Rob Reads to You: Recent Episodes
Rob Vary
In which the storybook romance has a happy ending, and Anne prepares for the next phase of her life; and in which your narrator can finally update his "currently reading" status on Goodreads.
Our final cover for this book is from a 2014 edition published by Sourcebooks Fire, the YA imprint of Sourcebooks. It's designed by Canadian illustrator Jacqui Oakley, who posted the in-progress rough designs of this cover on her site (scroll down a bit.) Oakley illustrated covers for the whole series, of course, and says that "as you can imagine, I got pretty good at painting red hair throughout this project. Each cover depicts Anne as she grows up, a specific building related to each story, as well as flowers and animals native to PEI." It's a lovely set of covers all together, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness that obviously went into each, and the fact that while none depict a specific scene from the book, they don't fall into the completely generic trap that so many of the others I've looked at do. A beautiful cover to bring our reading to a close.But we're not going to get out of this without a whole bunch of notes! Even though this isn't as long as the last two installments we somehow managed to need even more annotation, so look for them behind the jump.1:43 - "have her gray silk made princess." Presumably this means "to have her gray silk made into a princess line dress," a close-fitted style of dress where the bodice and skirt do not have a join or separation at the waist, and emphasizes the natural (well, corseted) figure, with no bustle, hoops, or crinoline. Like this:
They were especially popular around the late 1870s to early 1880s, around the time this story takes place, and has stayed a consistent part of dress design up through the present day.5:20 - "the vision and the faculty divine." This comes from William Wordsworth, whom we've met before, from his long poem The Excursion: Being a portion of The Recluse, a poem. He never finished The Recluse, so don't look. Anyway, this was from Book 1 of The Excursion: "The Wanderer":
O, many are the poets that are sownBy nature; men endowed with highest gifts,The vision and the faculty divine;Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse
In short, he goes on to talk about how many talented people there are who never discover their talent through lack of learning, an excess of temper, etc. Marilla has decided not to take further steps to try and discourage Anne's own poetic gifts, though I somehow think it was the narration and not Marilla herself that dragged Wordsworth into it.7:54 - "melancholy Byronic hero." We briefly met Lord Byron in Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1832 edition of Frankenstein, and I glancingly mentioned the "Byronic hero." Byron didn't actually invent the Byronic hero, as characters of the archetype existed before him, but he certainly codified and popularized it. The Byronic hero is the dark, brooding character, charismatic, passionate, and idealistic, but cynical. Inflexible in his philosophy and self-centered, yet mercurial in temperament and full of self-loathing, he (for this is usually a man, though not always) generally considers himself above the strictures of society. He the one that you, like Anne and Diana here, fall in love with, or think you want to fall in love with, as a teenager, before realizing that he's really just a self-important ass who needs to get over himself. See also: Hamlet, Mr. Rochester, Victor Frankenstein, Heathcliff, Batman, most vampires, and Lord Byron himself.7:59 - "things seen are mightier than things heard." Ah, our old friend, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This comes from his narrative poem Enoch Arden, published in 1864. It's the story of the titular Enoch, who loses his job and thus has to take work going to sea, but gets shipwrecked for ten years. When he finally returns, he finds that he's been declared dead and his wife had remarried a childhood friend of his, and has a child by him (added to the children she had with Enoch, now raised by this guy.) He wants them to be happy, so he doesn't reveal himself to them and dies of a broken heart. This quote comes from the part where Enoch, who had previously been informed of his family's new situation, actually sees them for the first time, and it really sinks in.8:55 - "if everybody saw alike. . . as the old Indian said, 'Everybody would want my squaw.'" Nope, no idea. I found a couple of other sources that use this or a similar expression (one attributing it to a "Cree chief," but they all came from after Anne of Avonlea, and all the words are just generic enough to make it hard to find sources that aren't just talking about something else entirely. So whether this is a reference to a specific story I can't find, or whether Montgomery made it up out of whole cloth, I can't tell you. Kinda racist either way, though.13:43 - "lares and penates." Lares were spirits of the dead who became guardian deities in ancient Rome. They protected places, which included individual households, roads, crossroads, cities, and even entire states. Penates were deities that were more specifically domestic, associated largely with the hearth and pantry of a specific household. The two often got conflated together under the umbrella of "household spirits," and sometime in the 1700s or so the phrase came to mean "all of one's household goods."17:08 - "helmet of Navarre . . . waved ever in the thickest of the fray." This most likely is a reference to the poem "The Battle of Ivry," or "Ivry, a Song of the Huguenots," by Thomas Babington Macauley. He wrote it as a young man in 1824, but eventually published it in 1842 as part of his Lays of Ancient Rome, a collection of narrative poems that were apparently standard reading in British schools for more than a century. Contrary to the title and most of the other poems, "The Battle of Ivry" is about the titular battle that won Henry IV of France and his Protestant forces the French throne over the forces of the Catholic League in 1590, as part of the French Wars of Religion. Before becoming King of France, Henry was King of Navarre, a small kingdom that lay on what is now the border of France and Spain, so it's his helmet we're talking about. Specifically, I'm pretty sure this is a reference to the lines
And in they burst, and on they rushed, while, like a guiding star,Amidst the thickest carnage blazed the helmet of Navarre.
17:23 - "horsehair trunk." Horsehair, or, uh, hair from a horse's tail or mane, can be woven into a very durable fabric that was often used for hard-wearing surfaces like upholstery and, as in this case, luggage.18:15 - "if not exactly a thing of beauty, certainly a joy forever." Surprisingly, this is apparently the first time any of our books to reference Keats. Huh. Anyway, this is a reference to the famous first line of John Keats's 1818 poem Endymion: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." The poem retells the myth of Endymion, a shepherd (or hunter, or king maybe?) who Selene, the Titan goddess of the moon, fell in love with. She had him put into an enchanted sleep so he would never leave her and would stay young forever, and had fifty(!) children by him. That's rough, buddy. Anyway, contemporary critics hated the poem, and even Keats was pretty critical of it and regretted publishing it, but that first line entered the popular lexicon and has stayed ever since.19:01 - "slept the sleep of the just and weary." I can find several other works that use this exact phrase, or the present-tense version of it, all from the 1890s through the 1920s and almost all from news articles for some reason, but no obvious source for it. Maybe just one of those things that just arose naturally in the public lexicon.19:56 - "a figure of fun." Basically, a person that other people make fun of.20:06 - "pour cats and dogs." Again, you all know this phrase surely, but no one's really sure where it comes from. Versions of it (like "rain dogs and polecats") date back at least to the 1650s and could be from Norse mythology, or the Greek phrase cata doxa ("contrary to belief"), the Old English word catadupe meaning "waterfall," and others.20:36 - "and upstairs was awaiting a bride, 'adorned for her husband.'" Another Bible quote, this one from Revelation 21:2: "And I John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (King James Version.) So, Miss Lavendar is a bride who looks like a post-apocalyptic heavenly city that looks like a bride.21:11 - "Raphael's cherubs." Painted by the legendary turtle-inspiring Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio di Urbino, aka Raphael. You know the ones:What I somehow never really realized is that these cherubs are just a fairly small detail of a much larger work called the Sistine Madonna, commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1512 for the church of San Sisto, Piacenza. Here's the whole thing:23:17 - "The bags of rice are in the pantry, ma'am, and the old shoes are behind the door." Throwing rice, of course, is a tradition that modern people have likely at least heard of, even if it has fallen out of favor in recent years. (No, it won't make birds explode. They don't exactly cook the grain they eat in the wild, after all.) Anyway, grain has long been a symbol of prosperity and fertility in many cultures, so it makes some sort of sense. But what's this with the old shoes? That's a new one on me, but apparently it was indeed a thing in Victorian times, especially in England and associated areas. You can read a whole 24-page treatise from 1895 on the possible origins of the custom, including theories that it was a call back to when the woman's family would back against the man capturing and running off with her, that it's a symbol of the "authority" over the woman transferring from her father to the groom, and that it came from a general ritual of luck symbolizing the transference of "life" from one person to another. Anyway, this custom eventually turned into tying shoes to the back of their carriages, presumably to cut down on bruises, then onto their automobiles once they became a thing, and then it seems that Americans decided they'd rather keep their shoes and started tying cans to the cars instead, a custom which I HAVE heard of, or at least seen in old cartoons.25:19 - "apple-pie order." This naturally just means that things are in neat and precise order, but the origins of the phrase are murky. The first recorded use of it was in the 1780 journal of a sailor named Thomas Pasley, where he wrote that the sailors had to be "clean and in apple-pie order on Sundays." It could be as simple as referring to the steps of making a pie, or pies stacked on shelves in a shop, or it could be a corruption of a French phrase like nappe-pliée, referring to neatly folded napkins, or cap-à-pie, meaning "head to foot."25:39 - "long, long thoughts." This is part of another Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, this one called "My Lost Youth." The poem reflects on Longfellow's youth growing up in Portland, Maine, and each of the ten stanzas ends with the refrain "A boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."27:47 - "guerdon." A reward.28:12 - "durance." An archaic form of "endurance" which also meant "imprisonment" or "confinement."And that's it! It only took us just shy of five years, but we've finally finished Anne of Avonlea. Next up with be a Short Story Interlude, and then a brand new book. Thanks for listening!
