Category: 1900s

Categories
1900s African American Authorship Decade Ocean Poem Song

Sea Lyric

Sea Lyric

By William Stanley Braithwaite
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Artist Unknown. Portrait of a Black Sailor (Paul Cuffe?). Oil on canvas, c. 1880, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public Domain. 
Over the seas to-night, love,
  Over the darksome deeps,
Over the seas to-night, love,
  Slowly my vessel creeps.

Over the seas to-night, love,
  Walking the sleeping foam—
Sailing away from thee, love,
  Sailing from thee and home.

Over the seas to-night, love,
  Dreaming beneath the spars—
Till in my dreams you shine, love,
Bright as the listening stars.
Braithwaite, william stanley. “Sea Lyric,” IN THE UPWARD PATH: A READER FOR COLORED CHILDREN, ED. MYRON T. PRITCHARD AND MARY WHITE OVINGTON, 189. HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, 1920.

Contexts

This poem appeared in The Upward Path: A Reader for Colored Children, published in 1920 and compiled by Myron T. Pritchard and Mary White Ovington. The volume’s foreword states that, “[t]o the present time, there has been no collection of stories and poems by Negro writers, which colored children could read with interest and pleasure and in which they could find a mirror of the traditions and aspirations of their race.”

“Sea Lyric” was initially included in Braithwaite’s 1904 poetry book Lyrics of Life and Love, wherein the poem was not segmented into stanzas.

Categories
1900s Birds Decade Poem

Pigeons out Walking

Pigeons out Walking

By Josephine Preston Peabody
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
[Feeding the Pigeons, Boston Common, Boston, Mass.] Photographic negative, bet. 1900 and 1920, Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress. Public Domain. 
They never seem to hurry,—no,
  Even for the crowd.
They dip, and coo, and move as slow,[1]
  All so soft and proud!
You can see the wavy specks
Of bubble-color on their necks;
  —Little, little Cloud.

Cloud that goes, the very way
  All the Bubbles do:
Blue and green, and green and gray,
  Gold and rosy, too.
And they talk as Bubbles could
If they only ever would
  Talk and call and coo!

—Till you try to catch one so,
  Just to make it stay
While the colors turn. But Oh,
  Then they fly away!—
All at once, two, three, four, five—
Like a snowstorm all alive,—
  Gray and white, and gray!
Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Pigeons out Walking,” in The Book of the Little Past, 10. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.

[1] Male pigeons coo to attract their mates.

Contexts

Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past (1908), illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green, gathered previously published and unpublished poems in which the author touched upon various subjects from a child’s perspective. A favorable 1908 review from The Bellman, a Minneapolis literary magazine, asserted that the volume would be “read and remembered and quoted as few poems of children are,” and referred to Peabody as “one of the first of American lyric poets.”

Resources for Further Study

Categories
1900s Cats Decade Genre Poem Themes

Concerning Love

Concerning Love

By Josephine Preston Peabody
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Lilla Cabot Perry. Woman with a Cat. Oil on canvas, 1901.
Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
I wish she would not ask me if I love the
    Kitten more than her.
Of Course I love her. But I love the Kitten,
    Too; and It has Fur.
Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Concerning love,” in The Book of the Little Past, 11. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.
Contexts

Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past (1908), illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green, gathered previously published and unpublished poems in which the author touched upon various subjects from a child’s perspective. A favorable 1908 review from The Bellman, a Minneapolis literary magazine, asserted that the volume would be “read and remembered and quoted as few poems of children are,” and referred to Peabody as “one of the first of American lyric poets.”

Categories
1900s Decade Genre Poem Wild animals

Market

Market

By Josephine Preston Peabody
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Detroit Publishing Co. Lexington Market, Baltimore, Maryland. Dry plate negative, bet. 1900 and 1910, Library of Congress. Public Domain.
I went to Market yesterday,
 And it is like a Fair
Of everything you'd like to see;
  But nothing live is there:
—The Pigeons, hanging up to eat;
And Rabbits, by their little feet!—
  And no one seemed to care.

