We thought we’d get a boy. Matthew is getting up in years, you know—he’s sixty—and he isn’t so spry as he once was. His heart troubles him a good deal. And you know how desperate hard it’s got to be to get hired help. There’s never anybody to be had but those stupid, half-grown little French boys; and as soon as you do get one broke into your ways and taught something he’s up and off to the lobster canneries or the States. At first Matthew suggested getting a Home boy. But I said ‘no’ flat to that. ‘They may be all right—I’m not saying they’re not—but no London street Arabs for me,’ I said. ‘Give me a native born at least. There’ll be a risk, no matter who we get. But I’ll feel easier in my mind and sleep sounder at nights if we get a born Canadian.’
Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
There's atleast 3 types of racism in here, against French Acadians, against Arabs and the purpoted race mixing happening in the wilds of London and general settler colonial erasure of indigenous Canadians because tbh that is what pastoralist fantasy is. This is just the first chapter.
Home boys here refers to the practice of rounding up street children in London, housing and feeding them for a bit and shipping them off to the colonies for labour, with all the abuse that follows at institutions that hire isolated children.
According to the British House of Commons Child Migrant's Trust Report, "it is estimated that some 150,000 children were dispatched over a period of 350 years—the earliest recorded child migrants left Britain for the Virginia Colony in 1618, and the process did not finally end until the late 1960s." It was widely believed by contemporaries that all of these children were orphans, but it is now known that most (88%) had living parents, some of whom had no idea of the fate of their children after they were left in children's homes, and some were led to believe that their children had been adopted somewhere in Britain.
From wikipedia