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
In which Miss Lavendar is sad and becomes increasingly attached to Paul, and the romantic ending to her story begins to come into focus, much to Anne's delight.
AAAH, look how cute this one is! Published by Sweet Cherry Publishing in 2018, with cover and illustrations by Elena Distefano. This is another oddly rare one to show an actual scene from the book, in this case Anne's embarrassing introduction to a famous author, when she was in kerchief and an old dress for cleaning and had just been changing the feathers in a mattress, oh and had accidentally turned her nose red. Ms. Distefano apparently decided to leave out the dyed nose, which admittedly would have looked rather odd and off-putting on a completely out-of-context cover. As it is, Anne just looks adorably flustered, and I love her.
Another extra-long one, so once again lots of notes coming your way!
5:50 - "fish days." Davy's talking about days where you "fast" by eating fish instead of meat, as Catholics used to do every Friday, and as several religions still do every Friday of Lent. It's established in the first book that the Cuthberts are Presbyterian and as near as I can tell they never had the "every Friday" rule, so he's likely just talking about various days of religious observation.7:24 - "grow like pigweed in the night." "Pigweed" can apparently refer to any of a number of different weedy plants that have been used as pig feed, but I'm pretty sure this is probably referring to Amaranthus retroflexus. 9:25 - "flourish like green bay trees." This is a reference to Psalm 37:35, which reads in the King James Bible as "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree." It's apparently more correctly translated as something like "a tree in its native soil." It didn't originally refer to any specific type of tree, but translations usually go with the bay laurel, an evergreen tree (thus, flourishing all year round) whose leaves were used to make the ancient Greek and Roman laurel wreaths and crowns and which, I am only just now learning, is the plant that the bay leaf comes from. Huh.13:28 - "blue pills." This is vague enough that it could mean just about anything, but there's a good chance Miss Lavendar is referring to the medicine known as "blue mass," a — yikes — mercury-based medicine of the time that was prescribed for everything from syphilis to constipation to toothache to childbirth pains to tuberculosis. Miss Lavendar is probably talking about how it was also prescribed for melancholia (now known as "depression.") In fact, Abe Lincoln supposedly took it for just that reason, though of course he eventually died due to a different sort of heavy-metal poisoning altogether.. . .too soon?14:28 - "pelican of the wilderness." This is another Psalms reference, this one to Psalm 102:6, part of a prayer outlining how miserable and wretched the supplicant is: "I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert" (KJV, again.) Once again it's unclear what specific birds are being referred to here, with other translations going with some variety of owl. Regardless, it's some sort of solitary bird in the desert, or wilderness, or ruins, or wasteland. Basically the antithesis of Anne Shirley in a strawberry patch.19:18 - "vine and fig tree." Another Biblical reference, though not Psalms this time. A version of the phrase is actually used three times: Micah 4:4, 1 Kings 4:25, and Zechariah 3:10, all of them basically referring to the simple joy of living on your own land.26:20 - "subscribed to the salary." The salary of a local minister in towns like Avonlea were paid by the congregation themselves, who would all pledge to pay a certain amount to make the total promised. Mr Harrison has apparently agreed to pay a share as well.28:52 - "capital of Afghanistan." Ooh, I know this one! It's Kabul!28:54 - "dates of the Wars of the Roses." Ooh, I definitely do not know this one! They're apparently May 22, 1455 - June 16, 1487. The Wars of the Roses, incidentally, were a war between rival factions of the House of Plantagenet, the Yorks and the Lancasters, who both claimed the throne of England. They basically wiped each other out, ending with the Lancastrian Henry Tudor killing off Yorkie Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth, then taking the crown as Henry VII and marrying Elizabeth of York, uniting the houses (more or less) and creating the new House of Tudor. I'm sure there are some nuances I'm missing, but I got the dates and so am one up on Anne's students.29:20 - "organdy." Organdy is a thin, semi-sheer, plain weave cotton fabric. It's best known as a stiff fabric used for curtains and petticoats, but there was also a soft version of it used for dresses.29:49 - "Foreign Missions." Presumably, Miss Lavendar means she donated to the missionaries in the church who would go to foreign countries.31:39 - "burst flower-like into rosy bloom." This is from the 1866 poem Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl, by John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier was a Quaker, and best known for his work and writings as an abolitionist. Abolition thankfully and by necessity went out of favor after the Civil War, at which point he wrote Snow-Bound, his most successful work. It's a long narrative poem, framed as a series of stories told by a family while snowed in. The quote in question is describing how the "old, rude-fashioned room" they are in lights up when the hearth-fire is lit.38:00 - "Prince Charming." Okay, obviously you all know what this means, the stock fairy-tale prince who exists solely to rescue the heroine and provide her with a happily-ever-after marriage. Most famously, the princes in Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella fit the bill. But it did get me to wondering where the specific term came from. Not Disney, of course, since Anne of Avonlea predates any of his works by decades. Arguably, it indirectly grew from two tales by Madame d'Aulnoy written in the 1600s: The Story of Pretty Goldilocks (no, not that Goldilocks) in which the hero's name was Avenant ("Fine" or "Beautiful" in French), and The Blue Bird, in which the hero was Le roi Charmant ("The Charming King.") When Andrew Lang published these stories in the 1890s in his Blue and Green Fairy Books, respectively, he translated the names to "Charming" and "King Charming."Close, but those guys aren't princes! It seems that the first known use of the exact term "Prince Charming" is in, of all places, the 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It's what the doomed actress Sibyl calls Dorian as he courts her. It's interesting that this first use of the term is already deconstructed and ironic, as (spoilers) Dorian is not exactly the hero of the tale, and certainly does not deliver a happily-ever-after to Sibyl.41:23 - "nods and becks and wreathed smiles." This comes from the poem "L'Allegro" by John "Paradise Lost" Milton, published in 1645. "L'Allegro" means "The Happy Man," and it's a pastoral poem framed as a supplication to the Greek goddess Euphrosyne, the Grace of Mirth. The line is from a portion where he's asking her to appear:
Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Nods, and Becks, and Wreathed Smiles...
The companion piece to this poem is "Il Penseroso," or "The Melancholy Man," a structurally identical poem where the writer dismisses all joy from his mind and hails an unnamed goddess of Melancholy. So. . . not so much Anne Shirley, except maybe in her more dramatic moments.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
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 roseand saunter'd home beneath a moon, that, justIn crescent, dimly rain'd about the leafTwilights of airy silver, till we reach'dThe 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!
In which are learned the details of Miss Lavendar's backstory with Mr. Irving and Paul explicitly compares her to his "little mother," and Gilbert and Anne's predictions of a major storm are unfortunately accurate.
Today's cover comes from Dover Publications in 2002, through their Dover Evergreen Classics line. It's another "Anne standing in front of the schoolhouse" cover, but I've got an odd fondness for this one. Maybe it's the combination of the sepia tones with the red highlights, or the actual spark of personality in her face and pencil behind her ear, but I think it's mostly that she looks like she's dressed for a community theater production of The Pirates of Penzance, which has absolutely no basis in the text but is 100% something Anne would take part in. And it's period appropriate!
Our last couple of installments were pretty light on notes, but we're making up for it with a goodly number this time around:
2:38 - "the world forgetting, by the world forgot." This is another from our old friend Alexander Pope, whom we last saw only three chapters ago. This one is from "Eloisa to Abelard," another of his Latin imitations. This one is not a translation with satire like his "Imitations of Horace," though, but an original poem down in the style of the epistolary poems of Ovid. It retells the well-known medieval story of nun and scholar Héloïse and her tragic affair with her teacher, Peter Abelard. The quote in question come from a portion where Eloisa is talking about how happy vestal virgins must be, having no sins, regrets, or worldly expectations to weigh them down. The passage is also the source of another phrase you may be more familiar with:
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!The world forgetting, by the world forgot.Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
7:13 - "Some are born old maids, some achieve old maidenhood, and some have maidenhood thrust upon them." This is a parody of the well-known Shakespearean quote from Twelfth Night: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." It's said by the character Malvolio, pompous steward to the wealthy countess Olivia. He reads it from a letter that he believes to be from her but is actually from several of the secondary characters, who wrote the letter as a prank to make him think Olivia was in love with him. This specific portion is where "Olivia" is assuring him that he need not worry that she so outranks him, and not to be afraid of the greatness that is most definitely now coming his way. In fact, he should start acting like he's already a nobleman and no longer a servant! (Spoilers: it does not go well for Malvolio.)
15:35 - "A Prophet in His Own Country." The title of Chapter 24 is a reference to a Biblical quote that appears in all four Gospels. The wording is different depending on the Gospel and the translation, but he basically says that a prophet may be accepted anywhere other than his own country. No one is going to accept that you're the Son of God (or can accurately predict the weather) when they know your parents, and your siblings, and remember you as a snot-nosed kid, and bought their furniture from you last week.