And there were Fishes out in rows,
  Bright ones of every kind;
Some were pink, and silver too;
  But all of them were blind.
Yes, everything you'd like to touch.—
It would not make you happy much,
  But no one seemed to mind.

And loveliest of all, a Deer!—
  Only its eyes were blurred;
And hanging by it, very near,
  A beautiful great Bird.
So I could smooth his feathers through,
And kiss them, very softly, too:
  But Oh, he never stirred!
Frans Snyders. Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market. Oil on canvas, 1614, Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain.
Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Market,” in The Book of the Little Past, 19. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.
Contexts

Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past (1908), illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green, gathered previously published and unpublished poems in which the author touched upon various subjects from a child’s perspective. A favorable 1908 review from The Bellman, a Minneapolis literary magazine, asserted that the volume would be “read and remembered and quoted as few poems of children are,” and referred to Peabody as “one of the first of American lyric poets.”

Resources for Further Study
  • In his 1991 essay “The American Public Market” (password protected), James M. Mayo argues that the public market system in the United States, highly influenced by its European counterparts, reached its peak “when the American economic structure was highly local or regional.” According to Mayo, overshadowed by private enterprise and corporatism, public markets were eventually associated with “a form of social life worth saving” and became the focus of historic preservation efforts.   
  • In her 1997 article “Feeding the Cities: Public Market and Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Helen Tangires offers a brief historical survey of American public markets. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discourses about the need to maintain, protect, and regulate public markets through municipal action found their way to contemporary newspaper columns and specialized journals. Public markets were considered indicators of “a city’s health and well-being” and many people fought “to protect them from private enterprise.”
  • Helen Tangires’s 2008 book Public Markets delivers a comprehensive illustrated account of public markets’ buildings and spaces throughout the years.
Contemporary Connections

Nancy B. Kurland and Linda Aleci. “From Civic Institution to Community Place: The Meaning of the Public Market in Modern America.”

The Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, founded by the City of Greensboro in 1874, remains committed to sell products either grown or made by the sellers.

Categories
1900s Decade Genre Landscape Poem Themes

The Journey

The Journey

By Josephine Preston Peabody
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Original illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green from The Book of the Little Past, between pp. 8 and 9.
Never saw the hills so far
And blue, the way the pictures are;

And flowers, flowers growing thick,
But not a one for me to pick!

The land was running from the train,
All blurry through the window-pane.

And then it all looked flat and still,
When up there jumped a little hill!

I saw the windows and the spires,
And sparrows sitting on the wires;

And fences, running up and down;
And then we cut straight through a town.

I saw a Valley, like a cup;
And ponds that twinkled, and dried up.

I counted meadows, that were burnt;
And there were trees,—and then there weren't!

We crossed the bridges with a roar,
Then hummed, the way we went before.

And tunnels made it dark and light
Like open-work of day and night.

Until I saw the chimneys rise,
And lights and lights and lights, like eyes.

And when they took me through the door,
I heard it all begin to roar.—

I thought—as far as I could see—
That everybody wanted Me!
Peabody, Josephine Preston. “The Journey,” in The Book of the Little Past, 8-9. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.
Contexts

Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past (1908), illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green, gathered previously published and unpublished poems in which the author touched upon various subjects from a child’s perspective. A favorable 1908 review from The Bellman, a Minneapolis literary magazine, asserted that the volume would be “read and remembered and quoted as few poems of children are,” and referred to Peabody as “one of the first of American lyric poets.”

The speaker from “The Journey” takes readers along on a scenic train route. Trains were a popular means of transportation in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, although leisure travel remained a luxury. According to the Library of Congress, railroad construction accelerated in the 1870s (after the Civil War), and, by 1900 “much of the nation’s railroad system was in place.”

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

spire: A tall structure rising from a tower, roof, etc., and terminating in a slender point; esp. the tapering portion of the steeple of a cathedral or church, usually carried to a great height and constituting one of the chief architectural features of the building.

