ABIGAIL (ABBA OR ABBY) MAY ALCOTT
Of Abba Alcott it has been said: “She never said great things, but did ten thousand generous ones.”
BORN 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 DIED
DISAMBIGUATION: This file is not about the Bostonian Abigail May (1754-1824) who married a distant cousin, the wealthy local merchant Colonel John May, when she was 19 and together with him had 11 children (although quite likely she was a relative and quite likely our Abigail May who married Bronson Alcott had been named in her relative’s honor). One of the founders of the Boston Asylum for Female Orphans, this older Abigail May also acted as a director of that institution. A friend described her as “lovely in person and character, and distinguished for her benevolence and practical good sense.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
• 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 Abigail May HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1449
Pogrom in Toledo, España, now alleged by historian Benzion Netanyahu to have been part of the complex social circumstances leading up to the Catholic Inquisition. INQUISITION ANTISEMITISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1478
November 1, Sunday (Old Style): Pope Sixtus IV issued the papal bull that extended the power of the Santo Oficio, or Inquisition from France into the Iberian peninsula. The Inquisition, which had been initiated during the 13th Century, was not only involved in the suppression of religious dissidence, but had been and would be responsible for the torture and execution of many individuals whom they supposed to be possessed by an evil spirit, individuals whom we would now describe as having one or another mental illness. At Seville, inquisitors Miguel de Morcillo and Juan de San Martin would in about 3 years account for, in round numbers, about 500 such individuals. In Aragon, inquisitor Thomas de Torquemada would make quite a name for himself in the pursuit of deviance. Not until the regime of Adolf Hitler would there again be such a ruthless extermination of the helplessly ill. PROTO-NAZISM PSYCHOLOGY
Of course, this sort of treatment was not reserved for the mentally ill. Forced Jewish converts to Catholic Christianity, known politely as conversos and impolitely as “swine,” who still (allegedly) practiced Jewish rites in secret within their own families, would be tortured until they confessed to such and then “relaxed” to the civil arm of government to be burned at the stake. –Unless, that is, they managed to flee the country, in which event they would be burned in effigy. (In either case their family estate would be divided among their persecutors.)1
1. See Lea, Henry Charles. HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION OF SPAIN and Netanyahu, Benzoin. THE ORIGINS OF THE INQUISITION IN FIFTEENTH CENTURY SPAIN (Random House, 1995). HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1547
The Santo Oficio, or Inquisition, spread like a pestilence from Spain into Portugal. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1800
October 8, Wednesday: Abigail (Abigail = “Father’s Joy,” Abby or her “baby name,” Abba) May (Alcott) was born in Boston, daughter of Colonel Joseph May and Dorothy Sewall, just in time for the nation’s 2d census. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
This infant would be baptized at the King’s Chapel.
Ludwig van Beethoven received 200 florins from Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz for the String Quartets op.18/4-6.
During this year a young woman with cancer, named Abigail May, traveled to Ballston Springs, New York to try the mineral water baths there, in search of relief from the pain of her illness. At first she was nervous at the sight of the douche hoses but, making sure she had her laudanum handy, she took the plunge into the soothing waters:
I felt finely for two hours after bathing.
OPIUM
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
Abigail May “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1801
March: In an autobiographical sketch she prepared at the end of her years, Abba Alcott recounted that at some point during this month “At six months, was badly burned on the face and right hand.” In addition to the permanent facial scar, two fingertips were so contracted that she would never be able to play the piano. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
So there was a reason why, when her daughter May Alcott drew pictures for her daughter Louisa May Alcott’s book extrapolating on the family, the mother figure was seated and facing as she was. The facial scarring and the damaged hand were being concealed from the public view.
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abigail May HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1819
On a trip through Charleston, South Carolina, the Reverend Joseph Tuckerman, a distant relative of Abba Alcott, watched as a carpenter was sold for $490.00, then a “very likely boy, about 12 or 13” for $400.00, then a seamstress for $375.00 — and this gave him the willies.2 But he sort of accepted it, at the time, as the way the world worked. In fact, in the next year, when he went off to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, he assumed that free black citizens would not be eligible for state office, just as he assumed that white women would likewise be ineligible. It wasn’t that he was a wicked or uncaring person, it was just that this was the normative framework which he had never thought to challenge. Tuckerman would later (1826) found the Unitarian Ministry at Large in service to the poor.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
2. By the way, this is not what Friend Maria Mitchell would be talking about, when she would opinion famously that “The needle is the chain of woman, and has fettered her more than the laws of the country.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1822
A prisoner was hanged for murder, and one for highway robbery, in Boston. In about this year, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, brother of Abba Alcott, since he believed it was wrong to kill, refused even to participate in killing to the extent of administering “last rites” to a prisoner being hanged. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
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 Abigail May HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1824
September 2, Thursday: The Marquis de Lafayette breakfasted in Newburyport on yet another rainy day, and William Lloyd Garrison was among the hundreds of townspeople who obtained his handshake at the Tracy mansion on State Street (a building which now houses the town’s public library) prior to his departure for Concord.
When the illustrious citoyen reached Concord, Squire Samuel Hoar, on behalf of all, rose to deliver the welcome.
Lafayette, nous sommes ici!
—General “Black Jack” Pershing, arriving with US troops in France at the very end of the WWI trench warfare.
Unfortunately, Squire Hoar did this in a manner which would begin a long and bitter controversy with Lexington over which town’s militia had been the first to fire upon the colonial army in America, by pointing out in his speech of welcome that it had been at the Old North Bridge over the Concord River rather than during the prior slaughter on the green in Lexington town that “the first forcible resistance” had been offered by the militia to the army. Before this visit by the marquis, there had in fact been very little note taken either in Concord or in Lexington of the anniversary of the April 19th dustup between the militia and the army. This invidious discrimination between two outbreaks of smallarms fire would produce a “storm of protest” from indignant Lexingtonians. Major Elias Phinney of Lexington would begin to pull together the depositions of survivors, none of whom had forgotten any details of the “battle” and some of whom were finding that they were able to recall details that hadn’t actually happened.
When Mary Moody Emerson was introduced to the general, she coquettishly told him that since she had been at the time a newborn infant, she also could lay claims to having been “‘in arms’ at the Concord fight.”3
John Shepard Keyes would later preserve a dim memory of having been pulled by a sister out of the way of the horses that drew Lafayette through Concord, and of the pageantry of that very special day.
Elizabeth Hallett Prichard, daughter of Moses Prichard and Jane Tompson Hallet Prichard, would all her long life remember being picked up by this geriatric general and kissed, before she reached her 3d birthday.
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn would later allege that Henry Thoreau had been able to summon a childhood 3. I don’t know whether this presentation of Mary Moody Emerson to Lafayette occurred earlier during this day, in Newburyport, or later, in Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY memory of this event, which would have occurred subsequent to his 7th birthday, but Thoreau’s memory of the event would have been rather more like the trace memory of Keynes (John Shepard Keyes) and nothing like Walt Whitman’s — for Walt’s memory much later (a memory produced for the amazement of his friend John Burroughs), was that somehow he had obtained for himself a manly kiss:
On the visit of General Lafayette to this country, in 1824, he came over to Brooklyn in state, and rode through the city. The children of the schools turn’d out to join in the welcome. An edifice for a free public library for youths was just then commencing, and Lafayette consented to stop on his way and lay the corner-stone. Numerous children arriving on the ground, where a huge irregular excavation for the building was already dug, surrounded with heaps of rough stone, several gentlemen assisted in lifting the children to safe or convenient spots to see the ceremony. Among the rest, Lafayette, also helping the children, took up the five-year-old Walt Whitman, and pressing the child a moment to his breast, and giving him a kiss, handed him down to a safe spot in the excavation. — John Burroughs.
Abba Alcott would love to recount, in her old age, how her aunt Dorothy Sewall Quincy met the marquis at the ball held in his honor. We may be able to judge the nature of the reception and ball at which Dorothy Sewall Quincy “met her marquis” –presumably in Boston rather than in Concord where there would not have been an adequate infrastructure of edifices, servants, and the paraphernalia of privilege– by considering that the visit of this distinguished “friend of America,” who had been declared a guest of the nation by President James Monroe and by the federal Congress, was our nation’s chief social excitement of this year.
In Philadelphia, for instance, the celebrations had occupied several days, with the good general Lafayette bowing with grace of manner and greeting each lady and gentleman presented to him with “How do you do?” in very careful English, and the following account subsequently appeared in Niles’ Weekly Register: HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
THE NATION’S GUEST On Monday morning, the 4th inst., about three hundred children of both sexes, from the different schools in Philadelphia, were arranged in the State House yard to receive General La Fayette: the spectacle was most beautiful and highly interesting. In the evening he attended a grand ball at the theatre: the lobby of which was converted into a magnificent saloon, adorned with beautiful rose, orange and lemon trees, in full bearing, and a profusion of shrubbery, pictures, busts, banners with classical inscriptions, etc., all illuminated with a multitude of lamps. For the dancers there were two compartments, the house and the stage; the upper part of the former was hung with scarlet drapery, studded with golden stars, while the great chandelier, with two additional ones, and a row of wax tapers, arranged over the canopy, shed down a blaze of light. The first and second tiers of boxes were crowded with ladies in the richest apparel, as spectators of the dazzling array. Beyond the proscenium the stage division wore the appearance of an Eastern pavilion in a garden, terminating with a view of an extended sea and landscape, irradiated by the setting sun, and meant to typify the Western world. The company began to assemble soon after seven o’clock, and consisted of two thousand or more persons, of whom 600 or 700 were invited strangers. Twenty-two hundred tickets had been issued. No disorder occurred in the streets, with the arrival and departure of the carriages, which formed a line along the adjoining squares. General La Fayette appeared at nine o’clock and was received at the door by the managers of the ball. He was conducted the whole length of the apartments through an avenue formed by the ladies to the bottom of the stage, where Mrs. Morris, Governor Shulze, and the Mayer waited to greet him in form: the full band playing an appropriate air during his progress. As soon as he was seated, the dancers were called, and at least four hundred were immediately on the floor. The dancing did not cease until near five o’clock, though the company began to retire about three. At twelve, one of the managers, from an upper box, proclaimed a toast “to the nation’s guest,” which was hailed with enthusiasm and accompanied by the descent of a banner from the ceiling. Behind this was suddenly displayed a portrait of the general, with allegorical figures. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY A short while later, churning this topic, Niles’ Weekly Register offered information about the sexual overtones of toasts which had been offered at a similar upscale bash in Baltimore, and the manner in which such gallantries had been offered and received:
When the music for the dancing ceased, the military band of the first rifle regiment played the most pleasing and fashionable airs.... Just before the ladies of the first tables retired, General La Fayette requested permission to give the following toast, which was received in a manner that reflected credit on the fair objects of it: “The Baltimore ladies — the old gratitude of a young soldier mingles with the respectful sense of new obligation conferred on a veteran.” The ladies rose and saluted the general, and the sensation and effect is not to be described; when he sat down there was a burst of applause from all the gentlemen present.
Need we explore the overtones of this toast? The old French general is relying upon the national stereotypes according to which Frenchmen in tights are “gallant,” and is reminiscing about when he and his fellows were young and horny, traveling around in magnificent uniforms diddling the lovely young colonial maidens. He is saying to these ladies at the banquet “Maybe it was you I swived with when you were much younger, and you will remember but not I, or consider that maybe it was your mama,” and he was saying to their husbands as well, “Maybe it was your wife I swived with when we were so much younger, and she will remember but not I and she will most certainly not tell you about it, or maybe it was your mama, or your wife’s mama.” He remembers youthful delights and is grateful. Lafayette says all this in the most careful innuendo, “and the sensation and effect is not to be described.” What could the American males do but applaud wildly? –They couldn’t very well rush the main table and shove this codger’s head into his soup, could they?
In Newport, Rhode Island Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day Morng - called a little while at Jos Anthonys, then came on board the Packet & got home in about five hours - This little jant [jaunt] to Providence has been attended with depression on account of the inconvenience of leaving home when I have considerable of my own to attend too, & my outward circumstances require my attention - yet I have (I trust) humbly to acknowledge an evidence of divine favour & even an enlargement of my views & exercises which is worth sacrifice & even suffering for & as to my spiritual condition I have returned refreshed & enlivened, with renew’d desires for myself & the society of which I am a member, that I may grow in grace, & there by become increasingly usefull to the latter RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1827
July: Responding to the Reverend Samuel Joseph May’s letter of request, Bronson Alcott appeared at the doorstep of his parsonage in Brooklyn, Connecticut after an all-day stagecoach journey.
His Cheshire, Massachusetts experiment in education had failed –due primarily to the conventionality and hostility of the parents of the children, who had used every weapon at their disposal and among other things had hinted that they might be led to accuse Alcott of fondling their little girls– and therefore Alcott, who had purchased a large library for his school, found himself $600.00 in debt. The reverend was out of the house, but the reverend’s vivacious dark4 sister Abba May [Abba Alcott] entertained the unexpected guest. This wasn’t exactly what you’d call proper, but then Abba wasn’t exactly what you’d call proper — for one thing, she was slightly disfigured by a facial burn and slightly disabled by a hand burn, neither of which do anything at all to enhance one’s marketability on the marriage mart.
Some nine years earlier she had been courted, by an older man, Samuel May Frothingham, but this hadn’t worked out, or perhaps negotiations had stalled while Abba had studied history, botany, French, Latin, chemistry, geometry, and astronomy under the scholar Abby Allyn in Duxbury, Massachusetts. And then this
4. May = Maies = Mayes, probably of Portuguese Jewish origin. Louisa May Alcott inherited the dark eyes and hair and swarthy vivacious Mediterranean look of this branch of the family through her mother, who was also dark complected:
Anna is an Alcott. Louisa is a true blue May, or rather brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT suitably not-picky elder suitor up and died.5
[ABBA’s JOURNAL] I found ... an intelligent, philosophic modest man, whose reserved deportment authorized my showing many attentions.
[BRONSON’S JOURNAL] There was nothing of artifice, of affectation of manners; all was openness, simplicity, nature herself.
So this time around it was love at first sight. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
5. Do you wonder what relation this old Samuel May Frothingham was to the Unitarian Reverend Octavius Brooks Frothingham? HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1828
April 24, Thursday: Bronson Alcott, age 31, who had been working in the South as a peddler, arrived in Boston. He would soon be selected to be the first headmaster of the first infant school for the children of the poor, in the northern part of Boston, on Salem Street. But, primarily, he had come to Boston to be near Abba May. And she was in Boston, she had come to Boston to be near Bronson. That situation would persist on for a full three months, with each incapable of confiding in the other. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abigail May HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT August 2, Saturday: Gianni di Calais, a melodramma semiseria by Gaetano Donizetti to words of Gilardoni after d’Arlincourt, was performed for the initial time, in Teatro del Fondo, Naples to a warm reception by the audience.
Hector Berlioz received the 2d Prix de Rome for his setting of the cantata Herminie.
Finally Abigail May broke the ice, by making an appointment to see Amos Bronson Alcott alone. She told him of her feelings for him. He opened his journal and she read what he had been writing about his feelings for her, some passages “which told me all I wished to know.” The couple began to take long walks together to appreciate the “romantic moral character” of local scenery.
I am not only his lover, his mistress, but his pupil, his companion. I live to promote the happiness of him with whom all my interests are blended, temporal & eternal for not even death can separate us linked by a love so pure. I am perhaps as happy as I can bear to be.
ABBA ALCOTT THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1830
May 23, Sunday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 23rd of 5th M / Both Meetings Silent & Enoch & Lydia Absent at Cumberland. — They however were seasons of some favour for which I was thankful RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
Abigail May (Abba Alcott) and Amos Bronson Alcott were wed in the chapel in which Abba had been baptized in her infancy, King’s Chapel in Boston,
by her brother the Unitarian minister Samuel Joseph May.
Earlier in this year Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Bronson had met: “She may perhaps aim at being ‘original’ and fail in her attempt by becoming offensively assertive. On the whole there is, we think, too much of the man and too little of the woman in her familiarity and freedom, her affected indifference of manner. Yet, after all, she is interesting.” The Peabody sisters of Salem happened by chance to be in the vicinity and stuck around for the wedding of Abba and Bronson by request in order to swell the little group into something a bit more impressive. Everything went swimmingly and almost immediately Abba would become pregnant:
My husband, hallowed be the name, is all I expected, this is saying a good deal.
Soon the newlyweds received an anonymous bequest of $2,000.00, it is suspected from Abba’s father. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
October 15, Friday: Helen Fiske was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She and another faculty child, Emily Dickinson, would play together and would attend one year of grammar school together at the Amherst Academy.
A convict ship, the Lady Harewood, set sail from England for New South Wales, Australia. Of the 216 convicts undergoing transportation, 62 had received life sentences and the average sentence was 8 years.