16:32 - "hymeneal altar." "Hymeneal" is an archaic word that means "having to do with weddings." It comes from the Greek god of weddings, Hymen, and is apparently unrelated to the anatomical word "hymen," despite its socially-constructed associations with "purity" on the wedding night. Seriously, people with hymens are not "sealed for freshness" like vacuum-packed lunchmeat. That's not a real thing.
26:07 - "how potent [the currant wine] was Anne, in her earlier days, had had all too good reason to know." In case you forgot when Anne accidentally got Diana drunk on "raspberry cordial."
28:15 - "Ginger’s gay dead body." I honestly thought this was a typo and supposed to be "gray dead body," because I suppose I had it in my head that Ginger was an African grey parrot. But no, it's like that on Gutenberg as well, so presumably it means that Ginger was a brightly-colored parrot like a macaw, and not that his dead body was especially happy or festive.
30:57 - "there was yet balm in Gilead." Another Biblical reference. The Balm of Gilead was a perfume/resin from a region that is now part of the country of Jordan. It was used medicinally and is mentioned in that context several times in the Bible. Most famously (and pertinently for Davy here) is in Jeremiah 8:22, where the prophet laments the fate of his people:
Is there no balm in Gilead,
Is there no physician there?
Why then is there no recovery
For the health of the daughter of my people?
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
In which Anne and Diana accidentally stumble upon an eccentric "old maid" in the woods who, to no one's surprise, turns out to be a kindred spirit, Anne and Marilla discuss said lady while chastising Davy, and the twins' final fate is settled, also to no one's surprise.
Greetings, quarantinos! Today we meet Miss Lavendar Lewis, who was mentioned by Rachel Lynde waaaaaaay back in Chapter One (which I read to you almost, uh, five years ago) when she told Anne about Paul Irving coming to the school, and how his father (now widowed) had been engaged to Miss Lavendar but they split up for reasons unknown. I'm sure none of this will be important at all!
Oh, and I fully realize that I am misspelling "lavender" here, but that's how it's spelled in the book, both for her name and when talking about the actual plant. It's like this in both my paperback and in the Project Gutenberg version, so it doesn't appear to just be an issue with the typesetting of my edition, nor can I find any evidence that this is some sort of "old-fashioned" spelling that Montgomery might have been using, so I guess maybe it's just a mistake that has somehow been carried through for over a century? And no one has wanted to fix it because, like me, they don't want to just change the spelling of a character's name? And they kept the spelling for the plant to, I don't know, make it less obvious? Anyway, I'll spell it correctly if I talk about the plant, but I'll retain the spelling for her name because. . . well, it's her name.
Our cover this time is from an Australian edition from 1955, published by Angus & Robertson (the same folks who did that fourth-wall-breaking cover from the '80s), and I am once again unable to find the artist's name. This one is interesting because it is, I think, the only one I've found that specifically features Paul Irving, despite the rather large part he plays in this particular volume. At least, I assume it's him. I can't think what other young boy might be walking alongside Anne, both carrying school items, while holding a small bouquet and staring up with a dreamy (one might almost say "vacant") expression.) Anyway, it's pretty enough, not wildly inaccurate, and applies to this specific book, so well done!
Just a couple of notes:
19:25 - "horns of elfland." This comes from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who you may remember from when Anne and her friends reenacted his telling of the story of the Lady of Shalott back in Anne of Green Gables, with hilarious results. This particular one comes from his poem "The Splendor Falls," which describes a sunset he saw over a waterfall in the mountains of Ireland. Go and read it; it's lovely and quite short.
24:51 - "Kerrenhappuch." Keren-happuch was an exceedingly minor character in the Bible. Remember the delightful story of Job? Where Job was a pious and righteous man, and Satan bet God that he was only so righteous because he had a comfy life and enjoyed God's protection, so God let Satan ruin Job's life by killing off his wife and children, financially ruining him, and stealing his health? And Job refused to get angry at God for his misfortunes, just accepting that it was all God's will while despairing that he did not know why? And God rewards his faith by healing him, giving him even more wealth than he had before, a brand-new wife, and seven new sons and three new daughters who were said to be the most beautiful women in the land? Yeah, Keren-happuch was the youngest of those daughters. Her name means "horn of kohl," so a container of eyeliner, I guess? It's unclear whether Diana was referencing her directly or just picked a weird name that happened to have a Biblical origin, as other people have indeed been called that, and it seems as though it would have been an egregiously old-fashioned name even then.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
In which Anne has a very nice day with three boys of varying levels of tediousness, then is surprised with hosting duties while at her least presentable; and in which your narrator is once again unable to restrain himself from complaining about Paul Irving.
Hi-ho, everyone! I hope you're all holding up well, staying home as much as possible and being careful if and when you must leave. Let's escape back into Avonlea for a bit, shall we?
Today's cover comes from the very edition I'm reading from, a Bantam Classics paperback from 1992 with cover art by Ben Stahl. It's a rather lovely painting, though it does fall a bit into that "generic" category I mentioned last time. We've got a pretty well-put-together Anne amidst a bunch of pretty flowers with what I assume is the schoolhouse in the background. Nothing really to tie it to this specific book so much.
Only a couple of mostly-simple notes this time around:
25:38 - "help Mr. Harrison haul dulse." I really expected this to be some sort of grain, but apparently it's a type of red seaweed that's been harvested for food for centuries in Ireland, Iceland, the northeastern US, and the Atlantic coast of Canada (which is, of course, where Prince Edward Island is.) Oh, and fun fact in case you didn't know: seaweed is not a plant, but is actually a type of algae.
35:22 - "forced to content herself with her black lawn." Lawn in this context is a type of plain weave linen, simple and fairly hard-wearing, but not as coarse and cheap as (say) wincey.
37:54 - "feast of reason and flow of soul." Anne here is quoting the great 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope, from his Imitations of Horace. Horace, in turn, was a 1st century CE Roman lyric poet whose works were very popular with Neoclassical writers like Pope. A popular thing for many of these writers to do was to translate classical works like Horaces Satires but update the cultural references, thus satirizing things in the present day in an imitation of the satires of 1800 years prior. Anyway, that's what Pope was doing here, and he used the phrase Anne quoted to describe congenial conversation.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
In which hijinks predictably ensue when Anne tries to host a dinner for a famous author; more ensuing happens when she tries to fix one of the results of said dinner; and in which all it took was a global pandemic to get your narrator to start recording again.
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!
In which summer vacation begins with a joyous trip to the graveyard, a question of theological geography is cleared up, and Anne prepares for a visit from a literary luminary; and in which our narrator asks if anything interesting happened while he was gone.
Hey, remember me? Been a long time! Almost exactly a year to be specific, after which an escape back to Avonlea — which, apropos of nothing, is in Canada — is sounding really good.
First up, our cover this time around comes from a 1987 edition published by the Australian firm of Angus and Robertson, where they published the whole series with covers that included something breaking out of the frame for some reason. I'd like to think that this symbolized Anne's out-of-the-box thinking or something, but they probably did this with lots of other books as well. And frankly, I don't know if I really feel comfortable with a post-modern, fourth-wall-breaking Anne.
Now for notes!
8:35 - "How fair the realm / Imagination opens to the view." All right, I am totally drawing a blank on where this quotation comes from. All the sources I can find list Ms. Montgomery as its author, though it's clearly formatted as a quotation in the text. Moreover, Montgomery has quoted this more than once: in a 1903 diary entry (six year before Anne of Avonlea was published and in a 1927 letter, for instance, each time clearly delineated with quotation marks. Looking for only part of the phrase (in case she's paraphrasing) gets the same results. Anyone else have any ideas?
8:55 - "east o' the sun, west o' the moon." Oh good, this one's easy. This is from a Norwegian folk tale of the same name, where the title refers to the impossible-to-find location of the troll castle the heroine's husband was spirited away to. Also her husband was a bear. I think I may actually read this as our next Short Story Interlude, if only to tell you the personal connection I have with it and explain one of my more esoteric tags.
11:31 - "Not failure but low aim is crime." Helpfully, Mrs. Allan partly sources this one herself, attributing it to "Lowell." This turns out to be the American Romantic poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), from his poem "For an Autograph." The whole line reads
Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,—
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
Which, FINE, I've already started recording again, sheesh. Quit bugging me, Lowell.
25:50 - "In the elder days of art / Builders wrought with greatest care / Each minute and unseen part / For the gods see everywhere" Ah, again helpfully sourced in the text! This is from "The Builders," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1850 collection The Seaside and the Fireside (the "Fireside" portion, in case you're curious). Longfellow, incidentally, was part of the group of 19-century New England poets called the Fireside Poets, which also included James Russell Lowell. Montgomery had certain preferences.
