The Green Gables enigma
There is enormous confusion (obfuscation?) at the Green Gables historical site near Cavendish in Prince Edward Island and Parks Canada does little to clarify the situation. The simple fact is that (except for one room) the house that Lucy Maude Montgomery grew up in (often referred to as the birthplace) no longer exists. What today’s tourists visit is a farmhouse that belonged to Lucy Maud Montgomery’s cousins and that was a partial model for the “Green Gables” of the famous novel – also musical(s), movie(s), coffee mugs, key chains, postcards etc. It has been painted to fit the fiction and the inside has been decorated with as much “Anne/Lucy Maud” memorabilia as could be assembled. As it says in the online Virtual tour, “the house has been restored and decorated to reflect the details included in Montgomery’s novel. ”So, in effect, the book borrowed, in part, from the house and the museum house borrows, largely, from the book. It must be remembered that the Anne of Green Gables oeuvre is an enormous tourist draw for P.E.I. and has been so since the 1920’s and earlier. Though it is never stated that this is not where Lucy Maud was either born, raised or lived until she was 37 years old and where she wrote Anne of Green Gables, you need to actually ask to discover the truth and that to see the “birthplace” you need to hike through the “Haunted Woods” to it – for which you are charged an extra fee. When you get there, you will discover a small bookstore (with a very nice attendant) and a locked-up shack. But no birthplace. Or, to even extend the confusion, you can now visit the house in New London, P.E.I. where Lucy Maud actually was born, but lived only the first 21 months of her life and has, really, nothing to do with her fiction. How did this all come to be?
Lucy Maud Montgomery was raised from the age of less than 2 years old by her paternal grandparents. Her mother had died of tuberculosis and her father had, essentially, abandoned her with his parents after the loss of his wife and after a personal business failure. He went to the west and re-married. Maud grew up in her grandparent’s house although she often visited and played at her cousins’ house. That house was the home of David Jr. and Margaret Macneill, who were cousins of Lucy Maud’s grandfather Alexander. David and Margaret provided partial models for Matthew and Marilla in the Anne Shirley novel and elements of both these houses play a role in the books. The house of the cousins is the house that is presented to the public as “Green Gables.”
When grandfather Alexander Macneill died, he left the farm to his son John Franklin Macneill (with whom he had feuded constantly) on the understanding that grandma Lucy Macneill could live there until her death; which also meant that Lucy Maude would have to stay on and take care of her. There was a great deal of wrangling over the farm which seemed to have more to do with family politics than money but Grandma and Lucy Maud got to stay on. When Grandma died n 1911, Lucy Maud married and moved to Ontario (another story, and I recommend the biography by Mary Henley Rubio). John Franklin took over the farm. By then Lucy Maud was an internationally famous author and almost single-handedly responsible for P.E.I. s growing popularity as a tourist destination. Most people came to see the sites of the novels: Lover’s Lane, the Haunted Woods and, of course, Green Gables, which they, naturally and accurately, took to be the house that Lucy Maude grew up in and wrote her first, most famous, novel in. It’s often forgotten today how popular L.M. Montgomery was then, but Governor Generals and British Prime ministers asked to meet with her and Mark Twain was an enormous fan. The tourists were all over the house and managed to trample the fields around it including Uncle John’s crops. As a result, in April of 1920, John – who had little respect for Lucy Maude and her books and was annoyed by all the attention and bother – decided to tear down the “decrepit old home.” Lucy Maud was quite aware that she was a major contributor to the tourism that provided the excuse for this destructive act but she was devastated by the result.
In fact, part of the house was preserved: the summer kitchen. For those who don’t know, a summer kitchen was a common feature of farm houses and cottages. It was a detached building and served a dual purpose: it provided a place to cook in the summer – hence the name – separate from the house so that the heat from the cooking would not overwhelm the main house. It also meant that a dangerous fire in the kitchen, not uncommon in the era of wood-burning stoves, would not consume the main house. For some unknown reason, this part of the house escaped John’s destructive rampage. It ended up being shipped from owner to owner(details unknown) until somehow it became the property of Parks Canada and was placed on the site of the original house and then closed to the public while awaiting some process between cleaning and renovating.
In the meantime, the idolatry of Lucy Maud Montgomery, or rather, Anne with an e, proceeded apace, but was lacking an original home because of Uncle John. So, the cousins’ house (with a certain amount of historical justification) was acquired and became the centre piece of the growing tourist site. In the 1970’sit was remodeled, repainted and expanded to resemble the house in the novels and then expanded again and restored again in 1985 and furnished with a number of artifacts to reflect Green Gables in the novels. Anne’s “enchanted bookcase”, the organ from the church (which she had played as a young woman), the “crazy patchwork quilt” and the blue chest from The Story Girl were distributed throughout the house and a new Green Gables was created for the visiting tourists. But the original home was gone.
Which place is New Place
One of the little considered facts about Shakespeare is that his career was astonishingly short considering the immensity of his achievement, influence and fame. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon and the first concrete evidence of him in association with the London Theatres was in 1592, when he was 28. He begins to withdraw from full time theatre work sometime after 1608 (at the age of 45), stopped writing plays without one collaborator or more in 1610 and seems to have retired to Stratford in 1613 at the age of 49. He was certainly gone by the time that the original Globe burned on June 29, 1613. So, he did it all in 20years or so, and by 1616 he was dead at the age of 52.
