Marmee & Louisa (59 page)

⁶²¹
“Bronson assigned great value”: John Matteson, lecture on John Brown and the Alcotts, School of Philosophy, Orchard House, July 2009.

⁶²²
a “passion for the blond”: Brooks,
Flowering of New England
, 277.

⁶²³
“Count thyself divinely tasked”: ABA, March 16, 1846,
Journals
, 173. Editor Odell Shepard noted in a footnote, “In Mrs. Alcott and Louisa . . . he thought that he saw diabolic traits.”

⁶²⁴
“I corrected their Journals”: ABA, April 1846,
Journals
, 175.

⁶²⁵
“family exchequer”: Caroline Ticknor,
May Alcott, A Memoir
, 26.

⁶²⁶
“I made [Louisa] write them”: Ellen Emerson to a friend, December 21, 1854, quoted in Stern’s
From Blood & Thunder
, 37. LMA later recalled writing her fairy tales at sixteen, but in 1848 she was fifteen.

⁶²⁷
Bronson desired a consociate family: ABA to Charles Lane, January 1846,
Letters
, 126.

⁶²⁸
“my own efforts to do and be”: AMA, September 5, 1845, journals, HAP.

⁶²⁹
Sophia Ford lived: ABA to Charles Lane, January 1846,
Letters
, 126.

⁶³⁰
John Edward May: CMW and LFM to SJM, October 12, 1845. MFPCL. John Edward May while boarding with the Alcotts attended the Lexington Classical School, which his father had run.

⁶³¹
“first clergyman to advocate”:
History of Woman Suffrage
, eds. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, 518.

⁶³²
“Why do half”: SJM, “The Rights and Condition of Women,”
Commensurate with Her Capacities and Obligations Are Woman’s Rights: A Series of Tracts
, 1–2,13.

⁶³³
masculine names: Cecile in “A Marble Woman” and Christy in
Work
, for instance. The quote is from the first chapter of
Little Women
.

⁶³⁴
abandon corsets: Jan Turnquist, executive director, Orchard House, in conversation, 2010.

⁶³⁵
“evils of Woman’s life”: AMA, “Sunday 19th” [probably 1848], journals, HAP.

⁶³⁶
“great big darling”: LFM to SJM, August 25 [probably 1828], MFPCL.

⁶³⁷
“dull & lonesome”: LFM to SJM, October 1845, MFPCL.

⁶³⁸
“No money comes”: LFM to SJM, October 24, 1845, MFPCL.

⁶³⁹
“these prosaic ministers”: LFM to SJM, December 11, 1846, MFPCL.

⁶⁴⁰
“quite out of place”: ABA to Charles Lane, January 1846,
Letters
, 126.

⁶⁴¹
“Though no son”: Emerson,
Journals
, IV, 460.

⁶⁴²
“all victims”: Blanchard,
Margaret Fuller
, 104.

⁶⁴³
“As was Eve”: Miller,
Margaret Fuller, American Romantic
, 298.

⁶⁴⁴
“sentimental period”: LMA, “Recollections.”

⁶⁴⁵
Jane Eyre
: LMA, 1852 “List of books I like,” in Cheney,
LMA Her Life, Letters, and Journals
, 68.

⁶⁴⁶
“too noble to curb”: AMA to SJM, February 29, 1848, family letters, HAP.

⁶⁴⁷
“constantly finding myself”: AMA to SJM, December 31, 1846, journals, HAP.

⁶⁴⁸
“determined purpose”: Cheney,
LMA Life, Letters and Journals
, 49.

⁶⁴⁹
“These arrearages,” AMA, December 31, 1846, journal, HAP.

⁶⁵⁰
“bright active beings”: AMA, January 22 [probably 1847], journals, HAP.

⁶⁵¹
“meeting [with] God”: AMA to SJM, December 31, 1846, family letters, HAP.

⁶⁵²
young fugitive: ABA, February 2, 1846,
Journals
, 188.

⁶⁵³
“the most intolerant”: ABA, February 1846,
Journals
, 191.

⁶⁵⁴
“hermit”: ABA to his mother, June 13, 1847,
Letters
, 130.

⁶⁵⁵
“Arrowheads”: Brooks,
Flowering of New England
, 296.

⁶⁵⁶
summer of 1847: ABA to his mother, June 13, 1847,
Letters
, 130.

⁶⁵⁷
Edward May: In a June 13, 1848, letter to his mother, ABA mentioned “a boy now living with us, Edward May, from Boston,” who studied in Anna’s school. Born in
January 1838 to Abigail’s first cousin the Rev. Samuel May Jr., of Leicester, Massachusetts, and his wife, this Edward May was later schooled in Boston for several years but apparently did not attend Harvard.