Oh, and you may have noticed that I've switched over to hosting my books on SoundCloud! This means you can more easily stream them to your phone through their handy app, where they're already helpfully parceled out into their own playlists. You can find all of my stuff here, where you can also favorite, make comments, subscribe, etc. At some point I'll go back and update all the old posts with the new embedded player.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
In which the twins will be staying with Anne and Marilla for a little longer, to no one's surprise, a theological discussion is had, and a potential disaster for the Improvement Society is averted by political corruption; and in which the narrator just sort of gives up on keeping all the very minor characters' voices straight.
Welcome back! I hope everyone had a good holiday season. We're diving back into Avonlea with the drama of aesthetically displeasing advertisements. No notes this time around, so we'll just have this installment's cover, from Aladdin Classics in 2005:
This has what appears to be an actual vintage photograph, which works fine as it's at least roughly the right time period and age to be Anne. I am curious, though, as to what exactly is going on with her left hand there. Is it just me, or is that handbag rather blatantly photoshopped in? Why is her hand in such an awkward position? Is that photoshopped too? Why would they do either of those things? Why is the bag flying up like that? Is she supposed to have just moved her forearm up very quickly for some reason that the rest of her body is unaware of? Is it just about to whap her in the face? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S HAPPENING.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
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!
In which Davy makes a good deal of trouble due to not being brought up right, and Anne writes a letter to someone we don't care about relating numerous funny, strange, or creative things her students have said; and in which our narrator is pretty sure that if Anne were around today she'd totally have her own Tumblr.
Today's cover is from Sterling Publishing in 2008 and makes the unusual choice of showing Anne as a teacher, with her class. I hadn't really realized it before, but it really is a bit odd that so few covers seem to depict her in this way, considering how a big part of this book relates to her teaching and relationships with her students. Here's a fun game: try and figure out which of these students are the saintly Paul Irving, the terrible Anthony Pye, the put-upon St. Clair Donnel, the clumsy Barbara Shaw, and the coquettish Prillie Rogerson! And wonder if the illustrator actually tried to represent the specific children or not! (I really have no idea if they did or did not.)
Notes:
12:59 - "asseverated." Man, the Pyes animadvert, Davy asseverates... Ms. Montgomery, I love you and I love your work, but you need to put down your thesaurus for a while. You can just say that Davy declared, or asserted, or stated earnestly or something.
21:00 - "Thomas à Becket." AKA St. Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of King Henry II in the twelfth century. Though the two had started out as friends, after his election to the archbishopship (... is that a word? That doesn't look right.) Becket had a bit of a change of heart and came into conflict with the king regarding the relative rights of the crown and the church. It got so bad between them that in 1170 Henry said... something. It's uncertain what, exactly, though tradition states it was "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" Whatever it was, it was interpreted (rightly or wrongly) by four of his knights as an order. They found Becket in Canterbury and demanded he come and account for himself. He refused, went in to say vespers, and they killed him. The Catholic and Anglican churches both venerate him as a martyr and a saint.
You might notice something missing from the above account, though: the "à." It's not actually part of his name, and no one's entirely sure why people sometime in the 1600s or so started putting it in there. Some say it was in imitation of Thomas à Kempis for some unknown reason. It doesn't even make sense in Becket's name, because it means "of" or "from" (so Kempis's name actually means "Thomas from Kempen," where Kempen was his hometown.) But Becket wasn't from anywhere named "Becket." One of those weird linguistic mysteries how it really got and stayed there for so long.
21:05 - "William Tyndale wrote the New Testament." Tyndale was a 16th-century English scholar, best known for his translation of the Bible into English at a time when unauthorized English Bibles were against the laws of both the Church of England and England itself. His was also the first English Bible to work directly from Greek and Hebrew texts (rather than working from later translations into Latin), and the first to be printed on the printing press. He later went on to vocally disapprove of King Henry VIII's divorces. For these varied crimes, he was eventually convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. Well, strangled to death while tied to the stake, and then burned.
21:09 - "Claude White says a 'glacier' is a man who puts in window frames!" Claude White is of course looking for the word "glazier."
22:32 - "carded rolls." Carding is a process of basically turning a raw, fibrous material like cotton or wool into a useful form by untangling the fibers, laying them out parallel to each other, and locking them together in a sort of web, using a sort of brush/comb called a card. This creates a sort of mat that can be pulled up off the card in rolls that can then be used to spin out yarn.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
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 buggyBy 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 CarBy 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!
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!
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!
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!
I decided to go with the Robert Browning poetic version, published in his collection Dramatic Lyrics in 1842, partly because I liked its humor and wordplay and largely because it's longer than most other versions and I didn't want this to be only like five minutes long. The poem was published on its own in 1888 by Frederick Warne with beautiful illustrations by Kate Greenaway (1846-1901). Greenaway was an author as well and generally preferred to illustrate only her own works, so this was a bit of a rare exception for her. Pretty unusually for a children's illustrator, she actually became pretty influential in the world of fashion. See, as the daughter of a seamstress she paid especially close attention to the clothing of her characters, and generally dressed them in detailed styles from the early 1800s, rather than in current fashion. The popularity of her illustrations is actually credited with a late-Victorian resurgence in Regency children's fashion. Anyway, it's her illustrations I'll be sharing here. There are so many of them and many of them are packed so tightly together that I won't bother time-stamping them (also I forgot.)
| | | Frontispiece, which seems to assume the children got a happy ending. |
| | | Title page illustration |
| | | Verso (the back of) the title page illustration |
| | | Crest. Of the town, maybe? It looks like Greenaway might've just made this up. |
| | | Story header: The mayor and council speaking to the Piper |
| | | Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, |
| | | And ate the cheeses out of the vats |
| | | And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles |
| | | Split open the kegs of salted sprats, Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, |
Oh, and notes! At 5:44 here, a sprat is a small type of fish, eaten in many places around the world.
| | | And even spoiled the women's chats |
Ladies and their chattin', amirite?
| | | By drowning their speaking With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and flats. |
| | | At last the people in a body To the Town Hall came flocking: "Tis clear,'' cried they, "our Mayor's a noddy; "And as for our Corporation -- shocking" |
| | | And at the scarf's end hung a pipe; And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying As if impatient to be playing Upon this pipe, as low it dangled Over his vesture so old-fangled.) |
In the piper's boasting around 8:30, he first says he did great feats of extermination for the Cham in Tartary. Tartary we talked about in Frankenstein, but the Cham probably refers to the Cham Albanians, who originate in Albania and northern Greece, which... are not really close to what was called Tartary, but are at least somewhat closer and more likely to be known to an English writer than the Cham people of southeast Asia. The Cham Albanians did have a large Islamic population that some called by some variety of "Turk," which may be how they were conflated into Tartary.
The piper goes on to talk about the Nizam in Asia, who was the hereditary monarch of Hyderabad, a princely state in India from 1724 until Indian independence in 1948. This is rather notably anachronistic for a poem taking place in 1376.
| | | "And as for what your brain bewilders, "If I can rid your town of rats "Will you give me a thousand guilders?'' "One? fifty thousand!'' -- was the exclamation Of the astonished Mayor and Corporation. |
At 8:44, a guilder (from the Middle High German gulden pfenninc, or "golden penny") was originally a sort of generic term in the Holy Roman Empire for any sort of gold coin in the 14th to 16th centuries. At the time, the actual gold currency in use was properly called the Fiorino d'oro, or the florin, and the two remain largely synonymous. (Fans of The Princess Bride who did not know this fact may suddenly find themselves getting a very subtle joke.) Eventually, "guilder" became the general term for some countries' currencies, whether golden or not. Most notably and recently, the Netherlands used the Dutch guilder until adopting the Euro in 2002.
| | | And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered, You heard as if an army muttered |
9:07 - "like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled." Try this for yourself! (With safety goggles, a fire extinguisher, and an adult safety partner.) In chemistry, different elements have different emission spectra, meaning that when their electrons transition from a high energy state to a lower energy state they release the extra energy in the form of photons. These photons will be at very distinct wavelengths corresponding to the amount of energy released. Since no two elements will have the exact same number of electrons all transitioning from the exact same states, the exact amount spectrum of light emitted is unique to that specific element.
In other words, if you (say) run an electric current through a gas or sprinkle grains of a solid into a fire, the resulting color(s) of light will tell you what elements make up that gas or solid. For instance, running electricity through hydrogen will cause it to release red, blue-green, blue-violet, and violet light, which all mix together to make a pretty purple color. To see the individual colors (since science likes to be more exact than "a mix that makes a pretty purple color") you would view that light through a diffraction grating, like those glasses you wore as a kid that made everything look all rainbowy. Some release far more colors, as well (here's iron, for instance). This is how, say, neon signs make light (though only ones that make a nice red-orange color actually use neon itself), and how we figure out what the sun, stars, and other astronomical bodies are made out of.
Which brings us back to our poem! What Browning describes is technically know as a flame test. The sodium in table salt has a distinctive emission spectrum that is primarily a very pure yellow color, which can easily be seen if you, say, sprinkle some salt into a candle flame.