When no white Boston church would allow use of their space for such questionable activities as developing among white Americans an opposition to the peculiar institution of human enslavement, it was arranged for William Lloyd Garrison to deliver his lecture at Julien Hall, the site usually used by such marginal folks as the
Freethinkers’ Society and Abner Kneeland’s Universalist Society. The Reverend Lyman Beecher attended and would term Garrison’s ideas not only misguided but dangerously fanatical (Beecher had been a hero of Garrison’s, but this would put an end to that). Also present at the speech in that packed chamber, but approving of it, were the Reverend Samuel Eliot Sewall and his cousin, the Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr., and Sam’s new brother-in-law Bronson Alcott. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
The Reverend May had come from his home in Connecticut to visit with family and friends and had been attracted by a newspaper advertisement to this series of lectures on “the awful sinfulness of slaveholding” in which the “duplicity of the American Colonization Society” would be exposed and “immediate, unconditional emancipation” would be proclaimed to be “the right of every slave and the duty of every master.” May was particularly affected by the fact that with Boston’s church doors being closed, such lectures were possible only due to the generosity of such as Abner Kneeland –this municipality’s reigning atheist– at the Freethinkers’ Society. Present were Lyman Beecher (disapproving), and Unitarian ministers Samuel HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
Sewall and Samuel J. May (highly approving). They noticed the presence of the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett. Deacon Moses Grant was in attendance, and John Tappan. The burden of Garrison’s talk was that to speak of “a republican or Christian slaveholder” was as self-contradictory as to speak of “a religious atheist, a sober drunkard, or an honest thief.” Trying to remain a Christian and a true American citizen while holding other Americans in slavery was about as nonsensical as squandering one’s life in an attempt to square the circle or devise a perpetual-motion machine. After the lecture Sam suggested:
We ought to know him. We ought to help him. Come, let us go and give him our hands.
The Reverends Sewall and May took Garrison to Alcott’s rooms and they all talked to this misguided and dangerous fanatic ’till midnight! The Reverends Sewall and May promised not only moral but also financial support, and Garrison, at that point but 25 years old, would eventually become Sam’s best friend.
December 14, Tuesday: With Abba Alcott six months pregnant, the Alcott family departed toward Germantown, Pennsylvania (where Bronson had been hired to teach school).
Hector Berlioz’s petition of October 28th that he might be allowed to spend his “Prix de Rome” year in Paris was denied by the Minister of the Interior (“Uh, is there maybe a word in ‘Prix de Rome’ that you need to have translated for you?”).
The Best Friend of Charleston, fitted with stronger wheels, was tried out again, this time pulling two coaches made with a double bench running along the middle. Forty factory laborers were commanded to take the seats aboard the coaches for this new experiment. At one point the “engineer” got this “train” up to 20 mph. Here is the ceremonial event, retrospectively illustrated by Theodore West of Darlington in 1885, in which man’s “Best Friend” woke up all creation with a little help from soldiers, a flag, and a field-piece — by tugging along its first passenger cars safely for all of 13 miles: HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1831
To support the Alcott family in Germantown near Philadelphia, Bronson Alcott taught school.6
For five years Dr. William Alcott and William Channing Woodbridge would prepare school geographies and maps, and edit American Annals of Education and a weekly for young people, Juvenile Rambles.
March 16, Wednesday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 16th of 3rd M 1831 / Silent but pretty good meeting at the Institution — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
Victor Hugo’s NÔTRE-DAME DE PARIS (THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME) appeared in print. One of its chapters had been misplaced and left out of this initial printing.
1st production of Concord playwright John Augustus Stone’s play TANCRED, KING OF SICILY; OR,THE ARCHIVES OF PALERMO,7 at the Park Theater in New-York, with the author in the cast.
After 36 hours of labor, Anna Bronson Alcott was born to Abba Alcott. For days after the birth, the husband and father Bronson Alcott never left the room. He was hunched over the table writing HISTORY OF AN INFANT:OBSERVATIONS ON THE PHENOMENA OF LIFE AS DEVELOPED IN THE PROGRESSIVE HISTORY OF AN INFANT DURING THE FIRST YEAR OF ITS EXISTENCE (although this, and Bronson’s observations of his other children, would amount to some 2,500 pages). Although it is arguably the first work of child psychology done in the United States of America, the manuscript has of course never been published. Bronson carefully recorded such things as the onset of the vowel sounds, and noted at what point the consonants f, g, k, j, and l could be distinguished. (Does this remind you of the “melting bank” section, in WALDEN? –It should.) To keep the family going, the Alcotts asked Abba’s father for a loan of an additional $300.00. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
6. Thoreau’s bearded Harvard classmate John Weiss, whose grandfather was a German Jew but who became a Unitarian minister, was from Germantown. Had he been taught by Alcott ? 7. Note that this is a completely different play than 1827’s TANCRED; OR, THE SIEGE OF ANTIOCH, which never was performed. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1832
November 29, Thursday: Adolf von Henselt made his official public debut in München, to great success.
Francisco Cea Bermudez replaced Jose Cafranga Costilla as First Secretary of State of Spain.
The 2d Alcott daughter, Louisa May Alcott, was born to Abba Alcott in the Germantown suburb of Philadelphia, on her father Bronson Alcott’s birthday.
NOTE: May = Maies = Mayes, probably of Portuguese Jewish origin. This infant inherited the dark eyes and hair, and swarthy vivacious Mediterranean look, of this branch of the family through her mother, who was also dark complected:
Anna is an Alcott. Louisa is a true blue May, or rather brown.
THE ALCOTT FAMILY
At some point during this month, the father wrote into his journal some remarks on family: From the great experience of domestic life which has been mine, I have derived much enjoyment, finding in the ties thus originated the necessary connexions with sympathetic existence from which my abstract habits incline me too strongly, perhaps, to escape. A family, while it turns the mind toward the tangible and practical, supplies at the same time fresh stimulus for the social and spiritual principle; it brings around the soul those elements from whose presence and influence it is fitted to advance its onward progress, and opens within the sweetest affection and purest purposes. The human being isolates itself from the supplies of Providence for the happiness and renovation of its like, unless those ties which connect it with others are formed. The wants of the Soul become morbid, and all its truth and primal affections are dimmed and perverted. Nature becomes encrusted over with earth and surrounded by monotony and ennui. Few can be happy shut out from the Nursery of the Soul. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1833
April: The Alcott family moved from their Germantown suburb to central Philadelphia.
Lecture Season: The 5th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum is shown on a following screen.
During this winter Abba Alcott became pregnant. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
The Salem Lyceum — 5th Season Edward Everett Agriculture E. Evans Geography, Manners and Customs of various Countries (1st lecture) E. Evans Geography, Manners and Customs of various Countries (2nd lecture) E. Evans Geography, Manners and Customs of various Countries (3rd lecture) E. Evans Geography, Manners and Customs of various Countries (4th lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (1st Lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (2nd Lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (3rd Lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (4th Lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (5th Lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (6th Lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (7th Lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (8th Lecture) Dr. Barber Phrenology (9th Lecture) George H. Devereux of Salem Adaptation of Philosophy to the Wants and Condition of Man David Merritt of Salem History of the Jews J.V.C. Smith Mechanism of the Eye Charles G. Page of Salem Pneumatics Charles G. Page of Salem Acoustics Charles A. Andrew of Salem ????????? Stephen P. Webb of Salem History of Turkey Lemuel Willis of Salem Progress of Society HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
December: Abba Alcott, wife of Bronson Alcott and again-pregnant mommy of an infant author-to-be, helped Friend Lucretia Mott and Harriet Purvis, the wife of Robert Purvis, form the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia.
Eventually Abba would be a member of three such antislavery societies, not only this one in Philadelphia but also the ones that would be formed in Boston and in Concord! HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1834
February: Over the next seven months Bronson Alcott would read Plato,8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth in the Loganian Library in Philadelphia, and gradually be weaned out of his Lockean empiricism and 18th-Century rationalism into the Platonic idealism which he would maintain for the duration of his long life. The pre-existence of the soul and its inherently good godlikeness were at the core of all his subsequent thought. Plato’s doctrine of the paideutic drawing out of pre-existent, half-forgotten ideas became the basis of his educational efforts, and he began his manuscript OBSERVATIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL NURTURE OF MY CHILDREN. Unfortunately, over these months of study, he became practically estranged for a time from his wife and his little girls, and remained so until Abba Alcott had a miscarriage.
Before the evening was half over, Jo felt so completely désillusionnée, that she sat down in a corner to recover herself. Mr. Bhaer soon joined her, looking rather out of his element, and presently several of the philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles beyond Jo’s comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing ‘evolved from her inner consciousness’ was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.
THE ALCOTT FAMILY
May 20, Tuesday: Students smashed the furniture of the Greek recitation room at Harvard College, and later that day they stoned dormitory windows.
8. Eventually a group of English educators would come to consider Bronson to be “the Concord Plato.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Abba Alcott had a miscarriage and came close to dying. Bronson Alcott moved back in with his family.
Once did I wander a little way from the Kingdom of Heaven, but childhood’s sweet and holy voice hath recalled me, and now I am one with them in this same Kingdom, a child redeemed.
Lafayette died in Paris. At his order, trunkloads of soil he had brought back from Bunker Hill would be used to top off his grave.9 Whence Henry Thoreau’s sarcasm:
WALDEN: Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly PEOPLE OF empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the WALDEN ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.
LAFAYETTE SAM PATCH
In Bunker Hill Soil
9. Hence the WWI slogan which is sometimes translated as “Lafayette, you are icky.” :-) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Americans would learn of their French hero’s death on June 19th: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Where would Henry Thoreau get the idiom “maggot in his head” that he would use in WALDEN in regard to patriotism? He would get it from a bit of doggerel published in this year by Seba Smith about Pawtucket, Rhode Island’s famous “jumper,” Sam Patch: But still a maggot, in his head, Told Sam he was a ninny, To spend his life in twirling thread, Just like a spinning Jenney.
READ THE ENTIRE PIECE OF DOGGEREL
PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September: The Alcott family moved back to Boston, to 21 Bedford Street around the corner from the Tremont Temple where Bronson set up his School for Human Culture:
This spacious edifice stands opposite the Tremont House, Tremont Street. Of a rich and warm brown tint, produced by a coating of mastic, it presents a peculiarly substantial and elegant frontage. It is seventy-five feet in height, and, with the exception of ten feet by sixty-eight which is left open on the north side for light, the building covers an area of thirteen thousand feet. Passing through the great central doorway, we find ourselves in the spacious entrance hall. On the first floor we observe on our right and left hand two ticket offices, and a broad flight of stairs also on either hand, each of which at their summit terminates in a landing, from whence to right and left diverge two flights of similar staircases, one landing you in the centre of the main hall, and the other to the rear part and the gallery. The MAIN HALL is a magnificent apartment. The utter absence of gilding and coloring on its walls renders it far more imposing and grand in appearance than if it had been elaborately ornamented with auriferous and chromatic splendors. It is one hundred and twenty- four feet long, seventy-two feet wide, and fifty feet high. Around the sides of it runs a gallery supported on trusses, so that no pillars intervene between the spectators and the platform, to obstruct the view. The front of this gallery is balustraded, and by this means a very neat and uniform effect is secured. The side galleries project over the seats below about seven feet. They are fitted with rows of nicely-cushioned and comfortable seats, and are not so high as to render the ascent to them wearisome in the least degree. The front gallery, though it projects into the hall only ten feet, extends back far enough to give it more than three times that depth. Directly opposite this gallery is the platform, with its gracefully- panelled, semicircular front. This platform, covered with a neat oil cloth, communicates with the side galleries by a few steps, for-the convenience of large choirs. There are also several avenues of communication from the platform to the apartments, dressing rooms, &c., behind, which are exceedingly convenient, and are far superior to the places of exit and entrance from and to any other place of the kind that we have ever seen. From the front of the platform the floor of the hall gradually rises so as to afford every person in the hall a full and unobstructed view of the speakers or vocalists, as the case may be. The seats in the galleries rise in like manner. The seats on the hall floor are admirably arranged in a semicircular form from the front of the platform, so that every face is directed towards the speaker or singer. They are each one numbered, have iron ends, are capped with mahogany, and are completely cushioned with a drab-colored material. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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material. Each slip is capable of containing ten or twelve persons, with an aisle at each extremity, and open from end to end. The side walls of the hall are very beautifully ornamented in panels, arched and decorated with circular ornaments, which would be difficult properly to describe without the aid of accompanying drawings; but as views of the interior of the Temple will soon be common enough, the omission here will be of little consequence. As was intimated, there is no fancy coloring; it is a decorated and relieved surface of dead white, and the effect, lighted as it is from above by large panes of rough plate glass, is beautifully chaste. The only color observable in the hall is the purple screen behind the diamond open work at the back of the platform, and which forms a screen in front of the organ. The ceiling is very finely designed in squares, at all intersections of which are twenty-eight gas burners, with strong reflectors, and a chandelier over the orchestra, shedding a mellow but ample light over the hall. By this arrangement the air heated by innumerable jets of gas is got rid of, and the lights themselves act as most, efficient ventilators. The eyes are likewise protected from glare; and should an escape of gas take place, from its levity it passes up through shafts to the outside, and does not contaminate the atmosphere below. Under the galleries are common burners. There are for day illumination twelve immense plates of glass, ten feet long, four feet wide, placed in the ceiling, in the spring of the arch, and open directly to the outer light, and by sixteen smaller ones under the galleries. The whole of the flooring of the hall, in the galleries, the body of it, and of the platform, consists of two layers of boards, with the interstices between them filled by a thick bed of mortar. The advantages of this in an acoustical point of view must be obvious to all. Another advantage is, that the applause made by the audience in this great hall does not disturb the people who may at the same time be holding a meeting in the other hall below –— a very important consideration. There are eight flights of stairs leading from the floors of the main hall, and four from the galleries, the aggregate width of which is over fifty feet. The Boston Young Men’s Christian Association occupy several beautiful rooms up one flight of stairs, which are admirably adapted for their present uses and occupants, and are rented by the Association for twelve hundred dollars per annum, though it is estimated that they are worth at least fifteen hundred dollars; but the Temple is owned by a church who were very desirous that a religious association should occupy them. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The great organ, built by the Messrs. Hook, is one of the finest instruments ever constructed in this country. Its bellows is worked by steam. The Tremont Temple, besides the great hall, contains a lesser one, called THE MEIONAON, the main entrance to which is through the northerly passage way, opposite the doors of the Tremont House; this avenue is about seven feet wide. The southerly passage way serves as an outlet from this lesser temple. Perhaps the reader, who may not have been initiated into the mysteries of Greek literature, may thank us a definition of this strange-looking word, “Meionaon.” It is so called from two Greek words —— meion, signifying less, smaller, and naon, temple —— Lesser Temple. It is pronounced Mi-o-na-on. This lesser temple is situated back from the street, and directly under the great hall. It is seventy-two feet long by fifty-two feet wide, and about twenty-five and a half feet high. Not so elaborately adorned as its neighbor overhead, this hall is remarkably chastely and beautifully fitted up, and within its walls the religious society of Tremont Street Baptist Church worship. Its walls are relieved by pilasters supporting arches. The seats are similarly arranged to those in the hall above and are equally comfortable and commodious in all respects. At one end is a platform, on which, on Sabbath days, stands a beautiful little pulpit, of dark walnut, and cushioned with crimson velvet. At the other extremity of the hall is a gallery for a choir; back of it stands a neat little organ. The place is beautifully adapted for sound, and competent judges say from their own experience that it is a remarkably easy place to speak in. From the hall to the outer door the way is through a broad passage way covered with Manilla matting let into the floor, so that little dirt can be brought in from the street; and as the doors swing on noiseless hinges, no interruption from scuffling of feet or slammings can ever occur. THE CUPOLA.—In making our way thither we travel over the ceiling of the great hall, dropping our heads as we pass beneath roof and rafter, to save our hat and skull, and beholding beneath our feet a great network of gas- piping connected with the burners of the hall under us. In long rows are square ventilators, which discharge their streams of vitiated air on the outside. The cupola forms a spacious observatory, glazed all round, and from every window is obtained a charming view, the whole forming one of the most superb panoramas that we ever witnessed. From this elevated spot may be seen the adjacent villages and towns, the harbor and its islands, the city institutions, churches, houses, and shipping. In short, the whole city and vicinity lies at our feet. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1835
June 24, Wednesday: Cesar Franck began lessons in composition with Anton Reicha in Paris.
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott, called “Lizzie” and “Betty” and “Beth,” and destined to have her middle name officially changed from “Peabody” to “Sewall,” was born to Abba Alcott. This was Abba’s third child. She was naming her infant after her friend Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody — but this was a friendship not destined to endure. A most unusual thing for those times: the father Bronson Alcott insisted on being present for the birth.
Arthur Ricketson, first son of Friend Daniel Ricketson, was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1836
Fall: In the 2d year of Alcott’s Temple School, the schoolmaster began to pioneer in what was, actually, the first sex education ever offered in America. And he began to do this by investigating with the children, of all sensitive topics, the bodily origins of Jesus Christ within the womb of Mary. I mean, this guy Bronson Alcott, who had such a wonderful and fully sensual relationship with his wife Abba Alcott, who wrote gloriously in his journals about his erections and ejaculations, who had such a wonderful time with his little girls as they played with each other naked in the bathtub, whose school in Cheshire, Connecticut had failed when he was accused by the parents of fondling the children, “especially the females” — was the sort of angel who simply could not be restrained from rushing in where fools would dare to tread. If you get my drift, he was a heresy looking for a place to happen. “Hey, All-Cocks, couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” Poor, sweet man. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
December 22, Thursday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 22 of 12 M / This morning in straping my Razor to Shave it accidentally slipped & took off the tip of my little finger, it bleed so much & was so painful that I did not go to Meeting. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Bronson Alcott self-published, through James Munroe and Company of Boston, the 1st volume of CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN ON THE GOSPEL (264 pages). This, and the 2nd volume (Boston MA: CONVERSATIONS, VOL. I
Russell, Shattuck and Company, February 1837, 198 pages), would cost the author $741.00 he did not have, CONVERSATIONS, VOL. II
and buy him an incredible amount of trouble. These conversations had been transcribed by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. However, the original title page, which in accordance with the convention of the time did not list the name of the author, was preceded by a page that read
CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN ON THE GOSPELS CONDUCTED AND EDITED BY A. BRONSON ALCOTT
rather than “transcribed by Elizabeth Peabody,” and evidently resulted from the desire of others who had been involved in the generation of this material that they not be implicated in the folly of its dissemination. Elizabeth Peabody and the new teacher at the school, Margaret Fuller, could see what was coming — the self-convicted supersalesman and self-convinced enthusiast could not Abba Alcott the faithful wife could not help but sympathize with her husband rather than with the helper who wanted no share of the repercussions: in the family record, she altered the name of her third child from Elizabeth Peabody Alcott to Elizabeth Sewall Alcott.