⁶⁵⁸
seraphine: Barton,
Transcendental Wife
, 124.

⁶⁵⁹
Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Willis Wells: Born in 1822, she gave birth in August 1839 to Elizabeth May Wells, who in 1866 married her first cousin once removed Samuel Sewall Greele, born October 10, 1824. In yet another union of first cousins, the Alcott girls’“Cousin Louisa” Windship, a daughter of Dr. Windship’s second marriage, married her first cousin by marriage Hamilton Willis.

⁶⁶⁰
“dreadfully”: LMA, July 1850,
Journals
, 63.

⁶⁶¹
“with tearful eyes”: AMA quoted in ABA to AAP, December 10, 1847,
ABA Letters
, 132.

⁶⁶²
“cold, heartless, Brainless”: AMA to SJM, January 10, 1848, family letters, HAP.

⁶⁶³
“one of the dullest little towns”: LMA to the
Springfield Republican
, May 5, 1869, in
Selected Letters
, 127.

⁶⁶⁴
water-cure establishment: The spa where Abigail worked was immortalized on an 1857 Seated Liberty Quarter counter-stamped “Dr. Shattuck’s Water Cure, Waterford, Maine.”

⁶⁶⁵
expanding railroad lines: Hale’s
New England Boyhood
describes the first U.S. steam railway going nine miles from Boston to West Newton in 1833, and to Worcester the next year. By 1840 railroads linked all six New England states.

⁶⁶⁶
Mary Moody Emerson: Among the many charming accounts of Emerson’s aunt is Carlos Baker’s in the “Aunt Mary” chapter of
Emerson Among the Eccentrics
.

⁶⁶⁷
“head of a water cure”: Ralph Waldo Emerson to Calvin Farrar, December 9, 1847,
Emerson’s Letters
, VIII, 126, quoting AMA.

⁶⁶⁸
“cannot afford to feed”: AMA, journals, HAP.

⁶⁶⁹
“Mrs. Alcott possesses”: Emerson to Farrar, op. cit. Oddly, the editor of Emerson’s letters, Elanor Tilton, writes that “nothing came of this scheme to provide a living for the Alcotts.”

⁶⁷⁰
“family cares”: ABA to Sylvester Graham, April 12, 1848,
Letters
, 134.

⁶⁷¹
“
Action
is a duty”: AMA, journals, HAP.

⁶⁷²
“By some chance as yet unforeseen”: ABA to AAP, April 13, 1848,
Letters
, 135.

⁶⁷³
“work beyond myself”: ABA to AAP, May 11, 1848,
Letters
, 138–39.

⁶⁷⁴
“fly” to her mother: ABA to AAP, June 23, 1848,
Letters
, 144.

⁶⁷⁵
bedchamber that she shared: ABA to AAP, May 16, 1848,
Letters
, 140.

⁶⁷⁶
“scene in a theater”: AMA to her family, May 27, 1848, Memoir of 1878, HAP. This letter is also the source of AMA’s dream about LMA.

⁶⁷⁷
“
nation
alities”: AMA to SES, June 14, 1848, family letters, HAP.

⁶⁷⁸
Daily spa schedule: AMA to ABA, May 20, 1848, Memoir of 1878, HAP. Although AMA mentions a Dr. Fisher, the doctor in charge of the spa that summer, according to
The Waterford Water Cure
, was Josiah Prescott, M.D., who had succeeded Dr. E. A. Kitteridge.

⁶⁷⁹
“the greatest thing”: newspaper clipping pasted on letter from AMA to SJM, June 14, 1848, family letters, HAP.

⁶⁸⁰
“handsome, genial”: Julian Hawthorne in Shealy,
Alcott In Her Own Time
, 205.

⁶⁸¹
Ann Sargent Gage: Many of her papers have been donated to the American Antiquarian Society. I am indebted to her great-great-grandson William Wheeler for sharing with me the letters AMA sent her in 1848.

⁶⁸²
“dignity and character”: AMA to Ann Sargent Gage, July 13, 1848, private collection, Waterford, Maine. In August 2010 the author viewed this and a second letter from AMA to Gage, dated a week later.

⁶⁸³
“selfish”: AMA, May 18–21, 1848, journal for 1848, HAP.

⁶⁸⁴
“I had staid”: AMAN to AMA, July 5, 1848, quoted in Ticknor,
May Alcott
, 28–30.