Have I mentioned that my day job is as a science educator?
| | | And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. |
10:14 - "train-oil flasks." Train-oil is another term for whale oil, which was, yes, harvested from whales and used in food, soap, and as a lamp oil. We'll learn more about this when we read Moby Dick.*
10:29 - "nuncheon." I could swear we already did this one, didn't we? In like... Alice, or something? No, I guess not. Well, anyway, a nuncheon is a midday snack.
10:32 - "sugar-puncheon." Hey, I'm as surprised as you that Browning got not one but two perfect rhymes for "luncheon." A puncheon was a specific barrel size, holding in the neighborhood of 80 gallons.
| | | "Go," cried the Mayor, "and get long poles, "Poke out the nests and block up the holes!" |
| | | "First, if you please, my thousand guilders!" |
11:22 - "cellar's biggest butt." Heh. Heh heh. I'm sorry, I'm, like, twelve. If you scroll up in the link for puncheon, you'll see that a butt or a pipe is another barrel size, of about 120 gallons. Some say this is actually what people originally referred to when talking about a buttload of something. Sure.
I forgot to timestamp this, but it's probably around 11:00 - "put in your poke." Remember from the first (and, um, only so far) installment of Anne of Avonlea, a poke is an old term for "bag."
| | | "A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!" |
12:19 - "don't think I'll bate a stiver!" Remember the Dutch guilder, mentioned above? A stiver or stuiver is one-twentieth of that. He's basically saying he won't haggle over even a nickel of his fee.
| | | Once more he stept into the street, And to his lips again Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane; |
| | | And ere he blew three notes |
| | | (such sweet Soft notes as yet musician's cunning Never gave the enraptured air) |
| | | There was a rustling |
| | | that seemed like a bustling |
| | | Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling |
| | | Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering |
Wooden shoes, stivers... Browning does realize this takes place in Germany and not the Netherlands, right? And that those are two different places?
| | | Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering |
| | | And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering |
| | | Out came the children running. |
| | | All the little boys and girls |
| | | With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls |
| | | And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls |
...okay Browning, now you're starting to creep me out in a different way.
| | | Tripping |
| | | and skipping |
| | | ran merrily after |
| | | The wonderful music with shouting and laughter. |
| | | The Mayor was dumb, and the Council stood As if they were changed into blocks of wood, Unable to move a step, or cry To the children merrily skipping by |
| | | Did I say, all? No! One was lame, And could not dance the whole of the way; |
Eesh, words we don't use anymore to describe people.
16:11 - "pipe or tabor." A tabor is a type of snare drum, usually hung about the neck and played with one hand. Often, the other hand is used to play -- yes -- a pipe.
Incidentally, the street Browning is referring to here is known as Bungelosenstrasse, or "Drumless Street." On the corner of it is the Rattenfängerhaus, or Rat-catcher House, built in the 1600s and which has an inscription on its facade mentioning the legend. It's a restaurant now. I bet you can guess its theme!
| | | So, Willy, let me and you be wipers Of scores out with all men -- especially pipers! And, whether they pipe us free from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise! |
I... really don't know who Willy is supposed to be here. I mean, the reader, obviously, but why "Willy?"
| | | End papers |
And that's it! We'll be moving on with Anne of Avonlea soon, I promise. I've got one in the can already. Really!
If you would like to read along, the text and illustrations can be found at Project Gutenberg, or as actual scans from this edition at the University of Indiana Library. No reading ahead, though!
We will not be reading Moby Dick. [Back]*
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!
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 thoughthim mighty civil and handsome. |
| | | Title illustration |
| | | What a funny sight it is to see a brood of ducklings with a hen! |
As mentioned in my introduction, that lady there is Mrs. Cannon (no, not given a first name in my references), who was the wife of the farm manager at Hill Top, Beatrix Potter's farm.
| | | 'I wish to hatch my own eggs; I will hatch them all by myself.' |
| | | She tried to hide her eggs; but they were always found and carried off. |
And those are Mrs. Cannon's children, Betsy and Ralph, to whom this tale was dedicated.
| | | She was wearing a shawl and a poke bonnet. |
2:48 - "poke bonnet." A poke bonnet is... well, the kind of bonnet that Jemima is wearing there, that you see at some point in pretty much any story that takes place in 19th-century England or America. It's got a wide, stiff brim that goes over and around the wearer's face to provide both shade and privacy.
| | | When she reached the top of the hill, she saw a wood in the distance. |
| | | She ran downhill a few yards flapping her shawl. |
| | | She flew beautifully when she had got a good start. |
| | | She was startled to find an elegantly dressed gentleman reading a newspaper. |
| | | The gentleman raised his eyes above his newspaper. |
| | | 'Ah! is that so? indeed!' said the gentleman with sandy whiskers |
| | | He led the way to a very retired, dismal-looking house amongst the fox-gloves. |
4:59 - "built of faggots." Erm, in the UK, especially prior to the 20th century but even still today, the word "faggot" meant a a twig, or more commonly a bundle of twigs. The more modern and, um, extremely offensive meaning was first recorded in 1914, and even today is primarily used in the US.
| | | The gentleman opened the door, and showed Jemima in. |
| | | It was very comfortable; and she made a nest without any trouble at all. |
| | | When she came out, the sandy whiskered gentleman was sitting on a log reading the newspaper. |
| | | He used to turn them over and count them when Jemima was not there. |
He... also apparently would take off his clothes to do so? I mean, look, these are still animals who by rights shouldn't be wearing clothes in the first place. But, you know, they've been anthropomorphized to varying degrees. Some, like Peter Rabbit and Jemima, only wear a couple of articles of clothing. Others, like Squirrel Nutkin and Kep (who we'll meet in a moment), wear none. But this guy was fully-clothed, pants and all! Except for here. I mean, look, I'm not gonna judge what foxes wear or don't wear while alone in the privacy of their own feather-shed, I'm just saying it seems an odd artistic choice is all.
| | | 'Let us have a dinner-party all to ourselves!' |
| | | She went round the farm-garden, nibbling off snippets of all the different sorts of herbs that are used for stuffing roast duck. |
Okay, see, this is a little less jarring, since Jemima only wears the bonnet and the shawl, and it's made fairly clear at the beginning that she really only even wears those when traveling outside of the farmyard. Perhaps I'm overthinking this.
| | | Jemima was rather in awe of the collie; she told him the whole story. |
| | | He went to look for two fox-hound puppies. |
| | | She was rather burdened with bunches of herbs and two onions in a bag. |
| | | 'Be sharp!' He was rather abrupt. |
| | | She heard pattering feet round the back of the shed. |
| | | And nothing more was ever seen of that foxy-whiskered gentleman. |
| | | The puppies rushed in and gobbled up all the eggs before he could stop them. |
| | | Jemima Puddle-duck was escorted home in tears. |
| | | She laid some more in June, and she was permitted to keep them herself. |
So the moral is... don't try to take more responsibility than you can handle? Be aware when you're not suited for parenthood? Do trust people who have who sheds full of what are quite obviously bodily remains?
The Tale of Two Bad Mice
| | | Frontispiece - He put the ham in the middle of the floor, and hit it with the tongs! |
| | | Title illustration |
| | | Once upon a time there was a very beautiful doll's-house. |
| | | It belonged to two Dolls called Lucinda and Jane. |
| | | There were two red lobsters and a ham, a fish,a pudding, and some pears and oranges. |
11:42 - "the dolls' perambulator." A perambulator, also known as a pram, is what we in the US would be more likely to call a baby buggy. This has of course largely fallen out of favor for more modern methods of baby transport.
| | | Tom Thumb put out his head for a moment. |
| | | A minute afterwards, Hunca Munca, his wife, put her head out, too |
It delights me how often I got to say "Hunca Munca" during this story.
| | | They pushed the front door—it was not fast. |
FUN FACT: The word "fast" is what is known as a contronym, meaning a word that holds contradictory meanings. An example would be, say, the word "off." In the morning, your alarm clock goes off, and then you turn it off. "Fast" can mean either "moving quickly from one place to another" or, as is intended in this case, "stuck firmly in one place."
| | | Such a lovely dinner was laid out upon the table! |
| | | Tom Thumb set to work at once to carve the ham. |
| | | Hunca Munca stood up in her chair, and chopped at the ham with another lead knife. |
I'm not really sure what Hunca Munca's line "It's as hard as the hams at the cheesemonger's" means, precisely. My best guess is that's it's just some sort of insult towards cheesemongers. Also, I like to say "cheesemonger."
Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeesemonger.
| | | The ham broke off the plate with a jerk, and rolled under the table. |
| | | Bang, bang, smash, smash! |
| | | They put it into the red-hot crinkly paper fire in the kitchen; but it would not burn either. |
| | | Tom Thumb went up the kitchen chimney and looked out at the top |
| | | When she turned them upside down, there was nothing inside except red and blue beads. |
14:04 - "Sago." Sago is a starch that comes from the stem of certain tropical palms. It's used to make a type of flour, and is commonly made into small "pearls" that are similar to tapioca, which you can see is also available in the dolls' kitchen.
| | | She remembered that she herself was in want of a feather bed. |
14:27 - "bolster." As you can probably tell from context, a bolster is a long pillow or cushion.
| | | With Tom Thumb's assistance she carried the bolster downstairs. |
| | | The book-case and the bird-cage refused to go into the mouse-hole. |
| | | Hunca Munca went to fetch a cradle. |
| | | The mice rushed back to their hole, and the dolls came into the nursery. |
| | | What a sight met the eyes of Jane and Lucinda! |
| | | Hunca Munca has got the cradle, and some of Lucinda's clothes. |
See, this here is a picture that really puts a different spin on the words. No mention is made in the narration of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca having little baby mouselets. It doesn't necessarily excuse their wanton, angry destruction, but the thievery was quite obviously so that they might support their tiny, verminous children.
| | | She also has some useful pots and pans, and several other things. |
We also see here how animals start to anthropomorphize: it all starts with a few doll clothes and cookware.
| | | 'I will get a doll dressed like a policeman!' |
Look carefully at the windows: Jane and Lucinda are peeking out, clearly terrified that their house will be torn asunder by these vandals again.
| | | But the nurse said,—'I will set a mouse-trap!' |
"No no, it's perfectly safe. Go on, Timmy. You go first."
| | | Upon Christmas Eve, he and Hunca Munca stuffed it into one of the stockings of Lucinda and Jane. |
You know, this whole thing is some sort of horror story if told from the perspective of Jane and Lucinda.
Oh, and Lucinda: Jane's your "cook," but she never does any cooking and she shares your bed? You're not fooling anyone.
| | | Hunca Munca comes with her dust-pan and her broom to sweep the Dollies' house! |
And the moral of this one, I suppose is... that it's okay to break into people's houses to destroy and/or steal their property because it will ultimately civilize you? I feel like Potter is drifting away from the clear-cut morality tales of Peter, Nutkin, and Benjamin.
The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher
| | | Frontispiece |
| | | Title illustration |
| | | Mr. Jeremy Fisher. |
Jeremy here, with the dark spots behind his eyes and the stripes on his hind legs, is probably a common frog, found throughout most of Europe and into Russia.
| | | But Mr. Jeremy liked getting his feet wet. |
| | | He was quite pleased when he looked out and saw large drops of rain. |
| | | 'I will get some worms and go fishing.' |
| | | He set off with enormous hops to the place where he kept his boat. |
18:53 - "macintosh." For those of us who live in the States, a Mackintosh (as the spelling has now been standardized) is a generic term for a raincoat, though properly speaking it specifically means one made out of a rubberized fabric. It was named for its creator, Charles Macintosh, who first started selling them in 1824. Apparently, the early coats had a tendency to melt in hot weather, and were also pretty smelly and stiff. This was largely fixed in the 1840s when Thomas Hancock, who by that point owned Macintosh's clothing company, patented the process of vulcanization. This process involves adding sulfur to the rubber (sulfur --> volcanoes --> Vulcan, Roman god of volcanos --> vulcanization), which cures it and makes it more durable, pliable, and less sticky. This now lets use use rubber for things like car tires, shoe soles, and hockey pucks.
...short answer: it's a raincoat.
| | | The boat was round and green, and very like the other lily-leaves. |
| | | Mr. Jeremy took a reed pole, and pushed the boat out into open water. |
| | | He settled himself cross-legged and arranged his fishing tackle. |
| | | For nearly an hour he stared at the float. |
| | | 'I will eat a butterfly sandwich, and wait till the shower is over.' |
| | | A great big water-beetle tweaked the toe of one of his goloshes. |
| | | 'I trust that is not a rat,' said Mr. Jeremy Fisher. |
| | | There was a bite almost directly! |
| | | 'A minnow! a minnow! I have him by the nose!' |
| | | The stickleback floundered about the boat. |
Sticklebacks are weird fish. They don't have scales, for one thing, though they do of course have sharp spines along their backs. All species of sticklebacks show a similar mating behavior, which is also odd for fish: the male makes a nest out of vegetation, the female lays her eggs in the nest, and the male fertilizes them and guards them until they hatch.
| | | A shoal of other little fishes put their heads out, and laughed. |
| | | Mr. Jeremy sat disconsolately on the edge of his boat, sucking his sore fingers. |
| | | A great big enormous trout came up—ker-pflop-p-p-p! with a splash—and it seized Mr. Jeremy with a snap. |
This trout is most likely a brown trout (Salmo trutta) which is the most common freshwater trout in Britain. And seriously, compare this illustration to the images on Wikipedia. Man, Beatrix Potter was good.
| | | In less than half a minute it spat him out again. |
| | | He swam with all his might to the edge of the pond. |
| | | He scrambled out on the first bank he came to. |
| | | He hopped home across the meadow with his macintosh all in tatters. |
21:58 - "What a mercy that was not a pike!" Whereas a brown trout in a small freshwater pond would likely only grow to maybe a foot long and weigh a couple of pounds, the northern pike averages between two to five feet and can weigh over 50 pounds! They are also known to be pretty aggressive feeders that are not terribly particular about their prey, so it's doubtful that poor Jeremy's mackintosh would've put one of them off.
| | | His friends both came to dinner. |
| | | Sir Isaac Newton wore his black and gold waistcoat. |
AHAHAAA GET IT HE'S A NEWT! Oh, that really delights me more than it should. Sir Isaac here is probably a great or Northern crested newt (Triturus cristatus), the largest and rarest of the three newts native to Great Britain. Since the relative sizes here are unclear, the black-on-gold irregular blotches on his "waistcoat" are the clue. Assuming that Sir Isaac is, in fact, a male, we can also tell that it is not mating season, because then he would have a very large, prominent crest running down his back. Also, I'm a huge dork, and once again love Potter's attention to scientific details.
| | | Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise brought a salad with him in a string bag. |
As an alderman, Mr. Ptolemy Tortoise is a member of the municipal assembly or council who was elected not by popular vote, but by members of the council themselves.
And... I'm really not sure what species of tortoise he's supposed to be. I didn't know this, but Great Britain doesn't actually HAVE any native species of turtle, except for some sea turtles around their coasts. There are now a couple of introduced terrapins, the red-eared slider and the European pond turtle, but those are both semi-aquatic, and Ptolemy here is quite definitely a land-dweller. Hmm. Probably someone's imported pet.
| | | They had a roasted grasshopper with lady-bird sauce. |
22:37 - "lady-bird sauce." Here's another England/US thing. In the States, we mostly call these "ladybugs." Apparently, entomologists tend to call them either ladybird beetles or lady beetles, since they aren't true bugs, which I didn't even know was a thing until now.
And the moral is: don't go fishing. Can do!
All right, that's all for now! Thanks for listening!
If you would like to read along, the texts and illustrations can be found at Project Gutenberg: Peter Rabbit, Two Bad Mice, and Mr Jeremy Fisher. No reading ahead, though!
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!
| | | Title illustration |
| | | The lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree. |
| | | 'Now my dears,' said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, 'you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden.' |
| | | 'Now run along, and don't get into mischief. I am going out.' |
| | | Then old Mrs. Rabbit took a basket and her umbrella, and went through the wood to the baker's. |
| | | Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail, who were good little bunnies, went down the lane to gather blackberries. |
| | | Peter, who was very naughty, ran straight away to Mr. McGregor's garden, and squeezed under the gate! |
| | | First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes; |
| | | And then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley. |
| | | But round the end of a cucumber frame, whom should he meet but Mr. McGregor! |
3:33 - "Cucumber frames." Wait... we heard about cucumber frames mentioned way, way back in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, our very first book! I hadn't decided at that time to do the unnecessarily extensive notes that I do now, so here we go: Cucumbers grow on a creeping vine and are usually cultivated to grow up on trellises or frames. This makes them less susceptible to disease, less likely to rot, and more able to reach the sun, in addition of course to saving space in your garden.
| | | He jumped up and ran after Peter, waving a rake and calling out, 'Stop thief!' |
| | | He lost one of his shoes among the cabbages,and the other shoe amongst the potatoes. |
| | | I think he might have got away altogether if he had not unfortunately run into a gooseberry net |
4:05 - "Gooseberry net." The net that Peter gets his buttons caught in is placed over gooseberry bushes to keep the birds away. In my opinion, this explains the next part.
| | | His sobs were overheard by some friendlysparrows, who... implored him to exert himself. |
| | | Peter wriggled out just in time, leaving his jacket behind him. |
| | | And rushed into the tool-shed, and jumped into a can. |
| | | Mr. McGregor was quite sure that Peter was somewhere in the tool-shed. |
| | | And tried to put his foot upon Peter, who jumped out of a window. |
| | | Peter sat down to rest. |
| | | She only shook her head at him. Peter began to cry. |
| | | A white cat was staring at some gold-fish. |
| | | His back was turned towards Peter, and beyond him was the gate! |
| | | He slipped underneath the gate, and was safe at last in the wood outside the garden. |
| | | Mr. McGregor hung up the little jacket and the shoes for a scare-crow |
| | | His mother was busy cooking; she wondered what he had done with his clothes. |
| | | 'One table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time.' |
| | | But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper. |
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
| | | Frontispiece |
| | | Title illustration |
| | | His name was Nutkin. |
| | | Amongst those trees stands a hollow oak-tree, which is the house of an owl who is called Old Brown. |
| | | All the little squirrels came out of the wood, and down to the edge of the lake. |
| | | They made little rafts out of twigs. |
| | | 'Old Mr. Brown, will you favour us with permission to gather nuts upon your island?' |
| | | But Nutkin was excessively impertinent in his manners. |
10:30 - "I'll give you a groat." The groat in Nutkin's obnoxious riddle was an English coin issued irregularly between the 13th century and the mid-19th century. It was silver and was worth four pence. Other countries had coins called groats as well, particularly Scotland and Ireland of course, but Nutkin is probably referring to the English one, though it hadn't been in general circulation in England for nearly 50 years by the time his story was published.