MR. ALCOTT. Do you think these conversations are of any use to you? CHARLES. Yes; they teach us a great deal. MR. ALCOTT. What do they teach you? GEORGE K. To know ourselves. ... MR. ALCOTT. Now, does your spirit differ in any sense from God’s spirit? Each may answer. CHARLES. (10-12 years old). God made our spirits. MR. ALCOTT. They differ from His then in being derived? GEORGE K. (7-10). They are not so good. WILLIAM B. (10-12). They have not so much power. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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AUGUSTINE (7-10). 1 don’t think our spirit does differ much. CHARLES. God is spirit, we are spirit and body. JOSIAH (5 years old). He differs from us, as a king’s body HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY differs from ours. A king’s body is arrayed with more goodness than ours. EDWARD B. (10-12) God’s spirit is a million times larger than ours, and comes out of him as the drops of the ocean. MR. ALCOTT. Jesus said he was the son - the child of God. Are we also God’s sons? WILLIAM B. Oh! before I was born - I think I was a part of God himself. MANY OTHERS. So do l. MR. ALCOTT Who thinks his own spirit is the child of God? (All held up hands). Now, is God your Father in the same sense that he is the Father of Jesus? (Most held up hands). MR. ALCOTT. Does Father and Son mean God and Jesus? CHARLES. No; it means God and any man. MR. ALCOTT. Do you think that were you to use all that is in your spirit, you might also be prophets? SEVERAL. If we had faith enough. WILLIAM B. If we had love enough. CHARLES. A prophet first has a little love, and that gives the impulse to more, and so on, until he becomes so full of love, he knows everything. MR. ALCOTT. Why did the angel say to Mary, “The Lord is with thee”? GEORGE K. I don’t know. The Lord is always with us. ARNOLD (?). The Lord is with us when we are good. AUGUSTINE. The Lord is with us when we are bad, or we could not live. ELLEN (10-12). [mentions Judgment Day] MR. ALCOTT. What do you mean by Judgment Day? ELLEN. The last day, the day when the world is to be destroyed. CHARLES. The day of Judgment is not any more at the end of the world than now. It is the Judgment of conscience at every moment. MR. ALCOTT Where did Jesus get his knowledge? MARTHA (7-10) He went into his own soul. AUGUSTINE. Heaven is in our spirits - in God. It is in no particular place. It is not material. It is wherever people are good. CHARLES. Heaven is everywhere - Eternity. It stops where there is anything bad. It means peace and love. High and white are emblems of it. ANDREW (7-10). Heaven is like a cloud, and God and Jesus and the angels sit on it. MR. ALCOTT Where is it? ANDREW Everywhere. Every person that is good, God looks at and takes care of. FREDERIC (10-12). Wherever there is good. SAMUEL R. (10-12) But in no place. FRANKLIN (10-12). Heaven is the spirit’s truth and goodness. It is in everybody; but mostly in the good. MR. ALCOTT. Can you say to yourself, I can remove this mountain? [Now comes an astonishing rhapsody by the five-year-old Josiah Quincy.] JOSIAH (bursts out). Yes, Mr. Alcott! I do not mean that with my body can lift up a mountain - with my hand; but I can feel; and I know that my conscience is greater than the mountain, for it can feel and do; and the mountain cannot. There is the HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT mountain, there! It was made, and that is all. But my conscience can grow. It is the same kind of spirit as made the mountain be, in the first place. I do not know what it may be and do. The body is a mountain, and the spirit says, be moved, it is moved into another place. Mr. Alcott, we think too much about clay. We should think of spirit. I think we should love spirit, not clay. I should think a mother now would love her baby’s spirit; and suppose it should die, that is only the spirit bursting away out of the body. It is alive; it is perfectly happy; I really do not know why people mourn when their friends die. I should think it would be a matter of rejoicing. For instance, now, if we should go into the street and find a box, an old dusty box, and should put into it some very fine pearls, and bye and bye the box should grow old and break, why, we should not even think about the box; but if the pearls were safe, we should think of them and nothing else. So it is with the soul and body. I cannot see why people mourn for bodies. MR. ALCOTT. Yes, Josiah; that is all true, and we are glad to hear it. Shall someone else now speak beside you? [But Josiah’s eloquence is like a mighty river; its momentum is such that he can barely restrain himself, and he is quiet only on condition.] JOSIAH. Oh, Mr. Alcott! then I will stay in at recess and talk. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1837
March 31, Friday: John Constable died.
David Henry Thoreau’s essay on his Harvard College assignment “Examine this theory [that various dreadful natural phenomena derive their dread sublimity from Death].” In the course of this essay he made reference not only to the aesthetic theory found in Edmund Burke’s A PHILOſOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL. ... WITH ſEVERAL OTHER ADDITIONS 7TH EDITION, OF 1773
(London, Printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall-mall. 1770, 6th edition) but also to the Rev. Archibald Alison’s ESSAYS ON THE NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. REV. ARCHIBALD ALISON
Here, then, is what Thoreau turned in for satisfaction of this class assignment: “The thunder’s roar, the Lightning’s flash, the billows’ roar, the earthquake’s shock, all derive their dread sublimity from Death.”
“The Inheritance,” chapter 56.
Examine this theory.
“Whatever,” says Burke, “is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.” — “Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the Sublime.” Hence Obscurity, Solitude, Power, and the like, in so far as they are fitted to excite terror, are sources of the sublime. This is a theory far more satisfactory than that which we are about to examine. He does not make death the source of terror, but rather pain, using the word in its broadest sense. Death itself is sublime. It has all the attributes of sublimity — Mystery, Power, Silence — a sublimity which no one can resist; which may be heightened, but cannot be equalled, by the thunder’s roar, or the cannon’s peal. But yet, though incomparably more awful, this is the same sublimity that we ascribe to the tumult of the troubled ocean, the same in kind, though different in degree, depending for its effect upon the same principles of our nature, though affecting us more powerfully and universally. To attribute the two to different principles, is not only unphilosophical, but manifestly unnecessary. We shrink with horror from attributing emotions so exalted and unearthly, and withal so flattering to our nature, to an abject fear of death. We would fain believe that the immortals, who know no fear, nor ever taste of death, can sympathize with us poor worldlings in our reverence for the sublime, — that they listen to the thunder’s roar, and behold the lightning’s flash, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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with emotions similar to our own. We do believe it; we have so represented it. The sublimity of the conflict on the plains of Heaven, between the rebel angels and the Almighty’s loyal bands, as described by Milton, was not lost upon the spirits engaged in it. Raphaël, who recounts the particulars of the fight to our forefather Adam, describes the Messiah as riding sublime “on the wings of cherub,”
“On the crystalline sky, in sapphire thron’d, Illustrious far and wide;” —
Nor could he have been entirely unconscious of the emotion in question, when he compared the combat between Satan and Michael, to the meeting of two planets. “As if”, to use his own expression,
“Among the constellations war were sprung, “Two planets, rushing from aspect malign “Of fiercest opposition, in mid sky “Should combat, and their jarring spheres confound.”
—Who can contemplate the hour of his birth, or reflect on the obscurity and darkness from which he then emerged into a still more mysterious existence, without being powerfully impressed with the idea of sublimity? Shall we derive this sublimity from death? Nay, further, can anything be conceived more sublime than that second birth, the resurrection? It is a subject which we approach with a kind of reverential awe. It has inspired the sublimest efforts of the poet and the painter. The trump which shall awake the dead is the creation of poetry; but to follow out the idea, will its sound excite in us no emotion, or will the blessed, whom it shall summon to forsake the mouldering relics of mortality, and wing their way to brighter and happier worlds, listen with terror, or indifference? Shall he who is acknowledged while on earth to have a soul for the sublime and beautiful in nature, hereafter, when be shall be all soul, lose this divine privilege? Shall we be indebted to the body for emotions which would adorn heaven? And yet there are some who will refer you to the casting off of this “mortal coil”, as the origin, and, I may add, the consummation of all this. We can hardly say that fear is a source of the sublime; it may be indispensable, it is true, that a certain degree of awe should enter into the admiration with which we listen to the billow’s roar, or the howling of the storm. We do not tremble with fright, but the calm which comes over the soul, is like that which precedes the earthquake. It is a pleasure of the highest kind, to behold a mighty river, rolling impetuously, and, as it were, blindly onward to the edge of the precipice, where, for successive ages, it plunges headlong to the bottom, roaring and foaming in its mad career, and shaking the solid earth by its fall, but it is not joy that we experience, it is pleasure, mingled with reverence, and tempered with humility. Burke has said that “terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.” Alison says as much, and Stewart advances a very different theory. The first would trace the emotion in question to the influence of pain, HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY and terror, which is but an apprehension of pain. I would make an inherent respect, or reverence, which certain objects are fitted to demand, that ruling principle; which reverence, as it is altogether distinct from, so shall it outlive, that terror to which he refers, and operate to exalt and distinguish us, when fear shall be no more. Whatever is grand, wonderful, or mysterious, may be a source of the sublime. Terror inevitably injures, and if excessive, may entirely destroy its object. To the coward, the cannon’s peal, the din and confusion of the fight, are not sublime, but rather terrible, the calm and self-collected alone, are conscious of their sublimity. Hence, indeed, are they inspired with courage to sustain the conflict. To fear is mortal, angels may reverence. The child manifests respect ere it had experienced terror. The Deity would be reverenced, not feared. Hence it is, that the emotion in question is so often attended by a consciousness of our own littleness; we are accustomed to admire what seemeth difficult or beyond our attainment. But to feel conscious of our own weakness is not positively unpleasant, unless we compare ourselves with what is incapable of commanding our respect or reverence and consequently is not a source of the sublime. Grandeur, of some kind or other, must ever enter into our idea of the sublime. Niagara would still retain her sublimity, though her fall should be reduced many feet, but the puny mountain stream must make up in depth of fall, for what it lacks in volume. What is more grand than mystery? The darker it is, the grander it grows. We habitually call it great. Burke has well remarked that divisibility of matter is sublime, its very infinity makes it so. Infinity is the essence of sublimity. Whatever demands our admiration or respect is, in a degree, sublime. It is true, nothing could originally demand our respect, which was not, at the same time, capable, in a greater or less degree, of exciting our fear, but this does not prove fear to be the source of that respect. Nothing, on the other hand, of which we stand in awe, is an object of our contempt; yet the source of our contempt is not, surely, indifference, or a feeling of security. It will be enough, merely to advert to the immense influence which the association of ideas exerts. Burke’s theory would extend those emotions which the sublime excites, to the brute creation. They suffer pain — they experience terror — they possess the faculty of memory, and philosophers have ascribed to them imagination and judgment. Why may not, then, the brute hearken with rapture to the thunder’s peal, or, in the deep of the forest, enjoy the grandeur of the storm? Man’s pride will not admit it. It savors of Immortality. But the brute knows not that peculiar reverence for what is grand, whether in nature, or in art, or in thought, or in action, which is the exclusive birthright of the lord of creation. There is an infinity in the mystery, the power, and grandeur, which concur in the sublime, the abstract nature of which is barely recognized, though not comprehended, by the human mind itself. Philosophers, it is true, have ascribed to brutes “devotion, or respect for superiors”, but, so to speak, this is a respect grounded on experience, it is practical or habitual, not the fruit of abstract reflection, nor does it amount to the recognition of any moral superiority. But to some it may appear, that this reverence for the grand, HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT if I may so style it, is not an original principle of our nature, — that it originates in fear. I answer, if this is not, neither is fear. Nay more, the former is a principle more universal in its operation, more exalting and ennobling in its influence, and is, besides, so superior to, and at variance with fear, that we cannot for a moment derive it from the latter. The philosopher sees cause for wonder and astonishment in everything, in himself, and in all around him, he has only to reflect, that he may admire. Terror avoids reflection, though reflection alone can restore to calmness and equanimity. How regard, respect, reverence, can grow out of fear, is, I must confess, incomprehensible. We reverence greatness, moral and intellectual, the giant intellect is no sooner recognized, than it demands our homage. Moral greatness calls for the admiration of the depraved even. The emotion excited by the sublime is the most unearthly and godlike we mortals experience. It depends for the peculiar strength with which it takes hold on and occupies the mind, upon a principle which lies at the foundation of that worship which we pay to the Creator himself. And is fear the foundation of that worship? is fear the ruling principle of our religion? Is it not, rather, the mother of superstition? Yes, that principle which prompts to pay an involuntary homage to the infinite, the incomprehensible, the sublime, forms the very basis of our religion. It is a principle implanted in us by our Maker, a part of our very selves, we cannot eradicate it, we cannot resist it; fear may be overcome, death may be despised, but the infinite, the sublime, seize upon the soul and disarm it. We may overlook them, or, rather, fall short of them, we may pass them by, but so sure as we meet them face to face, we yield.
This was the year in which Waldo Emerson would deliver his Phi Beta Kappa Society oration “The American Scholar” to the seniors at Harvard College (one of whom was in the process of changing his name from David Henry Thoreau to Henry David Thoreau, and was beginning a journal of sorts). Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1837 (æt. 20)
Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1838 (æt. 20-21)
Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1839 (æt. 21-22)
Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1840 (æt. 22-23)
Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1841 (æt. 23-24)
Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1842 (æt. 24-25)
Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1846 (æt. 27-29)
Can you parse this? According to Anita Haya Patterson’s FROM EMERSON TO KING: DEMOCRACY, RACE, AND THE POLITICS OF PROTEST (NY: Oxford UP, 1997, page 120), during this year in which the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society was constituting itself, the husband of Mrs. Lidian Emerson, one of the women10 involved in that formation, in the writing of a lecture on “SOCIETY”, would alter his concept of the obligations that obtain among friends. He would come to place primary reliance upon a concept “kindness” that savored of proto-racialism: [H]e argues that political obligations associated with kindness can bind together not simply an intimate circle of friends, but HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY also casual acquaintances and neighborhoods, whole towns, countries, and even continents. The obligations that arise out of such kindness, in this account, are in every case involuntarily assumed.
April (?): Two months after the publication of Bronson Alcott’s CONVERSATIONS, Harriet Martineau’s book SOCIETY IN AMERICA appeared in America: “There is fear of vulgarity, fear of responsibility; and above all, fear of singularity.”
“There is a school in Boston (a large one, when I left the city,) conducted on this principle [the principle of Platonic idealism, that the spirit precedes the body rather than vice versa, that in general it is ideals or ideas that create their own manifestations in the realm of sense rather than vice versa]. The master presupposes his little pupils possessed of all truth in philosophy and morals, and that his business is to bring it out into expression, to help the outward life to conform to the inner light; and especially to learn of these enlightened babes, with all humility. Large exposures might be made of the mischief this gentleman is doing to his pupils by relaxing their bodies, pampering their imaginations, over-stimulating the consciences of some, and hardening those of others; and by his extraordinary management, offering them inducements to falsehood and
10. Also involved in this new society were Abba Alcott and seven women residing at the Thoreau boardinghouse:
Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau
Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau
Helen Louisa Thoreau
Aunt Maria Thoreau
Aunt Jane Thoreau
Miss Prudence Ward
Miss Prudence’s mother. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT hypocrisy.”