Resources for Further Study
  • “Railroads in the Late 19th Century,” in the Library of Congress website.
  • The railroad construction boom brought with it fierce competition between railroad tycoons seeking to expand their lines. With the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, Congress acted against railroad monopolies and “railroads became the first industry subject to Federal regulation.”
  • Smithsonian Magazine article on the Pullman porters, African-American men employed by the Pullman Company, a railroad manufacturer and operator. The Pullman porters, who assisted wealthy (white) travelers in the company’s sleeper cars, became synonymous with luxury train travel since the late 1860s and until 1968. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which they founded in 1925, became “the first African-American labor union to succeed in brokering a collective bargaining agreement with a major corporation.”
Contemporary Connections

“What Travel Looked Like Through the Decades,” in Travel + Leisure magazine.

Categories
1900s African American Poem Trees

The Haunted Oak

The Haunted Oak[1]

By Paul Laurence Dunbar
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
American Forestry Ass’n, Live Oak, Jacksonville, Fla. Glass negative, 1919 or 1920, Library of Congress. Public Domain. 
Pray, why are you so bare, so bare,
     O bough of the old oak tree?
And why, when I go through the shade you throw
     Runs a shudder over me?

My leaves were as green as the best, I trow,
     And the sap ran free in my veins,
But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird,
     A guiltless victim's pains.

I bent me down to hear his sigh,
     And I shook with his gurgling moan,
And I trembled sore when they rode away,
     And left him here alone.

They'd charged him with the old, old crime,[2]
     And set him fast in jail;
O why does the dog howl all night long?
     And why does the night wind wail?

He prayed his prayer, and he swore his oath,
     And he raised his hands to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
     And the steady tread drew nigh.

Who is it rides by night, by night,
     Over the moonlit road?
What is the spur that keeps the pace?
     What is the galling goad?

And now they beat at the prison door,
     “Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within,
     And we fain would take him away

From those who ride fast on our heels,
     With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
     And the rope they bear is strong.”

They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
     They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
     And the great door open flies.

And now they have taken him from the jail,
     And hard and fast they ride;
And the leader laughs low down in his throat,
     As they halt my trunk beside.

O, the judge he wore a mask of black,
     And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
     Was curiously bedight.

O foolish man, why weep you now?
     ’Tis but a little space,
And the time will come when these shall dread
     The memory of your face.

I feel the rope against my bark,
     And the weight of him in my grain;
I feel in the throe of his final woe,
     The touch of my own last pain.

And never more shall leaves come forth
     On a bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
     From the curse of a guiltless man.

And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
     And goes to hunt the deer,
And ever another rides his soul,
     In the guise of a mortal fear.

And ever the man, he rides me hard,
     And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,
     On the trunk of a haunted tree.
DUNBAR, PAUL LAURENCE. “THE HAUNTED OAK,” IN THE DUNBAR SPEAKER AND ENTERTAINER, ED. ALICE MOORE DUNBAR-NELSON, 91-93. NAPERVILLE, ILL: J. L. NICHOLS & CO., 1920.

[1] According to Dunbar’s friend Edward F. Arnold, Dunbar wrote “The Haunted Oak” after hearing the story of a lynching that took place in Alabama many years before. In Arnold’s retelling, “the “night riders” took him [the victim, who had been wrongly accused of rape] from jail and strung him up on a limb of a giant oak that stood by the side of the road. In a few weeks thereafter the leaves on this limb turned yellow and dropped off, and the bough itself gradually withered and died while the other branches of the tree grew and flourished. For years in that section this tree was known as the “haunted oak.”

[2] Based on Edward F. Arnold’s account, the poem’s reference to “the old, old-crime” would be rape. See above.

Contexts

“The Haunted Oak” appeared previously in Dunbar’s 1903 collection Lyrics of Love and Laughter. It was also included in The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1913).

The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer‘s dedication reads: “To the children of the race which is herein celebrated, this book is dedicated, that they may read and learn about their own people.” In the foreword, Leslie Pinckney Hill, an African American educator, writer, and community leader who graduated from Harvard University in 1903, criticizes the one-sidedness of prevailing reading courses: “In vain may you search their pages—those pages upon which all our reading has been founded—for anything other than a patronizing view of that vast, brooding world of colored folk—yellow, black and brown—which comprises by far the largest portion of the human family.” Hill further writes that Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s book seeks to prove “that the white man has no fine quality, either by heart or mind, which is not shared by his black brother.”

