The Education of Ellen Tucker Emerson

kate culkin Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

N 1852, Ralph Waldo Emerson, considering where to send I his thirteen-year-old daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson to continue her schooling, wrote to Caroline Sturgis Tappan, “The teaching is of something less importance in Ellen’s case, that she is a good scholar & will learn easily and anywhere. But I wish she should have a good, reasonable & well behaved set of schoolmates.”1 The education of Ellen, his elder daughter with Lidian Jackson, over the following eight years included stints at the Sedgwick School in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Agassiz School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Concord School, run by Franklin Sanborn. A complete matrix of familial, social, and professional demands drove the choices the family made. Waldo clearly recognized his daughter’s intelligence, and he was often supportive of and engaged with her education. But he also at times privileged his needs above his daughter’s, and his need for someone to run Bush, the family home in Con- cord, because Lidian suffered from physical illness and depression also influenced his ideas of how and where Ellen shouldbe educated. Waldo, in addition, chose schools that solidified his social connections and broadcast his support of the educators. He did not make these decisions alone, moreover, as Ellen and Lidian brought their own desires and concerns to the table. The Emersons’ choices about how, when, and where to ed- ucate Ellen provide an opportunity to examine what Robert

1Ralph Waldo Emerson (RWE) to Caroline Sturgis Tappan (CST), August 26, 1852, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Eleanor Tilton (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1991), 8:327 (hereafter Emerson Letters).

74 THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 75 D. Habich has called “Emerson’s domesticity.” Habich notes that this domesticity is “a subject yet unexplored by scholars and biographers.”2 There are significant exceptions to this statement. Waldo’s relationship with his brothers and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and, to some extent, his marriage to Lidian, particularly in its early years, have received significant attention.3 But life at Bush during the Emerson children’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 youth and adolescence, years that are critical to understanding Waldo’s working habits and the family dynamic more generally, is largely unexplored. The window into domestic life at Bush in the 1850s afforded by Ellen’s educational journey does not just illuminate this time period but also helps explain the relationship between Ellen and Waldo in the last years of his life as he struggled with memory loss. While long acknowledged as his caregiver, more recently Ellen’s editorial work with James Elliot Cabot on her father’s essays in his final decade and after his death in 1882 has received growing notice. Ronald Bosco, in the historical introduction to volume eight of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Christopher Hanlon, in Emerson’s Mem- ory Loss, analyze correspondence and manuscripts to detail the surprising breadth of Ellen’s contributions.4 Focusing on

2Robert D. Habich, Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 134. 3On Emerson’s brothers, see: Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On Mary Moody Emerson, see: Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Phyllis Cole, “‘Men and Women Conversing’: The Emersons in 1837,” in Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 1997), 127–59. On Lidian Emerson, see: Cole, “‘Men and Women Conversing’”; Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jack- son Emerson, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991); Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. 330, 470. 4Ronald A. Bosco, historical introduction in Letters and Social Aims, vol. 8 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Myerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), xix-ccxii and Christopher Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). See also: Nancy Craig Simmons, “Arranging the Sibylline Leaves: James Elliot Cabot’s Work as Emerson’s Literary Executor,” Studies in the American Renaissance 76 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Letters and Social Aims (1874) and Natural History of the Intel- lect (1893), Hanlon finds her not only collaborating with Cabot to organize and edit essays, but also “revising and sometimes recomposing” portions. He argues that acknowledging Ellen and Cabot’s strong hand is critical to understanding the focus in Waldo’s later essays on “communal styles of intellection,” rather than self-reliance; this is part of a broader trend he identifies Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 in Emerson’s work after 1850, and he posits identifying the interest in collaboration in the later essays helps find seeds of it even in Waldo’s early works.5 Hanlon sees the acknowledgment of Cabot and Ellen’s work, then, not as “a kind of scandal,” but instead as, “a conduit toward a way for reading Emerson anew, from a position that also permits us to activate something in him that would otherwise remain dormant.”6 Ellen re- fused public credit for this work, and Hanlon also notes that his analysis “brings the challenge of discerning someone else in the midst who didn’t want to be noticed as she assisted her father; someone who worked so as to be forgotten, and who consequently barely registers in our discussions of nineteenth- century literary history even as she seems to have had a pro- found effect upon its course.”7 The unique combination of intellectual acuity and eschewal that led to Ellen’s commitment to her father’s work, her ability to contribute to it, and her re- fusal to take credit for it were forged in the family dynamics of her adolescence. Expanding our conception of Waldo as a husband and father is inherent to understanding those dynamics. Waldo’s reflections on marriage and observations by Margaret Fuller regarding the Emersons’ partnership have shaped much of the vision of domestic life in Bush. Fuller painted a grim picture on her trip to Concord in August 1842, eight months after the death of the couple’s first child, also Waldo, and less than a year after

(1983), 335–89; and Joseph Thomas, “Late Emerson: Selected Poems and the ‘Emer- son Factory,’” ELH, 65 (1998): 971–94. 5Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss, 3. 6Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss, 7–8. 7Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss, 45. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 77 the birth of their second daughter, Edith. Fuller described Lid- ian bursting into tears and reported in her journal on Septem- ber 1 that Waldo said to her, “Ask any woman whether her aim in this union is to further the genius of her husband; and she will say yes, but her conduct will always be to claim a devotion day by day that will be injurious to him, if he yields.”8 Emer- son wrote in “Experience,” published two years later, “Marriage Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.”9 Such passages have contributed to what Kathleen Lawrence has described as the “myth of Emerson as a sterile philosopher living on an ideal plane” stripped of “the emotion and passion so prevalent in his letters, journals, and poems.”10 Much of the vision of Waldo as a father focuses on this same time period, exploring the effect of his son’s death and his reflections on the tragedy in “Experience.” In the essay, he writes, “The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is.”11 Scholars such as John Matteson and Robert Richardson have noted that Emerson did in fact grieve deeply, but, in Mat- teson’s words, his dismissal of grief was “the wall he chose to erect around himself.”12 The lasting impact of the young boy’s death on the Emersons is also often stressed, with Richard- son arguing, “Waldo’s death made a deep wound in the entire Emerson family, one that never completely healed.”13 There is certainly ample evidence that the Emersons had a tense, complicated relationship, that they continued to mourn their son throughout their lives, and that Waldo at times

