(Lydia) Maria Francis Child and David Lee Child Hdt What? Index
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(LYDIA) MARIA FRANCIS CHILD AND DAVID LEE CHILD HDT WHAT? INDEX MARIA FRANCIS LYDIA MARIA CHILD 1802 February 11, Thursday: Birth of Lydia Maria Francis in Medford, Massachusetts, as the youngest of 7 children of Susannah Rand Francis and David Convers Francis,1 a successful baker and businessman.2 She would grow up under the wing of her bookish older brother Convers Francis, Jr. and attend local schools and Medford’s First Parish, an orthodox Congregational church. When she would become 9, her brother would leave home to attend Harvard College. Possessed of an eager, inquiring mind, Lydia would be free to use the library of the First Parish minister, the Reverend David Osgood. The 6th generation of Southmayds in America: Daniel Starr Southmayd was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was a son of Ebenezer Southmayd (January 23, 1775-September 30, 1831) and Elizabeth Starr Southmayd (January 8, 1777-July 3, 1842) who had gotten married at South Farms, Connecticut, on April 16, 1797. 1. Her paternal grandfather, a weaver by trade, had been in the fighting around Concord and Lexington in 1775, and is said to have offed 5 of the enemy before being himself offed. Her “Grandfather’s House” about which she wrote her Thanksgiving poem was on South Street in Medford, Massachusetts and supposedly is this one near the Mystic River: 2. At no point would she ever allow herself to be referred to as “Lydia.” The name “Maria” is here to be pronounced not as in Spanish or French but as if it were “Mariah,” per “they called the wind mariah.” HDT WHAT? INDEX LYDIA MARIA CHILD MARIA FRANCIS 1813 Boston boys Samuel Joseph May, Caleb Cushing who would become a Democratic politician, Samuel Atkins Eliot who would become mayor of Boston, 13-year-old George Bancroft who would become a national historian and Secretary of the Navy, George Barrell Emerson who would become an educational reformer, and David Lee Child who would become a radical abolitionist, were matriculants at Harvard College. Before entering Harvard, George Barrell Emerson had undergone a few weeks of preparation at Dummer Academy in Byfield, New Hampshire. He would concentrate in mathematics and Greek. He had been taught the Linnaean system of classification by his father and it would appear that right after getting settled in his dorm room, he visited the botanic garden in order to ply Professor William Peck there with questions about plants he had noticed during his boyhood in his hometown of Wells that he had been unable to identify. George Ticknor was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, and opened a law office in Boston. Professor Sylvestre François Lacroix’s TRAITÉ ÉLÉMENTAIRE D’ARITHMÉTIQUE, A L’USAGE DE L’ÉCOLE CENTRALE DES QUATRE-NATIONS (A Paris: Chez Mme veuve Courcier, Imprimeur-Libraire pour les Mathématiques, quai des Augustins, no 57). THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT. Maria Francis “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX MARIA FRANCIS LYDIA MARIA CHILD 1815 Summer: Caroline Amelia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Princess of Wales, in exile from England, purchased the Villa d’Este on the shores of Lake Como. The Reverend Timothy Flint embarked upon a number of missionary travels, first to Kingston and Raymond, New Hampshire, then perhaps into western Massachusetts and to Essex County in upstate New York, on behalf of the Massachusetts Society for promoting Christian Knowledge. After the death of her mother Abba and the marriage of her favorite sister Mary Francis, her father David Convers Francis decided that Lydia Maria Francis (Lydia Maria Child) would be better off in Mary’s new home in Norridgewock, Maine. She was removed from the meandering tidal Mystic River to Norridgewock on the Kennebec River, just downstream from the Bonebasee Rips and the ancient site of the Abenaki village of the name Norridgewock, still occupied, which she would visit.3 HDT WHAT? INDEX LYDIA MARIA CHILD MARIA FRANCIS 1817 September: Amos Eaton received his MA degree from Williams College. George Bancroft graduated from Harvard College after four years of instruction at the age of 17 (17 would not then have been at all precocious — but since this student of moderate means was graduating 2d in his class the college would offer him the opportunity to study in Europe for the following five years all expenses paid). David Lee Child graduated from Harvard. An