ABBY MAY ALCOTT

• Mr. Amos Bronson Alcott born November 29, 1799 as Amos Bronson Alcox in Wolcott, Connecticut married May 23, 1830 in Boston to Abigail May, daughter of Colonel Joseph May died March 4, 1888 in Boston

• Mrs. Abigail (May) “Abba” Alcott born October 8, 1800 in Boston, Massachusetts died November 25, 1877 in Concord, Massachusetts

• Miss Anna Bronson Alcott born March 16, 1831 in Germantown, Pennsylvania married May 23, 1860 in Concord to John Bridge Pratt of Concord, Massachusetts died July 17, 1893 in Concord

• Miss Louisa May Alcott born November 29, 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania died March 6, 1888 in Roxbury, Massachusetts

• Miss Elizabeth Sewall Alcott born June 24, 1835 in Boston, Massachusetts died March 14, 1858 in Concord, Massachusetts

• Abby May Alcott (Mrs. Ernest Niericker), born July 26, 1840 in Concord, married March 22, 1878 in London, England to Ernest Niericker, died December 29, 1879 in Paris

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abby May Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

1840

July 26, Sunday: Abby May Alcott was born to Abba Alcott, almost 41 years old. Bronson Alcott attempted to reconcile himself to the fact that he would not get a son:

Providence, it seems, decrees that we shall provide selectest ministries alone, and so sends us successive daughters of love to quicken the Sons of Light. We joyfully acquiesce in the divine behest and are content to rear women for the future world.

THE ALCOTT FAMILY

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Abby May Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

1843

Volume I of John Ruskin’s MODERN PAINTERS defended the paintings of J.M.W. Turner (Thoreau would not read Ruskin’s MODERN PAINTERS until October 1857).

J.M.W. Turner’s “Approach to Venice” appeared.

Benjamin Robert Haydon’s “Curtius Leaping into the Gulf” depiction of the self-sacrifice of Marcus Curtius,1 “Uriel and Satan,” and “Meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society” (now in the National Portrait Gallery).

Thomas Cole’s second version of his “Voyage of Life” series of paintings depicting life as a journey through space was placed on display in Boston, in New-York, and in Philadelphia. (It would then be purchased by George K. Shoenberger of Cincinnati, Ohio. After his mansion would be converted into a sanitarium and become part of Bethesda Hospital, this series of paintings would be rediscovered hanging in the chapel of the hospital and would, in 1971, be transferred to the National Gallery of Art.)

The board game “The Mansion of Happiness” was developed by S.B. Ives of Salem, Massachusetts: landing on a space designated for “Charity,” “Industry,” or other desirable traits would speed players up a spiral track toward eternal happiness while landing on the spaces marked for vices such as “Sloth,” “Cruelty,” and ingratitude would send them tumbling backward.

This would be played by the girls of the Alcott family.

1. According to Titus Livius, in 362 BCE a chasm opened in Rome. After attempting to deal with this through the offering of various sort of votive sacrifices, the people came to suspect that the chasm would close only if they put into it their “most precious thing of all.” Marcus Curtius, a young eques, understanding correctly that this most precious thing could only be the courage and strength of the Roman soldier, mounted his horse and, wearing all his weapons, rode into the chasm — which obediently closed upon him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT June 1 (Pentecost Thursday): Joseph Smith, Jr. “got married with” Elvira Anie Cowles.

Go East, 46-year-old black woman, go East: Isabella2 experienced a command to “go east” and testify, adopted the monicker Sojourner Truth, and departed New-York with but an hour’s notice, with two York shillings in her pocket, carrying her worldly belongings in a pillowcase, to move on foot through Long Island and Connecticut, testifying to whatever audiences she was able to attract. –It is the life of a wandering evangelist, is mine. In the course of attending Millerite meetings to testify, she would accommodate to a number of the apocalyptic tenets of that group.