8Quoted in Joel Myerson, “Margaret Fuller’s 1842 Journal: At Concord with the Emersons,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 21 (1973): 330–31. 9Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose, ed. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 241. 10Kathleen Lawrence, “The ‘Dry-Lighted Soul’ Ignites: Emerson and His Soul- Mate Caroline Sturgis as Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts,” Harvard Library Bul- letin 16 (2005): 39. 11Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” 228. 12John Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2012), 198. 13Richardson, Emerson:TheMindonFire,359. 78 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY isolated himself and prioritized his work over his wife and children. But it is not the full story. Waldo also made more sympathetic observations about marriage, writing, “Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.”14 And all three of his children who lived to adulthood often depict a happier story in their voluminous correspondence and their written memoirs, showing a household that at Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 times brimmed with humor and portraying a caring father who involved himself in his children’s lives and focused on their wel- fare. Their experiences should also be weighed when attempt- ing to comprehend the dynamics of the Emerson household and are key to understanding the loyalty shown by Ellen to her father later in life. The Emersons’ choices about Ellen’s education took place not only within the context of their family but also in a society paying increasing attention to education for girls, at least white daughters of the emerging middle class. Over three hundred female academies and seminaries opened between 1790 and 1850. A confluence of social and economic changes drove the development of these forerunners to women’s colleges. Indus- trialization and urbanization meant that women’s work was less in demand on family farms while also creating a gap in women’s lives between childhood and marriage; as men moved west and postponed marriage to start careers, a cohort of single women who needed to support themselves emerged; and religious re- vivals often advocated for the education of women as a way to strengthen their spiritual authority in their families. Middle class parents also saw educating their daughters, particularly at single-sex schools, as a mark of status. Although these schools prepared some women for careers as schoolteachers, writers, editors, and reformers, female education advocates often justified them in the language of separate spheres and female duty,

14Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 11, ed. A.W. Plumstead and William Gilman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 213. Armida Gilbert provides an overview of Emer- son’s shifting ideas on marriage. “Emerson in the Context of the Women’s Rights Move- ment,” A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 224–31. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 79 arguing that educated women would be better mothers and wives and better citizens for the Republic.15 The Emersons were among those parents who did not envi- sion education as a path to a career for their daughters. While in keeping with their contemporaries, the Emersons’ approach is notable given the intellectual ambition of many women in the Transcendentalist circle, such as Fuller, Tappan, and Elizabeth Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Peabody, as well as Lidian herself. She had attended a boarding school run by Mrs. Saunders and Miss Beach in Dorch- ester and Mrs. McKeige’s school in Jamaica Plain, and she participated in Fuller’s Conversations and Bronson Alcott’s Concord School of Philosophy. An intelligent, intense woman, she was most satisfied when intellectually engaged, reading or discussing literature and religion. She often fell into illness and depression when the responsibilities of raising children and running a famous author’s home overwhelmed her; the death of young Waldo in 1842 intensified these tendencies.16 Lidian’s unhappiness, however, did not drive her and Waldo to push Ellen to take a different path but instead to encourage Ellen to become the person who could take on the duties Lidian was unable or unwilling to fulfill. While their ambition for their daughter was limited, Lidian and Waldo invested time and money in her education from a young age, often combining resources with their neighbors. Ellen’s early education took place at private schools and with tutors, along with her siblings: Waldo, Edith (born in 1841), and Edward (born in 1844). Once she began attending a school led by Abba Prescott, her father gave her Cleveland’s Latin Gram- mar, telling her, “Now you are five years old it is time for youto

15For information on women and higher education in the nineteenth century see: Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006); Jamie Osterman Alves, Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 16For information on Lidian Jackson Emerson, see The Selected Letters of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987); Cole, “‘Men and Women Conversing’: The Emersons in 1838,” 127–60; and Ellen Tucker Emerson, Lidian Jackson Emerson. 80 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY begin Latin.”17 In 1846 and 1847, the Emerson siblings joined the Alcott sisters and the children of the poet Ellery Channing in the Emersons’ barn to be taught by Sophia Foord (sometimes known as Ford).18 In the summer of 1848, Alcott, then sixteen, served as the teacher, delighting Ellen with fairy stories.19 Jane Whiting taught a school of twenty Concord children, including the Emersons, from November 1848 through Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 February 1850; Helen Maynard took over in August 1850.20 Financial, social, and educational factors merged in the decision to send Ellen to the Sedgwick School in 1853. While Waldo helped hire Maynard, by August 1852 he complained, Ellen’s “schoolmates persist in not being of the right age, or the right turn of mind, for her,” and his growing financial security made it possible to send her to boarding school.21 Lidian favored the Sedgwick School because she had heard it encouraged “healthiness,” and Ellen was enthusiastic that she might attend with her friend Ida Wheeler.22 Waldo’s pri- orities included ensuring his daughter study arithmetic, Latin, and French, all which the Sedgwick School would supply. Cer- tainly, Caroline Sturgis Tappan’s presence in Lenox counted for Waldo. Ellen’s residence there would make it easier for Waldo to visit her, and he also may have hoped Tappan would serve as a friendly face for shy Ellen. Waldo expressed some qualms, writing, “I hate to lose the girl too. Ellen chatters with her

17Ellen Tucker Emerson, “What I Can Remember About Father,” unpub. manuscript, MS Am 1280.227, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Houghton Library). 18Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (New York: Dover, 1982), 225–28. 19John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 183. 20For Jane Whiting, see footnote 91 by Eleanor Tilton in Emerson Letters, 8:255. Tilton summarizes the hiring of Maynard in a note regarding a letter she believes Emerson wrote to Maynard around August 7, 1850, Emerson Letters, 8:258. 21RWE to CTS, August 26, 1852, Emerson Letters, 8:327; Edith Emerson Forbes (E.E. Forbes) to Elizabeth Cabot, [1886?], bMs Am1280.226, Emerson Family Corre- spondence, Houghton Library. 22Ellen Tucker Emerson (ETE) to RWE, December 29, 1852, *2003M-13, Ellen Tucker Emerson Correspondence and Other Papers, circa 1835-1909, (hereafter ETE Correspondence), Houghton, Library. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 81 mates: with me she is so quiet and intelligent, as no one else is.” He envisioned her stay at boarding school as ultimately benefi- cial to him, however, explaining to Tappan he could sacrifice a “year of quiet reason” to ensure that “she shall chatter well.”23 One of his primary goals in sending Ellen to school, thus, was to mold her into a better companion. “We go to school at eight in the morning and are dismissed at Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 one. Mrs. Sedgwick wishes us to study an hour at home every afternoon and we go to the schoolroom at four in the afternoon to sew an hour while Mrs. Sedgwick reads. After that we must take our walk,” fourteen-year old Ellen reported after ar- riving at the Sedgwick School in June 1853.24 Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick had founded the school for girls, which she described as a “character factory,” in 1828. The author Catharine Sedg- wick, the sister of Elizabeth’s husband Charles, was often in residence at the Hive, the Sedgwicks’ large home.25 Sedgwick stressed the importance of “forming” in her students the “habits of patient careful study, of a concentration of their powers, bearing upon a single point, as a sun’s rays are collected in a focus, and inspiring them with a love of knowledge for its own sake.”26 While Ellen grew to love the school, her adjustment to her first extended-stay away from home was rocky, and the Emersons’ relationship with Sedgwick was at times contentious. Ellen and Waldo’s correspondence her first term indicates his engagement with her education and how even early on their emotional bond was tied to their intellectual one. She complained the thirty minutes devoted to arithmetic was not suf- ficient. In Latin, she struggled with a “puzzling part of Virgil” and was annoyed that Elizabeth Sedgwick did “not teach scan- ning”; in French they learned grammar but had stopping speaking the language after Grace Sedgwick, Elizabeth’s daughter