Think of reading this poem out loud. Elocution (or public speaking) was a highly valued and widely taught skill in nineteenth-century America. In her introduction to the Dunbar Speaker, Alice Dunbar-Nelson offers some advice: “Before you begin to learn anything to recite, first read it over and find out if it fires you with enthusiasm. If it does, make it a part of yourself, put yourself in the place of the speaker whose words you are memorizing, get on fire with the thought, the sentiment, the emotion-then throw yourself into it in your endeavor to make others feel as you feel, see as you see, understand what you understand. Lose yourself, free yourself from physical consciousness, forget that those in front of you are a part of an audience, think of them as some persons whom you must make understand what is thrilling you–and you will be a great speaker.”

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

bedight: To equip, furnish, apparel, array, bedeck.

fain: To be delighted or glad, rejoice.

galling: Chafing, irritating or harassing physically. Irritating, offensive to the mind or spirit.

ho: An exclamation to attract attention.

nigh: Denoting approach to a place, thing, or person.

trow: To trust, have confidence in, believe (a person or thing).

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

In a moving personal essay, American poet Glenis Redmond explores how the history of lynching complicates her relationship with the Southern landscape: “The legacy of lynching is woven into the fabric of America. Used as a tool of fear and a widespread form of control after blacks gained freedom from slavery, it has cast its long shadow across the country. Trees, though benign in themselves, stand at the center of this history, and they bear that imprint.”

Categories
1900s Poem

My School

My School

By Jessie E. Sampter
Annotations by Mary Miller
Girl Reading Under a Tree. Public domain. Courtesy of Piortr Kowalcyzk.

Ah, you have bonny things to tell of school-
            days long gone by,
Your cheeks were ruddy as you went, your
            hearts were light; but I — 
I watched you caper down the road to
            Knowledge-land, and then,
With smiles to keep the tears away, I 
            wandered toward the glen,
The woods, the rills, the haunted nooks,
            where many an imp and elf
Was waiting for the sickly child—my poor,
            untutored self.


I lay upon the balmy earth; a canopy of
            pine
Was spread above to cool my brow, a
            kingly court was mine,
Where music welled for freedom’s sake, and
            asked for nothing more,
While venerable teachers came to teach me
            ancient lore.
I fear their pupil was not apt, yet do I 
            nothing doubt
But all the masters of the world were
            gathered thereabout.


The rill was whispering 'mid the ferns,
            enchanted as a dream;
It hastened down and lost itself within the
            wider stream;
It told me of a mighty world that never
            thought of me,
And myriad little laboring brooks that perish
            in the sea!
And, all unheeded, by my side I saw a lily
            spring;
It taught me of a Love and Law that guideth
            everything!


From out the throats of wondrous birds
            melodious anthems poured
Of all the lovely, holy things that live not for
            reward.
And when upon the ethereal sky the rose of
            even smiled.
I turned me slowly home again, a solemn
            dreaming child.
Your books were lightly thrown aside, you
            bubbled o’er with play,
But I was pondering o’er the things I learned
            in school that day.
SAMPTER, JESSIE E. “MY SCHOOL.” ST. NICHOLAS MAGAZINE 28, No. 7 (MAY 1901): 638.
Contexts

This poem speaks of an illness that, because of the narrator’s relatively immobility, may suggest polio. In the early 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, paralyzing hundreds of thousands of children every year. Dr. Jonas Salk and his team of medical researchers developed a vaccine, which ultimately ended the epidemic in the industrialized world. This was a time when scientists were trusted and respected by the public, and many people received the vaccine in public places such as schools. Dr. Salk refused to take out a patent, saying that he believed the vaccine belonged to the people.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

rill: A small stream or brook.

etherial: of the sky; heavenly.