As Louisa May Alcott has reported in later life, on this same day quite another journey was taking place:

On the first day of June, 1843, a large wagon, drawn by a small horse and containing a motley load, went lumbering over certain New England hills, with the pleasing accompaniments of wind, rain and hail. A serene man with a serene child upon his knee was driving, or rather being driven, for the small horse had it all his own way. Behind a small boy, embracing a bust of Socrates, was an energetic looking woman, with a benevolent brow, satirical mouth and eyes full of hope and courage. A baby reposed upon her lap, a mirror leaned against her knee, a basket of provisions danced about her feet, and she struggled with a large, unruly umbrella, with which she tried to cover every one but herself. Twilight began to fall, and the rain came down in a despondent drizzle, but the calm man gazed as tranquilly into the fog as if he beheld a radiant bow of promise spanning the gray sky.

The Consociate Family of Bronson Alcott was on its way from Concord to “Fruitlands” on Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts, in the district then known politely as “Still River North” and impolitely as “Hog

2. Isabella Bomefree van Wagenen, “Bomefree” being the name of her first husband which by virtue of enslavement she had been denied, and “van Wagenen” being the name of the white family which she assumed and used for a number of years. (“Wagener” was a consistent misspelling perpetrated by the printer of the first version of her NARRATIVE in 1850.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT Street,” with its prospect of Wachusett and Mount Monadnock and its prospect of “ideals without feet or

hands” (an apt phrase said to have been created by Waldo Emerson,3 who himself, if anyone ever metaphorically lacked them, metaphorically lacked feet and hands and other essential body parts), ideals such as “a family in harmony with the primitive instincts of man.” In her fictional account of the journey, Louisa May Alcott invented an additional child and placed it on her father’s knee, obviously where she would have wanted to be, and made it a “serene” child, what she never was but longed to be. The bust of Socrates actually rode between the father Bronson, who was holding the reins, and Charles Lane, on the wagon’s bench. There was no room in this wagon for William Lane or for Anna Alcott, who for all 14 miles of the journey had to walk alongside it.

At this point the Association of Industry and Education had 113 members, a large proportion of whom were children:

3. But we may note that in Bronson Alcott’s journal for Week 45 in November 1837, Alcott had himself termed himself “an Idea without hands.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

COMMUNITARIANISM Membership

April 1842 41 May 1842 65 End of 1842 83 June 1843 113 Winter 1844 120 Spring 1845 120

Having had enough after less than two months of attempting to teach almost entirely without teaching supplies and without adequate classroom space, Sophia Foord threatened to resign as teacher at the Association. (Promises would be made that would keep her teaching while efforts were made to convert a barn into classrooms, but the problem eventually would be resolved by the need of the community to use its children as a cheap source of incessant factory labor. After Miss Foord left Northampton, she became tutor to the children of the Chase family (Elizabeth Buffum Chace) of Valley Falls, Rhode Island; “she taught botany; she walked with the children over the fields … and made her pupils observe the geographical features of the pond and its banks, and carefully taught them to estimate distances by sight.”)

Railroad service to Concord began. Preliminary earthmoving crews, and then crossties and rails crews, had reached Concord at the rate of 33 feet per day, filling in Walden Pond’s south-west arm to give it its present shape. 1,000 Irishmen were earning $0.50 or $0.60 for bonebreaking 16-hour days of labor. Waldo Emerson was elated because he much preferred riding in the railroad coach to riding in the stage coach which offered a “ludicrous pathetic tragical picture” (his comment from April 15, 1834; I don’t know whether he meant that he felt that he presented a ludicrous pathetic tragical appearance while riding on the stage coach or that the view from the stage coach window presented him with a ludicrous pathetic tragical perspective). He found, however, that when a philosopher rides the railroad “Ideal Philosophy takes place at once” as “men & trees & barns whiz by you as fast as the leaves of a dictionary” and this helps in grasping the real impermanence of matter: “hitherto esteemed symbols of stability do absolutely dance by you” and we experience “the sensations of a swallow who skims by trees & bushes with about the same speed” (June 10, 1834). By this time, with the railroad actually in Concord, Emerson had decided that “Machinery & Transcendentalism agree well.”4

“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

4. EMERSON’S JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS 4: 277, 4:296, 8:397. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

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ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

CHRISTMAS 1843

December 25, Monday: Benjamin Wiley, Jr. got married with Hannah P. Tufts.