23RWE to CST, October 13, 1852, Emerson Letters, 8:337. 24ETE to E.E. Forbes, June 1, 1853, ETE Correspondence. 25Lucinda Damon-Bach, “Inspiration or Competition? Catharine Sedgwick’s Influ- ences on Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 41 (2015): 1–32; Les Olson, “Elizabeth Buckminster (Dwight) Sedgwick, 1801-1864,” The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society Newsletter (2017): 2–4. 26Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick, “Teaching,” Friend’s Intelligencer, July 25, 1868, 333. 82 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY who was the French instructor, felt the students were laugh- ing at her.27 Her father gave Ellen practical advice on address- ing the issues with her instructors and promised, “if you keep your own eye on the books you value most, they will, in the course of a year, take their right place.” He concluded, “Keep up a brave heart, my dear child, as true persons always may!”28 He later felt stronger about her speaking French, commanding Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Ellen to tell Grace Sedgwick, “that it is a principle point with you to learn to speak French; & at all events, that papa, who knows that no French man or woman ever set foot in Concord, was on the verge of sending you to a convent in Montreal, for no other purpose.”29 Ellen also called upon her father to negotiate non-academic matters. When she and Ida Wheeler arrived at their boarding house, run by the Farleys, to find they had been assigned un- expected roommates, Ellen pleaded with her mother to “beg father to hold Mrs. Sedgwick to her promise of letting us room alone together.”30 He soon complied. In her second year, Ellen, then living with the Sedgwicks, was distraught when Sedg- wick punished her for distributing raisins to her friends after Ellen misunderstood Sedgwick’s somewhat obscure rules dictating which foods the girls could share. Both of her parents found the scolding of obedient, anxious Ellen outrageous, and a “disgusted and provoked” Waldo wished to send Ellen a case of nuts and figs immediately, a proposition that amused Ellen’s classmate.31 Waldo’s willingness to involve himself with the mundane details of his daughter’s life shows a commitment to fatherhood that is at odds with the image of the broken

27ETE to RWE, June 14, 1853, ETE Correspondence; RWE to ETE, June 9, 1852, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., ed. Ralph Rusk et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–1992), 4:364. 28RWE to ETE, June 21, 1853, Emerson Letters, 4:370. 29RWE to ETE, July 8, 1853, Emerson Letters, 4:372. 30ETE to Lidian Jackson Emerson, June, 1, 1853, ETE Correspondence. 31ETE to Lidian Jackson Emerson (LJE), February 26, 1854, ETE Correspon- dence; LJE to ETE, February 28, 1854, Lidian Jackson Emerson Selected Letters, 198; ETE to LJE, March 5, 1854, ETE Correspondence. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 83 parent who retreated from his family after the death of his el- dest child. The tug-of-war between Ellen’s education and independence and the needs of her mother and the family home that would shape her schooling emerged almost immediately. Lidian expressed ambivalence as Ellen, although shy, began to feel at ease and make friends, including Sally Gibbons, whose mother Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 was the abolitionist and prison reformer Abigail Hopper Gib- bons, and Abby Manning.32 Lidian replied, “I do not know whether I feel most glad or sorry to know that for all you do not call yourself homesick but happy.”33 After Ellen reported she did not have time to comply with her mother’s request that she read a daily Bible verse, Lidian suggested that she ask Sedg- wick to give her shorter lessons in arithmetic or French, two of the subjects Waldo found most critical.34 While their correspondence was often fraught with Lidian’s moralizing and reports of her illnesses, the exchanges with Ellen also crackle with the enjoyment of examining the world through the lenses of literature and religion. Lidian loved to read, and be read to, feeling it helped keep the imagination and senses from being “dulled by the routine of life.”35 The Pilgrim’s Progress, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, serialized from April 1852 through October 1853, Catharine Sedgwick’s Linwoods, and The Lamp- lighter which Lidian selected because the author, Maria Su- sanna Cummins, had been a Sedgwick student, all appear in their correspondence.36 Ellen promised her mother, “I have never read any that I am not sure you would be willing to

32Edith Gregg, “List of School Friends,” The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 1, ed. Edith Gregg (Kent, OH; Kent State University Press, 1982), 1:xxii. Ellen Emer- son refers to Abby Adeline Manning as Addy throughout her letters. 33LJE to ETE, June 28, 1853, Lidian Jackson Emerson Selected Letters, 180. 34LJE to Ellen ETE, July 6, 1853, Lidian Jackson Emerson Selected Letters, 180. 35LJE to Edward Waldo Emerson, July 9, 1861, Lidian Jackson Emerson Selected Letters, 211. 36ETE to LJE, March 27, 1854 and ETE to LJE, August 10, 1853, ETE Corre- spondence; LJE to ETE, March 21, 1854, Lidian Jackson Emerson Selected Letters, 199. 84 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY have me,” adding, “I consider however that Miss Sedgwick, Miss Edgeworth, Grace Aguilar, the author of Ruth and Mary Barton and the Waverley Novels are not forbidden.”37 She was particularly enthusiastic about Linwoods, which she liked “ever so much, it makes me feel as if I knew more of Washington.”38 Ellen also sent detailed reports on the ministers she encoun- tered as she explored the religious world beyond Concord’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 First Parish Church, the beginning of a life-long interest. Of Henry Beecher, she raved, “He preached differently from any one I ever heard before, just as he ought to, as if he was talk- ing to one and not to a church.”39 Their shared enjoyment in parsing sermons and literature built a bond between mother and daughter that likely helped Ellen through the often difficult task of caring for her mother in future years while also developing the attention to language that would help her edit her father’s work. Ellen did, as Waldo likely hoped, find a supportive friend in Caroline Sturgis Tappan, which also allowed Waldo opportuni- ties to see Tappan. Kathleen Lawrence argues that Tappan and Waldo’s passionate friendship in the 1830s and 1840s provided him with inspiration and an emotional satisfaction he did not find with Lidian.40 By the time Ellen arrived in Lenox, Caroline had been married to William Aspinwall Tappan since 1847 and had two children. Tappan, mourning her sister Susan Sturgis Bigelow’s suicide in June 1853, invited Ellen to her house regularly. After her visit on July 23, Ellen raved to Lidian, “it was the prettiest tea table I ever saw” and told her father “the house is very pleasant and handsome and we had a delightful time.”41 It may have been hard for Lidian to hear that the woman who enchanted her husband had now also enchanted her daughter, but she encouraged Ellen’s interest.42 Meanwhile, in July 1853,