Resources for Further Study
  • Learn more about the history of polio and the development of the vaccine which virtually eliminated this dreadful disease.
  • Read about Sampter and other early twentieth-century women who were trailblazers in their work to imagine and build a more perfect world through Jewish political and religious traditions. In “Hadassah and the Gender of Modern Jewish Thought,” Cara Rock-Singer argues that they have “gone unrecognized as such because of the fundamentally gendered constructions that undergird these traditions and their study.”
Contemporary Connections

Prior to 1975, disabled children in the United States were often unable to receive an appropriate public education. The following information on legislation to protect the educational rights of disabled children is from the US Department of Education: “On November 29, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed into law the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142), now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). In adopting this landmark civil rights measure, Congress opened public school doors for millions of children with disabilities and laid the foundation of the country’s commitment to ensuring that children with disabilities have opportunities to develop their talents, share their gifts, and contribute to their communities.

Categories
1900s Flowers Poem Seasons

Harvest Home

Harvest Home

By Doris Webb [age 16]
Annotations by Mary Miller
Barnes, Dr. Thomas G. Prairie Gentian and Grey Goldenrod Flowers. Public Doman.

The careful store of summer days
    The earth with bounty yields,
And goldenrod [1], the fairies’ torch,
    Is glowing in the fields.

When early gentians [2] peeping out
    Reflect the heaven’s dome,
Across the golden fields we hear
    The cry of, “Harvest home!”

And now the farmer toiling on
    His distant homestead sees,
And once again we hear them shout
    Beneath the shading trees.

And now they turn along the road
    And gaily onward come
To gather for the yearly feast
    The joyous harvest home.

Webb, Doris. “Harvest Home.” St. Nicholas Magazine
Vol. 28, no. 11 (september 1901): 1051.

[1] Goldenrod is a native flower that grows throughout the United States. It blooms in the late fall and has very bright yellow flowers that truly glow like a torch.

[2] Gentian is a fall-flowering herb with trumpet-shaped flowers, usually of an intense blue, which are reminiscent of a deep blue sky.

Gentian is native in alpine habitats in temperate regions of Asia, Europe and the Americas. Some species also occur in northwestern Africa, eastern Australia, and New Zealand.

Contexts

Doris Webb was sixteen when this poem was published in the September 1901 issue of St. Nicholas in the St. Nicholas League section.

The St. Nicholas League, with the motto “Live to learn and learn to live,” was a monthly feature in the magazine. The editors encouraged children to join the League and participate in competitions in prose, verse, drawing, photography, and both puzzle-making and puzzle-solving. The League’s founder and editor from 1899-1908, Albert Bigelow Paine, served as a mentor and tutor to the League’s members. He and the magazine’s longtime editor, Mary Mapes Dodge, judged the submissions and awarded prizes in the form of gold and silver badges. In the early twentieth century many Americans farmed for a living. St. Nicholas published “Harvest Home” in September 1901 among other autumnal-themed work.

Resources for Further Study
  • Anna M. Recay’s essay “‘Live to learn and learn to live’: The St. Nicholas League and the Vocation of Childhood” is an in-depth analysis of the St. Nicholas League and its founding editor Albert Bigelow Paine. In the essay Recay explores the paradox inherent in Paine’s approach to training children in the arts: celebration of a child’s freedom and relationship with nature paired with an insistence in learning adult forms of literary expression.
  • E. B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, was active in the St. Nicholas League as a young writer, and later wrote “The St. Nicholas League” [password protected], an essay reflecting on its role in nurturing many young writers, among them Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had seven poems published.
  • “St. Nicholas and Mary Mapes Dodge: The Legacy of a Children’s Magazine Editor, 1873-1905” is an anthology of critical essays about the magazine and Mary Mapes Dodge. The book is a treasure trove of information about the editors and contributors to St. Nicholas, regarded by many as one of the best children’s magazine ever published.
Contemporary Connections

An example of a contemporary version of St. Nicholas is Cricket Magazine, which began publishing in 1973. Founded by Marianne Carus, Cricket has a target audience of children from six to fourteen. It includes works from notable artists, including original stories, poems, folk tales, non-fiction articles, and illustrations. As did St. Nicholas, Cricket also runs contests and publishes work by its readers.