This was the Christmas season on which Charles Dickens’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL IN PROSE became available for purchase, at least in England.

http://www.stormfax.com/dickens.htm

According to the author, this was the boil-down of typical Christmas holiday festivities of the period: “Such HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blindman’s-buffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissing-in of new ones never too places in these parts before.... I broke out like a madman.” The Bronson Alcott /Abba Alcott family was among the 1st of New England families to celebrate the Christmas holiday in the “secular” manner, that is, by an exchange of presents — but we should not take that to mean that the father was present in the home at Fruitlands:

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. “It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. “I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have lots of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff. “We’ve got father and mother and each other, anyhow,” said Beth contentedly, from her corner.

Jo Marsh = Louisa May Alcott, portrayed by Katherine Hepburn in the magnificent 1933 movie of George Cukor titled LITTLE WOMEN.

Meg March = Anna Bronson Alcott, portrayed by Frances Dee, who married John Brook (=John Bridge Pratt), portrayed by John Davis Lodge.

Amy March = Abby May Alcott (Mrs. Ernest Niericker), portrayed by Joan Bennett.

Mr. March = Bronson Alcott, portrayed by Samuel S. Hinds.

Marmee March = “Abba” Abigail May Alcott, portrayed by Spring Byington.

Beth March = “Lizzie” Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, the eldest daughter, portrayed by Jean Parker. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

THE ALCOTT FAMILY

Waldo Emerson to his journal, same date:

At the performing of Handel’s Messiah I heard some delicious strains & understood a very little of all that was told me.

December 19, Saturday: Friend Daniel Ricketson in Concord, to his journal:

PARKER PILLSBURY Clear and colder; accompanied Thoreau on a survey of WALDO EMERSON woodland near Walden Pond this forenoon, dined with him ABBA ALCOTT at his father’s, afternoon at my lodgings with Thoreau and Parker Pillsbury. R.W. Emerson also joined us at LOUISA MAY ALCOTT the close of the P.M. Took tea with Mr. Emerson, called on Mrs. Alcott and her daughters, whom I found very ELIZABETH ALCOTT agreeable and intelligent people; one daughter I did MAY ALCOTT not see, being quite ill, probably not to recover. Mr. Sanborn called there, with whom I returned to my room, he occupied with a sister Channing’s house. ELLERY CHANNING

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abby May Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT March 12, Friday: Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, age 23, died of the aftereffects of scarlet fever.

The girls never forgot that night, for no sleep came to them as they kept their watch, with that dreadful sense of powerlessness which comes to us in hours like those. “If God spares Beth, I never will complain again,” whispered Meg earnestly. “If God spares Beth, I’ll try to love and serve Him all my life,” answered Jo, with equal fervor. “I wish I had no heart, it aches so,” sighed Meg, after a pause. “If life is often as hard as this, I don’t see how we ever shall get through it,” added her sister despondently. Here the clock struck twelve, and both forgot themselves in watching Beth, for they fancied a change passed over her wan face. The house was still as death, and nothing but the wailing of the wind broke the deep hush. Weary Hannah slept on, and no one but the sisters saw the pale shadow which seemed to fall upon the little bed. An hour went by, and nothing happened except Laurie’s quiet departure for the station. Another hour, — still no one came; and anxious fears of delay in the storm, or accidents by the way, or, worst of all, a great grief at Washington, haunted the girls. It was past two, when Jo, who stood at the window thinking how dreary the world looked in its winding-sheet of snow, heard a movement by the bed, and turning quickly, saw Meg kneeling before their mother’s easy-chair with her face hidden. A dreadful fear passed coldly over Jo, as she thought, “Beth is dead, and Meg is afraid to tell me.” She was back at her post in an instant, and to her excited eyes a great change seemed to have taken place. The fever flush and the look of pain were gone, and the beloved little face looked so pale and peaceful in its utter repose that Jo felt no desire to weep or to lament. Leaning low over this dearest of her sisters, she kissed the damp forehead with her heart on her lips, and softly whispered, “Good-by, my Beth. Good-by!”

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abby May Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT March 19, Friday: Henry Thomas Buckle’s lecture at the Royal Institution, “Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge.”

