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!