In 2011 a Canadian digital education platform, ePals Corporation, purchased Cricket and brought it into the digital age. The target audience has expanded to include children from birth to the age of fourteen. It is still alive and well and is now part of the Cricket Media enterprise.

Categories
1900s African American Flowers Poem

A City Garden

A City Garden

By William Stanley Braithwhite
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Bridges, Fidelia. Pink Roses. Watercolor on wove paper, 1875. Public Domain.
Hid in a close and lowly nook,
    In a city yard where no grass grows—
Wherein nor sun, nor stars may look
     Full faced—are planted three short rows
     Of pansies, geraniums, and a rose.

A little girl with quiet, wide eyes,
     Slender figured, in tattered gown,
Whose pallored face no country skies
     Have quickened to a healthy brown,
     Made this garden in the barren town.

Poor little flowers, your life is hard;
     No sun, nor wind, nor evening dew.
Poor little maid, whose city yard
     Is a world of happy dreams to you—
     God grant some day your dreams come true.
BRAITHWHITE, WILLIAM STANLEY. “A CITY GARDEN,” IN THE DUNBAR SPEAKER AND ENTERTAINER, ED. ALICE MOORE DUNBAR-NELSON, 28. NAPERVILLE, ILL: J. L. NICHOLS & CO., 1920.
Contexts

The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer‘s dedication reads: “To the children of the race which is herein celebrated, this book is dedicated, that they may read and learn about their own people.” In the foreword, Leslie Pinckney Hill, an African American educator, writer, and community leader who graduated from Harvard University in 1903, criticizes the one-sidedness of prevailing reading courses: “In vain may you search their pages—those pages upon which all our reading has been founded—for anything other than a patronizing view of that vast, brooding world of colored folk—yellow, black and brown—which comprises by far the largest portion of the human family.” Hill further writes that Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s book seeks to prove “that the white man has no fine quality, either by heart or mind, which is not shared by his black brother.”

Think of reading this poem out loud. Elocution (or public speaking) was a highly valued and widely taught skill in nineteenth-century America. In her introduction to the Dunbar Speaker, Alice Dunbar-Nelson offers some advice: “Before you begin to learn anything to recite, first read it over and find out if it fires you with enthusiasm. If it does, make it a part of yourself, put yourself in the place of the speaker whose words you are memorizing, get on fire with the thought, the sentiment, the emotion-then throw yourself into it in your endeavor to make others feel as you feel, see as you see, understand what you understand. Lose yourself, free yourself from physical consciousness, forget that those in front of you are a part of an audience, think of them as some persons whom you must make understand what is thrilling you–and you will be a great speaker.”

Before appearing in The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, “A City Garden” was included in Braithwhite’s Lyrics of Life and Love (1904), fully available on Google Books.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

pallor: Paleness or pallidness, especially of the face.

tattered: Clad in jagged or slashed garments.

Resources for Further Study
  • In the early 1900s, Americans started to concentrate in cities, lured by the promise of better jobs and higher wages. However, the lives those who worked in the city factories (mainly former rural families and immigrants) was harsh. The Library of Congress offers information on American cities during the Progressive Era (1896-1920).
  • Smithsonian Gardens offers a comprehensive timeline of American Garden History.

Categories
1900s Book chapter

Anne of Green Gables: From Chapter IV: Morning at Green Gables

Chapter IV: Morning at Green Gables

By Lucy Maud Montgomery
Annotations by Mary Miller
Lucy Maud Montgomery Library and Archives Canada / Public Domain