37ETE to LJE, April 9, 1854, ETE Correspondence. 38ETE to LJE, March 27, 1854, ETE Correspondence. 39ETE to LJE, August 21, 1853, ETE Correspondence. 40Lawrence, “The ‘Dry-Lighted Soul’ Ignites,” 37–67. 41ETE to LJE, July 25, 1853 and ETE to RWE, July 24, 1853, ETE Correspon- dence. 42LJE to ETE, Aug. 5, 1853, Lidian Jackson Emerson Selected Letters, 184. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 85 Waldo wrote Tappan, “I very much wish to come & see you & will use the occasion of Ellen’s wants to come.”43 In the dark Lenox winter, on the last day of 1853, Ellen wrote to her mother, “Oh how I wish I were at home. It seems now as if I were old and home and school and the time when I was young were all gone.”44 She added that life at Bush would never be the same after the death of her grandmother, Ruth Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Emerson, in November. Waldo and Lidian responded differently to Ellen’s contemplative, morose mood. Waldo, on a lecture tour, found the letter alarming when Lidian forwarded it to him, writing, “What business have fourteen years to be melancholy.”45 Living in a house that suffered under the shadow of Lidian’s moods and having seen his brother Edward suffer a nervous breakdown in 1828, Waldo likely feared signs of depression manifesting in his older daughter.46 His reaction also mirrors his attempts to dismiss the significance of grief in “Ex- perience.” Lidian, however, saw her own vulnerable emotional state as evidence of an enlightened sensitivity to the world and interpreted Ellen’s reflections as evidence of a similar enlight- enment. She wrote to her daughter, “I do rejoice that you have reflection and feeling enough to look pensively atthe dark side”; she did, however, also encourage her to “look on the bright side” and count all the new blessings the Sedgwick School had brought her.47 Lidian defended Ellen in stronger language to her husband, proclaiming, “The coming Soul must bring pensiveness at least, and I should be sorry if Ellen did not, at this age, give signs of this approach.”48 While Ellen recovered from her melancholy state, family obligations soon brought her home, beginning the career as helpmate and caregiver that would eventually lead to the role of editor. In early 1854, a lecture tour took Waldo away from

43RWE to CST, July 22, 1853, The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 373. 44ETE to LJE, December 31, 1853, ETE Correspondence. 45RWE to LJE, January 9, 1854, Emerson Letters, 4:414. 46Bosco and Myerson, The Emerson Brothers, 225. 47LJE to ETE, January 3, 1854, Lidian Jackson Emerson Selected Letters, 192. 48LJE to RWE, January 11, 1854, Lidian Jackson Emerson Selected Letters, 195. 86 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY home for weeks at a time. These tours were critical to the family finances, as well as an important part of Waldo’s creative process; as Bosco explains, he stressed the importance of “the ‘congenial’ responses from his lecture audiences to his continuing work on a lecture which might bring it to the level of polish required of a printed essay.”49 Lidian’s difficulties main- taining the household, and retaining servants, however, sharp- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 ened as she faced the task without the support of her husband and elder daughter. In August, Waldo explained, “Your Mother is very feeble; & I doubt much if in October I can spare you to go to school anywhere. I think we shall have to instal [sic] you as a housekeeper for a time.”50 The decision made, Waldo confessed to Abel Adams, “if Ellen were not coming home in October, with ambition to keep house for us, I should be seriously tempted to sell mine, so feeble is Lidian & such is the trial of bad domestics.”51 Tappan, however, took him to task for putting his domestic trials over his daughter’s education and, he reported, “advised me to send her still to school.” His response was telling: “Ah, thought I, & where is my house to be mean- time?”52 Ellen’s return, in Waldo’s mind, was the household’s salvation and thus her education must be put aside. “I am still gladder that I may not go to school this winter, but stay at home and keep house. I am going to try very hard to learn soon, that I may be a wonder of a housewife for you,” Ellen wrote to her mother in August 1854.53 She took the role seriously, preparing by studying Catharine Beecher’s A Trea- tise on Domestic Economy while still in Lenox; the most popular housekeeping manual in the United States in the 1850s, the volume combined practical knowledge with an emphasis

49Ronald A. Bosco, historical introduction in Society and Solitude, vol. 7, Collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), xxviii. 50RWE to ETE, August 2, 1854, Emerson Letters, 4:454. 51RWE to Abel Adams, August 7, 1854, Emerson Letters, 4:455. 52RWE to William Emerson, August 21, 1854, Emerson Letters, 4:456. The exchange perhaps occurred on August 14 when he and Edith spent the night at the Tap- pans on the way to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Waldo addressed the Adelphi Union at Williams College. 53ETE to LJT, August 6, 1854, ETE Correspondence. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 87 on women’s roles in the moral development of their family and their nation.54 While Ellen depicted the decision as one that would bring her happiness through serving her family, she did confess to her cousin Charlotte Haskins Cleveland, “I am so glad I have known it beforehand, for now I am ready to begin, but if it has been suddenly decided after I got home, alas poor me what should I do!”55 She would in one way or another Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 continue her education for years, but going forward she would almost always have to balance the demands of her schooling with family commitments. The transition to housekeeper did not always go smoothly, as, despite summoning Ellen home, Lidian was reluctant to “give up all power.” Soon, though, Ellen was in charge of hiring and supervising servants, caring for her younger siblings, sewing, and serving as her father’s secretary, among other tasks. She spent hours each day, in addition, reading to her mother, joking one of her “titles” should be “Universal Reader.”56 Even with all her work, Ellen remained intellectually engaged, studying Greek on her own before breakfast and visiting the Boston Athenaeum, where she and Abby Manning laughingly quoted Paradise Lost to a statue of Satan.57 In December she went into a “swoon” when she learned Louisa May Alcott had ded- icated Flower Fables, her first published book, to Ellen; it was based on the stories which Alcott had told her when acting as her tutor.58 Waldo’s friendships again shaped Ellen’s education when the arrival of Franklin Sanborn in Concord the following year allowed her to return to school. Sanborn would go onto play important roles in the histories of Transcendentalism, abolition, and Concord, but in March 1855 he was a promising Harvard student and Emerson acolyte whom Waldo recruited to take