Many years later Abba Alcott would comment succinctly on the above paragraph: “Thus Harriet Martineau took the bread from the mouths of my family.” THE ALCOTT FAMILY Harriet Martineau, reporting to her British readers about the state of America, complained of the moral cowardice of the conservative Unitarian leadership, with a handful of exceptions. The schism that divided Unitarians into a conservative institution versus a more radical opposition in the 1820s was epitomized in Emerson’s resignation from the ministry in 1832 and his famous dissatisfaction with the doctrine’s “corpse- cold” institutionalization. The Reverend Charles Follen, a German professor and political radical who arrived in Boston in 1825 and managed to impress both Boston’s conservative-Unitarian establishment and its breakaway intellectuals with his firsthand familiarity with the new ideas and practices in his native land, was also one of Martineau’s exceptions, as he was active in both in Unitarianism and in abolitionism. According to Edmund Spevack’s CHARLES FOLLEN’S SEARCH FOR NATIONALITY AND FREEDOM (Harvard UP, 1997, pages 138ff, 284-85 notes 63 and 65), he became America’s first Germanist, and apparently sat in on some early sessions of Hedge’s transcendental “club.” Here is the matter as expressed by Martineau in her Part IV, Chapter 3, “Administration of Religion.” ...On one side is the oppressor, struggling to keep his power for the sake of his gold; and with him the mercenary, the faithlessly timid, the ambitious, and the weak. On the other side are the friends of the slave; and with them those who, without possibility of recompense, are sacrificing their reputations, their fortunes, their quiet, and risking their lives, for the principle of freedom. What are the Unitarian clergy doing amidst this war which admits of neither peace nor truce, but which must end the subjugation of the principle of freedom, or of oppression? HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY I believe Mr. [Samuel] May had the honour of being the first Unitarian pastor who sided with the right. Whether he has sacrificed to his intrepidity one christian grace; whether he has lost one charm of his piety, gentleness, and charity, amidst the trials of insult which he has had to undergo, I dare appeal to his worst enemy. Instead of this, his devotion to a most difficult duty has called forth in him a force of character, a strength of reason, of which his best friends were before unaware. It filled me with awe for the weakness of men, in their noblest offices, to hear the insolent compassion with which some of his priestly brethren spoke of a man whom they have not light and courage enough to follow through the thickets and deserts of duty, and upon whom they therefore bestow their scornful pity from out of their shady bowers of complacency. —Dr. Follen came next: and there is nothing in his power that he has not done and sacrificed in identifying himself with the cause of emancipation. I heard him, in a perilous time, pray in church for the “miserable, degraded, insulted slave; in chains of iron, and chains of gold.” This is not the place in which to exhibit what his sacrifices have really been. —Dr. Channing’s later services are well known. I know of two more of the Unitarian clergy who have made an open and dangerous avowal of the right: and of one or two who have in private resisted wrong in the cause. But this is all. As a body they must, though disapproving slavery, be ranked as the enemies of the abolitionists. Some have pleaded to me that it is a distasteful subject. Some think it sufficient that they can see faults in individual abolitionists. Some say that their pulpits are the property of their people, who are not therefore to have their minds disturbed by what they hear thence. Some say that the question is no business of theirs. Some urge that they should be turned out of their pulpits before the next Sunday, if they touched upon Human Rights. Some think the subject not spiritual enough. The greater number excuse themselves on the ground of a doctrine which, I cannot but think, has grown out of the circumstances; that the duty of the clergy is to decide on how much truth the people can bear, and to administer it accordingly. —So, while society is going through the greatest of moral revolutions, casting out its most vicious anomaly, and bringing its Christianity into its politics and its social conduct, the clergy, even the Unitarian clergy, are some pitying and some ridiculing the apostles of the revolution; preaching spiritualism, learning, speculation; advocating third and fourth-rate objects of human exertion and amelioration, and leaving it to the laity to carry out the first and pressing moral reform of the age. They are blind to their noble mission of enlightening and guiding the moral sentiment of society in its greatest crisis. They not only decline aiding the cause in weekdays by deed or pen, or spoken words; but they agree in private to avoid the subject of Human Rights in the pulpit till the crisis be past. No one asks them to harrow the feelings of their hearers by sermons on slavery: but they avoid offering those christian principles of faith and liberty with which slavery cannot co-exist. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1838
Fall: The Alcotts moved to Number 6, Beach Street in Boston and gave up renting the basement of the Masonic Temple for their schoolroom. The few remaining pupils, which of course included the Alcott girls, would now be educated in their home. There were still nearly 20 students, but they were paying only $6.00 to $12.00 per quarter. The family income had dropped to less than $500.00 per year. Abba Alcott was pregnant for the seventh time, with the baby due in the summertime. Bronson Alcott began to supplement his income by giving evening “conversations,” often for less than $1.00 per evening. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Winter: Two months after the Alcott family had been forced to move to Boston’s South End, Abba Alcott, pregnant for the 6th time, had a 2d miscarriage. She was so near death that her doctor resided at the Alcott home for two weeks. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1839
April 4: Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live — and begin to be. A boat-man stretched on the deck of his craft, and dallying with the noon, would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me, as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze.
April 6, Saturday: Abba Alcott gave birth to a “fine boy, full grown, perfectly formed” who lived only a few minutes. The anniversary of April 6th would become, for the next two decades, a sad gray-tinged day with a “draught of bitterness to taste, yes to drink from death’s bitterest beaker.... Ah Me! My Boy!” Bronson Alcott always wanted a boy, and Abba always wanted to give him one, but it would never be. Senile old Joseph May asked to accompany Bronson to the May family vault in the Old Granary burying ground on that Sunday, because, as Bronson was laying down the body of the baby, Joseph desired to look at his wife’s remains. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.: HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1840
April 1, Wednesday: The Liberty Party met in Albany to nominate James Gillespie Birney of New York and Thomas Earle of Pennsylvania for president and vice-president. Rochester’s Myron Holley was one of the party’s organizers.
With the encouragement of Waldo Emerson and with him at least initially paying the rent for them, the Alcotts moved into an unoccupied tenant cottage on the estate of Edmund Hosmer in Concord, in order to have the company of the Emersons and to try if they could not “dig Bread from the bosom of the earth” while Bronson Alcott went around offering his dollar evening conversations.
Dove Cottage was brown, was a warren of tiny rooms, one story in front and two in the rear, surrounded by sheds and barns (since this was before 1853, it would be #66 at G9 on the Gleason map, at the end of the green HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY arrow below):
3 It came with 1 /4 acres of land, enough for a large garden to feed a 9-year-old girl, Anna Alcott, a 7-year-old girl, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, and an almost 5-year-old girl, Louisa May Alcott, and give them plenty of things to do even while their father was being too good for this world. The cottage would get even tighter when, in 1842, the two English mystics, Henry Gardiner Wright and Charles Lane, would move in, with Charles Lane’s son. This April 1st, Abba Alcott was five months pregnant and it was still winter:
The trees, encrusted with ice wore a most fantastic and fairy-like appearance; nothing has escaped their notice and admiration. the river, everything is an occasion of joy.
THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Abby May Alcott would be born there on July 26th. For the first time the girls would be attending a school not taught by their own father, for Bronson was working long days putting in a garden and otherwise fixing up this old tenant structure. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY Fall: The Alcott garden and orchard had yielded ample food for the winter, but firewood would have to be bought or they would freeze — and there was no money. Abba Alcott told her hired help that, regardless of how little they were willing to work for, she could give them no wage, and began to take in the sewing of her friends in Boston for herself and her two older daughters to do. Waldo Emerson proposed that he should dismiss all his servants except one full-time servant and one part-time servant, and move the Alcotts into the Emerson home to replace these services. “Liberty, Equality, & a common table.” Bronson Alcott was eager, but Abba was frightened. GOD IN CONCORD by Jane Langton © 1992 Penguin Books USA Inc. 29 We are children of light—our destiny is dark. Journal, October 3, 1840 Viking Penguin
Homer and Mary Kelly watched the television encounter between Hope Fry and Ananda Singh. Mary was shocked to ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1841
The “Practical Christians” purchased a farm at Mendon in the western part of Milford near Worcester and christened it “Hopedale.” The conservative Restorationists abandoned both the Practical Christians and the Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists and fell back upon their Unitarian connections established over the years. The pro-reform fragment of the Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists became the nucleus of the Hopedale Community. The Reverend Adin Ballou was chosen president of the organization, called “Fraternal Communion No. 1” (he would fill this position into 1852). Two couples were the core leadership of the community, the Reverend Ballou and Lucy Ballou and their friends Ebenezer Draper and Anna Draper, who made the largest economic contribution to the joint-stock company. Other important members during the community’s early period were drawn from the Restorationist ministry: George W. Stacy, Daniel S. Whitney, William H. Fish, and David R. Lamson. Due to the soft economy of the period, more people applied for admission to a share of the experiment’s benefits than could readily be accepted, and then there arose during the initial year a disagreement in regard adopting a form of socialism. The poorer members, including David Lamson, sought of course to have all property held in common in according with socialism’s perennial inspiring slogan “What’s yours is ours.” However, it was the consideration of the Reverend Ballou that to defuse tensions within the overcrowded community they needed to be aiming not toward an “absorption of the individual in the community,” but rather “more opportunity for personal seclusion, activity, and development.” The group’s constitution would be amended to allow more privacy and increased economic reward for effort and contribution, and the more intransigent of the communists, including David Lamson, would leave the Hopedale community.
Charles May, a brother of the Reverend Samuel Joseph May and of Abba Alcott, after serving in the Navy as a chaplain and teaching school in Alabama had become so mentally unstable as to be unable to hold a job. He would be supported by his brother (in what was characterized as a “wren-box” of a house) in this idealistic community.
1 00 February: Abba Alcott’s father died, and the Alcott family inherited an exact /7th of his estate, $2,100. plus a silver teapot. It seems that the Alcotts had been expecting Abba’s father to be less exact in his will, in light of their need which was greater than the need of his other heirs. No matter, for all this money was immediately claimed by the creditors of the School of Human Culture to whom Bronson Alcott still owed some $6,000.00, and went into an escrow account rather than being disbursed to them.
Family straits. This is the winter of my discontent.
The silver teapot was quickly disposed of, by sending it to Boston to be sold. The situation had gotten so bad that Abba was refusing to get into bed with Bronson. At one point, under this pressure, Bronson even made the announcement that he intended to chop wood for his neighbors. But, as Waldo Emerson noted,11
He had no vocation to labor. It depressed his spirits even to tears.
11. Reminds me somewhat of my own father Benjamin Bearl Smith, another supersalesman type who lived only to impress people and lived exclusively by impressing people. However, in the case of my father, he could not only not work, he also could not drive his polished new Buick past a person who was doing work –in particular any farmer in any field– and let slide the opportunity to sneer, make a face, curl his lip, and comment about the fools of the world who lived only to be taken advantage of by smart persons like himself. And I cannot suspect the Bronson Alcott of this record, who likewise lived only to impress people, and only by impressing people, of harboring any such attitude of contempt toward the people who found him impressing and were willing to attempt to help him and his family. I cannot suspect that he was as hard a case as my father. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
October 7, Thursday: Nathaniel Hawthorne to his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS: October 7.—Since Saturday last, (it being now Thursday,) I have been in Boston and Salem, and there has been a violent storm and rain during the whole time. This morning shone as bright as if it meant to make up for all the dismalness of the past days. Our brook, which in the summer was no longer a running stream, but stood in pools along its pebbly course, is now full from one grassy verge to the other, and hurries along with a murmuring rush. It will continue to swell, I suppose, and in the winter and spring it will flood all the broad meadows through which it flows. I have taken a long walk this forenoon along the Needham road, and across the bridge, thence pursuing a cross- road through the woods, parallel with the river, which I crossed again at Dedham. Most of the road lay through a growth of young oaks principally. They still retain their verdure, though, looking closely in among them, one perceives the broken sunshine falling on a few sere or bright-hued tufts of shrubbery. In low, marshy spots, on the verge of the meadows or along the river-side, there is a much more marked autumnal change. Whole ranges of bushes are there painted with many variegated hues, not of the brightest tint, but of a sober cheerfulness. I suppose this is owing more to the late rains than to the frost; for a heavy rain changes the foliage somewhat at this season. The first marked frost was seen last Saturday morning. Soon after sunrise it lay, white as snow, over all the grass, and on the tops of the fences, and in the yard, on the heap of firewood. On Sunday, I think, there was a fall of snow, which, however, did not lie on the ground a moment. There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October. The sunshine is peculiarly genial; and in sheltered places, as on the side of a bank, or of a barn or house, one becomes acquainted and friendly with the sunshine. It seems to be of a kindly and homely nature. And the green grass, strewn with a few withered leaves, looks the more green and beautiful for them. In summer or spring Nature is farther from one's sympathies.
October 8, Friday: Nathaniel Hawthorne to his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS: October 8.—Another gloomy day, lowering with portents of rain close at hand. I have walked up into the pastures this morning, and looked about me a little. The woods present a very diversified appearance just now, with perhaps more varieties of tint than they are destined to wear at a somewhat later period. There are some strong yellow hues, and some deep red; there are innumerable shades of green, some few having the depth of summer; others, partially changed towards yellow, look freshly verdant with the delicate tinge of early summer or of May. Then there is the solemn and dark green of the pines. The effect is, that every tree in the wood and every bush among the shrubbery has a separate existence, since, confusedly intermingled, each wears its peculiar color, instead of being lost in the universal emerald of summer. And yet there is a oneness of effect likewise, when we choose to look at a whole sweep of woodland instead of analyzing its component trees. Scattered over the pasture, which the late rains have kept tolerably green, there are spots or islands of dusky red,—a deep, substantial hue, very well fit to be close to the ground,—while the yellow, and light, fantastic shades of green soar upward to the sky. These red spots are the blueberry and whortleberry bushes. The sweet- fern is changed mostly to russet, but still retains its wild and delightful fragrance when pressed in the hand. Wild China-asters are scattered about, but beginning to wither. A little while ago, mushrooms or toadstools were very numerous along the wood-paths and by the roadsides, especially after rain. Some were of spotless white, some yellow, and some scarlet. They are always mysteries and objects of interest to me, springing as they do so suddenly from no root or seed, and growing one wonders why. I think, too, that some varieties are pretty objects, little fairy tables, centre-tables, standing on one leg. But their growth appears to be checked now, and they are of a brown tint and decayed. The farm business to-day is to dig potatoes. I worked a little at it. The process is to grasp all the stems of a hill and pull them up. A great many of the potatoes are thus pulled, clinging to the stems and to one another in curious shapes,—long red things, and little round ones, imbedded in the earth which clings to the roots. These being plucked off, the rest of the potatoes are dug out of the hill with a hoe, the tops being flung into a heap for the cow-yard. On my way home I paused to inspect the squash-field. Some of the squashes lay in heaps as they were gathered, presenting much variety of shape and hue,—as golden yellow, like great lumps of gold, dark green, striped and variegated; and some were round, and some lay curling their long necks, nestling, as it were, and seeming as if they had life. In my walk yesterday forenoon I passed an old house which seemed to be quite deserted. It was a two-story, wooden house, dark and weather-beaten. The front windows, some of them, were shattered and open, and others were boarded up. Trees and shrubbery were growing neglected, so as quite to block up the lower part. There was an aged barn near at hand, so ruinous that it had been necessary to prop it up. There were two old carts, both of which had lost a wheel. Everything was in keeping. At first I supposed that there would be no inhabitants in such a dilapidated place; but, passing on, I looked back, and saw a decrepit and infirm old man at the angle of the house, its fit occupant. The grass, however, was very green and beautiful around this dwelling, and, the sunshine falling brightly on it, the whole effect was cheerful and pleasant. It seemed as if the world was so glad that this desolate old place, where there was never to be any more hope and happiness, could not at all lessen the general effect of joy. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT I found a small turtle by the roadside, where he had crept to warm himself in the genial sunshine. He had a sable back, and underneath his shell was yellow, and at the edges bright scarlet. His head, tail, and claws were striped yellow, black, and red. He withdrew himself, as far as he possibly could, into his shell, and absolutely refused to peep out, even when I put him into the water. Finally, I threw him into a deep pool and left him. These mailed gentlemen, from the size of a foot or more down to an inch, were very numerous in the spring; and now the smaller kind appear again.
For Abba Alcott’s 41st birthday, her husband Bronson Alcott did not have enough money to buy her a present so he made her a lovely present of a book created by copying poems and pasting pictures onto stitched sheets. In this book, Bronson whistled in the dark and worshiped the future in his best con-artist manner:
Not always not long shall our pathways be in any wise diverse. Soon shall they be one and the same, and we shall walk hand in hand therein; our sight shall be one, even as our Hope is one. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY October 12, Tuesday: The combined British detachment that had ventured out from the relative safety of the metropolis, Cabul, Afghanistan, by this morning had become large enough to transit the pass of Khoord-Cabul, and this was effected with some loss due to long range sniper fire down from the rocks at the sides of the defile. The force then set up a defensive camp perimeter on the far side of the defile at Khoord-Cabul and the 13th light infantry again subjected itself to losses due to its exposure to this unrelenting rifle fire, by returning through the pass to its defensive camp perimeter at Bootkhak. For some nights the camps would repel attacks, “that on the 35th native infantry being peculiarly disastrous, from the treachery of the Affghan horse, who admitted the enemy within their lines, by which our troops were exposed to a fire from the least suspected quarter. Many of our gallant sepoys, and Lieutenant Jenkins, thus met their death.”12
Frederick Douglass addressed the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society at the Universalist meetinghouse in Concord.
We very much need to know who was in town at the time, and who did and who did not attend this meeting: • Bronson Alcott ? • Abba Alcott ? • Anna Bronson Alcott ? • Louisa May Alcott (8 years old)? • Phineas Allen ? • Perez Blood ? • Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks ? • Squire Nathan Brooks ? 12. Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). THE MILITARY OPERATIONS AT CABUL: WHICH ENDED IN THE RETREAT AND DESTRUCTION OF THE BRITISH ARMY, JANUARY 1842, WITH A JOURNAL OF IMPRISONMENT IN AFFGHANISTAN. Philadelphia PA: Carey and Hart, 1843; London: J. Murray, 1843 (three editions); Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). PRISON SKETCHES: COMPRISING PORTRAITS OF THE CABUL PRISONERS AND OTHER SUBJECTS; ADAPTED FOR BINDING UP WITH THE JOURNALS OF LIEUT. V. EYRE, AND LADY SALE; LITHOGRAPHED BY LOWES DICKINSON. London: Dickinson and Son, [1843?] HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT • Caroline Downes Brooks ? • George Merrick Brooks ? • Deacon Simon Brown ? •Mrs. Lidian Emerson ? • Waldo Emerson ? • Reverend Barzillai Frost ? • Margaret Fuller ? • William Lloyd Garrison ? • Nathaniel Hawthorne ? • Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar ? • Edward Sherman Hoar ? • Senator George Frisbie Hoar ? • Elizabeth Sherman Hoar ? • Squire Samuel Hoar ? •Dr. Edward Jarvis ? • Deacon Francis Jarvis ? • John Shepard Keyes, Judge John Shepard Keyes ? • John M. Keyes ? • Reverend George Ripley ? • Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley ? • Reverend Samuel Ripley ? • Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley ? • Lemuel Shattuck ? • Daniel Shattuck ? • Sheriff Sam Staples ? • Henry David Thoreau ? • John Thoreau, Senior ? • Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau ? • John Thoreau, Jr. ? • Helen Louisa Thoreau ? • Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau ? • Aunt Maria Thoreau ? • Aunt Jane Thoreau ? • Alek Therien ? • Miss Prudence Ward ? HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1842
May 6, Friday: Frederick Douglass spoke in Southbridge, Massachusetts.
