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!