In her journal for this month, Louisa May Alcott referred to having purchased the Alcott family plot in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. (Knowing that Lizzie was dying, the family would have made arrangements, most likely with Emerson’s help. The only one who’s not there in the family plot now is Abby May Alcott (Mrs. Ernest Niericker), who would die abroad and whose body would be placed in a rented grave in Paris. Although Louisa would arrange for a stone in the family plot in Sleepy Hollow and make plans to have her body brought home, with her death the rental payments would lapse and May’s remains would be moved to a mass grave.) Louisa’s letter to Eliza Wells on this day indicated that her sister Elizabeth Sewall Alcott had been buried there after her funeral service had been read by the Reverend Dr. Frederic Huntington. Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn had been among the pallbearers.

March 19. P.M. —To Hill and Grackle Swamp. Another pleasant and warm day. Painted my boat this afternoon. These spring impressions (as of the apparent waking up of the meadow described day before yesterday) are not repeated the same year, at least not with the same force, for the next day the same phenomenon does not surprise us. Our appetite has lost its edge. The other day the face of the meadow wore a peculiar appearance, as if it were beginning to wake up under the influence of the southwest wind and the warm sun, but it cannot again this year present precisely that appearance to me. I have taken a step forward to a new position and must see something else. You perceive, and are affected by, changes too subtle to be described. I see little swarms of those fine fuzzy gnats in the air. I am behind the Hemlocks. It is their wings which are most conspicuous, when they are in the sun. Their bodies are comparatively small and black, and they have two mourning plumes in their fronts. Are not these the winter gnat? They keep up a circulation in the air like water- bugs on the water. They people a portion of the otherwise vacant air, being apparently fond of the sunshine, in which they are most conspicuous. Sometimes a globular swarm two feet or more in diameter, suggesting how genial and habitable the air is become. I hear turkeys gobble. This too, I suppose, is a spring sound. I hear a steady sigh of the wind, rising and swelling into a roar, in the pines, which seems to tell of a long, warm rain to come. I see a white pine which has borne fruit in its ninth year. The cones, four in number, which are seven eighths of an inch long, have stems about two and a half inches long! — not yet curving down; so the stem probably does not grow any more. Met Channing and walked on with him to what we will call Grackle Swamp, admiring the mosses; those bright- yellow hypnums (?), like sunlight on decaying logs, and jungermannia, like sea-mosses ready spread. Hear the phebe note of a chickadee. In the swamp, see grackles, four or five, with the light ring about eye, —their bead eyes. They utter only those ineffectual split notes, no conqueree. Might I not call that Hemlock Brook? and the source of it Horse-Skull meadow? Hear the pleasant chill-lill of the F. hyemalis, the first time I have heard this note. This, too, suggests pleasant associations. By the river, see distinctly red-wings [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] and hear their conqueree. They are not associated with grackles. They are an age before their cousins, have attained to clearness and liquidity. They are officers, epauletted; the others are rank and file. I distinguish one even by its flight, hovering slowly from tree-top to tree-top, as if ready to utter its liquid notes. Their whistle is very clear and sharp, while the grackle’s is ragged and split. It is a fine evening, as I stand on the bridge. The waters are quite smooth; very little ice to be seen. The red-wing and song sparrow are singing, and a flock of tree sparrows is pleasantly warbling. A new era has come. The red- wing’s gurgle-ee is heard when smooth waters begin; they come together. One or two boys are out trying their skiffs, even like the fuzzy gnats in the sun, and as often as one turns his boat round on the smooth surface, the setting sun is reflected from its side. I feel reproach when I have spoken with levity, when I have made a jest, of my own existence. The makers have thus secured seriousness and respect for their work in our very organization. The most serious events have their ludicrous aspect, such as death; but we cannot excuse ourselves when we have taken this view of them only. It is pardonable when we spurn the proprieties, even the sanctities, making them stepping-stones to something higher. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abby May Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

1859

November 23, Wednesday: In Friend Daniel Ricketson’s journal:

Walked after breakfast to Edmund Hosmer’s farm, spent EDMUND HOSMER an hour with him and his youngest daughter, an BRONSON ALCOTT intelligent and well educated young woman. Called at Mr. Alcott’s and dined with him in his library on LOUISA MAY ALCOTT boiled rice, grated cheese, cider, and apples. Walked ABBY MAY ALCOTT this P.M. with Thoreau to the Hallowell farm; returned ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT to Thoreau’s room; plain talk, perhaps too much so. Called at Mr. Alcott’s this evening; he was at Mr. Emerson’s. Sat till nearly 9 with the two young ladies; introduced to Mr. Pratt, engaged to Miss Anna Alcott, who was also in the room a short time. Spent the night at the Middlesex House, kept by a Mr. Newton, formerly a stage-driver between Taunton and Boston. Retired at 10. Talk in the barroom with several persons.

William H. Bonney (Billy the Kid) was born.

Henry Thoreau responded to the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s letter of November 19th, that he was already fully committed but did hope for the success of the new Cincinnati reincarnation of THE DIAL.

[NO ENTRIES IN THOREAU’S JOURNAL FOR 23 NOVEMBER]

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Abby May Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

1861

September 3, Tuesday: The 23rd anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s freedom, which we may well elect to celebrate in lieu of an unknown slave birthday.

Here is a Daguerreotype, by an unidentified photographer in the 1850-1855 timeframe.

“It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday.”

Per Friend Daniel Ricketson’s journal:5By this point Abby May, the youngest of the Alcott daughters, would

BRONSON ALCOTT Weather warm and cloudy. Spent forenoon with Mr. Alcott in his study, Thoreau there part of the time. On our ABBA ALCOTT way visited an antiquarian collection of a Mr. Davis LOUISA MAY ALCOTT in company with Miss Sophia Thoreau and Mr. Thoreau. Dined with Mr. Alcott, his wife, and daughters Louisa SOPHIA E. THOREAU and Abby. Returned to Thoreau’s to tea, walked this evening in the dark, got lost for a time, but by retracing my steps found my way again. Dark cloudy evening, warm. Talked with T. till ten.

have reached her full adult stature of five feet ten inches, so she must have made quite a contrast with the five 5. Would this Mr. Davis be the wealthy philanthropist who in 1843 was leading the “Providence Movement” of mystic anarchists in Providence RI? Or the owner of “Eleazer Davis’s Hill” near Carlisle Bridge? Would he be a descendant of the Davis who stood and delivered among the Concord minutemen on the Lexington battleground? HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT foot three inch Ricketson! “How’s the weather down there?” THE ALCOTT FAMILY Table of Altitudes

Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Dr. Ruth Westheimer 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Edith Piaf 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Linda Hunt 4 ' 9 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Mother Teresa 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Tammy Faye Bakker 4 ' 11'' Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut 4 ' 11'' jockey Willie Shoemaker 4 ' 11'' Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 4 ' 11'' Joan of Arc 4 ' 11'' Bonnie Parker of “Bonnie & Clyde” 4 ' 11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' Gloria Swanson 4 ' 11''1/2 Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 '' Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Dollie Parton 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

Pia Zadora 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' Dred Scott 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±) Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) John Keats 5 ' 3/4 '' Debbie Reynolds (Carrie Fisher’s mother) 5 ' 1 '' Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) 5 ' 1 '' Bette Midler 5 ' 1 '' Dudley Moore 5 ' 2 '' Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel) 5 ' 2 '' Honore de Balzac 5 ' 2 '' Sally Field 5 ' 2 '' Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Volt ai re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 '' Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2'' 1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2'' average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' Charles Dickens 5 ' 6? '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President Martin Van Buren 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. 5 ' 7 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' “Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President Zachary Taylor 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President Millard Fillmore 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

1 President Jimmy Carter 5 ' 9 /2'' 3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' Franklin Pierce 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots 5 ' 11'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11'' President Grover Cleveland 5 ' 11'' President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President Woodrow Wilson 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard Milhous Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith, Jr. 6 ' 0 '' David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President James Buchanan 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President John Tyler 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' John Camel Heenan 6 ' 2 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