George G. Pratt was born to Lucy Jenkins Alley Pratt and the Reverend Enoch Pratt.
An attempt was made on the life of Lilburn W. Boggs, the man who had while governor of Missouri issued Executive Order 44 for the extermination of the Mormons. Fired upon through a window while reading the newspaper in his study, he sustained two large buckshot balls to the skull, one to the neck, and one to the throat (which he swallowed). Orrin Porter Rockwell, former Danite and later a member of the Council of Fifty, was suspected.
Having arranged for his brother Junius Alcott to stay at Dove Cottage with Abba Alcott and their daughters in his absence, Bronson Alcott left Concord at noon, bound for Boston Harbor to embark there for England aboard the Rosalind. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT August 2, Tuesday: Bronson Alcott wrote Abba Alcott that on a 3rd visit to Thomas Carlyle, they had quarrelled outright.
I shall not see him again.
Carlyle wrote Waldo Emerson about the encounter, describing Alcott’s “long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes,” speaking of him as genial, innocent, simple-hearted, good, venerable, but declaring him a Don Quixote “bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age,”13 a man “whom nobody can even laugh at without loving” but nevertheless a “bottomless imbecile.”
He warned Emerson against allowing his public reputation in England to become entangled with that of such a person. Emerson, frightened for his reputation, wrote to Alcott in England, warning that while his English friends could trust his “theories” they could not trust his “statement of facts.” And Emerson ordered Alcott to show this letter to his English friends, and Alcott did this. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
November 29, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau was written to from Boston by Orestes Augustus Brownson.
Trouble was brewing in the Alcott home. Abba Alcott was being pushed much too hard and rewarded much too little:
Circumstances most cruelly drive me from the enjoyment of my domestic life. I am prone to indulge in occasional hilarity, but I seem frowned down into stiff quiet and peace-less order. I am almost suffocated in this atmosphere of restriction and form.... A desire to stop short and rest, recognizing no care but myself seems to be my duty.... HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY November 30, Wednesday: William Cooper Nell presented resolutions at the Great Massachusetts Meeting of Colored Citizens of Boston in protest against the treatment of George Latimer. He and hairdresser John T. Hilton would
13. Since Don Quijote was un hombre exageradamente grave y serio o puntilloso, this was a fine and accurate description of Concord’s own knight of the woebegone countenance. This is what John Brown looked like in 1842, as a failed businessman,
but the above description would also be a fine description, later, of a more mature John Brown: If Bronson Alcott could be said to have been a Quijote whose favorite reading was the New Testament, it could be said of Brown that he was a Quijote whose favorite reading was the Old. For Miguel de Cervantes put into the mouth of his antihero the following words:
These saints and knights were of the same profession as myself, which is the calling of arms. Only there is this difference between them and me, that they were saints, and fought with divine weapons, and I am a sinner and fight with human ones. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT raise funds for Latimer’s defense against the charge that he was 1/8th black and had run away from his owner.
From the bosom of the Alcott family, Charles Lane diagnosed the situation with Abba Alcott:
In all respects we are living or trying to live as we should in a larger community. Mrs. A. has passed from the ladylike to the industrious order but she has much inward experience to realize. her pride is not yet eradicated and her peculiar maternal love blinds her to all else....
Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY Christmas Eve: Abba Alcott unexpectedly left her family, taking little Louisa May Alcott and little William Lane. She turned up at the home of her relatives in Boston:
Left Concord to try the influence of a short absence from home. My duties for the past three months have been arduous and involved. I hope the experiment will not bereave me of my mind. The enduring powers of the body have been well tried. The mind yields, falters and fails.... They all seem most stupidly obtuse on the causes of this occasional prostration of my judgement and faculties. I hope the solution of the problem will not be revealed to them too late for my recovery or their atonement of this invasion of my rights as a woman and a mother. Give me one day of practical philosophy. It is worth a century of speculation.
Christmas Day: A battle in Mier between Texan raiders and Mexican defenders cost the lives of 600 Mexicans and 30 Texans. Unaware of these relative losses, the Texans surrendered.
That evening, in Boston, Abba Alcott took little Louisa May Alcott and little William Lane to see the lighting of the Christkindelbaum. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1843
January 1, Sunday: Bronson Alcott, who was at the time trying to get the Emersons to enlist in the Alcott family’s experiment in communal living with the two Brits Charles Lane and Henry Gardiner Wright –or at least to get Waldo Emerson to agree to become the financial angel for the experiment–14 remonstrated with his absent wife Abba Alcott:
I sincerely believe that you are in the arms of a benignant Providence, who shall do for yourself and us more than we can conceive or ask. Let him guide. Relinquish all self-willfullness. Be willing to be used as he shall direct. I am in the hands of a divine Destiny that shall make me be, and do, better and wiser than I can do for myself.
14. In his journal, Emerson referred to these Brits as “two cockerels.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY May 20, Saturday: Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane hiked 14 miles to Harvard, Massachusetts to look at a farm consisting of 90 acres of orchard and woodland –the Wyman farm– attached to an old house and old barn which were at the end of no existing road but which were situated on Prospect Hill overlooking the Nashua valley across which could be seen Mount Monadnock and Mount Wachusett,
in the district then known politely as “Still River North” and impolitely as “Hog Street.” This farm which had a view but no fruit trees would do for Fruitlands (102 Prospect Hill Road, Harvard MA 01451 as marked by the red star at the left edge of the map below).
They made this journey despite the fact that a very suitable place was available in the vicinity of Concord – HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT the 16 acres of orchard known as the Hollowell Farm (Gleason 64/H5) above a large woodland across the
Sudbury River From Bear Garden Hill, to near which Abba Alcott and Junius Alcott had rowed the children in the Water Sprite for that birthday pic nic about a year earlier.
Why? –Because Charles Lane, disregarding Abba’s preferences, had vetoed the idea of being close to Concord and its ambient moral influences.
The asking price at Harvard was $2,700.00 but they bargained it down to $1,800.00 for the land alone, with the right to use the buildings for one year. Sam May agreed to act as trustee for the Consociate Family and signed a supplemental note for $300.00 to be paid in two installments of $150.00 within the year. The remaining $300.00 of the funds that Lane had brought from England would go to pay off Alcott’s creditors in Concord.
As planned, they renamed the Wyman farm on Hog Street “Fruitlands.” THE ALCOTT FAMILY
May 23, Thursday: In Hancock County Circuit Court, Illinois, William Law, editor of the Nauvoo Expositor, filed a formal complaint charging that Joseph Smith, Jr. was living “in an open state of adultery” with his foster daughter Maria Lawrence, a teenaged orphan in the Smith household (Joseph had gotten married with Maria Lawrence, age 19, and her sister Sarah Lawrence, age 17, on May 11, 1843, and was serving as executor of their $8,000 estate). Joseph excommunicated William Law and had himself appointed as legal guardian over the Lawrence sisters.
A letter informed Abba Alcott that her father Colonel May’s estate had, after four years of negotiation, been settled, with the creditors of the Temple School agreeing to accept roughly 33 cents on the dollar, paying out about $2,000.00 and leaving net funds of about $4,000.00 that would be held in trust for her by her brother the Reverend Samuel Joseph May and her attorney cousin Samuel Eliot Sewall. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY June 1 (Pentecost Thursday): Joseph Smith, Jr. “got married with” Elvira Anie Cowles.
Go East, 46-year-old black woman, go East: Isabella15 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
15. 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
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA 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,16 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:
16. 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
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
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.”17
“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
17. EMERSON’S JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS 4: 277, 4:296, 8:397. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
June 14, Wednesday: Frederick Douglass, Charles Lenox Remond, and Cyrus M. Burleigh lectured at the Worcester County North Division Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Lunenburg, Massachusetts.
After Charles Lane paid Bronson Alcott’s Concord debts of about $300.00 the Alcotts and Lane moved to the Harvard farm.
After August 4, Friday: Abba Alcott was becoming frantic about the condition of Bronson Alcott, who not only had dysentery and was fainting several times a day, but also was exhibiting mental symptoms of excitedness and restlessness. Secretly, she wrote her brother, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May:
He sees too much company, his mind is altogether too morbidly active — I thought of proposing to him a little quiet journey in a chaise –leaving the children with Mr. Lane and Abraham– but he says no he wants rest perfect quiet –“that when he journeys it will be a long one — and alone”– I do not allow myself to despair of his recovery — but oh Sam that piercing thought flashes through my mind of insanity— HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY August 26, Saturday: Abba Alcott, back from a visit to the Shakers, exploded in her journal (if anybody ever had a right to this kind of talk, she had):
Wherever I turn I see the yoke on woman in some form or other– On some it sits easy for they are but beasts of burden; on others pride hushes them to silence –no complaint is made for they scorn pity or sympathy– on some it galls and chafes, they feel assured by every instinct of their nature that they were designed for a higher, nobler calling than to “drag life’s lengthening chain along”– A woman may perform the most disinterested duties. She may “die daily” in the cause of truth and righteousness, she lives neglected, dies forgotten– But a man, who never performed in his whole life one self-denying act, but who has accidentally gifts of Genius is celebrated by his contemporaries, while his name and his works live on, from age to age — he is crowned with Laurel while scarce a “stone may tell where She lies.”
August 26, Saturday: The future will no doubt be a more natural life than this. We shall be acquainted and shall use flowers and stars, and sun and moon, and occupy this nature which now stands over and around us. We shall reach up to the stars and pluck fruit from many parts of the universe. We shall purely use the earth and not abuse it — God is in the breeze and whispering leaves and we shall then hear him. We live in the midst of all the beauty and grandeur that was ever described or conceived. We have hardly entered the vestibule of nature. It was here be assured under these heavens that the gods intended our immortal life should pass — these stars were set to adorn and light it — these flowers to carpet it HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT September 28, Monday: Frederick Douglass lectured in Richmond, Indiana.
In a ceremony in Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith, Jr. and his wife of many years Emma Hale Smith were the recipients of a 2d anointing, in which each was “anointed & ordained to the highest & holiest order of the priesthood.”
During the harvest time, before September 29th, although Bronson Alcott had recovered from his dysentery and fainting, he was still exhibiting mental symptoms of excitedness and restlessness. He and Charles Lane had left in the middle of the harvest work on yet another trip of visiting and lecturing and attempting to garner the new recruitments and the renewed funding that was essential if this “pyramid scheme” of a community was not to collapse. They had lectured in Providence, Rhode Island, and in New-York, and in New Haven and Waterbury in Connecticut, stopping off in Alcott’s old home town, Spindle Hill. When they came stopped off at Fruitlands, it was only to leave immediately for New Hampshire, and then for Concord, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY During this period Waldo Emerson recorded a visit in his journal:
Alcott came, the magnificent dreamer, brooding as ever on the renewal or reedification of the social fabric after ideal law, heedless that he had been uniformly rejected by every class to whom he has addressed himself and just as sanguine & vast as ever; the most cogent example of the drop too much which nature adds of each man’s peculiarity. To himself he seems the only realist, & whilst I & other men wish to deck the dulness of the months with here & there a fine action or hope, he would weave the whole a new texture of truth & beauty. Now he spoke of marriage & the fury that would assail him who should lay his hand on that institution, for reform: and spoke of the secret doctrines of Fourier. I replied, as usual — that, I thought no man could be trusted with it; the formation of new alliances is so delicious to the imagination, that St Paul & St John would be riotous; and that we cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue. Very pathetic it is to see this wandering emperor from year to year making his round of visits from house to house of such as do not exclude him, seeking a companion, tired of pupils.
At about this period Anne Page, Abba Alcott’s servant, was caught eating fish at a neighbor’s table, and then a chunk of cheese was discovered inside her trunk. For thus exploiting the lives of animals, she was terminated by the Consociate Family of Fruitlands. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
In his journal, Henry Thoreau mentioned “Thomas the Rhymer” out of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, by Conner & Cooke in New-York in 1833.
Thursday, September 28. We have never conceived how many natural phenomena would be revealed to a simpler and more natural life. Rain, wind, sunshine, day and night, would be very different to experience if we were always true. We cannot deceive the ground under our feet. We never try. But we do not treat each other with the same sincerity. How much more wretched would the life of man be if there was the same formality and reserve between him and his intercourse with Nature that there is in human society! It is a strange world we live in, with this incessant dream of friendship and love; where is any? Genius cannot do without these; it pines and withers. I believe that the office of music is to remind us continually of the reality and necessity of the fine elements of love and friendship. One mood always forgets another, and till we have loved we have not imagined the heights of love. Love is an incessant inspiration. By the dews of love the arid desert of life is made as fragrant and blooming as a paradise. The world waits yet to see man act greatly and divinely upon man. What are social influences as yet? The poor human flower would hold up its drooping head at once, if this sun should shine on it. That is the dyspepsia with which all men ail. In purer, more intellectual moods we translate our gross experiences into fine moralities. Sometimes we would fain see events as merely material, — wooden, rigid, dead; but again we are reminded that we actually inform them with better life, by which they live; that they are the slaves and creatures of our conduct. When dull and sensual, I believe they are corn-stalks good for cattle, — neither more nor less. The laws of Nature are science; but, in an enlightened moment, they are morality and modes of divine life. In a medium intellectual state they are aesthetics. What makes us think that time has lapsed is that we have relapsed. Strictly speaking, there can be no criticism of poetry other than a separating of that which is poetry from that which is not, — a detecting of falsehood. From the remotest antiquity we detect in the Literature of all nations, here and there, words of a loftier tone and purport than are required to transact the daily business of life. As HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT Scott says, they float down the sea of time like the fragments of a parted wreck, — sounds which echo up among the stars rather than through the valleys of earth; and yet are heard plainly enough, to remind men of other spheres of life and activity. Perhaps I may say that I have never had a deeper and more memorable experience of life in its great serenity, than when listening to the trill of a tree sparrow among the huckleberry bushes after a shower. It is a communication to which a man must attend in solitude and silence, and may never be able to tell to his brother. The least sensual life is that experienced through pure senses. We sometimes hear, and the dignity of that sense is asserted.
November 11, Saturday: According to one of the biographers of the Alcott family, Madelon Bedell (pages 229-30), at this point Abba Alcott began to suspect that the bond between Bronson Alcott and this so-strict British troublemaker Charles Lane was “personal and sexual as well as intellectual,” and totally in conflict with her bond with her husband, and so she began to marshal the weapons with which she would destroy it. Sometime during the month, she went to Lexington MA to visit her brother, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, and incidentally get something to eat, and shortly after she returned, Samuel delivered the coup de grace to the “Fruitlands” community by way of a letter announcing that he had no intention of making the next payment of $150.00 as trustee, a payment which he had previously given a guarantee that he would make. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY November 29, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau, unhappy on Staten Island, had been home to Concord from Castleton for Thanksgiving, perhaps as early as the 23d, and would return to the William Emerson home only to pick up his clothing. THOREAU RESIDENCES
At this point Abba Alcott formally notified everyone at “Fruitlands” that she was taking the children and leaving. Charles Lane sent off a letter to a friend in England saying that
Mr. Alcott’s constancy to his wife and family and his inconstancy to the Spirit have blurred his life forever.
Little Louisa May Alcott jotted in her diary:
Eleven years old. It was Father’s and my birthday. We had some nice presents. We played in the snow before school. Mother read “Rosamond” when we sewed. Father asked us in the eve what fault troubled us most. I said my bad temper. I told mother I liked to have her write in my book. She said she would put in more, and she wrote this to help me:— Dear Louy,— Your handwriting improves very fast. Take pains and do not be in a hurry. I like to have you make observations about our conversations and your own thoughts. It helps you to express them and to understand your little self. Remember, dear girl, that a diary should be the epitome of your life. May it be a record of pure thought and good actions, then you will indeed be the precious child of your loving mother.
Until December 16th, four United States vessels would be demonstrating (firing off cannon and generally looking fierce) and landing various parties (one party would be made up of 200 marines and sailors) in order to discourage piracy and the slave trade along the Ivory coast, and in order to punish attacks by the natives on American seamen and shipping. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT December: On a visit to Concord, Charles Lane was jailed by Sheriff Sam Staples for refusal to pay his $1.50 poll tax
but Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar paid for him.
