Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six

In which Mr. Harrison's marital scandal rocks Avonlea, and Thomas Lynde's death really kind of works out well for everyone.

Oh my, this is quite possibly my favorite cover I've found so far. It's from a 2014 printing of the whole series by Tundra books, and is a paper-cut illustration by Elly MacKay, with cover design by Kelly Hill. You can see MacKay's covers for the rest of the series (along with an unused illustration and covers for several other Montgomery books) here. Beyond the fact that the illustrations themselves are lovely (look at the details! Anne's dirty hem from where she's stomping in the mud!), the fact that it's actually a photograph of physical paper cutouts adds a gorgeous depth of field and luminance to the image. Beautiful.

This was an extra-long installment — these end chapters are getting long, so it's either an extra-short installment with one chapter or an extra-long one with two — and thus has a goodly number of notes. Try to keep up!

4:16 - "as neat as if she had just stepped out of the proverbial bandbox." A bandbox is another term for a hatbox, and this was indeed an idiom of the time for when someone looked especially fresh and neat.

4:56 - "Fair Unknown." Mrs. Harrison here is being compared to a figure from Arthurian legend, and unknown young man of questionable lineage who just shows up in court one day demanding to be knighted. He's usually knighted quickly, but then has to prove his worth, and it's also usually discovered that he's actually a relative of Gawain's and thus of Arthur himself.

6:34 - "such stuff as dreams are made of." While at this point this quote might be better known from its famous use in the 1941 movie of The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is quoting Prospero from Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act 4, scene 1). Prospero's speech follows him ending a play-within-a-play, but it's okay because none of it was real anyway, the actors "were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air" — oh yes, this is where "into thin air" comes from — but the real world is "like the baseless fabric of this vision," everything ends, life is insubstantial. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with sleep." I won't blame Anne too badly for getting the last word wrong ("of" instead of "on"); it feels more natural so it's a common change, and she had just had quite a shock after all. 

7:58 - "Mrs. Lynde rushed in where Anne had feared to tread." This is of course a reference to the well-known idiom "fools rush in where angels fear to tread," but I was unaware that this is yet another from our friend Alexander Pope, this time from his Essay on Criticism, which also supplied us with "to err is human, to forgive divine" and, if you cast your memory back to our reading of Anne of Green Gables chapter 31, "a little learning is a dangerous thing."

14:23 - "pattern housekeeper." This was kind of a hard one to track down, as the phrase is just specific enough to make it seem like it's an actual reference, but vague enough that searches pull up all sort of other unrelated stuff. It seems to be using the word "pattern" in the sense of a model, or something to be imitated, as context clearly shows that it means a very scrupulous housekeeper. I did find a semi-satirical article on the concept by Mrs. N. T. Munroe in "The Ladies Repository," volume 19, from 1851. It definitely makes it clear that "pattern housekeeping" was A Thing that existed, but still have no idea where the term came from, if indeed anyone knows.

23:46 - Roses red and vi'lets blue, / Sugar's sweet, and so are you." Okay, Davy, you're following up Alexander Pope and Shakespeare, you need to step up your game. This was trite even for a seven-year-old in the 1870s(?) I know everyone here knows it, but you may not know that it goes back at least to a 1784 collection of nursery rhymes, and arguably as far back as Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene from 1590 with the lines:

She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,

And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew. 

35:26 - "airy silver." This description of moonlight comes from Anne's old friend, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who we just ran into a few chapters ago. It's from his poem "Audley Court," published in the same 1842 collection of poetry that contained "The Lady of Shalott," which you surely remember from when it stranded Anne in the middle of a river. Anyway, the pertinent bit goes like this:

...but ere the night we rose

and saunter'd home beneath a moon, that, just

In crescent, dimly rain'd about the leaf

Twilights of airy silver, till we reach'd

The limits of the hills...

38:37 - "sitting Turk-fashion." According to the Wikipedia article on "Sitting," which is a real thing that exists, this is just an slightly old-fashioned and primarily European term for "sitting cross-legged on the floor;" what Americans of my generation and older usually called "Indian style," and which is now generally called "criss-cross applesauce" in the schools I go to.

44:04 - "mash." Ruby Gillis's new "mash" probably means a new crush she has (indeed, the two words are both used in this context for similar reasons, though only "crush" has really survived to present), but could potentially go the other direction, meaning a new admirer. For those who, like me, love old movies from the '30s-'50s, it's related to the terms "masher," or a guy constantly trying to pick up women, and "mash note," or love letter.

