Anne’s Dinner Fiasco While Preparing for Charlotte E. Morgan

Anne’s Dinner Fiasco While Preparing for Charlotte E. Morgan is a comic sequence of mounting domestic accidents at Green Gables, where Anne’s wish to welcome a celebrated author collides with broken pies, spoiled peas, and a shattered borrowed platter. The expected visit never happens: after the disastrous day, Anne learns that Charlotte E. Morgan has badly sprained her ankle and cannot travel to Avonlea. The episode makes the gap between anticipation and outcome its engine, while giving Anne a chance to see both the humor and the hurt in a day that has gone wrong at nearly every turn.

Anticipation and preparations

Anne learns from a letter from Priscilla Grant that Charlotte E. Morgan is on Prince Edward Island and may come to Green Gables on Thursday, weather permitting. The plan is for Morgan to spend the afternoon with the household and then go on to the hotel at White Sands, where American friends are staying. For Anne, the prospect is extraordinary: Morgan is the author of The Rosebud Garden, and Anne wants to do something worthy of the writer whose heroines she admires. Marilla responds with dry practicality, but acknowledges that a visit from a famous woman is unusual.

Anne asks to cook the entire dinner herself, and Marilla gladly lets her take over the work. Anne plans peas, beans, creamed potatoes, lettuce salad, lemon pie with whipped cream, coffee, cheese, and ladyfingers. She intends to bake the pies and ladyfingers the next day and prepare her white muslin dress. She also plans to tell Diana Barry, who has shared her hope of meeting Morgan and the idea of wearing white muslin in her honor. Anne invites Mr Allan, Mrs Allan, and Miss Stacy as well, since they are eager to meet the author. Her careful preparations turn the visit into more than a meal: it is a private ceremony of admiration, made tangible in the menu, the dress, and the choice of company.

The household’s cheerful preparations also contain warnings of disorder. Anne cannot bring herself to kill the chickens and says she will ask John Henry Carter to do it. Davy Keith volunteers instead, proposing that Marilla hold the birds while he uses an axe. Anne keeps planning while managing Davy’s play with the pea pods, telling him not to push them into the floor cracks or sail them in the water bucket. She even takes Uncle Abe’s forecast of rain as a promising sign, because he expects wet weather for most of the week. After waking three times to check whether that prediction is coming true, Anne sees Thursday dawn clear and bright. Diana arrives after breakfast carrying flowers and her muslin dress, which she will put on only when the dinner preparations are finished.

Accidents in the pantry

The first major accident destroys the dessert Anne has made in advance. Davy, having unwound his herring net and collected its twine into a ball, goes into the pantry to put it on a shelf above the table. He keeps many similar balls there, valued for the pleasure of possessing them rather than any useful purpose. Although Marilla has already forbidden him to climb onto the table after an earlier mishap, Davy climbs up and reaches toward the shelf at a dangerous angle. He slips and lands on the two lemon pies, coating his clean print blouse with filling and leaving the desserts crushed. The pig eventually benefits from the accident, but Anne must look for another dessert; Marilla suggests strawberry preserves with the whipped cream that remains.

The incident exposes a difference between Davy’s immediate understanding of trouble and Marilla’s rules. When she reminds him that he had been forbidden to climb on the table, he says he forgot because there are too many things he is told not to do. He hopes Anne will save him bones from the dinner and asks to take some of the spoiled pie upstairs. Marilla refuses the pie and sends him away. Anne, meanwhile, has to abandon one part of her carefully arranged menu, though the preserves offer a practical replacement.

A strained dinner and a broken platter

One o’clock passes without Priscilla Grant or Charlotte E. Morgan arriving. Anne has finished the preparations, but the soup cannot be trusted to stay at its best indefinitely. At the table, the peas bring a second culinary reversal. Diana tastes them and discovers that they are sweetened. Anne had added a spoonful, believing that was the household’s usual practice; Marilla had independently added another because she assumed Anne would forget. The peas receive two spoonfuls of sugar through the very efforts meant to prevent a mistake, and are left off the dinner table. The Allans and Miss Stacy try to sustain the occasion, while Anne and Diana are too disappointed and exhausted to eat or converse easily. Anne makes an effort to attend to her guests, but her excitement has drained away.

The final accident comes just after Mr Allan has finished returning thanks. A heavy object bounds down the stairs, ending in a crash. At the bottom lies the pink conch shell among the broken pieces of Miss Barry’s willow-ware platter; Davy, who had been kneeling at the top of the stairs to watch through the bannisters, is terrified. He says his foot struck the shell and pushed it off, rather than that he threw it deliberately. The platter had been borrowed from Miss Barry of Charlottetown, who had paid twenty dollars for it. Anne had promised to be careful with it and had carried it herself after its use at the Aid bazaar. In the rush to respond to the crash in the pantry, she set it on the second stair and forgot it there. When she gathers the fragments, she accepts responsibility for the breakage instead of blaming Davy, even as she worries about what Miss Barry will say.

Cancellation and aftermath

The guests soon leave, judging it tactful to go. Anne and Diana wash the dishes in unusual silence; Diana goes home with a headache, and Anne retreats to the east gable. The day’s reversals have therefore damaged more than the planned menu: the visitors have not met Morgan, Anne’s hoped-for welcome has become an ordeal, and the valuable platter has been destroyed through her own carelessness.

At sunset, Marilla returns from the post office with a letter from Priscilla Grant, written the previous day. It explains that Morgan’s ankle has been sprained so severely that she cannot leave her room. By the time she recovers, she will have to return to Toronto, so she will not come to Green Gables. The letter confirms that the guest Anne had spent the day preparing for was never able to make the visit. Anne is bitterly disappointed, but does not settle on the conclusion that her hopes were foolish: she recognizes that good things have come true for her before and may continue to do so. She can imagine that she and Diana might laugh about the day when they are old, while admitting that she cannot yet find it funny. Marilla, intending comfort, cautions that life will bring further disappointments and observes that Anne invests her hopes intensely. The ending preserves both sides of the episode: the day is genuinely painful to Anne, yet its sequence of mishaps has already acquired the shape of a comic story she may one day tell differently.