while also attempting to re-emphasize his humanity. Though, it should be noted, Karloff's portrayal was in fact very humanistic, but that's not how it really stuck in the public's consciousness.

Notes after the jump!

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Two, Chapters Eight and Nine

In which the creature rages against the heavens and vows revenge, murders just a little bit, then asks Victor for one tiny favor in order to leave everyone alone forever.



Here we go, we're picking up steam again! I mean, still plenty of angst and misery, but we're back to the murdery and mad sciencey place again. Yay!

Today's cover goes full-on Karloff:


This doesn't even really pretend to take its imagery from anything other than the movie. There's even a castle! This 1976 edition published by Pocket Books had this here cover done by Mara McAfee (1929-1984). McAfee started out as a minor-league actor in the 1950s before going on to a very well-respected career as an artist and illustrator who did do some literary illustrations like this, but was best known for satirical illustrations for publications like National Lampoon, which often featured her work on the cover. A small selection of her work (including a closer look at this cover) can be viewed here.

Thankfully brief notes after the jump!

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Two, Chapters Five to Seven

In which the creature edumacates himself with incredibly convenient books, relates the unnecessary backstory of his cottagers, reveals himself to them and is disappointed; and in which the narrator assures you that that does indeed span three whole chapters.



Well, it turns out that our chewy nougat center has, I don't know, a thin ribbon of caramel or something running through it, in the form of the cottager's completely superfluous and interminable backstory. Bah. We dug down four levels deep into this nested narrative, now we claw our way back up. First, though, our next cover! This edition was published sometime in the 1990s by Holt, Rinehart and Wilson.


Aww, sad monster.

Mostly literary notes, and a lot of them, after the jump!

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Two, Chapters Three and Four

In which the creature explains how he lived in a forest for a while, was attacked by some villagers for being scary, and shacked up in a hovel where he could spy on a beautiful little poor family he falls in love with; and in which our narrator really wonders about the family not ever looking into the little little hovel attached to their house over the course of several months even though someone's nearby collecting their wood for them, I mean, right?



Okay, so now we've tunneled down through our Frankenbar into the chewy nougat center that is the Creature's Story, and I think that's where our candy bar metaphor reaches its limit. Anyway, this installment's cover is from a Romanian edition by Excelsior-Multi Press from some indefinite year:


This is crazy! We've got the title all drippy and bleeding and stuff, and it looks like we're seeing the monster as his head is being, like, hooked up, on a background of lab equipment and... and is that a... a crocodile? What in the world is that doing there? Was that used for parts or something?

Notes after the jump!

Monday, March 9, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume Two, Chapters One and Two

In which the family Frankenstein takes a field trip to raise their spirits, where Victor takes a solitary sojourn on a glacier and unexpectedly encounters a familiar face who begs to tell his side of the story.



And so starts Volume Two, where we will find out what the creature has been up to over the past several years after being brought to life and promptly abandoned. A few notes, mostly pertaining to places, but first our new cover:


This cover is from an edition published by Signet in 1965, and is rather special to me as the edition in which I myself first read the story, and which still sits on my bookshelf. It does, however, contain the 1832 version, so it's not the one I'm actually reading right now.

I like the impressionistic style of this cover. It emphasizes the monster's human-like but somehow still bestial nature, and gives the whole thing a sort of air of mystery over horror, while still being suitably creepy. It also manages to be somewhat reminiscent of Karloff's monster — the flat-top head, the sunken eyes — while not being an obvious reference to it.

Notes after the jump!

Friday, March 6, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume One, Chapter Seven

In which Justine goes to trial for William's murder, it goes about as well as can be expected, but Victor makes sure to let us all know that his suffering is the worst of everyone; and in which the narrator is STILL not dead.



Hi-ho, everyone! Yup, still not dead, and here with another installment of Frankenstein. This is a rather short one, as we come to the end of Volume One after only a chapter, but now we start getting into the real angsty stuff. No notes this time around(!), and we're all out of illustrations, so here's our new vintage cover:


Holy hell, how great is this thing? A 1932 printing from Illustrated Editions, with cover (and interior illustrations) by Nino Carbé. Carbé later went on to be an animator at Disney and worked on films such as Fantasia, Bambi, and Pinocchio, though he primarily ended up working as a children's book illustrator. And yes, that's the face of his monster, definitely playing up the "daemon" aspect of Victor's narration. Interestingly, while this was done after the 1931 movie (and, in fact, probably published to capitalize on its popularity), Karloff's monster had not become quite iconic enough to completely overtake designs of the monster, as it later would. It is, however, probably responsible for Carbé putting electrodes in the monster's neck. Man, I wish these illustrations were in the public domain. I would've LOVED to use them here. Ah well.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Frankenstein, Volume One, Chapters Five and Six

In which Victor returns to health, letters arrive from loved ones, Elizabeth expounds at length on the history of a person whom Victor really already knows, tragedy strikes, and Victor figures it's probably his fault but eh, it'll probably end up working out this time, right? And in which the narrator assures you that he, too, will not stay dead.



Lookit that, we're back! This was actually recorded in part over a month ago, but only just completed last night (in case the sound between the two chapters sounds different or anything. Unfortunately, I appear to have, uh, misplaced my notes for Chapter 5, and my computer just ate my notes for Chapter 6, so I'm gonna have to go back through and listen to find out what notes are needed and where. I'll post 'em up here soon as I can!

In the meantime, here's today's cover, from a 1963 edition from Airmont Classics.Boy, this is a good one! I love that we've got Victor being all broody amongst his laboratory equipment that is also a graveyard, with the subtle grim specter of the creature's (Karloff-inspired) face looming in the background. This is also a great example of stock lab equipment in art. Want to show people your character is a "scientist"? Put some colored liquid into some flasks -- round-bottom and Erlenmeyer are especially popular, though I'm surprised there aren't any retorts there -- a smoking crucible over some kind of a burner, probably, and a mortar and pestle and boom! Science!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!