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

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!

Sense and Sensibility, Volume the Second, Chapter Nine

In which much is revealed by Colonel Eeyore, chiefly pertaining to his personal history, and we discover the enormity of Willoughby's perfidy; and in which the narrator insists that yes, he's using those words correctly.



Wow, well THAT was a shocker of a chapter, wasn't it? With the forced marriages, the infidelity, the multiple illegitimate children, the wasting death, etcetera? Dang, no wonder Colonel Brandon's so Droopy-Dog all the time.

Some short notes: at 13:43, Colonel Brandon says that he randomly found his lost love in a "spunging house," spelled more modernly as "sponging house." It wasn't exactly debtor's prison, but it wasn't exactly not debtor's prison either. Basically, it was a debtor's last chance to pay up -- squeezed out like a sponge, get it? -- while being confined to the house of, usually, so government official who took a cut. A charming place, by the sound of it.

Next, at 21:51, the good Colonel states that, after finding out what had occurred between him and Brandon's ward, he met Willoughby by appointment. As might be inferred from the text, he means that they met for a duel, at which they are both apparently terrible as no one is even wounded. BORING.

Sadly, no illustrations for this turning-point chapter, of the spunging house or otherwise, so here's another fun cover. For... certain values of "fun."

I mean, my but this is a cheerless cover. It's from a 2001 edition published by Broadview Press, an independent academic publisher, that actually sounds kinda cool and included some neat-sounding stuff in this edition (well, neat-sounding to people like me, I guess.) It's just... I mean, kudos for standing out from the seething crowd of other covers featuring two young women in pretty, vaguely-Regency-era-if-you-don't-know-much-about-fashion-history-which-I-don't-so-maybe-it-is-actually-accurate dresses, but it sure makes this book look somber. Jane Austen does tackle some heavy themes, and does some incredibly trenchant social satire, but her books are really anything but dour, especially this one. I guess maybe they don't want anything intended for an academic setting to look too... well, fun.

Aesthetics aside, I wonder about the image's source. It's not listed on the website that I saw, but it certainly appears to be a vintage 1800s photograph of some kind. Now, it obviously can't be from the time Austen was writing as that predated photography, but it's always possible they were in period costume (you know, 1870's ladies dressed in 1811's clothes, or something.) Maybe someone who actually knows something about fashion history can enlighten me: is this even remotely the right time period for the story?

These are the sorts of things that intrigue and bother me.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg, and high-res copies of the Thompson illustrations can be found in the British Library's Flickr stream. No reading ahead, though!

Sense and Sensibility, Volume the First, Chapters One to Three

In which we are introduced to the members of the Dashwood family, and difficulties with early 19-century British inheritance laws causes problems for the side of the family we like, and in which our narrator won't even pretend to do British accents, don't worry.



Hey, we're back! New book and everything! Spring is finally here after what turned out to be just a terrible March, and we're going to get well and truly rolling again here. Again.

As far as I can tell, there are no "original" illustrations for Sense and Sensibility, as in ones that went with the first printing in 1811. It seems though, that (much like the N. C. Wyeth illustrations from Treasure Island) ones from a later edition have come to be the best known. In this case they are these line drawings by Hugh Thompson from an 1896 edition. Perhaps more importantly, these are the illustrations that were posted in the British Library's astounding public domain Flickr account, so they're the ones I'll be using.

3:48 - His son's son, a child of four years old.

17:40 - "I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it."

Only a couple of quick notes: around 23:00, we hear of the delightful Mrs. John Dashwood's wish that her brother, Edward Ferrars, would be the sort of man who drove a barouche. Not to be confused with the landaus and broughams we met in "A Scandal in Bohemia," a barouche is a four-wheeled carriage with a retractable hood, where the driver sits up front driving two horses, and there is room inside for two couples facing each other. It was obviously very fashionable during the nineteenth century.

At 26:45, we learn of Marianne's admiration for William Cowper, an eighteenth-century poet whose work, often about landscapes and various melancholy stuff, is considered one of the forerunners of Romaticism. Austen loved him, and this is not the last we'll hear about him. He is not to be confused with the anatomist William Cowper, best known for describing what's now known as the Cowper's gland, which is the only thing I can think of when the poet is mentioned.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg, and high-res copies of the Thompson illustrations can be found in the British Library's Flickr stream. No reading ahead, though!