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.

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 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

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!

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!

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!

"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!