Crispus Attucks 6 ' 2 '' President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 '' Gabriel Prosser 6 ' 2 '' Dangerfield Newby 6 ' 2 '' Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President Bill Clinton 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) William Buckley 6 ' 4-7” Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' William “Dwarf Billy” Burley 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1'' HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT

1869

April: Volume II of LITTLE WOMEN, OR, MEG, JO, BETH AND AMY by Louisa May Alcott was published by Roberts Brothers of Boston. Submitting to the judgment of her publishers, the author allowed the “amateurish” sketches made by her sister Abby May Alcott (the “Amy March” character) to be replaced by the work of the

then well-known illustrator Hammatt Billings:

If ‘genius is eternal patience,’ as Michael Angelo affirms, Amy certainly had some claim to the divine attribute, for she persevered in spite of all obstacles, failures, and discouragements, firmly believing that in time she should do something worthy to be called ‘high art.’

THE ALCOTT FAMILY MICHELANGELO HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT Alcott cited her hero Wendell Phillips the anti-slavery orator full of grace:6

HATEVER his motive might have been, Laurie studied to some purpose that year, for he W graduated with honor, and gave the Latin oration with the grace of a Phillips and the eloquence of a Demosthenes, so his friends said. They were all there, his grandfather — oh, so proud — Mr. and Mrs. March, John and Meg, Jo and Beth, and all exulted over him with the sincere admiration which boys make light of at the time, but fail to win from the world by any after-triumphs.

Note that Alcott described a particular one of Amy’s painting pigments as being tomato-colored: From fire to oil was a natural transition for burnt fingers, and Amy fell to painting with undiminished ardor. An artist friend fitted her out with his cast-off palettes, brushes, and colors, and she daubed away, producing pastoral and marine views such as were never seen on land or sea. Her monstrosities in the way of cattle would have taken prizes at an agricultural fair, and the perilous pitching of her vessels would have produced sea-sickness in the most nautical observer, if the utter disregard to all known rules of ship building and rigging had not convulsed him with laughter at the first glance. Swarthy boys and dark-eyed Madonnas, staring at you from one corner of the studio, did not suggest Murillo; oily brown shadows of faces with a lurid streak in the wrong place, meant Rembrandt; buxom ladies and dropiscal infants, Rubens; and Turner appeared in tempests of blue thunder, orange lightning, brown rain, and purple clouds, with a tomato-colored splash in the middle, which might be the sun or a bouy, a sailor’s shirt or a king’s robe, as the spectator pleased. 6. We may note in passing that Louisa’s character “Laurie” was not a depiction of Wendell Phillips. He was not a depiction of Waldo Emerson either, although the author had suffered a rather serious crush on Emerson in her teen years, writing him love letters which, she would later acknowledge, she’d had the good judgment not to post. Perhaps Louisa didn’t allow Jo to marry because she so closely modeled this point-of-view character on herself — and as a young woman she had averred that she’d “rather be a literary spinster and paddle my own canoe.” Though many men have stepped forward to claim that they were “Laurie,” when the author was asked about this she replied that the character had been a composite of two young men she had known. One of these, Alfred Whitman, had been a member of the Concord Dramatic Union founded by Louisa and others in the mid-1850s with whom she had continued to correspond long term, and the other had been Ladislas Wisniewski, a young Polish man with whom she had shared a brief romance while she had been on tour in Europe as companion to an invalid woman. (In “My Boys,” a sketch published late in her life, Louisa would identify only Wisniewski.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT The name deployed in Chapter 27 of LITTLE WOMEN, “Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury,” was modeled by Louisa on the name of the serial novelist of the 1850s, Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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… Pausing to turn a page, the lad saw her looking and, with boyish good- nature offered half his paper, saying bluntly, “Want to read it? That’s a first- rate story.” Jo accepted it with a smile, for she had never outgrown her liking for lads, and soon found herself involved in the usual labyrinth of love, mystery, and murder, — for the story belonged to that class of light literature in which the passions have a holiday, and when the author’s invention fails, a grand catastrophe clears the stage of one-half the dramatis personæ, leaving the other half to exult over their downfall. “Prime, isn’t it?” asked the boy, as her eye went down the last paragraph of her portion. “I think you and I could do most as well as that if we tried,” returned Jo, amused at his admiration of the trash. “I should think I was a pretty lucky chap if I could. She makes a good living out of such stories, they say;” and he pointed to the name of Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury, under the title of the tale. “Do you know her?” asked Jo, with sudden interest. “No, but I read all her pieces, and I know a fellow who works in the office where this paper is printed.” “Do you say she makes a good living out of stories like this?” And Jo looked more respectfully at the agitated group and thickly-sprinkled exclamation points that adorned the page. “Guess she does! She knows just what folks like, and gets paid well for writing it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1875

