The Alcott Family

THE PATHETIC FAMILY • 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 The Alcotts HDT WHAT? INDEX THE ALCOTTS THE PATHETIC FAMILY 1616 A family coat of arms was granted to Thomas Alcocke,1 made up of the device “three cocks emblematic of watchfulness,” and the motto “Semper vigilans”2 — which is an interesting aside on Thoreau’s use of Chanticleer in the epigraph for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, and his original desire to use a drawing of a rooster on the title page rather than a drawing of the cabin, for Amos Bronson Alcox would among others be a descendant of this Alcocke family and as the text makes clear, this older man had been a frequent visitor at the cabin and during this period had been a great influence upon Henry Thoreau. THE ALCOTT FAMILY Here’s something I am currently finding amusing — for what it’s worth. The leaves of Thoreau’s initial WALDEN manuscript, from which he would lecture, would employ the 19th-Century polite term “rooster”; however, in 1849 while he would still be going around to the lyceums of various New England towns giving readings from what would become the various earlier chapters, at some point he would line out “rooster” and substitute the 19th-Century rude terms “cock” and “cockerel.” Thoreau would leave his manuscript that way, and when after its 8 drafts and 11 years of gestation his book would finally get published in 1854, the polite word “rooster” would still have been replaced by the impolite “cock” and “cockerel.” This in the America in which the young Amos Bronson Alcox had seen fit to change his family name to Alcott because of the “all- cocks” jokes he had been having to put up with. Isn’t it interesting, that Thoreau would flaunt his “cock” in the face of this contemporary usage? Background on these 19th-Century usages and polite conventions can come to us from pages 38-43 of Peter Fryer’s MRS. GRUNDY: STUDIES IN ENGLISH PRUDERY (1963), from 1. Doctor George Alcock, a physician who would settle in Roxbury, with his brother Thomas, would come over in the fleet with Winthrop in 1630. Dr. Alcock would represent at the first court on May 14, 1634. Francis Alcock would come over in the Bevis in 1638 at the age of 26. Samuel Alcock, who would settle in Kittery in 1652 and become a freeman of Massachusetts. 2. “Arms—Gules a fesse between three cocks’ heads erased argent, braked and crested or.” “Crest—A cock ermine braked and membered or.” “Motto—Vigilate.” HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PATHETIC FAMILY THE ALCOTTS which I will here quote at length: The commonest demotic words for the male sex organ, prick (from Old English prica, “point” or “dot”) and cock (from Old English cocc) date back in written sources to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively. The former has been a vulgarism since the eighteenth century, the latter since about 1830 (somewhat earlier in the USA). Both words were suggested punningly by Shakespeare. “The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon”, says Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet [circa 1595]; “Pistol’s cock is up, / And flashing fire will I follow, says Pistol in King Henry V [circa 1599]. Florio, in his Italian- English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), renders coglinto as “one that hath a good prick.” “The main Spring’s weaken’d that holds up his cock,” says a servant to Sulpitia, Mistress of the Male Stewes about a Dane exhausted in her service, in Fletcher and Massinger’s play The Custom of the Country (composed between 1619 and 1622). The word cock seems to have had a specially strong aura in America, where, as the polite term for a male domestic fowl, rooster (1772) became cock of the walk early in the nineteenth century; it has remained so to this day. Bache protested energetically, but unavailingly: Why ... should we substitute rooster for cock? Does not the hen of the same species roost also? We say woodcock, peacock, weathercock,—although some persons object to these,—why, then, should we not use the distinctive name from which the compounds are derived? ... Or shall we read, where Peter denies the Master— “the rooster crew”? The word rooster is an Americanism, which, the sooner we forget, the better. De Vere quotes an anonymous Englishman who professed to have heard a rooster and ox (i.e., cock and bull) story in the United States. But even rooster was considered somewhat advanced; one New York boarding-house keeper preferred barn-door he-biddy, and gamechicken (1846) and crower (1891) were quite frequent. Roaches started to oust American cockroaches in the 1820s; haystacks began to replace haycocks in the same decade; by 1859 cockchafers were being called chafers; and a young woman tells Judge Haliburton’s Sam Slick (1838) that her brother is a rooster swain in the navy! It is, on the whole, surprising that the USA was the home of a drink called a cocktail (one colloquial English meaning of which is “whore”). But these changes were not all. What Bartlett in 1877 called the “mock modesty of the Western States” required that a male turkey should be called—a gentleman turkey. In comparison with the plain words prick and cock, such expressions as member (circa 1290), privy member (1297), genitals (1390), privy parts (1556), pudenda (1634), penis (1693), arbor vitae (1732), tree of life (1732), means of generation (1791), genitalia (1876), private parts (1885), (male) organ, and sex sound distinctly emasculate. So do the HDT WHAT? INDEX THE ALCOTTS THE PATHETIC FAMILY more literary euphemisms—catso (the 17th Century and the early 18th; from the Italian cazzo), gadso (late 17th Century to mid- l8th; cf. catso; used in Dickens as an interjection), cyprian sceptre, mentule, priap, and thyrsus—and also the colloquial (but still respectable) ones: thing (Century 17), (matrimonial) peacemaker (mid-18th Century), private property (the 19th Century), affair (the 19th Century), it (the 19th Century), concern (circa 1840), Athenaeum or the A (before 1903), thingummy (the 20th Century), contrivance, privates, and privities. Less so, perhaps, Rochester’s rector of the females, or champion of women’s rights, or nakedness, or phallus. But the feebleness, or archness, of most of these terms is more than compensated for by a wealth of popular synonyms —THE SLANG OF VENERY lists about 600— both euphemistic and dysphemistic, which reflect the unquenchable verbal inventiveness, sexual vigour and pride (and, to a certain extent, cynicism) of Englishmen over several centuries. These synonyms fall into five main groups. First, there are words —colloquialisms or slang terms— which refer to the bodily position, appearance, or shape of the relaxed or tumescent penis. The majority of words in this group seem euphemistic — though we must bear in mind that both euphemism and dysphemism are relative terms, depending on the context and on the degree of social acceptability, in a specific milieu, of the plain word which the chosen synonym is replacing. The position of the penis is indicated by such terms as middle finger (the 19th Century), middle leg (the 19th Century), middle stump (the 20th Century) and middle; best leg of three (the 19th Century); down-leg; and foreman. For the organ in detumescence there are tail (mid- Century 14; Standard English until the 18th Century) and such compounds as tail-pipe and tail-tree; flip-flap (circa 1650); flap-doodle (late 17th Century); lobcock (mid-18th Century); flapper (the 19th Century); dingle-dangle (circa 1895), and a nursery term, worm. Two other nineteenth-century euphemisms of this kind are dropping member (especially if gonorrhoea’d) and hanging Johnny (especially if impotent or diseased). Little finger (the 20th Century) is a female euphemism. There is a series of expressions likening the penis to a tool or machine- part or domestic article of some kind: tool itself (mid-Century 16; Standard English until the 18th Century), master-tool, and instrument; pen and pencil (late 19th Century); pin (the 17th Century; used by Burns), tail-pin and needle (Standard English in the 18th Century); pump(-handle) (the 18th Century); horn (the 18th Century); key (the 18th Century); rod (the 18th Century), rod of love and Aaron’s rod; copper-stick (the 19th Century); pendulum (the 19th Century); pole (the 19th Century); button (the 19th Century; baby’s); spout (the 19th Century); pestle (the 19th Century); machine (the 19th Century); (k)nob (late 19th Century), broom-handle, broomstick, busk, candle, clothes-prop, cork, golden rivet, peg, spigot, sponge, and spindle. Other names come from the kitchen or the sweet shop: poperine-pear (late 16th Century to mid-17th; used by HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PATHETIC FAMILY THE ALCOTTS Shakespeare); pudding (the 17th Century) and roly-poly (the 19th Century); sugar-stick (late 18th Century) and lollipop (the 19th Century); bone (mid-19th Century; Cockneys’), gristle (circa 1850) and marrowbone (the 19th Century); banana, potato inger, radish, and (live) sausage.

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