Upon release, he went directly to the Waldo Emerson home to arrange to take over from the Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr. as financial agent for Fruitlands, and to complain about Abba Alcott’s destructive attitude, and to complain in general about defects which he had discovered to exist in the instinct of Maternity. (It seemed that the instinct which mothers exhibit toward their children was a selfish and particular one, that is to say, was an extension of self-regard rather than an altruism, and was therefore quite antagonistic to the unselfish and indiscriminant spirit of Universal Love! Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, it seemed to him, had been quite mistaken, for rather than mother love being any sort of solution for the general problem of selfishness — it figured, as near as Lane was able to decipher this, as a central part of that problem!) THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
CHRISTMAS 1843
Late in the year: Late in this year Bronson Alcott was helping his English friends Wright and Charles Lane look for a farm in the vicinity of Boston that they could purchase and equip as an experiment in their sort of pure life. Lane virtually ran the Alcott household in Concord and then at Fruitlands, and was so strict and so unreasonable that Wright left, and Abba Alcott had to get away from the scene by visiting friends in Boston over the pre-Christmas holiday season. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT 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 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.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY 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
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1844
January 1, Monday: For $14,000, the North American Phalanx purchased 673 acres in Monmouth, New Jersey from Hendrick Longstreet and Daniel Holmes. Settlement of its men would begin over 6 months, with women and children to follow during Spring 1845. COMMUNITARIANISM
Bronson Alcott returned to Fruitlands from a convention in Boston. Abba Alcott confided to her journal that she had “Concluded to go to Mr. Lovejoy’s,” a neighboring farm, to get away from all this struggling for existence. Her journal does not indicate whether this included her husband, although clearly it did not include the formidable Charles Lane. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
January 6, Thursday: Charles Lane and his son William Lane, very much aware that they would be unable to survive in the unheated Fruitlands farmhouse once it was “without furniture,” went across the river to sojourn at the Shaker community.
After January 7: Yesterday I skaited [skated] after a fox over the ice. It was like a slight trait of Scythia — to vary our modern town life. I am always cheered by the sight of any such phenomenon — any piece of wild nature. He sat on his haunches and 18barked at me like a young wolf. It made Me think of the bear and her cubs on the ice as related by Capt. Parry I think –especially when the perplexed brute would turn in its retreat and stretching its neck –bark anxiously at me. He carries methinks but a duller sunlight in his tawny hide. All brutes I should say have a genius for mystery –an oriental aptitude for symbols and the language of signs– The fox manifested an almost human suspicion of mystery– While I skalted [skated] directly after him he cantered at the top of his speed but when I paused and stood stock still though his fear was not abated some strange but inflexible law of his nature caused him to stop also and sit again on his haunches. While I still stood motionless he would go slowly a rod to one side then sit and bark then a rod to the other side and sit and bark again –but did not retreat –as if spell bound. When however I commenced the pursuit again he found himself released from his durance. Plainly the fox belongs to a different order of things than that which reigns in the village– Our courts though they offer a bounty on his hide –our pulpits though they draw many a moral from his proverbial cunning –are in few senses contemporary with his free forest life. Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed though it is noble and rare when it is fine and clear memory impartial — distinct. Its productions are then works of art. And stand like monuments of history– To the poet as artist his words must be as the relation of his remotest and finest memory. And older and simpler antiquity– Contemporary with the moon and grasshoppers.
January 8, Saturday: At The Manse, “Nathaniel blasphemed superbly whenever he looked at the thermometer,” this being the coldest January in a century. After interminable talk and too little work, “the chickens had come home to roost” at Fruitlands. It was midwinter and there was nothing in the pantry, nothing in the root cellar. Charles Lane and his son William Lane had gone across the river to the Shaker community. After a period in which Bronson Alcott attempted to atone by starving himself to death, the Alcott family found temporary accommodations in nearby Still River (3 rooms in the Lovejoy home).
18.William Edward Parry. THREE VOYAGES FOR THE DISCOVERY OF A NORTHWEST PASSAGE. New York: Harper’s Family Library, 1841, II:49. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
January 10, Sunday: In this exceedingly cold and biting winter, an exceedingly cold and biting law went into effect in the District of Columbia. The burden of proof was shifted entirely onto the shoulders of any Negro taken under arrest, to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the white authorities that he had in fact been born free.
At Fruitlands, during this exceedingly cold and biting winter, after interminable talk and too little work, “the chickens had come home to roost.” It was still midwinter and already there was nothing whatever in the pantry, nothing whatever in the root cellar, nothing whatever in the woodshed. Bronson Alcott had been attempting to atone by starving himself to death, but, as Louisa May Alcott put his spiritual situation in her autobiographical TRANSCENDENTAL WILD OATS,
When all other sentiments had faded into dimness, all other hopes died utterly; when the bitterness of death was nearly over, when body was past any pang of hunger or thirst, and soul stood ready to depart, the love that outlives all else refused to die.
Abba Alcott wrote her brother, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, that
having ate our last bit and burnt our last chip, we sent for Mr. Lovejoy to come and get us out — which he did.... All Mr. Lane’s efforts have been to disunite us. But Mr. Alcott’s conjugal and paternal instincts were too strong for him.
Bronson has destroyed his journal of the last months at Fruitlands. It appears he also went through his daughter Anna’s diary, ripping out numerous pages. Eight pages of Louisa’s diary of that period have turned up, behind a partition in one of the houses the Alcott family subsequently inhabited, so it is remotely possible that more pages may someday appear. Of course, we do have her TRANSCENDENTAL WILD OATS, but it would be nice to have something less thoroughly sanitized by afterthoughts. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Richard Wagner wrote Felix Mendelssohn about their new relationship. “If I have come a little closer to you, that is the nicest thing about my whole Berlin expedition.”
Waldo Emerson lectured at the lyceum in Salem, likely on “The New England Man.” He would receive $20.
Sunday, January 10, 1844. I believe that no law of mechanics, which is observed and obeyed from day to day, is better established in the experience of men than this, —that love never fails to be repaid in its own coin; that just as high as the waters rise in one vessel just so high they will rise in every other into which there is communication, either direct or under ground or from above the stars. Our love is, besides, some such independent fluid element in respect to our vessels, which still obeys only its own, and not our laws, by any means, without regard to the narrow limits to which we would confine it. Nor is the least object too small for the greatest love to be bestowed upon. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
January 11, Monday: The Alcott family was in temporary accommodations in three rooms of the Lovejoy home in the nearby village of Harvard MA. Their assets were $32.00 in cash and four daughters from age 4 to age 13. The assets of the Consociate Family at Fruitlands were assumed by Joseph Palmer “in consideration of seventeen hundred dollars” additional investment, and his assumption of a $300.00 mortgage still held by Godfrey Sparrow.
May 22: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Suppression of the Slave-Trade on the coast of Africa: Message from the President, etc.” –HOUSE DOCUMENT, 28 Cong. 1 sess. VI. No. 263.
It was Abba Alcott’s 14th wedding anniversary. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The enhanced price of slaves throughout the American slave market, brought about by the new industrial development and the laws against the slave-trade, was the irresistible temptation that drew American capital and enterprise into that traffic. In the United States, in spite of the large interstate traffic, the average price of slaves rose from about $325 in 1840, to $360 in 1850, and to $500 in 1860.19 Brazil and Cuba offered similar inducements to smugglers, and the American flag was ready to protect such pirates. As a result, the American slave-trade finally came to be carried on principally by United States capital, in United States ships, officered by United States citizens, and under the United States flag. Executive reports repeatedly acknowledged this fact. In 1839 “a careful revision of these laws” is recommended by the President, in order that “the integrity and honor of our flag may be carefully preserved.”20 In June, 1841, the President declares: “There is reason to believe that the traffic is on the increase,” and advocates “vigorous efforts.”21 His message in December of the same year acknowledges: “That the American flag is grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations is but too probable.”22 The special message of 1845 explains at length that “it would seem” that a regular policy of evading the laws is carried on: American vessels with the knowledge of the owners are chartered by notorious slave dealers in Brazil, aided by English capitalists, with this intent.23 The message of 1849 “earnestly” invites the attention of Congress “to an amendment of our existing laws relating to the African slave-trade, with a view to the effectual suppression of that barbarous traffic. It is not to be denied,” continues the message, “that this trade is still, in part, carried on by means of vessels built in the United States, and owned or navigated by some of our citizens.”24 19. Cf. United States census reports; and Olmsted, COTTON KINGDOM. 20. HOUSE JOURNAL, 26th Congress, 1st session, page 118. 21. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27th Congress, 1st session, pages 31, 184. 22. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27th Congress, 2d session, pages 14, 15, 86, 113. 23. SENATE JOURNAL, 28th Congress, 2d session, pages 191, 227. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY Governor Buchanan of Liberia reported in 1839: “The chief obstacle to the success of the very active measures pursued by the British government for the suppression of the slave-trade on the coast, is the American flag. Never was the proud banner of freedom so extensively used by those pirates upon liberty and humanity, as at this season.”25 One well-known American slaver was boarded fifteen times and twice taken into port, but always escaped by means of her papers.26 Even American officers report that the English are doing all they can, but that the American flag protects the trade.27 The evidence which literally poured in from our consuls and ministers at Brazil adds to the story of the guilt of the United States.28 It was proven that the participation of United States citizens in the trade was large and systematic. One of the most notorious slave merchants of Brazil said: “I am worried by the Americans, who insist upon my hiring their vessels for slave-trade.”29 Minister Proffit stated, in 1844, that the “slave-trade is almost entirely carried on under our flag, in American-built vessels.”30 So, too, in Cuba: the British commissioners affirm that American citizens were openly engaged in the traffic; vessels arrived undisguised at Havana from the United States, and cleared for Africa as slavers after an alleged sale.31 The American consul, Trist, was proven to have consciously or unconsciously aided this trade by the issuance of blank clearance papers.32 The presence of American capital in these enterprises, and the connivance of the authorities, were proven in many cases and known in scores. In 1837 the English government informed the United States that from the papers of a captured slaver it appeared that the notorious slave-trading firm, Blanco and Carballo of Havana, who owned the vessel, had correspondents in the United States: “at Baltimore, Messrs. Peter Harmony and Co., in New York, Robert Barry, Esq.”33 The slaver “Martha” of New York, captured by the “Perry,” contained among her papers curious revelations of the guilt of persons in America who were little suspected.34 The slaver “Prova,” which was allowed to lie in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and refit, was afterwards captured with two hundred and twenty-five slaves on board.35 The real reason that prevented many belligerent Congressmen from pressing certain search claims against England lay in the fact that the unjustifiable detentions had unfortunately revealed so much American guilt that it was deemed wiser to let the matter end in talk. For instance, in 1850 Congress demanded information as to illegal searches, and 24. HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, III. pt. I. No. 5, page 7. 25. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 152. 26. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, pages 152-3. 27. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 241. 28. Cf. e.g. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 28th Congress, 2d session, IV. pt. I. No. 148; 29th Congress, 1st session, III. No. 43; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 2d session, VII. No. 61; SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 1st session, IV. No. 28; 31st Congress, 2d session, II. No. 6; 33d Congress, 1st session, VIII. No. 47. 29. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 218. 30. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 221. 31. Palmerston to Stevenson: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, page 5. In 1836 five such slavers were known to have cleared; in 1837, eleven; in 1838, nineteen; and in 1839, twenty-three: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, pages 220-1. 32. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1839, Volume XLIX., SLAVE TRADE, class A, Further Series, pages 58-9; class B, Further Series, page 110; class D, Further Series, page 25. Trist pleaded ignorance of the law: Trist to Forsyth, HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 33. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 34. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 290. 35. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, pages 121, 163-6. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT President Fillmore’s report showed the uncomfortable fact that, of the ten American ships wrongly detained by English men-of- war, nine were proven red-handed slavers.36 The consul at Havana reported, in 1836, that whole cargoes of slaves fresh from Africa were being daily shipped to Texas in American vessels, that 1,000 had been sent within a few months, that the rate was increasing, and that many of these slaves “can scarcely fail to find their way into the United States.” Moreover, the consul acknowledged that ships frequently cleared for the United States in ballast, taking on a cargo at some secret point.37 When with these facts we consider the law facilitating “recovery” of slaves from Texas,38 the repeated refusals to regulate the Texan trade, and the shelving of a proposed congressional investigation into these matters,39 conjecture becomes a practical certainty. It was estimated in 1838 that 15,000 Africans were annually taken to Texas, and “there are even grounds for suspicion that there are other places ... where slaves are introduced.”40 Between 1847 and 1853 the slave smuggler Drake had a slave depot in the Gulf, where sometimes as many as 1,600 Negroes were on hand, and the owners were continually importing and shipping. “The joint-stock company,” writes this smuggler, “was a very extensive one, and connected with leading American and Spanish mercantile houses. Our island41 was visited almost weekly, by agents from Cuba, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and New Orleans.... The seasoned and instructed slaves were taken to Texas, or Florida, overland, and to Cuba, in sailing-boats. As no squad contained more than half a dozen, no difficulty was found in posting them to the United States, without discovery, and generally without suspicion.... The Bay Island plantation sent ventures weekly to the Florida Keys. Slaves were taken into the great American swamps, and there kept till wanted for the market. Hundreds were sold as captured runaways from the Florida wilderness. We had agents in every slave State; and our coasters were built in Maine, and came out with lumber. I could tell curious stories ... of this business of smuggling Bozal negroes into the United States. It is growing more profitable every year, and if you should hang all the Yankee merchants engaged in it, hundreds would fill their places.”42 Inherent probability and concurrent testimony confirm the substantial truth of such confessions. For instance, one traveller discovers on a Southern plantation Negroes who can speak no English.43 The careful reports of the Quakers “apprehend that many [slaves] are also introduced into the United States.”44 Governor Mathew of the Bahama Islands reports that “in more than one instance, Bahama vessels with coloured crews have been purposely wrecked on the coast of Florida, and the crews forcibly sold.” This was brought to the 36. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, XIV No. 66. 37. Trist to Forsyth: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. “The business of supplying the United States with Africans from this island is one that must necessarily exist,” because “slaves are a hundred per cent, or more, higher in the United States than in Cuba,” and this profit “is a temptation which it is not in human nature as modified by American institutions to withstand”: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 38. STATUTES AT LARGE, V. 674. 39. Cf. STATUTES AT LARGE, V., page 157, note 1. 40. Buxton, THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND ITS REMEDY, pages 44-5. Cf. 2D REPORT OF THE LONDON AFRICAN SOCIETY, page 22. 41. I.e., Bay Island in the Gulf of Mexico, near the coast of Honduras. 42. REVELATIONS OF A SLAVE SMUGGLER, page 98. 43. Mr. H. Moulton in SLAVERY AS IT IS, page 140; cited in FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (Friends’ ed. 1841), page 8. 44. In a memorial to Congress, 1840: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 1st session, VI. No. 211. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY notice of the United States authorities, but the district attorney of Florida could furnish no information.45 Such was the state of the slave-trade in 1850, on the threshold of the critical decade which by a herculean effort was destined finally to suppress it.
May 23, Thursday: In Hancock County Circuit Court, Illinois, William Law, editor of the Nauvoo Expositor, filed a formal complaint charging that Joseph Smith, Jr. was living “in an open state of adultery” with his foster daughter Maria Lawrence, a teenaged orphan in the Smith household (Joseph had gotten married with Maria Lawrence, age 19, and her sister Sarah Lawrence, age 17, on May 11, 1843, and was serving as executor of their $8,000 estate). Joseph excommunicated William Law and had himself appointed as legal guardian over the Lawrence sisters.
A letter informed Abba Alcott that her father Colonel May’s estate had, after four years of negotiation, been settled, with the creditors of the Temple School agreeing to accept roughly 33 cents on the dollar, paying out about $2,000.00 and leaving net funds of about $4,000.00 that would be held in trust for her by her brother the Reverend Samuel Joseph May and her attorney cousin Samuel Eliot Sewall. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
45. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1845-6, pages 883, 968, 989-90. The governor wrote in reply: “The United States, if properly served by their law officers in the Floridas, will not experience any difficulty in obtaining the requisite knowledge of these illegal transactions, which, I have reason to believe, were the subject of common notoriety in the neighbourhood where they occurred, and of boast on the part of those concerned in them”: BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1845-6, page 990. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT Fall: After suggesting that the Alcott family build themselves a home on one of the tracts of land which he owned on Walden Pond, and after giving up on that idea as entirely impractical, Waldo Emerson, along with Abba Alcott’s brother the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, agreed to purchase the Horatio Cogswell place on
Lexington Road from the wheelwright of Concord, for $850.00, for the use of the Alcott family. The house and plot were to be held in the name of the May family in order that creditors of Bronson Alcott would not be able to attach it. Emerson agreed to the purchase of eight acres of the Concord meadow, across the road from this house, for an additional $500.00, so the Alcott family would be able to raise vegetables to feed themselves. The Alcotts would rename the place “Hillside” in honor of the grand estate of Benjamin Marston Watson, one of Alcott’s benefactors, in Plymouth MA, and would be living in this home for three years.
