scope for imagination

“Scope for imagination” is Anne Shirley’s phrase for the imaginative room opened by the old memorials and epitaphs in Old St. John’s Cemetery. In Kingsport, historical fragments prompt her not merely to read what is carved in stone, but to picture the lives behind it.

The Cemetery and the Memorial

Priscilla Grant introduces the phrase while describing Old St. John’s Cemetery, across the street from the young women’s rooms. Though it is no longer used for burials, the walled cemetery, with its rows of trees and old tombstones, has become one of Kingsport’s sights. Priscilla says Anne will go there to study, and points out a monument to Nova Scotian soldiers who fell in the Crimean War, opposite the entrance gates. The memorial, she tells Anne, has “scope for imagination”—a phrase she associates with Anne’s own way of speaking.

Epitaphs as Open Histories

When Anne and Priscilla later wander among the gravestones, Anne reads the worn inscription for Albert Crawford, a Kingsport ordnance keeper who served in the army until the peace of 1763, retired because of ill health, and died in 1792 at the age of eighty-four. The epitaph calls him a brave officer and the best of husbands, fathers, and friends. Anne imagines a life full of adventure from these few details, while also wondering whether Crawford heard such praise during his lifetime. The inscription gives her facts, but its silences leave room for questions about the person behind them.

Priscilla then reads another memorial: Alexander Ross died in 1840, aged forty-three, and the tribute says that someone he served faithfully for twenty-seven years regarded him as a friend deserving of confidence and attachment. Here, too, a short inscription suggests a long relationship without recounting its daily particulars. The phrase thus applies both to a public monument commemorating soldiers and to private epitaphs that preserve only a fragment of an individual life.

Meaning and Narrative Use

The expression describes a way of reading that joins recorded detail to acknowledged uncertainty. The cemetery’s stones do not supply complete biographies; their dates, occupations, praise, and relationships instead give Anne starting points for imagining what cannot be recovered from the inscriptions themselves. Her response is not simply to accept the epitaph’s praise: her question about whether Crawford knew he was valued keeps the gap between commemoration and lived experience in view. “Scope for imagination” therefore marks both the possibility and the limit of historical remembrance: the evidence invites vivid conjecture, while leaving the unrecorded life unfinished.