⁶⁸⁵
around July 10: Bedell and many other biographers of the Alcotts theorized that Abigail stayed at the water-cure spa for the three months to which she had agreed. But a newly discovered letter she wrote to Ann Gage from Concord, Massachusetts, on July 13, 1848, indicates she left the spa after about two months. The two-word quote about Eliza Stearns is from that letter.

⁶⁸⁶
“threshold of my Home”: AMA to Ann Gage, July 13, 1848, private collection.

⁶⁸⁷
“Despair is the paralysis”: AMA to SJM, September 17, 1848, Memoir of 1878, HAP.

⁶⁸⁸
“antique furniture”:
Memoir of SES
, 149. His partner was George Dary.

⁶⁸⁹
influx of immigrants: Rawson,
Eden on the Charles
, 17. Irish immigration to Boston began in the 1820s and swelled in the 1840s with a massive influx of rural peasants to the urban environment. The city was one-third Irish by 1855, and by the end of the century Protestant Yankees were “outnumbered nearly three to one by people of other ethnic backgrounds,” according to Rawson.

⁶⁹⁰
America’s fourth-largest: Ibid., 86.

⁶⁹¹
“dark lanes and alleys”: Dr. Walter Channing,
Plea for Pure Water
, 14.

⁶⁹²
spread disease: According to
Eden on the Charles
, 82, an 1834 study by Boston’s city council found that water from one-third of the city’s 2,767 wells was undrinkable.

⁶⁹³
“Dr. Huntington’s Society”: The Rev. Dr. Frederic Dan Huntington (1819–1904), a Unitarian minister who preached in Boston, became Harvard’s Plummer professor of Christian Morals, and in the 1860s joined the Episcopal Church.

⁶⁹⁴
“City Missionary”: ABA to his mother, April 22, 1849,
Letters
, 149.

⁶⁹⁵
“a visitor of the poor”: Mary Van Wyck Church, unpublished manuscript biography of Elizabeth Peabody, MHS, 339. I am grateful to Megan Marshall for pointing out this quotation.

⁶⁹⁶
thirty to eighty dollars: A few months after AMA started working in Boston, her monthly salary increased because the South Congregational Church Benevolent and Relief Fund directed by the Rev. Dr. Huntington employed AMA “to visit and distribute the alms of their society to the Destitute Poor of Ward 11.”

⁶⁹⁷
impoverished South End: For eighteen months, from fall 1848 to spring 1850, AMA lived and worked in Boston’s Ward 11, the rectangular portion of the South End including Harrison, Washington, and Tremont streets from Dover Street northwest to the Roxbury border.

⁶⁹⁸
Hillside tenant: Bedell,
Alcotts
, 271.

⁶⁹⁹
“we women folk”: LMA, “Recollections of My Childhood,” in
Lulu’s Library
, xv–xvi.

⁷⁰⁰
“bustle and dirt”: Ibid.

⁷⁰¹
“fine free times”: Ibid.

⁷⁰²
“all-absorbing poor”: Ibid.

⁷⁰³
“drudgery”: ABA to AMA, September 17, 1849,
Letters
, 152, quoting AMA.

⁷⁰⁴
“daily protest”: AMA to SJM, 1850–1851, family letters, HAP.

⁷⁰⁵
Atkinson [now Congress] Street: ABA to his mother, April 28, 1850,
Letters
, 155. LMA said Uncle Sam’s house had “many comforts about us which we shall enjoy.” The editors of her
Journals
indicate that this Uncle Sam was SJM, the Alcotts’ “longtime financial supporter,” but in fact he was her great uncle Samuel May, Colonel JM’s younger brother, who lived from 1776 to 1870. LFM to SJM, May 14, 1857, in MFPCL, mentions that this Uncle Sam “made millions of dollars by some lucky speculation.” Bedell,
Alcotts
, 271, cites an anonymous 1846 pamphlet listing Samuel May’s worth as $500,000, equal to more than a billion dollars in 2000.

⁷⁰⁶
ABA depression: ABA to AMA, September 17, 1849,
Letters
, 152.

⁷⁰⁷
“
A man once lived
”: Ibid.

⁷⁰⁸
returned to slums: ABA to Chatfield Alcott, September 16, 1850,
Letters
, 159.

⁷⁰⁹
“poverty and Crime”: AMA, 1851, journals, HAP.

⁷¹⁰
“despondent”: ABA, May 27, 1850,
Journals
, 231, quoting AMA.

⁷¹¹
“spared house rent”: ABA, April 6, 1850,
Journals
, 230–31.

⁷¹²
“implied indifference”: ABA, May 27 and June 30, 1850,
Journals
, 231–32.

⁷¹³
“family destitution”: Ibid., 231.