The basic house was one of those sound old structures built around a huge central chimney, with hand-hewn beams and wide floorboards.46 HILLSIDE THE WAYSIDE OLD HOUSES
46. This house had been erected in 1775 by one of the few families in Concord who had been rich enough to be able to afford slaves, but had fallen into considerable disrepair and may have been a real mess — a previous owner had been penning pigs in the ten-foot strip between house and road that passed for a front yard. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1845
Early January: After suggesting that the Bronson Alcott / Abba Alcott family build a home on a tract of land which he owned on Walden Pond, and giving up that idea as impractical, Waldo Emerson and the Reverend Samuel Joseph May completed, early in January, their purchase in the name of the May family of the Cogswell place
on Lexington Road. This house would be renamed the Hillside in honor of Benjamin Marston Watson, one of Alcott’s benefactors, who had a much grander estate of that name in Plymouth MA, and would be for the use of the Alcott family. They paid $850.00.47 Emerson purchased eight acres of meadow across the road from this house for an additional $500.00 so the family could raise their own vegetables. The house and plot were registered in such manner that Alcott’s creditors would not be able to attach it. Bronson immediately added wings to the structure, and the family would live in this home for three years. Bronson would draw the sketch below after he had added wings. This is the home which the Alcotts would eventually be selling to the
47. The place was in considerable disrepair and may have been a real mess for a previous owner had kept pigs in the 10-foot strip between house and road that passed for a front yard — although the man from whom the house had been purchased, Horatio Cogswell, was a wheelwright by trade. However, the basic house was one of those sound old structures built around a huge central chimney, with hand-hewn beams and wide floorboards. (It had been erected in 1775 by one of the few families in Concord who had been rich enough to be able to afford slaves.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT Hawthornes, who would rename it again, as “Wayside,” and add porches and a writerly tower:
THE WAYSIDE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools released their counter-counter-counterpublication to Horace Mann, Sr.’s counter-counterpublication, titled REJOINDER TO THE “REPLY” OF THE HON. HORACE MAN; SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION, TO THE “REMARKS” OF THE ASSOCIATION OF BOSTON MASTERS, UPON HIS SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT, in more than 200 pages. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY Summer: Charles Lane visited Hillside for several weeks in an attempt to restore the influence he had had over the
Alcott family at Fruitlands, but Abba Alcott had won and knew she had won and she was both intractable and
intransigent. If she had seen this first usage of the phrase “manifest destiny” in regard to our nation’s future, she might have applied it quite readily to that fact that the future was going to be a future of Abba and not Charles having influence over Bronson Alcott. Lane went away to visit with the Shakers muttering about how it was Bronson’s job in the family to keep the garden “free of weeds” and Abba’s job in the family to keep the house “clear of all intruders.” He left his son William Lane with the Shakers and went down to the socialist community of the North American Phalanx near Raritan, New Jersey, and then on to New-York, floating “on the placid bosom of the Stream of Love.” THE ALCOTT FAMILY MOTHER ANN LEE AND THE “SHAKERS” HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABIGAIL MAY ABBA ALCOTT
1847
October 17, Sunday: Waldo Emerson read a new book given him by Abba Alcott, A YEAR OF CONSOLATION. BY MRS. BUTLER, LATE FANNY KEMBLE. (New-York: Wiley & Putman). A YEAR OF CONSOLATION HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1848
January 10, Monday: Abba Alcott felt that she had had about enough of “cold, heartless, Brainless, soulless Concord.” She and Bronson Alcott had been offered a job living in a cottage at the “Water Cure” establishment in Waterford, Maine, with her as the “matron” and Bronson as the resident “preacher and teacher,” but her husband was stalling. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY May 10, Wednesday: Abba Alcott took her 8-year-old, Abbie May, and a charge, 13-year-old Eliza Stearns –the challenged (“imbecile”) daughter of the William Stearnses of Nova Scotia– and got on the stagecoach and left for her new job in Waterford, Maine, high in the White Mountains in a lake and resort district. She had made
a commitment to be “matron” there for at least three months, and would see whether her husband would bring the rest of the family, Lizzie and Louisa May (Anna was teaching in a little summer school in Walpole, New Hampshire while living with her married cousin Lizzie Wells), and follow her leading. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY Early in August: Her three-month commitment to her job at the “Water Cure” spa barely complete, Abba Alcott got on the stagecoach in Waterford, Maine and returned to her husband in “cold, heartless, Brainless, soulless” Concord.
September 17, Sunday: Abba Alcott began to do the 19th-Century version of networking for a job, in Boston: “Despair is the paralysis of the soul.” “A mother must always find the way because she has the will to do for her offspring.” She enlisted the support of an old friend, Hannah Robie, and of Mary Goddard May, the wife of one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in Boston, Samuel May the brother of Colonel May. His fortune was being estimated, in an anonymous “Our First Men” pamphlet of the day, at half a million dollars at a time when the US dollar was worth about a hundred of today’s dollars, so one would suppose that the moral encouragement of his wife would count for a lot. This guy, although not a billionaire, was definitely in the “I could run for president if I wanted to” class, with the Henry Ross Perots of this nation. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1849
January 17, Wednesday: While Bronson Alcott was offering daily lessons and Conversations in a room on West Street in Boston, Abba Alcott had a salary of $30.00 per month48 contractually guaranteed by a group of 21 wealthy Bostonians, for her to act as an early form of social case worker –perhaps the first female professional salaried social case worker ever– on their behalf, as a “Missionary to the Poor” charged to make house calls “investigating their wants and their merits.”
December 4, Tuesday: The popular Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer came to Concord on the train in a snowstorm to visit Waldo Emerson the fellow author. She was more impressed with Lidian Emerson, the author’s wife.
No one spoke of the great trouble, — not even Mrs. March, — for all had learned by experience that when Jo was in that mood words were wasted, and the wisest course was to wait till some little accident, or her own generous nature, softened Jo’s resentment and healed the breach. It was not a happy evening, for though they sewed as usual, while their mother read aloud from Bremer, Scott, or Edgeworth, something was wanting, and the sweet home- peace was disturbed. They felt this most when singing-time came, for Beth could only play, Jo stood dumb as a stone, and Amy broke down, so Meg and Mother sang alone. But in spite of their efforts to be as cheery as larks, the flutelike voices did not seem to chord as well as usual, and all felt out of tune.
Bremer had been highly regarded by Abba Alcott but, when Anna Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott met her, they were immensely disappointed and “went into the closet and cried.” THE ALCOTT FAMILY
President Zachary Taylor sent a message to the US Congress. Guess what, we’re such a nation of go-getters that to some significant degree we’re doing this to ourselves! “Your attention is earnestly invited to an amendment of our existing laws relating to the African slave-trade, with a view to the effectual suppression of that barbarous traffic. It is not to be denied that this trade is still, in part, carried on by means of vessels built in the United States, and owned or navigated by some of our citizens.” HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 31st Congress, 1st session, III. No. 5, pages 7-8.
48. To get a sense of what that amounted to in today’s money, consult
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1850
August 14, Thursday: US Senator Lewis Cass wrote to Giuseppe Garibaldi, welcoming him to America.
Abba Alcott opened an “intelligence service” on Atkinson Street. That is, what we would refer to as an upscale and decent “employment agency,” one not preoccupied with a project of attracting poor young girls off the street and into brothels, or making promises to poor people and working them and then discharging them without their pay. Abba began to talk about how the relation between mistress and maid was a “false relation” with which she hated to be in any way associated.
Best American and Foreign Help. Families provided, at the shortest notice, with accomplished COOKS, good PARLOR and CHAMBER GIRLS, NURSERY MAIDS, SEAMSTRESSES, TOILETTE WOMEN, and DRESS MAKERS. Any person paying the Subscription of $1 shall be furnished with a ticket, entitling her to a choice of Help for six months from Mrs. Alcott’s rooms.
Middle of August: {One leaf missing} unexpected pleasure. I knew a clergyman who when any person died was wont to speak of that portion of mankind who survived as living monuments of Gods mercy. A negative kind of life to live! I can easily walk 10 15 20 any number of miles commencing at my own door without going by any house– without crossing a road except where the fox & the mink do. Concord is the oldest inland town in New England, perhaps in the States. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant.– First along by the river & then the brook & then the meadow & the wood-side– Such solitude from a hundred hills I can see civilization & abodes of man afar. These farmers & their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks As I was going by with a creaking wheelbarrow, one of my neighbors who heard the music ran out with his grease pot & brush and greased the wheels That is a peculiar season when about the middle of August the farmers are getting their meadow hay. If you sail up the river you will see them in all meadows raking hay and loading it onto carts great lorry teams–under which the oxen stand like beetles chewing the cud waiting for men to put the meadow on–with the heaviest load they dash aside to crop a daisy.–(the half-broken steers There was reason enough for the first settlers selecting the elm out of all the trees of the forest with which to ornament his villages It is beautiful alike by sunlight & moonlight–and the most beautiful specimens are not the largest– I have seen some only 25 or 30 years old, more graceful and healthy I think than any others. It is almost become a villageous tree–like martins [Purple Martin Progne subis] & blue birds. The high blue-berry has the wildest flavor of any of the huckle-berry tribe– It is a litle mithridatic– It is like eating a poisonous berry which your nature makes harmless. I derive the same pleasure as if I were eating dog wood berries & night-shade wild parsnip with impunity. –Man & his affairs–Church & state & school trade & commerce & agriculture–Politics for that is the word for them all here today–I am pleased to see how little space it occupies in the landscape–it is but a narrow field– that still narrower highway yonder leads to it– I sometimes direct the traveller {One leaf missing} HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
And once again When I went a maying– For there grow the May flower Epgaea repens & the Mt Cranberry —— Jake Lakin!49 —— O whither doest thou go? Which way dosest thou flow Thou art the way– Thou art a rode Which Dante never trode Not many they be Who enter therein —— For thou leadest nowhere But to the Irish man Quin: —— Only the guests of the Irishman Quin There was a crossed-eyed fellow used to help me survey–he was my stake-driver–and all he said was–at every stake he drove–“There, I should’nt like to undertake to pull that up with my teeth.” It sticks in my crop–thats a good phrase–many things stick there.
49. In the birth records for the town of Lincoln there is a 1777 entry for a Jacob Lakin. It appears that nobody has any idea why Thoreau jotted this name down in his journal at this point. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
The man of wild habits Partridges [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] & Rabbits Who has no cares Only to set snares Who liv’st all alone Close to the bone– And where life is sweetest constantly eatest. —— Where they once dug for money But never found “any” —— To market fares With early apples & pears. —— When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel I can get enough gravel on the Old Marlboro’ Road. If you’ll leave your abode With your spirits unfurled You may go round the world By the old Marlboro Road. Nobody repairs it– For nobody wears it– It is a living way As the Christians say– What is it–what is it But a direction out there And the bare possibility O going somewhere– Great guide boards of stone But travellers none. It is worth going there to see Where you might be They’re a great endeavor To be something for ever. They are a monument to somebody To some select man Who thought of the plan What king (did the thing) I am still wondering– Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their Crowns Huge as Stone henge Set up how or when By what select men? Gourgas or Lee Clark or Darby? Blank tablets of stone Where a traveller might groan And in one sentence grave all that is known Which another might read In his extreme need. I know two or three That might there be. Literature that might stand All over the land. Which men might remember Till After December. And read again in the spring After the thawing. —— Old-meeting-house bell I love thy music well It peals through the air Sweetly full & fair as in the early times When I listened to its chimes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
I walk over the hills, to compare great things with small, as through a gallery of pictures–ever and anon looking through a gap in the wood, as through the frame of a picture, to a more distant wood or hill side, painted with several more coats of air– It is a cheap but pleasant effect. To a landscape in picture, glassed with air. —— What is a horizon without Mts! —— A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air– It has new life & motion. It is intermediate between land & sky.– On land only the grass & trees wave–but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see the breeze dash across it in streaks & flakes of light. It is somewhat singular that we should look down on the surface of water.– We shall look down on the surface of air next–& mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it When I go out of the house for a walk uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instincts to decide for me {Two leaves missing} {Two-thirds page missing}
Is consigned to the nine. I am but the Jackes of myself. Without inlet it lies Without outlet it flows From & to the skies It comes & it goes I am its source– & my life is its course I am its stoney shore, & the gale that passes oer {Two-thirds page missing} {MS torn}s man & womans {MS torn} All that the money digger had ever found was a pine-tree-shilling. Once as he was dunging out. He was paid much more for dunging out–but he valued more the money which he found. The boy thinks most of the cent he found–not the cent he earned– {One leaf missing}
Among the worst of men that ever lived However we did seriously attend A little space we let our thoughts ascend Experienced our religion & confessed ’Twas good for us to be there–be anywhere Then to a heap of apples we addressed & cleared a 5 rail fence with hand on But by a natural law our thoughts returned to ground And we went on to heaven by the long way round. —— What’s the rail-road to me? I never go to see Where it ends It fills a few hollows And makes banks for the swallows It sets the sand a flowing And blackberries a growing —— HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY Fall: The Alcott family moved from Atkinson Street in Boston to 50 High Street on the edge in between the highfalutin’ neighborhoods of the family’s rich supporters and the utter slums of Fort Hill. During this period Bronson’s mother, Anna Alcox, stayed with them for several months and, although she was very intimate with rural poverty, was horrified at this urban squalor: “…you are so good to wate on them that neade.” Abba was musing in her journal:
It is more respectable to be in my family —than a Servant of the Public in any capacity— and to be used by it is ignoble.
At that time in Boston, for a family of four, unless you had an income of at least $550.00 per year, you would probably wind up being badly victimized by one or another of the “bottom-feeders” who abounded in the slums, and yet, for the years 1851, 1852, and 1853, Abba Alcott’s income varied, usually somewhere between $0.05 to $1.00 per day while Bronson Alcott brought in hardly anything at all, perhaps a dollar very occasionally.50 Meanwhile, however, Abba was organizing a petition that women should be allowed to vote on proposed amendments to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that were to be offered at the forthcoming Massachusetts State Constitutional Convention. According to Harriet Robinson’s 51 MASSACHUSETTS IN THE WOMAN SUFFERAGE MOVEMENT, this petition was signed not only by persons such as A. Bronson Alcott but also by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Samuel Eliot Sewall, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, Wendell Phillips, and the Reverend Samuel Joseph May. The motion to allow women to vote on these proposed amendments to the state constitution, however, failed badly, 14 male delegates for to 108 male delegates against.
50. According to Leone Levi’s WAGES AND EARNINGS OF THE WORKING CLASSES - REPORT TO SIR ARTHUR BASS (London: John Murray, 1885), the population of England was at this point divided into a laboring class of 19,300,000 persons, a lower middle class of 6,900,000, and an upper class of 1,500,000 “taxpayers” (we don’t know what tax is referred to here). In the laboring classes, spinners (in cotton factories) earned about £1 a week, which amounted to perhaps £50 a year. Skilled labourers were lucky to earn more than £1.25 a week, say £65 a year. Agricultural workers earned around half these amounts, though they usually received in addition their accommodation and some food. The average sort of earnings in 1851 for the English laboring class was £52 a year, and for the lower middle class £80 per year. To receive such wages people often worked 60 hours a week or more. The lower middle class were people like teachers who earned between £75 and £100 a year. What were regarded as “the middle classes” had family incomes of between £150 and £500 per annum -- there were just over 90,000 English households in that category. What were considered “the higher middles classes” had incomes between £500 and £3000, and in this category were situated 18,300 families. The “higher class” English, of which there were 1,889, had annual incomes of between £3000 and £50,000. (In GREAT EXPECTATIONS, therefore, Pip, since he had acquired a newfound income of £500 a year, was being described by Charles Dickens as having been propelled straight up all the way from having been the apprentice to a blacksmith, lowest of the low, into the higher end of the middle classes — with an income approximately one order of magnitude greater than Joe the blacksmith’s accompanied by no responsibilities whatever.) 51. Boston: Roberts, 1881, page 91 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1852
April 7, Wednesday: Since Henry Thoreau checked out the Canadian Geological Survey’s REPORT OF PROGRESS FOR 1849-50 (Montreal, Toronto) from the Boston Society of Natural History, my guess is that after his lecture on PERUSE THIS REPORT
“Reality” during the snowstorm of the previous evening he had not attempted a return trip to Concord, but had instead perhaps stayed over at the Alcott home. Of course, it is possible that he was taken into the parsonage of the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, his sponsor, for this month of April was the month in which the Alcotts were making a large transition. The Hawthorne family, Nathaniel, Sophia, and their three young children Una, Julian, and Rose, desiring to return to Concord, agreed to purchase the rundown Hillside property from the Alcotts and Waldo Emerson for a total of $1,500.00, a down payment of $250.00 of which was to be made to Samuel Eliot Sewall as executor of the Alcott interest and placed in a trust fund for Abba and a payment of $500.00 of which was to be made to the Emersons, who would set it up as a trust fund for Bronson Alcott. (The balance of $750.00 was to be paid into Sam Sewall’s trust fund for Abba within one year.) On this basis the Alcotts were in the process of moving from their slum place on High Street into a rundown 4-story brick house in a good neighborhood on Beacon Hill, 20 Pinkney Street, agreeing to pay a rent of $350.00 per year. By this point in her trajectory, Abba Alcott had had quite had her fill of being a do-gooder and being treated like one,52 and was determined to run this home on Beacon Hill as a private boardinghouse. THE WAYSIDE OLD HOUSES
52. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.” —C.S. Lewis HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1853
Abba Alcott and others presented a petition for citizens of Massachusetts to endorse, on the sensitive subject of the equal political rights of woman: Fellow-Citizens:—In May next a Convention will assemble to revise the Constitution of the Commonwealth. At such a time it is the right and duty of every one to point out whatever he deems erroneous and imperfect in that instrument, and press its amendment on public attention. We deem the extension to woman of all civil rights, a measure of vital importance to the welfare and progress of the State. On every principle of natural justice, as well as by the nature of our institutions, she is as fully entitled as man to vote, and to be eligible to office. In governments based on force, it might be pretended with some plausibility, that woman being supposed physically weaker than man, should be excluded from the State. But ours is a government professedly resting on the consent of the governed. Woman is surely as competent to give that consent as man. our Revolution claimed that taxation and representation should be co-extensive. While the property and labor of women are subject to taxation, she is entitled to a voice in fixing the amount of taxes, and the use of them when collected, and is entitled to a voice in the laws that regulate punishments. It would be a disgrace to our schools and civil institutions, for any one to argue that a Massachusetts woman who has enjoyed the full advantage of all their culture, is not as competent to form an opinion on civil matters, as the illiterate foreigner landed but a few years before upon our shores—unable to read or write—by no means free from early prejudices, and little acquainted with our institutions. Yet such men are allowed to vote. Woman as wife, mother, daughter, and owner of property, has important rights to be protected. The whole history of legislation so unequal between the sexes, shows that she can not safely trust these to the other sex. Neither have her rights as mother, wife, daughter, laborer, ever received full legislative protection. Besides, our institutions are not based on the idea of one class receiving protection from another; but on the well- recognized rule that each class, or sex, is entitled to such civil rights, as will enable it to protect itself. The exercise of civil rights is one of the best means of education. Interest in great questions, and the discussion of them under momentous responsibility, call forth all the faculties and nerve them to their fullest strength. The grant of these rights on the part of society, would quickly lead to the enjoyment by woman, of a share in the higher grades of professional employment. Indeed, without these, mere book study is often but a waste of time. The learning for which no use is found or anticipated, is too frequently forgotten, almost as soon as acquired. The influence of such a share, on the moral condition of society, is still more important. Crowded now into few employments, women starve each other by close competition; and too often vice borrows overwhelming power of temptation from poverty. Open to women a great variety of employments, and her wages in each will rise; the energy and enterprise of the more highly endowed, will find full scope in honest effort, and the frightful vice of our cities HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY will be stopped at its fountain-head. We hint very briefly at these matters. A circular like this will not allow room for more. Some may think it too soon to expect any action from the Convention. Many facts lead us to think that public opinion is more advanced on this question than is generally supposed. Beside, there can be no time so proper to call public attention to a radical change in our civil polity as now, when the whole framework of our government is to be subjected to examination and discussion. It is never too early to begin the discussion of any desired change. To urge our claim on the Convention, is to bring our question before the proper tribunal, and secure at the same time the immediate attention of the general public. Massachusetts, though she has led the way in most other reforms, has in this fallen behind her rivals, consenting to learn, as to the protection of the property of married women, of many younger States. Let us redeem for her the old pre-eminence, and urge her to set a noble example in this the most important of all civil reforms. To this we ask you to join with us in the accompanying petition to the Constitutional Convention. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1857
September 23, Wednesday: Charles Wesley Slack; Greenfield MA. To Evelina E. Vannevar Slack; Boston MA Account of business trip.