54ETE to LJE, September 3, 1854, ETE Correspondence. For more on Beecher, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973). 55ETE to Charlotte [Haskins Cleveland], September 24, 1854, ETE Correspon- dence. 56ETE to Emma Stimson (ES), October 8, 1854, ETE Correspondence. 57ETE to ES, November 6, 1854, ETE Correspondence. 58ETE to ES, December 21, 1854, ETE Correspondence. 88 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY over the school on Sudbury Road when Helen Maynard left to marry Joseph Keyes. Sanborn had to obtain the permission of the Harvard authorities to finish his studies while running the school. His sister Sarah, an experienced teacher, joined him. Ellen, Edith, and Edward were among the 17 students in the first class.59 Ellen initially found the experience frustrat- ing, feeling befuddled by algebra, Latin, and her history com- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 position, complaining “I haven’t the least idea what he wants me to write about.” Perhaps cautious about criticizing a man whom her father endorsed, she added incongruously, “I think Mr. Sanborn is a very good teacher and everybody likes him.”60 The following fall, Ellen enrolled in the first class at the Agas- siz School for Young Ladies in Cambridge, a surprising move given Waldo’s role in recruiting Sanborn. Waldo’s burgeoning friendship with Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist and Harvard professor, likely played a part in the decision. Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, Louis’s wife, founded the school, and Louis lectured there. In an April letter, Agassiz, noting he would be happy to have Ellen as a pupil, concluded he and Waldo would now have a “personal acquaintance,” and the men were soon meeting regularly as part of the Saturday Club dinners.61 Eliz- abeth opened the school to contribute to the family finances and relieve her husband of the burden of lecture tours to sup- plement his university salary.62 Sending Ellen there allowed Waldo to contribute to his new friend’s financial health and lend his endorsement to the school and Louis Agassiz himself. The opportunity to study with Harvard professors, which Eliz- abeth Agassiz stressed, and Ellen’s frustration under Sanborn

59Kenneth Walter Cameron, “Sanborn’s Preparatory School in Concord (1855– 1863),” American Renaissance Literary Report 3 (1989): 39; Franklin Sanborn, Rec- ollections of Seventy Years (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1909), 2:441–42. 60ETE to Haven Emerson, April 7, 1855, Ellen Tucker Emerson Letters, 1:88–89. 61Louis Agassiz to RWE, April 2, 1855, Emerson Letters, 8:428. For more on Emerson and Agassiz’s friendship and the Saturday Club, see, James Schlett, ANot Too Greatly Changed Eden: The Story of the Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 56–58. 62For information on the Agassiz School, see: Christoph Irmscher, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013), 283–86 and Lucy Allen Paton, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 45–46. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 89 may also have influenced the decision. Waldo, in addition, was hoping to complete English Traits and thus planned to travel less in the fall, so he would be on hand at Bush.63 Ellen spent the next two years studying at the Agassiz School, but each term the Emersons weighed the importance of Ellen’s education against the needs of the family and Waldo’s work. Six days before Ellen began at the Agassiz School, Waldo de- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 livered his first lecture on women’s rights at a convention at Meionaon Hall in Boston, on the invitation of Paulina Wright Davis. In the address, which eventually appeared as “Woman” in Miscellanies in 1884, he supports women’s property rights and argues that educating women is a critical element in having them enter pubic life; he endorses women’s suffrage but wonders to what degree women actually want the vote. He praises women for their “sentiment” and intuition and envisions women primarily within the domestic sphere and as those who can “civilize” and spread beauty in the world.64 Caroline Healey Dall praised the speech, but reported to him, “some of the papers thought it doubtful whether you were for us or against us.”65 Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholars have debated the same question.66

63See Eleanor Tilton’s discussion of Waldo’s plans. Emerson Letters, 8:448–49n97. 64Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address at the Woman’s Rights Convention, 20 Septem- ber 1855,” The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 2:15-29. 65Caroline Healey Dall to RWE, October 7, 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson Letters from Various Correspondents, Houghton. For more on Dall, Emerson, and women’s rights, see Helen R. Deese, “‘A Liberal Education’: Caroline Healey Dall and Emer- son,” in Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson, 237–60. 66Scholars such as Armida Gilbert, Len Gougeon, and Christina Zwarg argue the lecture is a strong statement of support for women’s rights, particularly within the context of the time. Phyllis Cole, on the other hand, has argued that Emerson’s support for women’s rights was limited, particularly when compared to some of his peers, and lacked the urgency of his support for abolition while acknowledging the potential for his ideas to inspire women’s rights advocates. Leslie Elizabeth Eckel stresses this importance of this potential, as it allowed activists to create “a new shared sphere of pos- sibility in which men and women could choose to be ‘heroic’ on his or her own terms.” Phyllis Cole, “The New Movement’s Tide: Emerson and Women’s Rights,” Emerson: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson (Boston: Massachusetts His- torical Society, 2006), 117–52; Leslie Elizabeth Eckel, “Gender,” Ralph Waldo Emer- son in Context, ed. Wesley T. Mott (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 189; Armida Gilbert, “‘Pierced by the Thorns of Reform’: Emerson on Womanhood,” 90 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY The address’s ambiguity reflects Waldo’s approach to Ellen’s education, which was likely on his mind as he prepared for the lecture while she prepared to start at a new school. He clearly valued his daughter’s intelligence, but for him that value lay largely in how her intelligence would assist him, in his hope that she “chatter well.” As Phyllis Cole states in her critical as- sessment of his commitment to women’s rights, “In the defini- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 tive task of parenthood, Emerson was no revolutionary.”67 It is hard not to think of Ellen when reading in “Woman,” “The part which women play in education, in the care of young, and the tuition of older children, is their organic office in the world. So much sympathy as they have makes them inestimable as medi- ators between those who have knowledge, and those who want it. Besides, their fine organization, their taste and love of details, makes the knowledge better in their hands.”68 Ellen eventually served as the type of mediator her father described by becoming a Sunday school teacher. And of course, she used her education, and her organization and “love of details,” to become the helpmate who assisted the esteemed author in reach- ing his audience, first as secretary and later, significantly, ashis in-the-shadows editor. Ellen settled into the Agassiz School much more easily than she did at the Sedgwick and Concord schools. She reported at the end of her first week, “I rejoice in the school, everything about it is so pleasant,” and she found herself as enchanted