CHAPTER IV: Morning at Green Gables

IT was broad daylight when Anne awoke and sat up in bed, staring confusedly at the window through which a flood of cheery sunshine was pouring and outside of which something white and feathery waved across glimpses of blue sky. For a moment she could not remember where she was. First came a delightful thrill, as something very pleasant; then a horrible remembrance. This was Green Gables and they didn’t want her because she wasn’t a boy! But it was morning and, yes, it was a cherry-tree in full bloom outside of her window. With a bound she was out of bed and across the floor. She pushed up the sash–it went up stiffly and creakily, as if it hadn’t been opened for a long time, which was the case; and it stuck so tight that nothing was needed to hold it up. Anne dropped on her knees and gazed out into the June morning, her eyes glistening with delight. Oh, wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it a lovely place? Suppose she wasn’t really going to stay here! She would imagine she was. There was scope for imagination [1] here. A huge cherry-tree grew outside, so close that its boughs tapped against the house, and it was so thick-set with blossoms that hardly a leaf was to be seen. On both sides of the house was a big orchard, one of apple-trees and one of cherry-trees, also showered over with blossoms; and their grass was all sprinkled with dandelions. In the garden below were lilac-trees purple with flowers, and their dizzily sweet fragrance drifted up to the window on the morning wind. Below the garden a green field lush with clover sloped down to the hollow where the brook ran and where scores of white birches grew, upspringing airily out of an undergrowth suggestive of delightful possibilities in ferns and mosses and woodsy things generally. Beyond it was a hill, green and feathery with spruce and fir; [2] there was a gap in it where the gray gable end of the little house she had seen from the other side of the Lake of Shining Waters [3] was visible. Off to the left were the big barns and beyond them, away down over green, low-sloping fields, was a sparkling blue glimpse of sea. Anne’s beauty-loving eyes lingered on it all, taking everything greedily in. She had looked on so many unlovely places in her life, poor child; but this was as lovely as anything she had ever dreamed. She knelt there, lost to everything but the loveliness around her, until she was startled by a hand on her shoulder. Marilla had come in unheard by the small dreamer.

Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. Boston: L. C. Page & Co., 1908.

[1] “Scope for imagination” is a phrase Anne uses frequently when she is inspired by nature, people, or events.

[2] Montgomery describes the trees surrounding Green Gables through Anne’s eyes. There are blooming cherry and apples trees as well as purple-blossomed lilac trees. The lilacs are especially romantic because of their sweet fragrance which perfumes the air in early spring.

[3] Lake of the Shining Water was the name Anne gave to a small pond on the farm. She had an extraordinary imagination and often gave names to things that inspired her spirit.

Contexts

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908. The setting is a small community on Prince Edward Island in Canada. This was a time when women’s rights were greatly restricted, in Canada and throughout the world. The book tells the story of an orphan girl who is desperate for a loving family. She is sent to help two older people, a brother and sister, who live in a house called Green Gables. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have never been married and have no experience raising children. They have requested to adopt a boy who could help with farm chores. Instead, Anne arrives. Marilla is ready to send her back to the orphanage, but Matthew is quickly charmed by Anne’s happy and inquisitive personality and her love of the beautiful countryside in Avonlea, the town where she finds her new home. The story touches on the plight of women in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries as Anne struggles to live out her dreams. Montgomery’s ability to paint pictures with language is demonstrated magnificently in the book through Anne’s words. This early chapter is a lovely introduction to the beginning of Anne’s life in Avonlea with the Cuthberts.

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Resources for Further Study
  • You can easily find the book by searching for” Anne of Green Gables” online or on Amazon.
  • Watch the series “Anne with an E” on Netflix and try not to cry at least once.
  • Learn more about Lucy Maud Montgomery by reading Mary Henley Rubio’s biography “Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings” published in 2010 by Anchor Canada.
  • Visit the Canadian historical site, Green Gables Heritage Place if you plan to visit Prince Edward Island in Canada.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

gable: the upper part of the end wall of a building, between the two sloping sides of the roof, that is shaped like a triangle.

sash: either of a pair of windows, one above the other, that are opened and closed by sliding them up and down inside the frame.

Contemporary Connections

Lucy Maud Montgomery struggled to overcome sexism as a female writer at a time when it was not considered an appropriate aspiration for women. She fought a courageous battle to become one of Canada’s most beloved novelists, and supported her family almost entirely with her publishing income. Historica Canada created a Heritage Minute video on Montgomery for International Women’s Day in 2018.

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