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!

"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.

"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!

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.

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!

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!

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!