Yes, yes, I know it's been a long, LONG time since my last recording, and even long since I started this book (coming up on five years!), but right now I feel we could all use a little something to keep ourselves occupied, and that's as good an excuse as any.
Anyway, cover! We've got this 1997 edition published by Penguin Classics. This is a nice one because it's one of the very few that depicts an actual scene from the novel, instead of some generic, baffling, or vaguely terrifying picture of a girl who could conceivably be Anne (or not). This artist (whose name was not listed in the copyright info inside the book, boo, credit your artists) clearly read the book, or was at least given very clear instruction from someone who did.And now, your notes!
4:22 - "antimacassars." I could swear I'd covered this one at some point already, but search is coming up empty. Anyway, the cloths (often lacy, frilly, and/or embroidered) which are draped over the headrests and sometimes arms of chairs? Those are antimacassars. Macassar hair oil (so called because its ingredients were supposedly purchased at the port city of Makassar in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia) was extremely popular among Western Europeans throughout pretty much the entire 19th century, but it had a tendency to transfer to and stain fabric, so antimacassars were put on chairs to prevent that from happening. You still see them on chairs that get high usage, like on buses, trains, and planes.
4:46 - "a great blue bowlful of snowballs." This most likely refers to Hydrangea aborescens, alternatively known as the smooth hydrangea, wild hydrangea, sevenbark, or snowball bush.
4:55 - "Every shelf of the what-not. . ." You know those spindly little freestanding shelves? They're like end tables, but with multiple levels, and each shelf is maybe six inches across, and it's only really good for holding knick-knacky little crap? That's a what-not.
6:26 - "bread sauce." Maybe this is a common thing in some areas and I just haven't heard about it, but in case you're in the same boat: this is basically what you would think, a type of milk-based sauce/gravy that is thickened with bread crumbs, typically served with fowl.
8:42 - "her namesake in the Bluebeard story peered from the tower casement." This is, obviously, a reference to the story of Bluebeard, in which a young wife disobeys her new husband's orders not to look in a specific locked room, even though he gives her a key, and finds the remains of all his previous wives. In the Charles Perrault version of the story, the unnamed bride sends her sister, Anne, up to the top of the tower to keep a lookout for their brothers coming to save her.
9:22 - "twenty dollars." I can't find US-Canada exchange rates past 1913, but it seems to have held roughly steady at 1-1 for pretty much that whole time, so I'll go ahead and say that it was probably equal to about 20 US dollars at the time. Using various inflation calculators for roughly the time the story takes place (1880s?) and the time it was written (early 1900s), it looks like that's somewhere between $500 and $600 today, and the $25 that Anne eventually shells out for it is more like $700, which, WOW, sounds about right for rich old Aunt Josephine, but sounds a bit much for Anne to have been able to actually cover, so maybe my calculations are off somehow.
23:04 - "over the mountains of the moon / down the valley of the shadow." These lines come from the 1849 poem "Eldorado," by Edgar Allan Poe. It's about a knight looking for and failing to find the famous city of gold. It was one of Poe's last poems before he died, and written at least in part about the 1849 gold rush. And, if I am interpreting these specific lines right, Anne is basically telling young Davy that "sleep" is in the land of the dead. Dark.
26:36 - "jumping on the spare room bed. . . I must refer them to Anne's earlier history." This of course refers to the events of Chapter 19 of Anne of Green Gables, where Anne and Diana accidentally jump on old Miss Barry, thinking the bed she was in was empty.
36:12 - "Do send it to the Canadian Woman." This sounds like a magazine or periodical of some sort, but I can't find any that were ever called that, so perhaps it's made up?
38:25 - "cowcumbers." This is a very old name for cucumbers, apparently considered hopelessly old-fashioned even back in the 1830s. Its use here -- and the scare quotes around it when it's repeated in the narration -- is presumably to mark Miss Copp as a particularly rustic and uneducated person (as does her saying that "I didn't know men were so skurse."
And that's it! I'll see you next time, hopefully in increments of days rather than years.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
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