In Michigan and Minnesota, women obtained the franchise to vote in school elections. FEMINISM

Abby May Alcott opened an art gallery and workshop on the 2d floor of the Town School building, above the Concord fire engines.

Sojourner Truth issued an expanded version of her NARRATIVE, and fell ill. Frances D. Gage’s retrospections about Truth’s participation in the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, retrospections which probably in large part were spurious, were republished in this volume, from the May 2d, 1863 pages of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Again Truth did not challenge those retrospections.7

The new public school establishment had no clue that the 1st Amendment might be used to rule out government aid for the religious schools they sought to destroy, so what they worked toward was a new, separate constitutional amendment that would prohibit public funds, tax money, from being used for such independent schools. This was known as the Blaine Amendment, and in this year it fell short by four votes of the necessary 2/3ds margin needed for passage in the US Senate. The nativist Know-Nothing Party enrolled in the struggle, and in addition the Ku Klux Klan. The campaign for the new constitutional amendment was taken to the legislatures of the various states. Eventually, 29 state legislatures, including the state legislature of New York, would add Blaine Amendments to their state constitutions in order to destroy the Catholic school system. SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

7. She could not write and thus was not putting this volume together herself, although it was being done with her active involvement, but also, as has been pointed out, her focus in recounting stories about herself had always been on the moral values which could be obtained thereby, the significance of which nobody in her audiences could be inclined to sniff at, rather than upon the mundane factual realities of her life, the significance of which at that time, for anyone other than herself and her loved ones, would have been at best an opportunity for attempts at humor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ABBY MAY ALCOTT ABBY MAY ALCOTT March 24, Wednesday: Abby May Alcott, the “artistic” daughter of the Alcott family, had been solicited and had suggested a local young man, Daniel Chester French, she considered to be of promise;

he had produced a minute plaster model on the model of the Apollo Belvedere (with clothes on);8 a bronze statue was in the last stages of being prepared;9 the base and inscription for the new statue of the “Minute Man” on the west bank of the Concord River at the Old North Bridge in Concord were complete.

8. The Roman copy known as the Apollo Belvedere, at the Vatican, was termed in 1775 “the consummation of the best that nature, art, and the human mind can produce.” It had been uncovered sometime late in the 15th Century, and dates to the reign of Hadrian. We presume that the original of this had been sculpted about 320BCE by Leochares, an Athenian, at the court of Alexander the Great. Thomas Carlyle dealt with the Apollo Belvedere in “Hudson’s Statue.” 9. The plan had been, originally, for a marble statue, but young Daniel the sculptor had preferred bronze and Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar had persuaded the US Congress to make available 10 condemned Civil War brass cannon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1878

March 22, Friday: Abigail May Alcott got married with Ernest Nieriker in London.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Abby May Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1879

November 8, Saturday: Abigail May Alcott Nieriker gave birth to a daughter Louisa May “Lulu” Nieriker in Paris.

December 29, Monday: The body of “Charley” Parkhurst was discovered in her California cabin after she had died of tongue cancer evidently induced by her lifelong constant indulgent in manly cigars and chewing tobacco. Preparing her body for burial, her gender was revealed for the 2d time. In the cabin, in a trunk, was a pair of baby shoes and a little red dress — could this have been what she had worn as a child in New Hampshire in the 1810s, before she had run away from the orphanage disguised as a boy?

Abigail May Alcott Nieriker died in Paris. The body would be placed in a rented plot at Montrouge, although Louisa May Alcott, who would be caring for her daughter “Lulu,” would position a stone with her initials in the family plot in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abby May Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 12, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.