(Incidentally, if you can't figure out the answers to Nutkin's riddles and haven't picked up on Potter's subtle clues, listen for the italics.)
| | | The squirrels filled their little sacks with nuts. |
| | | Twinkleberry and the others brought a fine fat mole. |
| | | 'If you touch Hitty Pitty,Hitty Pitty will bite you!" |
11:07 - "Nettle." Is this really the first reference to nettles we've had? Or just the first one I decided to write a note about, because they made such a big deal about it? Either way, "nettle" can refer to a bunch of different plants, but "true" nettles are those that belong to the genus Urtica. The best known of these, and the one that these stories tend to refer to, is Urtica dioica, the common or stinging nettle. They are covered with small stinging hairs that are painful to the touch and cause a histamine reaction in the skin. A frequent use of them in these stories is references to "grasping the nettle firmly," because gently touching the nettle allows the hairs to sting you, but holding it firmly crushes the hairs down so they can't sting you so well.
| | | Nutkin peeped through the key-hole. |
| | | But Nutkin sat upon a beech-stump playing marbles. |
| | | On the third day the squirrels got up very early and went fishing. |
| | | Nutkin ran in front, singing. |
| | | Each beetle was wrapped up carefully in a dock-leaf, fastened with a pine-needle pin. |
| | | Nutkin gathered robin's pincushions off a briar bush, and stuck them full of pine-needle pins. |
| | | It was so sweet and sticky that they licked their fingers as they put it down upon the stone. |
| | | Old Mr. Brown turned up his eyes in disgust at the impertinence of Nutkin. |
| | | But Nutkin played ninepins with a crab apple and green fir-cones. |
| | | They brought a new-laid egg in a little rush basket as a last parting present for Old Brown. |
| | | He opened one eye and shut it again. But still he did not speak. |
| | | Nutkin danced up and down like a sunbeam; but still Old Brown said nothing at all. |
| | | He took a running jump right onto the head of Old Brown! |
| | | There was Old Brown sitting on his door-step, quite still, with his eyes closed, as if nothing had happened. |
| | | This looks like the end of the story; but it isn't. |
Okay, I admit, I'm a little confused as to why Potter says that Nutkin was in Old Mr. Brown's waistcoat pocket and then clearly drew him without a waistcoat. Unless "in one's waistcoat pocket" is some British euphemism for "pinned to the ground by one's talons." I am also intrigued by the hint of what appears to be maybe a chair on the left there, inside of Mr. Brown's house.
| | | He dashed up the staircase and escaped out of the attic window. |
| | | 'Cuck-cuck-cuck-cur-r-r-cuck-k-k!' |
The Tale of Benjamin Bunny
| | | Frontispiece - Old Mrs. Rabbit earned her living by knitting rabbit-wool mittens and muffatees. She also sold herbs, and rosemary tea, and rabbit-tobacco. |
Note that from this illustration we learn that Old Mrs. Rabbit's actual name is Josephine.
| | | Title illustration |
| | | One morning a little rabbit sat on a bank. |
| | | Little Benjamin Bunny slid down into the road, and set off to call upon his relations. |
| | | In the neatest, sandiest hole of all lived Benjamin's aunt and his cousins—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. |
17:56 - "Muffetees." This is simply a small muff that's worn over the wrist.
| | | He came round the back of the fir-tree, and nearly tumbled upon the top of his Cousin Peter. |
| | | He looked poorly, and was dressed in a red cotton pocket-handkerchief. |
See, his spirit's been completely broken by his own previous morality tale! BE GOOD, KIDS.
| | | Little Benjamin sat down beside his cousin. |
| | | At this point old Mrs. Rabbit's voice was heard inside the rabbit hole. |
| | | Peter's coat and shoes were plainly to be seen upon the scarecrow, topped with an old tam-o'-shanter of Mr. McGregor's. |
19:13 - "Tam-o-shanter." The illustration makes it clearer what this is, but the tam o'shanter is a traditional Scottish hat that looks sort of like a large, floppy beret perched on top of a cylindrical hatband, with a pompom on top. Picture a stereotypical cartoon Scotsman, or Bugs Bunny playing golf. He's probably wearing a tam o'shanter.
| | | Peter fell down head first; but it was of no consequence. |
| | | They left a great many odd little footmarks all over the bed. |
| | | Benjamin tried on the tam-o'-shanter, but it was too big for him. |
| | | Peter did not seem to be enjoying himself; he kept hearing noises. |
Yup! Broken spirit.
| | | The lettuces certainly were very fine. |
| | | Presently Peter dropped half the onions. |
| | | They went along a little walk on planks, under a sunny, red brick wall. |
| | | Presently Peter let the pocket-handkerchief go again. |
| | | Peter heard noises worse than ever; his eyes were as big as lolly-pops! |
| | | This is what those little rabbits saw round that corner! |
| | | The cat got up and stretched herself, and came and sniffed at the basket. |
| | | She sat there for five hours. |
| | | Old Mr. Benjamin Bunny was smoking a pipe of rabbit-tobacco, and had a little switch in his hand. |
| | | He took a tremendous jump off the top of the wall on to the top of the cat. |
Dude! Old Mr. Benjamin Bunny is HARDCORE.
| | | Then he took out his nephew Peter. |
| | | Then he took out the handkerchief of onions, and marched out of the garden. |
Ha! I only just now noticed the poor cat behind the greenhouse window. Nicely done.
| | | When Mr. McGregor returned about half an hour later he observed several things which perplexed him. |
Oh come on, Mr. McGregor, you really can't figure out the tiny clog footprints? Your scarecrow had a coat and shoes that you personally saw a rabbit wearing.
| | | Cotton-tail and Peter folded up the pocket-handkerchief. |
If you would like to read along, the texts and illustrations can be found at Project Gutenberg: Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, and Benjamin Bunny. No reading ahead, though!
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.
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!
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!
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!
16:11 - "The season of assizes approaches." The court of assizes were judges who traveled circuits through the country, periodically hearing criminal and civil cases that were too large to be handled by the local magistrates' courts. The Irish assizes specifically started with a local magistrate or justice of the peace deciding if the evidence merited a trial, then referring the bill of indictment to a Grand Jury who would decide if the bill was correct and did indeed deserve a trial, at which point the defendant would be indicted and sent to trial proper. In Victor's case, the grand jury decided the evidence of him still being in the Orkneys at the time of the murder was strong enough for him not to need a trial.
The assizes were abolished in the Irish Free State (the independent precursor to the current Republic of Ireland) in 1924, and in Northern Ireland in 1978.
18:00 - "maladie du pays." Victor inexplicably slips back into French (which is his native language, in case you forgot) with this phrase, which literally means "illness of the country," and which is an old-fashioned French idiom meaning "homesickness."
20:33 - "laudanum." Laudanum is an alcoholic solution or "tincture" of opium, usually prescribed as a pain-reliever or a cough suppressant but used for a variety of other ailments as well. It contained pretty much all of the active ingredients in opium, including a pretty high concentration of morphine. As with all opiates, it's highly addictive.
21:12 - "port of Holyhead." Holyhead is a Welsh town on Holy Island, itself part of the county of Anglesey. It's a major port on the Irish Sea, with numerous ferry lines going back and forth to Ireland. If it sounds familiar to you, and you're a Harry Potter fan, it may be because of the all-lady Quidditch team the Holyhead Harpies, which was Ginny Weasley's favorite team and for whom she played as Chaser after the events of the novels.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
In which Victor changes his mind, re: monsters, creating another, and the monster vows revenge, whereupon Victor gets lost at sea and ends up in a land of terrible accents; and in which the narrator apologizes for his terrible accents.
Things are heating up now! Someone's dead! I wonder if the monster had anything to do with it. Probably! No notes this time around, thankfully after last time, so two covers for you here, both from Classics Illustrated:
Yes, LOOK AT THIS THING! The lightning font! The perspective that makes it look like the monster is Godzilla-sized! The armpit lightning! Man, this is just fantastic. This is the original line drawing cover of Classics Illustrated number 26, with cover and interior art by Robert H. "Bob" Webb and Ann Brewster. It was first published in 1945 under the banner of Classic Comics, but since this specific cover cost a full fifteen cents and is under the Classics Illustrated banner (the changed the name in 1947), it's probably from the 1951 reprint.Around 1953, CI decided to update their look by replacing the line drawings with painted covers, and this included replacing the covers of reprints of back issues, leading to this one:
Here we get to see a scene not usually depicted on covers: the monster being pursued across the polar wastes by Victor in his dogsled. See him back there? He looks like he's waving! Anyway, this cover first appeared in September 1958 and was by Norman Saunders, who you might remember from his saucy "Famous Fantastic Mysteries" Time Machine cover.