The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform, ed. T. Gregory Gar- vey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 93–114; Len Gougeon, “Emerson and the Woman Question: The Evolution of His Thought,” New England Quarterly 71 (1998): 570–92; Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Cole bases her argument on the text published in the 2001 edition of Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published after Gougeon, Zwarg, and Gilbert’s analyses. She notes its publication “may require revising some of the critical judgement based on Edward Waldo Emerson’s text from the Century Edition,” which may have, due to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s methods of reworking earlier material on the same manuscript pages, been closer to speeches he gave in 1860 and 1869, as his ideas about women’s rights evolved. Cole, “The New Movement’s Tide,” 139. 67Cole, “The New Movement’s Tide,” 125. 68Emerson, “Address at the Woman’s Rights Convention,” 20. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 91 by the Agassiz family as her father was by Louis Agassiz.69 By November, after commuting for a month, she and her Concord friend Birdy Cheney were boarding with George and Susan Hillard at 62 Pinckney Street in Boston, where Harriet Beecher Stowe was often a guest.70 While Ellen loved the entire Agassiz clan, she developed a particular connection with Ida Agassiz, one of Louis Agas- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 siz’s children from his first marriage who taught French and German at the school. Ellen experienced the relationship as a serious crush. While describing their friends in language that sounds romantic and even sexual to modern ears was com- mon among nineteenth-century girls, Ellen’s feelings for Ida go beyond friendship, as the teacher became a central figure in Ellen’s emotional life.71 Ellen never had a romance with a man, and she seems to have rejected the idea of marriage at a young age; when she was sixteen, she wrote that she had dif- ficulty bonding with the other Agassiz students, “for their interest and conversation is apt to be gentleman and of course I cannot join,” although she did not explain why.72 Perhaps significantly, Ellen was writing to Abby Manning, who would enter a long-term partnership with the sculptor Anne Whitney.73

69ETE to ES, September 29, 1855, ETE Correspondence. 70Edith Gregg explains Ellen’s living situation in a note in Ellen Tucker Emerson Letters, 1:98. See also, Charles Bahne, Chronicles of Old Boston: Exploring New En- gland’s Historic Capital (New York: Museyon, 2012), 234; “George and Susan Hillard House—62 Pickney Street,” Boston African American National Historic Site Mas- sachusetts, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/hillard .htm (accessed July 27, 2016). 71For information on women’s nineteenth-century relationships, see: Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 2014); Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth- Century American,” Signs 1 (1975): 1–29; Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Love Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 72ETE to Addy [Abby Adeline] Manning (AM), January 22, 1856, ETE Correspon- dence. 73Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2001), 33. 92 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Waldo and Lidian, whose goals for Ellen may have never included marriage, seem to have encouraged the relationship. They gave Ellen a daguerreotype of Ida, for instance, as her New Year’s gift in 1858; she carried it with her when visiting friends in Concord and Boston, asking them to comment on Ida’s beauty.74 That Ellen’s emotional and intellectual interests reinforced one another, helping satisfy Waldo’s concern that she Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 master French and German, may be a reason for their accep- tance. On studying German she explained, “since I study it with Miss Ida and above all since my tongue was untied I love it beyond all my other studies.”75 When Ida was not available to teach, Ellen’s motivation flagged. The daughters’ friendship, moreover, helped solidify the deepening connection between Louis Agassiz and Waldo. “The next year will probably be an apprentice-ship in house-keeping and after that I hope to begin my career as superintendent of the house,” Ellen wrote in January 1856.76 Ellen’s use of terms such as apprenticeship, career, and superintendent, along with her studying Catharine Beecher’s guide before starting housekeeping, indicate the seriousness with which she accepted the mission and suggest she understood the value of her work to the family and to her father’s career. But a gift Waldo gave her during this time, and her response to it, suggests that they also framed her role within the ideology of separate spheres. Visiting her at the Hillards, she later remembered, he gave her The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore “and said it was a good book for me to read.” She continued, “I found it so.”77 In the poem, published in four parts beginning in 1854, Patmore idealizes his wife as a docile and devoted woman whose purpose is to serve him. Waldo also cited the poem in his address to the women’s rights confer- ence, to illustrate the sentiment that women “should magnify their ritual of manners. Society, conversation, decorum, music,

74ETE to ES, February 15, 1858, ETE Correspondence. 75ETE to ES, December 14, 1855, ETE Correspondence. 76ETE to (AM), January 22, 1856, ETE Correspondence. 77Ellen Emerson, “What I Remember About Father.” THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 93 flowers, dances, colours, forms, are their homes and atten- dants.”78 In this vision, Ellen’s housekeeping was not a career demanding intelligence and organization but a demonstration and fulfillment of her feminine nature. Ellen’s complex inter- nationalization of her role in the house as both formal, valuable work—a career—and a demonstration and fulfillment of her feminine nature foreshadows her later approach to working on Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 her father’s texts. Her duties as editor were inextricably inter- twined with her role of caregiver to her ailing and aging father. That connection might have motivated both her serious effort on his essays and her desire to obscure it from public view, both out of modesty and to protect her father’s reputation. Ellen did not, in the end, return to her housekeeping career the next year, again illustrating the influence of Waldo’s friends on her education and the attention Waldo’s female friends paid her. When Ellen started boarding in Boston, Anna Barker Ward, whose daughter Anna was Ellen’s classmate, told her, “when I didn’t know what to do about anything or if I was sick or when I wanted to go anywhere, to come over and tell her and she would arrange it for me.”79 In February 1856, Ward “persuaded” Waldo that Ellen “had better stay another year at school.”80 Ward thus succeeded where Tappan had failed, con- vincing Waldo to put Ellen’s education above his convenience. The history of Tappan and Ward with Waldo makes their advocacy for Ellen’s education striking. In August 1840, before either woman married, they joined Margaret Fuller on a visit to Concord, during which Waldo thought the women had pledged their devotion to him. He expressed bewilder- ment and annoyance when Anna announced her engagement to Samuel Ward soon after, despite his own marriage and children and his friendship with Samuel. He wrote to Tap- pan, “I thought the whole spirit of our intercourse at Con- cord implied another solution,” and worried Tappan would

78Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address at the Woman’s Rights Convention,” 22. 79ETE to E.E. Forbes, November 9, 1855, ETE Correspondence. 80ETE to E.E. Forbes, February 15, 1856, ETE Correspondence. 94 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY marry soon as well.81 As Eleanor Tilton explains, “Emerson could entertain a ‘mere imagination’ and an absurd one: that his four friends Miss Fuller, Miss Sturgis, Miss Barker, and Mr. Ward would remain forever celibate, devotees of ‘Celes- tial Love,’ perhaps.”82 Despite their continuing affection for Waldo, therefore, both women understood from personal experience his self-involvement and pressed him to put the needs Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 of his daughter, particularly in terms of her education, before his own. They may have also sensed that Ellen needed a type of support her mother, often sick and overwhelmed, could not give her. While Ellen continued in school, the compromise was that she would commute from Concord, rising at 5AM to take to the early train. Already balancing housework and schoolwork, abolition came to the forefront of Ellen’s attention. While Lid- ian was a founding member of the Concord Female Anti- Slavery Society and Waldo had become increasingly out-spoken about abolition, Ellen had previously only mentioned the cause in passing. The actions of Concord in response to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act engaged her, however. Boasting of the money the town raised to help abolitionist settlers in the Kansas and Nebraska territories, she raved, “Great is little Concord. Oh the finest town imaginable.” She joined a sewing circle, in which women made flannel underclothes to send to the settlers, and she loved listening to Sanborn and her father discussing the issues. Echoing a sentiment popular in Concord, she de- clared, “what pleases me most is to hear from any quarter that the North will be bold and leave the South.”83 Her excitement over abolition was shared by the family, as well as marking the

81RWE to CST, September 6, 1840, quoted in Eleanor M. Tilton, “The True Ro- mance of Anna Hazard Barker and Samuel Gray Ward,” Studies in the American Re- naissance (1987): 69. 82Tilton, “The True Romance of Anna Hazard Barker and Samuel Grey Ward,” 69. 83ETE to (AM), September 8, 1856, ETE Correspondence. For more on Lidian, Waldo, and Ellen Emerson’s work for abolition and disunion sentiment in Concord, see Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, To Set This World Right: The Anti-Slavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006). THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 95 first time Ellen actively thought of her actions as connected to the world beyond her family and community. In October, the schedule of reform work, schooling, household duties, and commuting caught up with her, and Ellen fell sick enough for a week to alarm her parents. She expressed frustration that her family tried “to baby” her through the illness and lectured her on the “Herculean labors” she had un- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 dertaken that fall.84 Neither she nor her parents seemed willing to acknowledge that her family requested, or required, much of the work. The Emersons, Ellen included, seemed to have in- ternalized the idea that Ellen drove herself. Ellen demonstrated confidence and a willingness to challenge her father after she returned to full-time housekeeping in the fall of 1857. Waldo travelled extensively in the summer of 1858, including visits to Newport and the Forbes family on Naushon Island, as well as a trip to the Adirondacks with a group including Agassiz.85 By August Ellen was frustrated at his lack of communication. “We were all indignant enough before at your not writing a word, but now the word has come, you don’t tell us anything, and I don’t think that’s pretty. Nei- ther does Mother,” she scolded. She offered what were perhaps her first editorial suggestions to her father: “I send you Edie’s letters which are models for you. She begins at the beginning and tells us everything that has happened to her, and you say ‘I have had good luck and you may write to me.’”86 Ellen also managed the household accounts in her father’s absence; much of their correspondence concerned when to pay bills and how much was owned to various parties, with Ellen often pleading for more money as she stretched each dollar. Waldo eventually acknowledged she was “the best accountant in the house.”87 While Ellen and Waldo at times framed her as the angel, rather than the accountant, in the house, her job always required tasks

84ETE to Sally [Gibbons], October 15, 1856. ETE Correspondence. 85Albert J. von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (Albuquerque, NM: Studio Non Troppo, 2016), 2:761–62. 86ETE to RWE, August 3, 9, 1858, ETE Correspondence. 87RWE to William Emerson, June 8, 1859, Emerson Letters, 5:152. 96 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY other than caregiving and household chores, and she was willing to criticize her father and ask for what she needed. These experiences would inform her relationship with Waldo when, as his memory failed, she needed to take charge of his written work as well the family accounts. In September 1858, the family again reconfigured its balance among education, housekeeping, and Waldo’s friendships. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Ellen, now nineteen, returned to the Concord School, where she joined Edward while Edith was sent to the Agassiz School.88 Neither Ellen nor Edith was thrilled with this ar- rangement, suggesting Lidian and Waldo’s desire to have the more experienced housekeeper at home trumped their daughters’ wishes. During this year, Ellen often worked on assignments in her father’s study, and she turned to him for help, particularly with recitations. On one February night, she “induced Father to read Troilus and Cressida for half an hour” while she packed a basket to send to her sister.89 Notably, the study was a site where Ellen, Edith, and Edward all remembered bonding with their father in their memoirs of him. Edith wrote, for instance, “Many hours I spent in his study, for he loved to teach us how to learn the poetry and how to to recite it, hearing it over and over with inexhaustible patience.”90 The room was not just the site of his work and his meetings with notable men and women of letters, but a place of family connection through the written word. In fall 1859, Edith, now seventeen, took a year off from school so Ellen, at twenty, could focus on her last year of her education with fewer distractions.91 This exchange marked a new stage in the sisters’ relationship. Until Edith’s marriage to William Forbes in 1865, they collaborated to balance the

88RWE to William Emerson, October 18, 1858, Emerson Letters, 5:121. 89ETE to E.E. Forbes, February 9, 1859, ETE Correspondence. 90Edith Emerson Forbes quoted in “Emerson as Remembered by His Children,” EmersoninHisOwnTime,ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Iowa City: Uni- versity of Iowa Press, 2003), 166. 91E.E. Forbes to Suzy [Loring?], July 18, 1860, Edith Emerson Forbes and William Hathaway Forbes Papers and Additions, 1827–1969, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 97 workload to ensure their parents’ needs were met and the household functioned while also allowing themselves time for their own pursuits and social lives. Even after Edith’s marriage and move to Milton, Massachusetts, the sisters continued to share their responsibilities. Ellen regularly visited to help care for Edith’s growing family, which eventually numbered eight children; Edith consulted on all major family decisions and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 intervened when the stress of caring for their aging parents threatened to overwhelm Ellen. In light of the sisters’ arrange- ment, it is intriguing that Hanlon locates the emphasis on collaboration in Waldo’s works that Cabot and Ellen collected, edited, and “recomposed.” Perhaps Ellen’s experience collaborating on the physical and emotional work of housekeeping with her sister helped to shape her philosophy. It certainly prepared her to share tasks with another person to benefit her father. Political events swept into the Emersons’ decisions about Ellen’s education as the country marched towards the Civil War. She had hoped to return to the Agassiz School in January 1860, as Ida was planning to quit teaching after the following summer. But developments beyond Concord threw her plans into disarray in ways that illustrate how her presence at a school symbolized her father’s endorsement. On October 16, 1859, John Brown led the raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Sanborn had been one of the “Secret Six” who helped support Brown. Officials found letters from Sanborn to Brown in Brown’s Maryland headquarters; fearing arrest, Sanborn de- stroyed papers in his own possession and fled Concord repeat- edly from October through February. While Sanborn justified his flights, they made Waldo “uneasy,” and, during the firstab- sence, he urged Sanborn, “By all means return at the first hour wheels or steam will permit.”92 Sanborn’s flights made it difficult for Ellen to leave the school, both for practical and symbolic reasons. Having Ellen