The other little considered fact about Shakespeare was that he retired (and died) a relatively wealthy man. No poor-writer-in-the-garret life for him, except, perhaps, in the early days. He owned property in Stratford and property in London and was speculating in wool futures. When he retired to his home town, he bought the most expensive house there to retire in – which brings us to the connection with Lucy Maud. Like Lucy’s first home, Shakespeare’s last home no longer exists – and for pretty much the same reasons.
The house in question was known then and is known today as New Place. It was built on the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane by Sir Hugh Clopton in 1493 and was reputed to be the second largest dwelling in Stratford. It was a brick and wood structure with ten fireplaces, five (not green) gables and grounds with two barns and an orchard. It remained in the Clopton family until Dec. 20, 1563when it was sold by a money-strapped William Clopton to William Bott who sold it to William Underhill who sold it to Shakespeare in 1597 for 60 pounds. Apparently, William Bott was then poisoned to death by his son Fulke and The Court of Exchequer gave the Underhill estate to Fulke’s younger brother Hercules who reached a private agreement about the house with Shakespeare, confirming Will’s ownership and Will lived there from his retirement until his death.
When Shakespeare died in 1616 the house was left to his daughter Susanna and her husband Dr. John Hall. When Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth died, the house retuned to the ownership of the Clopton family. In 1756 it passed into the hands of the Reverend Francis Gastrell who, it seems, was a property speculator and a complete oddball. At this point it is unclear how much of the house remained original and how much had been replaced or renovated, but one thing certainly remained and that was a mulberry tree in the garden which was supposed to have been planted by Will himself.
Now, another uncommon piece of knowledge about Shakespeare was that during his lifetime he was considered just one of several good playwrights and that after his death until the mid 1700’s he was largely unknown, or at least not particularly famous. But the new generation of actor-managers, starting with David Garrick, changed all that. You see, for Garrick and the other great actors of his era, Shakespeare was a playwright of genius and characters like Hamlet, Richard III and Romeo became the vehicles of their fame. It was the era of the soliloquy and Garrick was its undisputed king. In fact, Garrick could be said to have been the major driver in the move to crown Shakespeare the greatest playwright/poet in the English Literature. In September 1769 Garrick created a Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon, inaugurating that town as a tourist attraction for generations to come (even though the Jubilee itself was a miserable event of mud and rain).
It took the town some time to learn to cash in on Shakespeare’s long shadow. It wasn’t until the late century that his “birthplace” was rescued from its fate as a dilapidated pub and turned into the shrine it is today. At one point it was looking very much like it would be sold to an American and shipped across the Atlantic – much like London Bridge was sold to an American in 1968for 2 ½ million dollars, shipped through the Panama Canal and re-assembled in Arizona(it was rumoured that the American thought he was buying Tower Bridge). The birthplace needed the intervention of Dickens and other literary luminaries to ensure its retention in Stratford. In the end the town, using the birthplace as its centre piece, became an enormous shrine to the Bard and a particularly tedious place to visit.
But in the immediate aftermath of Garrick the tourists were already flocking to Stratford and one of their objects of veneration was the aforementioned mulberry tree. Sounds a lot like the way the tourists flocked to Lucy Maude’s birthplace in P.E.I. Here, however, is where the story gets a little murky, particularly when the myth makers of Stratford got their hands on it. One thing that every one is clear on is that Gastrell got very upset at all the tourists messing with his mulberry tree, either with or without his permission and he had it torn out by the roots. There are a number of versions of what happened next. In one version, Gastrell became furious with the tourists gawking at “Shakespeare’s House” and tore that down as well. In another version he refused to pay what he considered to be unreasonable property taxes and then, to take advantage of a loophole in the law, he tore the house down on the principal that “no house, no tax.” Whatever the scenario, the house was destroyed and Gastrell was so hated in Stratford that he left town and the town, in turn, passed a law preventing his ever returning. Whatever the scenario, the tree and the house were torn down by Gastrell and are not with us today – and the reason seems at least in part, to have been a reaction to tourism.
When I visited Stratford there was no indication of any of this. The spot where New Place had stood was a small park and right next to it was a Tudor House of ample proportions that bore the sign “New Place Museum.” And just like “Green Gables” in Prince Edward Island, you could tour the house, chock full of Tudor era furniture and memorabilia, with nothing to tell you that this, in fact, was not New Place, but the Nash House next door. Someone must have called the museum people (or the town) out on this because at some point they ‘fessed up” and started cashing in on the Gastrell story and these days they actually have an actor portraying Gastrell, greeting the in excess of 100,000 visitors that Stratford-on-Avon gets each year.
In the end, the tourist industry will always win – there’s just too much money to be made. From the giant tour ships of Venice that will, in the end, destroy the city, to the massive mobs doing selfies on the steps of Propylaea in Athens, the tourists exert their sway over the truths of the past. Our only option seems to be to spread the truth among the caring few.