assignment he prepared “Astronomical Problems” (21 x 28 ¾ inches) is still on file there: <http://oasis.harvard.edu:10080/oasis/deliver/ ~hua17004> 3. At some point during Lydia Maria Child’s adolescent years in Maine, 1815-1821, she would allege much later in her LETTERS FROM NEW YORK, she had visited one of the Penobscot villages on the banks of the Kennebec River and had there met the sachem of the Penobscot, “Captain Neptune,” with small black eyes, “smoking a pipe and wearing a crushed hat and a dirty blanket.” Accompanying the sachem, she would say, was his nephew Etalexis, who was of marriageable age and thus was attired in “a broad band of shining brass around his hat, a circle of silver on his breast, tied with scarlet ribbons, and a long belt of curiously-wrought wampum hanging to his feet.” Miss Francis alleged that she had reached down and grabbed this young man’s wampum, and had demanded to know why the sachem himself was not so attired. “Me no want to catch ’em squaw,” she alleged the old man replied. (Miss Francis had made no mention, however, of such an incident, in her correspondence of the period, and one would have fancied that, had such an incident occurred, it would have been eagerly recounted to any number of her friends. My sense of it is that what we have here is not an account of a meeting, but a rare and privileged glimpse into this young lady’s sexual fantasy life. It wasn’t this young red man’s wampum that she took in her hand, and rather than it being this old red man who was not looking to catch ’em, it was the young woman who was hoping that this young red man was looking to catch ’em.) HDT WHAT? INDEX MARIA FRANCIS LYDIA MARIA CHILD At the age of 14, Ralph Waldo Emerson left Boston Latin School to matriculate at Harvard. Harvard Ceremony In those times, even if he had entered at the age of thirteen, this would not have been any indication of 4 intellectual endowment, regardless of the hagiography of such sources as ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA. Waldo would be a student at Harvard into the year 1821. On the following screen is a sketch he made in his junior year of his dorm room, which was Hollis 15. 4. (“Abstract of text biography. Emerson was a precocious child, entering Harvard at the age of 14.”) It was considered usual to enter Harvard College at such an age. By way of radical contrast, when Cotton Mather had matriculated as a freshman at Harvard College he had already read Homer and Isocrates in the original language, and Vergil and Ovid in the original language — and was but twelve years of age. Cotton indeed was precocious, and had been considered precocious. It would continue not to be considered at all unusual, for a lad to enter Harvard College at the age of thirteen. When in 1837 Thomas Wentworth Higginson would matriculate there at the age of thirteen, nobody would see fit to make any remarks, either about precocity or about anything else (but then, don’t you know, Higginson does not, like Emerson, have a 20th-Century fan club, a gang of adorers). HDT WHAT? INDEX LYDIA MARIA CHILD MARIA FRANCIS HDT WHAT? INDEX MARIA FRANCIS LYDIA MARIA CHILD Holden Chapel Hollis Hall N Fellows Barn Harvard Hall ’ Stoughton Hall Stoughton Massachusetts Hall HDT WHAT? INDEX LYDIA MARIA CHILD MARIA FRANCIS 1820 At the age of 18 Lydia Maria Francis (Lydia Maria Child) became a teacher in Gardiner, Maine. There she began to make herself familiar with the thought of Emanuel Swedenborg. The Reverend Andrew Bigelow was ordained as an Evangelist and delivered and published SERMON AT THE DEDICATION OF THE FIRST CONGRESSIONAL MEETING-HOUSE IN EASTPORT, MAINE. HDT WHAT? INDEX MARIA FRANCIS LYDIA MARIA CHILD May: “You need not fear my becoming a Swedenborgian,” Lydia Maria Francis (Lydia Maria Child) wrote her brother Convers Francis. “I am more in danger of wrecking on the rocks of skepticism than of standing on the shoals of fanaticism. I am apt to regard a system of religion as I do any other beautiful theory. It plays round the imagination, but fails to reach the heart. I wish I could find some religion in which my heart and understanding could unite; that amidst the darkest clouds of this life I might ever be cheered with the mild halo of religious consolation.” “HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE. Maria Francis “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX MARIA FRANCIS LYDIA MARIA CHILD 1821 Returning to Massachusetts from Maine, Lydia Maria Francis (Lydia Maria Child) was baptized at First Parish in Medford.