Warning: If you have a visual impairment, use the manuscript transcript version including the Lucy Maud Montgomery’s foot notes and contextual annotation references.

L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables Manuscript Scan

Chapter 27 - (VERSO)

~~415~~ 489

proof now—green hair is proof enough for anybody. But I hadn’t then and I believed every word he said, implicitly.

“Who said? Who are you talking about?”

“The pedlar that was here this afternoon. I bought the dye from him.”

“Anne Shirley, how often have I told you never to let one of those Italians in the house. I don’t believe in encouraging them to come around at all.”

“Oh, I didn’t let him in the house. I remembered what you told me and I went out, _^^{carefully shut the door,} and looked at his things on the step. _^^Y15 He had a big box of very interesting things and he told me he was working hard to make enough money to bring his wife and children out from Germany. He spoke

LMM Notes

TEXT ANNOTATION

"he wasn't an Italian – he was a German Jew" [in Y15]: There were many travelling pedlars on P.E.I. in Montgomery’s day, and many were from Europe. Marilla's use of "Italian" is probably her catch-all name for any foreign pedlar. Anne is innocently unaware that the pedlar's being identified as a German Jew would not have allayed Marilla's suspicions since he would thus be seen, in Marilla's cultural frame, as a double outsider: not English Canadian and not Christian. At least 55 Jewish men obtained P.E.I. peddlers' licenses between 1893 and 1913, and their stays lasted from one season, through several years, to the rest of their lives (see Glass, "Researching the Jewish History of Prince Edward Island,"Shalom, 2019).