Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Twelve and Thirteen

In which Anne has a very cranky day and finds her personal educational philosophy slipping, but then celebrates a pseudo-birthday by exploring the countryside and learning a terribly tragic story; and in which our narrator wonders whatever happened to Anne's toothache, because she should really get that checked out, seriously now.



Today's cover is from a 1995 Norstedts printing of the Swedish edition of Vår vän Anne. I like that this one shows Anne with (presumably) Davy and Dora, who I have never seen featured anywhere. Heck, they're hardly ever even mentioned when talking about these books, so it's rather nice to see them on a cover. In Sweden, anyway. I also appreciate that Davy looks like he's trying to claw his way out of those fancy clothes that are strangling him.

Unnecessarily complex notes to follow!


10:56 - "by what somebody has called 'a Herculaneum effort.'" Herculaneum was an ancient Roman city that was, like the more famous Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. It was wealthier than Pompeii, and actually better preserved, containing organic remains like wood, food, beds, and even skeletons. The destruction of Pompeii, though, was famously witnessed and described by Pliny the Younger, so it's distinctly the better-known.

Of course, that doesn't have much to do with this quote, which is a malaprop for the idiom "a Herculean effort." I'm not sure who the "somebody" is that Montgomery is attributing this phrase to, though. My best guess comes from an 1894 travelogue called Our Journey Around the World, by Rev. Francis Clark and Harriet Clark, where the narrator says "with a Herculaneum effort, as Mrs. Partington would have said..." Mrs. Partington turns out to be a character created by American humorist B. P. Shillaber in the 1850s who is described as an American Mrs. Malaprop (who, in turn, was from the play The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and who, of course, gave her name to the practice of humorously replacing one word for another, similar-sounding one). The texts the Mrs. Partington are from, though, don't appear to be readily available online, at least not in searchable form, and what I can find does not appear to use particular term. I found other people in the 1800s making this same malaprop, though, so maybe it was just a semi-common joke with no specific source.

12:58 - "plum puffs won't minister to a mind diseased" Ah, okay, this one's easy. Anne here is adapting a quote from Act V, Scene III of Shakespeare's Macbeth:

MACBETH: How does your patient, doctor?

DOCTOR: Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies
That keep her from rest.

MACBETH: Cure her of that!
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon her heart.

DOCTOR: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

One should note that by quoting this, Anne is casting herself in the part of Lady Macbeth, guilt-ridden over the murder of King Duncan.

13:37 - "Every morn is a fresh beginning / Every morn is the world made new." Anne here is caroling the start of the poem "New Every Morning," from the 1889 book A Few More Verses by Susan Coolidge (1835-1905, real name Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, and also author of, of course, Verses). As far as I know, it was never set to music. If it ever was, it most certainly was not whatever travesty I saddled it with.

17:45 - "harrowing." A harrow is an agricultural tool made up of many spikes, discs, or tines which are dragged across plowed soil to smooth it out and break up large clump of dirt, giving it a finer and more finished appearance  that is also better for seeding. This is also where the word "harrowing" comes from, as in "a harrowing experience." Because, well, imagine being dragged through this sucker.

18:17 - "Begone, dull care!" This comes from an old English folk song that dates back to at least the 1600s, and possibly earlier.

19:14 - "It would be too hot to hold some folks." ...yeah, no, I still have no idea what Jane is so "sagely quoting" here, if indeed anything.
 
20:21 - "elephant's ears." I'm not sure which of the various related plants referred to as "elephant ears" they are referring to, but as far as I can tell none of them would be described as "graceful" or "feathery," or appropriate for "picking a big bunch," as they're primarily known for their very large, leathery, heart-shaped leaves rather than their flowers.


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 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!

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Part One

In which we are introduced to the town of Sleepy Hollow; its itinerant schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane; wealthy coquette Katrina Van Tassel; and local hero and roustabout Brom Bones; and in which we hear of the local superstition of the headless horseman; and Ichabod departs for a dinner party.



New short story! One of the most enduring examples of early American fiction, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was originally published in 1820 as part of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of Irving's short works. This book is commonly considered, along with James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales, one of the first works of American literature to be widely read back in Europe. Perhaps even more than anything by Cooper, "Sleepy Hollow" (and Irving's other best-known work, "Rip Van Winkle," also published in The Sketch Book) is one of those stories that has entered the American lexicon. Even those who've never read the story have an idea what you mean when you describe someone as looking like Ichabod Crane, and the image of the Headless Horseman, brandishing his flaming pumpkin aloft, has indelibly etched itself into our collective brain.

The illustrations I've picked out come from two different sources. The color illustrations are by Felix Octavius Carr Darley (more commonly known by F. O. C. Darley, and who can blame him) from an 1849 printing of The Sketch Book. Darley was considered one of the preeminent "genre" illustrators of the mid-1800s, creating watercolors or line illustrations for Irving, Cooper, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Clement C. Moore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many more. The black and white illustrations are from an 1863 edition, and are done by a variety of artists, who will be credited by their respective illustrations. Near as I can tell, only a few of these were actually created specifically to illustrate "Sleepy Hollow;" several are landscapes done by prominent local artists known specifically for, well, landscapes, and not for book illustrations, so I think they were preexisting works pressed into service for this printing. Several of said artists were followers of the Hudson River School of art, which focused on romantic landscapes of the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding mountains.

Oh, and due to the length of this story, I've broken it into two parts, of which this is obviously the first.

3:21 - "View in Sleepy Hollow," by William Hart (from a sketch by J. H. Hill)

This is one of those landscape works I mentioned.  William Hart was one of those members of the Hudson River School, and was known for his landscapes involving strong angled sunlight, foreground shadow, and cows. He, uh, painted a lot of cows. He is also the maternal grandfather of E. B. "bet I can make you cry over a spider" White. I haven't been able to figure out for sure who J. H. Hill was, but another of the pictures are by Hart from a sketch of his, so maybe he was some sort of assistant?

Much more after the jump!