Matthew Cuthbert

Matthew Cuthbert’s place in Anne Shirley’s life is defined by a quiet but enduring act of care: he was the first to give her the love and sympathy her childhood had lacked. After his death, that bond remains active in Anne’s weekly visits to his grave, in the flowers she brings, and in the way she and Marilla Cuthbert remember his understanding of her. The novel makes him a continuing presence not through new action, but through gifts, recollection, and repeated acts of remembrance.

Identity and First Care

The available recollections present Matthew as quiet and shy, a man whose importance is easy for the wider community to overlook. Anne’s memory is different. At the close of the school year, she reflects that others in Avonlea have forgotten him, with Marilla the sole exception, but that his memory remains green in her own heart. She remembers him as the first person to offer the love and sympathy her starved childhood had craved. The contrast between public forgetfulness and Anne’s constancy makes his emotional significance clear: his care was not a passing kindness to her, but the beginning of belonging.

His role in bringing Anne into the Cuthbert home also survives as a point of comparison in the community’s later understanding of Marilla. Rachel Lynde remembers the earlier spring evening when Matthew brought Anne home, an arrival that had made people laugh at the idea of Marilla raising a child. Years later, after Marilla returns from a funeral with the Keith twins, Rachel sees a similar surprise in a changed form: Marilla has taken in two children, and Anne is there to help. Matthew is not shown acting in the later decision, but his part in Anne’s arrival remains the precedent by which Rachel measures the family’s unexpected growth.

A Gift That Endures

A dispute over a cow briefly brings Matthew’s care into the present-tense action. J. A. Harrison confronts Anne after finding the animal in his oats for the third time. When he blames Marilla, Anne corrects him: Marilla is not her aunt, and the cow is Anne’s, not Marilla’s. Matthew gave her the animal three years earlier, when it was still a calf, after buying it from Mr. Bell. Anne apologizes for the damage but also points out that the fence separating the oatfield from the pasture is in poor repair.

The scene gives the remembered relationship a concrete object. The cow is not merely part of the dispute over the damaged oats; its ownership allows Anne to explain a particular gift from Matthew and to speak for herself. The gift does not prevent trouble—the cow has trespassed repeatedly, and Harrison is angry—but it remains Anne’s possession and her responsibility. In this small, practical detail, Matthew’s affection persists as something woven into ordinary life rather than preserved only in solemn recollection.

The Weekly Pilgrimage

Anne’s remembrance is a repeated practice. From the earliest mayflowers onward, she has not missed her weekly pilgrimage to Matthew’s grave. At the end of the school year, after locking the schoolhouse for the beginning of vacation, she walks down the hill with a basket of flowers and visits him. The timing links the close of her teaching year to an older, continuing obligation of affection: she can feel at peace with the world and still make space for the person whose kindness first helped make that world habitable for her.

The graveyard scene also places remembrance among the living. Paul Irving waits for Anne and joins her on the way there, carrying flowers for his grandfather and white roses in memory of his mother. Anne’s visit to Matthew’s grave thus takes place beside another child’s act of mourning. The scene does not make the losses identical; rather, the two sets of flowers show how affection can be expressed through a shared gesture even when the dead are remembered for different reasons.

Anne’s practice extends beyond Matthew. After placing flowers on his grave, she visits the grave of Hester Gray, where she has left flowers ever since the spring picnic. The previous evening she had returned to Hester’s deserted garden to gather its own white roses. This detail gives Anne’s memorial visits a particular, attentive character: she carries the flowers that belong to the remembered person’s world. Matthew’s grave is part of a wider habit of fidelity, but it remains the visit that anchors this account of Anne’s continuing bond with him.

Memory in Conversation and Change

Matthew’s importance appears in the way others remember Anne’s childhood as well as in Anne’s solitary visits. When Marilla and Anne discuss the possibility of Rachel moving into Green Gables, Marilla recalls how bewildered she had been about managing Anne and says Matthew understood her better. Anne answers softly that he understood everything. The exchange is brief, but it shows that his insight remains a standard against which Anne’s early experiences of being understood are measured. Marilla’s later willingness to share her home with Rachel also emerges in a household whose history has already been changed by taking Anne in.

The memory is not idealized as a collection of grand declarations. Its force comes from repeated, specific references: Matthew brought Anne home, gave her a calf, and understood her when Marilla felt at a loss. Anne’s weekly journey to the grave keeps those details from becoming merely family history. Each return turns memory into an ongoing relationship, while the conversations with Marilla make that relationship legible to someone who shared Matthew’s home and life.

Flowers, Loss, and Legacy

A later storm damages crops and fruit across Avonlea and leaves Anne with only two blighted stalks of white narcissus. She is sorry that they are the only buds the storm spared and says she had wanted flowers for Matthew’s grave, since he was fond of June lilies. Marilla misses the flowers too, though she notes the more extensive destruction. Anne answers that people have resown their oats and that her annuals are coming up again, but June lilies cannot be replaced. She also thinks of Hester Gray, whose garden has none left.

The ruined flowers make the act of remembrance vulnerable to circumstance: the wish to bring something to Matthew’s grave cannot always be fulfilled as Anne hopes. The passage also joins private mourning to the storm’s wider losses without treating them as equivalent. Crops may be sown again; Anne’s annuals are returning; the June lilies, once tied to Matthew’s affection, are absent. Their absence sharpens the memory of what he loved and gives a small natural loss a personal meaning.

That meaning is carried forward by other people. When Anne expects to leave Avonlea, she asks Diana Barry to put flowers on Matthew’s grave while she is away, and Diana readily promises to do so. Anne also asks her to remember the graves of the Allans’ baby and Hester Gray. The request makes memory a responsibility that can be shared without diminishing Anne’s own attachment. Matthew’s lasting significance lies in this continuity: the man who first gave Anne a home remains present in her habitual acts of care, in the memories she voices, and in the promise that someone else will tend his grave when she cannot.