92RWE to Sarah Swain Forbes, October 26, 1859, Emerson Letters, 5:179; RWE to Franklin Sanborn [October 23, 1859], Franklin Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1909), 1:196. For more on Concord’s reaction to John Brown and Sanborn’s involvement, see, Petrulionis, To Set this World Right,127– 34. 98 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY teach was explicitly part of the plan laid out by Sarah Sanborn to cover classes when her brother left in October, and Ellen took on the role again in January. “Mr. Sanborn was constantly disappearing, the other teachers overworking in consequence,” Ellen later explained; she noted, as “the oldest scholar, I was often called upon for one thing and another, and had my hands full sometimes.”93 Beyond the help she provided in the class- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 room, Ellen and Edward were visible embodiments of Waldo’s backing of Sanborn, whatever his private qualms about the disappearances. While Ellen pitched in, she wrote her father, again on a lecture tour, anguished letters that make it clear how much she wanted to return to Cambridge. When he did not re- ply to her first two missives, she scolded, “you haven’t noticed or answered them and I asked you to talk about my going to Cambridge.” She also took up her case with Sanborn one of the times he reappeared in Concord, asking “whether I should take this term or the next in Cambridge”; he, unsurprisingly, answered, “Next.”94 Waldo agreed. On February 18, he wrote to Ellen, “If your staying gives, as it must, a certain feeling of stability, girls & boys will stay, who will otherwise grow restless & go. I think you had better wait till my return.”95 Ellen was again proud of Concord when townspeople physically stopped the officers who arrived to arrest Sanborn in April 1860, explaining the town “flatters itself that this is the spirit of96 ’76.” But her frustration on a personal level is the dominant feature of her correspondence regarding Sanborn’s actions, as he cost Ellen four months of study with Ida. When she finally returned to the Agassiz School later in April, she commuted and still bore a heavy burden of housework.97 When her formal education came to an end in the fall of 1860, Ellen confessed she “felt as if nothing could be so good

93ETE to (AM), October 8, 1860, ETE Correspondence. 94ETE to RWE, February 11, 1860, ETE Correspondence. 95RWE to ETE, February 18, 1860, Emerson Letters, 5:200–1. 96ETE to Agnes, April 4, 1860, ETE Correspondence. 97ETE to Edith Emerson, May 19, 1860, ETE Correspondence; Franklin Sanborn to Benjamin Smith Lyman, April 22, 1860, quoted in Young Reporter of Concord, ed. Kenneth Cameron Walter (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1978), 24. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 99 as to go straight back and continue such a charming life till age made it ridiculous, which it is already perhaps.”98 It was a lugubrious goodbye to her schooling, which, despite regular interruptions, was one of the best a young woman in her era could obtain. The fact that she did go to school for so long suggests how much she and her father valued the opportunity for her to study. Much of the way she and others recorded her Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 life, however, worked to obscure her intellectual abilities and curiosity. Soon after Ellen died on January 14, 1909, Elizabeth Powell Bond, the first Dean of Women at Swarthmore, claimed in Ellen’s obituary, “She has not written books nor made stat- ues, but she has lived the best that is in books and in artist’s achievements.”99 In her eulogy, in an oddly similar sentiment, the Unitarian minister A. W. Jackson, explained, “She wrote no “Consuelo,” no “Middlemarch,” but in her the Emerson philosophy of life became flesh and dwelt among us.”100 While her (very wordy) tombstone notes she had a “fine mind,” it goes on to state, “she cared more for people than for books” and stresses “she eagerly helped others” and was the “comfort” of her parents’ “last years.”101 This emphasis on the fact that she did not write, or even much value reading, is particularly striking in light of Hanlon’s revelations of her work on her father’s essays. In presenting her as the embodiment of her father’s ideas, the eulogy of- fers a fun-house mirror of Ellen’s relationship to her father’s final volumes, in which she is not her father’s philosophy made flesh but one of the minds shaping the philosophy. Ellen herself contributed to the view that she was an unintellectual caregiver, not only by refusing credit for involvement with the late essays, but making dismissive references to intellectual life in her correspondence. But for all the comments that housekeeping left her no time for books, there are others in which she

98ETE to (AM), October 8, 1860, ETE Correspondence. 99Elizabeth Powell Bond, “Ellen Tucker Emerson,” Friend’s Intelligencer, February 6, 1909, 66. 100A.W. Jackson, “Ellen Tucker Emerson,” [1909]: 3, ETE Correspondence. 101Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (Concord, MA), Ellen Tucker Emerson tombstone, per- sonally photographed, August 8, 2008. 100 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY discusses volumes she has read, carefully parses sermons, and details her thoughtful attention to the texts she assigned to her Sunday School classes. Further evidence of her intellectual engagement is found in the biography she wrote of her mother, a project she took seriously and read aloud to friends, and her decision to enroll in a World History course at Oxford in 1893. The distinction between her “fine mind” and her desire to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 care for others made on Ellen’s tombstone is a false dichotomy. Ellen’s contributions to Waldo’s essays, like the hours spent reading to her mother, was part and parcel of her caregiving. So was her desire to hide her contributions and thus preserve his reputation. From the time she was fourteen and studying Catherine Beecher’s ideas on housekeeping and female nature, serving as the “Universal Reader,” and acting as her father’s secretary, Ellen and her family linked the work of the mind and the work of caregiving and housekeeping. When Waldo’s memory loss made it necessary, it was an easy, seemingly natural, evolution for her career as housekeeper, secretary, nurse, and accountant to expand to include editor and collaborator.

Kate Culkin is a professor of history at Bronx Community College, City University of New York. She is the author of Har- riet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography (2010) andanasso- ciate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (2008).