That wraps it up for now! Come back next time for Victor's Irish adventure, apparently!
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
In which Victor drags his heels on fulfilling his promise to the creature, and he and Henry travel to Britain; and in which the narrator assures you that that was the whole two chapters.
Well, not a whole lot happened here, besides Victor ultimately secreting himself off the coast of Scotland to finish his work. Lots of notes, though, mostly about people and places Victor and Henry see and discuss on their journey. But first, our cover!
This edition, issued by Tor in 1989, features a cover by well-known fantasy artist Boris Vallejo. More of his work can be found on his official site, though his work tends heavily to the "half-naked barbarians" end of the spectrum, and later into "completely naked fantasy ladies," so maybe don't check it out at work. Anyway, this cover shows the trend from the late 20th century of veering away from Karloff's monster into representing him somewhat more how he's described in the book, while also attempting to re-emphasize his humanity. Though, it should be noted, Karloff's portrayal was in fact very humanistic, but that's not how it really stuck in the public's consciousness.
Notes after the jump!
13:31 - "where the priest and his mistress were overwhelmed by an avalanche." Henry lists a bunch of his travels, mentioning this story. There, uh, appears to be very little mention of this story anywhere except through Mary Shelley. Before putting it in Frankenstein, she mentions it in her 1817 travel narrative History of a Six Weeks' Tour, saying:
The summits of several of the mountains that enclose the lake to the south are covered by eternal glaciers; of one of these, opposite Brunen, they tell the story of a priest and his mistress, who, flying from persecution, inhabited a cottage at the foot of the snows. One winter night an avalanche overwhelmed them, but their plaintive voices are still heard in stormy nights, calling for succour from the peasant.
And that's... that's about all we've got about this story.
13:40 - "La Valais, and the Pays de Vaud." Here, Henry is referring to the Cantons (or states) of Valais, where the Matterhorn is, and Vaud, which produces a lot of wine and is the official home to the International Olympic Committee.
14:33 - "the very poetry of nature." Shelley herself notes this one (though it was apparently cut from my edition for some reason) as being from "Leigh Hunt's 'Rimini'" referring to the poet's 1816 poem "The Story of Rimini," which relates the story of Paolo and Francesca, a pair of tragic lovers most famously mentioned in Canto V of Dante's Inferno, where they suffer in the second circle of Hell, reserved for those who succumb to lust.
(It should, perhaps, be noted here that Leigh Hunt was friends with Percy Shelley.)
15:04 - "The sounding cataract... Unborrowed from the eyes." Victor does another lengthy poetry quote here, which I was really afraid would end up being from another of Percy's poems, but no. This instead is a portion of William Wordsworth's succinctly-titled poem "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798." Surprisingly, Wordsworth wasn't a friend of Percy's, though Shelley was of course acquainted with his work.
Oh, and a "cataract" here is an old-fashioned word for "waterfall."
16:17 - Victor and Henry ride "post the rest of the way." As we discussed back in Sense and Sensibility, this means that they went by speedy post-chaise.
16:49 - "Tilbury Fort, and remembered the Spanish Armada; Gravesend, Woolwich, and Greenwich." Another list of places. All right, Tilbury Fort was built in the 16th Century by Henry VIII and sits on the Thames estuary in Essex to protect London from attack by sea. Elizabeth I reinforced it and famously rallied her army there in response to the threat of invasion from the Spanish Armada in 1588. Gravesend is an ancient town in Kent on the opposite side of the Thames estuary from Tilbury, and contains the remains of another fort built by Henry VIII. Woolwich was a town in Kent before being absorbed into South East London that was a major military and industrial center. If you've heard of the Arsenal Football Club in England, it was founded in the late 1800s by workers at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. Greenwich is another district in South East London, this one notable for its maritime history which lead to it being deemed the center of timekeeping with the Greenwich (or "Prime") Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time.
20:44 - Here, Victor discusses the history of Oxford, specifically how Charles I had been driven out of London by Parliament during the English Civil War, setting up his court in Oxford instead. "Amiable Falkland" was Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount of Falkland, who started out as a member of the Parliament set against Charles, but eventually broke with them to become Charles's secretary of state. "Insolent Gower" is apparently supposed to (and was corrected in later editions to) refer to George Goring, Lord Goring, one of Charles's generals who later betrayed him to Parliament.
21:34 - "The lovely Isis" is a portion of the Thames River that runs through Oxford. Apparently, there are those who've claimed that the whole of the Thames is properly called the Isis, but today it's really only referred to as such for the sake of the Oxford rowing team.
22:51 - "tomb of the illustrious Hampden." John Hampden was one of the major leaders of the Parliament that opposed Charles I in the Civil War previously mentioned. He died in battle early in the war, and has since been embraced as an English patriot who helped establish greater limitations to the power of the monarchy. I used to live in a neighborhood named after him!
23:24 - "Matlock." Matlock is a town in Derbyshire that was known for many years as a spa town, being home to some natural thermal springs discovered in 1698. The "wondrous cave" they visit is presumably the Great Rutland Cavern, part of the Heights of Abraham and then known as "Nestor Mine." Note it was first opened to the public in 1812, well after the novel is supposedly taking place (again).
26:29 - "Edinburgh... romantic castle... Arthur's Seat, St. Bernard's Well, and the Pentland Hills." Oh, for... okay, another list of random places they see. Edinburgh is of course the capital city of Scotland, since at least the 15th century. The "romantic castle" is, naturally enough, Edinburgh Castle, which is located on Castle Rock high above the city. About a mile east of Castle Rock is the high hill called Arthur's Seat. It's unclear why exactly it's called "Arthur's Seat," but naturally many claim it's linked to the legend of King Arthur. Both Castle Rock and Arthur's Seat were formed by a now-extinct ancient volcanic system that was subsequently eroded by glaciers. St. Bernard's Well is a mineral water well located in the ritzy Stockbridge area of Edinburgh. The well-house has a distinctive pump room designed to look like a circular Greek temple, with a statue of Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health. The Pentlands are a 20-mile-long range of hills southwest of the city.
28:23 - Victor seeks solitude to finish the Bride on "one of the remotest of the Orkneys." Orkney, or the Orkney Islands, is an archipelago of around 70 islands off the northern coast of mainland Scotland. Fun fact: the people who live there are called "Orcadians."
Man, Victor's travels are KILLING me with these notes. Stop looking at so much stuff!
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
In which the creature rages against the heavens and vows revenge, murders just a little bit, then asks Victor for one tiny favor in order to leave everyone alone forever.
Here we go, we're picking up steam again! I mean, still plenty of angst and misery, but we're back to the murdery and mad sciencey place again. Yay!
Today's cover goes full-on Karloff:
This doesn't even really pretend to take its imagery from anything other than the movie. There's even a castle! This 1976 edition published by Pocket Books had this here cover done by Mara McAfee (1929-1984). McAfee started out as a minor-league actor in the 1950s before going on to a very well-respected career as an artist and illustrator who did do some literary illustrations like this, but was best known for satirical illustrations for publications like National Lampoon, which often featured her work on the cover. A small selection of her work (including a closer look at this cover) can be viewed here.
Thankfully brief notes after the jump!
After last installment's literary adventures, we've only got two quick notes this time around:
30:29 - Victor whines about the winds that feel like a "dull, ugly siroc" come to consume him. This is short for sirocco, a hot, dusty wind that blows from the Sahara Desert across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. When this hits cooler, wetter air over the sea, it creates winds that can reach hurricane speeds that often carry very abrasive dust and sand. Fun!
31:21 - Victor says that his promise weighs upon his mind like "Dante's iron cowl on the heads of the hellish hypocrites." This is, of course, a reference to Dante's Divine Comedy, specifically from Canto XXIII of The Inferno. Here, Dante and his guide Virgil wander through the eighth circle of Hell (the next-to-lowest circle) where those guilty of Fraud are kept. After they pass through ditches containing panderers, seducers, flatterers, crooked priests, sorcerers, false prophets, astrologers, and crooked politicians, they come to the ditch with the hypocrites. The lucky folks located here wear beautiful golden cloaks that are lined with lead weighing them down. They meet a few people here, including one of many popes they meet across the various circles, but most prominently they meet Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest who ordered Jesus' death. No fooling with cloaks for him; he gets staked to the ground where everyone has to walk on him. Even more fun!
That's all for today! Next time, we'll see if Victor makes the monster his bride and the two go off together where they'll never bother or be bother by anyone ever again and everyone lives happily ever after. (Spoilers: No.)
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!