Bronson Alcott wrote from Concord to Abba Alcott in Boston:
The Orchard is surveyed and Thoreau promises to give us the plot fair and finished to the acres and rods, all lined and bounded, tomorrow.
September 23, Wednesday: P.M. –To chestnut oaks. Varieties of nabalus grow along the Walden road in the woods; also, still more abundant, by the Flint’s Pond road in the woods. I observe in these places only the N. alba and Fraseri; but these are not well distinguished; they seem to be often alike in the color of the pappus. Some are very tall and slender, and the largest I saw was an N. Fraseri! One N. alba had a panicle three feet long! The Ripley beeches have been cut. I can’t find them. There is one large one, apparently on Baker’s land, about BAKER FARM two feet in diameter near the ground, but fruit hollow. I see yellow pine-sap, in the woods just east of where the beeches used to stand, just done, but the red variety is very common and quite fresh generally there.53 JAMES BAKER
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
53.October 14, 1858. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1858
March 15, Monday: At 3PM, Dr. Huntington arrived at the Alcott home and the family held final rites over the body of Elizabeth Sewall Alcott.
At Abba Alcott’s urgent request, the Reverend Dr. Frederic Huntington read the King’s Chapel Burial Service. After the closing prayer, “Mr. and Mrs. Emerson and Ellen Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, John Bridge Pratt, his sister [Caroline Pratt] and mother, and others,” (such as Dr. Josiah Bartlett, and since it would be he who would tend Louisa May Alcott in 1863 during her mercury-induced delusions, we may infer that it was he who had been looking in on Elizabeth during her final illness) helped deposit the remains in the Alcott family’s new plot at Sleepy Hollow. BRONSON ALCOTT LIDIAN EMERSON WALDO EMERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY Amy Belding Brown has been told that she was one of the first people to be buried in this new cemetery. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1860
Walt Whitman came to Boston to oversee the printing of the 3d edition of LEAVES OF GRASS. He had picked up, from various scientific and scientistic sources in the general culture, the Lamarckian notion that if you ate right and exercised, and then had good free sex, your children could be genetically improved, leading to the progressive development of the human kind.54 Waldo Emerson tried to persuade him to omit his overtly sexual “Children of Adam” poem (Whitman explained later that Emerson “did not see that if I had cut sex out I might just as well have cut everything out,” because his doctrine that the expression of human instinct was the expression of divine immanence could not allow that in a single exception the expression of human instinct was the expression of something else, something not divine, something that needed to be, not uninhibited, but inhibited). Whitman was proposing a new nationalistic chronology, according to which the supreme, in fact pivotal, event of world history was not the birth of Christ but the date of our throwing off the English yoke. Thus that 3d edition, issued in AD1860, was marked “85TS,” that is, the 86th year of These States. Despite all this hot patriotism, Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, Lidian Emerson, and Abba Alcott, discussing together, put it out to the menfolk that this Walt fellow would not to be welcome in their homes.
54. That hot fantasy did not necessarily have anything in particular to do with Waldo Emerson’s worm “striving to be man” as it “mounts through all the spires of form,” for it was a notion that had been around for a long time: certain ancient Greeks believed that were a woman to receive an inadequate quantity or quality of semen and sexual interest during her pregnancy, she was more likely to bear a female / deformed / inadequate child. And Lamarckism would also be around for a long time after Whitman, as witness such pop luminaries of our own era as Arthur Koestler and Teilhard de Chardin. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY February: Walt Whitman came to Boston to oversee the printing of the 3d edition of LEAVES OF GRASS. He had picked up, from various scientific and scientistic sources in the general culture, the Lamarckian notion that if you ate right and exercised, and then had good free sex, your children could be genetically improved, leading to the progressive development of the human kind.55 Waldo Emerson tried to persuade him to omit his overtly sexual “Children of Adam” poem (Whitman explained later that Emerson “did not see that if I had cut sex out I might just as well have cut everything out,” because his doctrine that the expression of human instinct was the expression of divine immanence could not allow that in a single exception the expression of human instinct was the expression of something else, something not divine, something that needed to be, not uninhibited, but inhibited). “Specimen Days”
BOSTON COMMON — MORE OF EMERSON I spend a good deal of time on the Common, these delicious days and nights — every mid-day from 11.30 to about 1 — and almost every sunset another hour. I know all the big trees, especially the old elms along Tremont and Beacon streets, and have come to a sociable-silent understanding with most of them, in the sunlit air, (yet crispy-cool enough,) [Page 915] as I saunter along the wide unpaved walks. Up and down this breadth by Beacon street, between these same old elms, I walk’d for two hours, of a bright sharp February mid-day twenty-one years ago, with Emerson, then in his prime, keen, physically and morally magnetic, arm’d at every point, and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual. During those two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was an argument-statement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home, (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry,) of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, “Children of Adam.” More precious than gold to me that dissertation — it afforded me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point of E.’s statement was unanswerable, no judge’s charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put — and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. “What have you to say then to such things?” said E., pausing in conclusion. “Only that while I can’t answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify it,” was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the American House. And thenceforward I never waver’d or was touch’d with qualms, (as I confess I had been two or three times before).
Whitman was proposing a new nationalistic chronology, according to which the supreme, in fact pivotal, event of world history was not the birth of Christ but the date of our throwing off the English yoke. Thus that 3d edition, issued in AD1860, was marked “85TS,” that is, the 86th year of These States. Despite all this hot patriotism, Miss Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, Mrs. Lidian Emerson, and Mrs. Abba Alcott, discussing together, put it out to the menfolk that this Walt fellow would not to be welcome in their homes. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
55. That hot fantasy did not necessarily have anything in particular to do with Waldo Emerson’s worm “striving to be man” as it “mounts through all the spires of form,” for it was a notion that had been around for a long time: certain ancient Greeks believed that were a woman to receive an inadequate quantity or quality of semen and sexual interest during her pregnancy, she was more likely to bear a female / deformed / inadequate child. And Lamarckism would also be around for a long time after Walt Whitman, as witness such pop luminaries of our own era as Arthur Koestler and Teilhard de Chardin. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY May 23, Wednesday: It was a bright, warm day and Henry Thoreau received an invitation from Mrs. Abba Alcott, to attend her daughter Anna Bronson Alcott’s (Meg’s) wedding at the Orchard House (known before 1857 as the Moore house). The Emersons also attended. The date had deliberately been set as the anniversary of the date of the wedding of the bride’s parents Abba and Bronson in 1830 in King’s Chapel!
The ceremony of Anna “Meg” Alcott to John Bridge Pratt took place at 11AM with the uncle, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, having the honor of again officiating as he had officiated before on behalf of the parents. Out in the yard afterward, the guests danced around the couple, and Waldo kissed the bride but Henry did not, perhaps because he had not been alerted in time for him to produce a wedding present. (The newlyweds would settle in Chelsea, Massachusetts.) A lovely day, the house full of sunshine, flowers, friends, and happiness. Uncle S.J. May married them, with no fuss, but much love, and we all stood round her. She in her silver-gray silk, with lilies of the valley (John’s flower) in her bosom and hair. We have had a little feast ... then the old folks danced round the bridal pair making a pretty picture to remember, under our Revolutionary elm. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
My dear friend Mr Thoreau Will you join us for [one] hour (11 [oclock] to 12.) at our home this day to celebrate of the marriage our ^ dear Anna and John Yrs affectionately Abby Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY May 23. 6 A. M.—To Junction. River four and one sixth inches below summer level, having risen about three inches since the morning of the 19th. See hopping along the limbs of a black willow and inspecting its leafets for insects, in all positions, often head downward, the Sylvia striata, black-poll warbler. Black crown or all top of head; a broad white space along side- head and reaching less distinctly over the neck, in a ring; beneath this, from base of mandibles, a streak of black, becoming a stream or streams of black spots along the sides; beneath white; legs yellow; back above slaty- brown, streaked with black; primaries yellowish-dusky, with two white bars or marks; inner tail-feathers more or less white; tail forked; bill black. Not particularly lively. The female is said to be considerably different. This at first glance was a chickadee-like bird. It was rather tame. I distinguish well the red-eye and the yellow-throat vireo at the Island. It would not be easy to distinguish them always by the note, and I may have been mistaken sometimes, and before this year, in speaking of the yellow- throat vireo. The red-eye sings as slightly and feebly here now as the other. You can see these here to advantage now on the sunny side of the woods, the sun just bursting forth in the morning after the rain, for they [are] busily preening themselves, and, though incessantly moving, their heads and bodies, remain in the same spot. Myrtle-bird here still. Notice the first lint from new leafets, evidently washed off by the rain, and covering the water like dust.
P. M.—69. By boat to Ball’s Hill. Say the sweet-scented vernal grass is in its prime. Interrupted fern fruit probably a day or two, and cinnamon, say the same or just after. I see on the white maples, and afterward running along the shore close to the water, at different times, three or four water-thrushes (water wagtails, Turdus Noveboracensis). By its lurking along the waterside it might be mistaken by some at first for the song sparrow. It is considerably like the golden-crowned thrush, but it has a distinct buffish-white line over the eye and the breast and sides distinctly striped with dark. All above uniform olive-brown. It may be distinguished at a distance from a sparrow by its wagging motion, teetering on its perch. It persistently runs along the shore, peetweet-and song-sparrow-like, running like a rail around the tussocks and other obstacles and appearing again at the water’s edge. It was not very shy. We very easily kept along two rods off it, while it was amid the button-bushes. Started up two (probably) Totanus solitarius (?), (possibly small yellow-legs???). They utter a faint yellow-leg note, rather than peetweet note, viz. phe, phe, pheet pheet pheet. Are not shy; stand still [on] or beside a tussock to be looked at. Have peculiarly long, slender, curving wings. Fly like a peetweet, but are considerably larger and apparently uniformly dark-brown above. The belly and vent very bright white; breast (upper part) grayish- brown. When they flew from me saw considerable white, apparently on tail-coverts or sides of tail. Watched one still within three rods, with glass. There was a little speckling of whitish perhaps amid the brown above. I think they were too small for the lesser yellow-legs. Eleocharis pallustris, say three or four days. Critchicrotches some two or three days; now tender to eat. How agreeable and surprising the peculiar fragrance of the sweet flag when bruised! That this plant alone should have extracted this odor surely for so many ages each summer from the moist earth! The pipes in the Great Meadows now show a darker green amid the yellowish of the sedges, like the shadow of a passing cloud. From a hilltop half a mile off you can easily distinguish the limits of the pipes by their dark green. They do not terminate abruptly, but are gradually lost in the sedge. There is very little white maple seed this year, so that I cannot say surely how far advanced it is. What I notice appears to be fully grown, but is on the trees yet, always surprisingly large, like the wings of some lusty moth. Possibly it ripens with mouse-ear. I get sight for a moment of a large warbler on a young oak,—only the under side, which is a clear bright lemon- yellow, all beneath, with a sort of crescent of black spots on the breast. Is it not the Sylvia pardalina? Methinks it was a rather dark brown above. [Vide 28th.] The quarter-grown red oak leaves between you and the sun, how yellow-green! Now, if you look over our Great Meadow from Ball’s Hill, in a warm, fair day like this, you will receive the same impression as from the English grass fields in the middle of June, the sedges are so much more dense and forward. I mark the large white maples, now conspicuous and pretty densely leaved, stand up over the green sea on this edge of the river, so still, with each a speck of shade at its base, as in the noon of a summer day, and a dark line merely of shadow runs along at the base of the hill on the south of the meadow,—the June shadows beginning here. A green canopy held still above the already waving grass. It reminds you of warm, still noons, high grass, and the whetting of the scythe. Most of the corn is planted. Distinguish plainly a swamp sparrow (two to-day) by the riverside, a peculiarly glossy deep-chestnut crown, ash side-head and throat, and a dark or black line through the eye. I find, in skunk hedge below Flint’s, Carex rosea, not long, say three or four days. I should have thought it C. stellulata, but it is plainly staminate above, fertile below. [Also seen at calamint wall, Annursnack, June 10th.] Also C. gracillima, same place, apparently four or five days. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY River at 6 P. M. about one and two thirds inches below summer level; risen some two and a half inches since 6 A.M. Notice the flags eaten off, probably by musquash. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
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:56By 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
56. 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
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY foot three inch Ricketson! “How’s the weather down there?” THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1862
March 24, Monday: At the head of the thumbnail file of the life of the Reverend Samuel Joseph May and his contacts with people who were in contact with Henry Thoreau, there stands the following inscription: In the index to Raymond Borst’s THE THOREAU LOG: A DOCUMENTARY LIFE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU 1817- 1862, there is one and only one reference to a person bearing the surname “May.” That reference is to page 604, on which, under the date March 24, 1862, “Abigail Alcott writes to her brother, Samuel May,” about the weak condition of “Our poor Thoreau.” So who was this brother Samuel May and what had been his contact with Thoreau? This file provides a bit more detail.
Here is the post from Abba Alcott to her minister brother as reprised by Borst: Our poor Thoreau is most gone– Elizabeth Hoar is arranging his papers– Miss Thoreau copying for him — he is too weak to do any of the mechanical part himself. Mr Ticknor has been up to buy the right of all his works– He means to get up a uniform edition– Mr Alcott has written a beautiful sketch of Thoreau which is to appear in the April number of the “Atlantic” preparatory to this works– Mr Fields thought it a good introduction– He is very calm, but earnest about every thing as if his moments were numbered– Mr Alcott carries him sweet apples and now and then a Bottle of Cider which seems to please him.
ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR WILLIAM DAVIS TICKNOR BRONSON ALCOTT SOPHIA E. THOREAU Sheriff Sam Staples visited the Thoreaus and the next day recounted the substance of his visit to Waldo Emerson:
Samuel Staples yesterday had been to see Henry Thoreau. Never spent an hour with more satisfaction. Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure & peace. Thinks that very few men in Concord know Mr Thoreau; finds him serene & happy. Henry praised to me lately the manners of an old, established, calm, well-behaved river, as perfectly distinguished from those of a new river. A new river is a torrent; an old one slow & steadily supplied. What happens in any part of the old river relates to what befalls in every other part of it. ’Tis full of compensations, resources, & reserved funds. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
This happens to be the first recognition among Emerson’s journal jottings that Thoreau had been for some time in an irreversible and inevitable process of wasting away and dying. The situation had become so much more than obvious as to be no longer avoidable. [At some point during his terminal illness (I'll insert this here) Thoreau heard an organ grinder on the street, “loosening the vary paving stones and tearing the routine of life to rags and tatters,” and insisted “Give him some money. Give him some money.” This was reminiscent of what he wrote in his Journal for August 8, 1851: “The really inspiring melodies are cheap & universal –& are as audible to the poor man's son as to the rich mans. Listening to the harmonies of the universe is not allied to dissipation.… All Vienna cannot serve me more than the Italian boy who seeks my door with his organ.”] HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1864
October 8, Saturday: Louisa May Alcott contracted to publish, through the firm of A.K. Loring, her most serious novel, her favorite novel, MOODS, in which her memories of Henry Thoreau were the basis for one character. Although this was her most serious novel, her favorite novel, it had had to be cut almost in half so it could be issued as a saleable one volume rather than as an unsalable two. It would appear on Abba Alcott’s 64th birthday, Christmas Eve. ALCOTT FAMILY
Lawrence Buell would comment, in particular about this book and in general about the relation of women writers to Thoreau, cherchezing for the femme dryly and –one trusts– in good humor, that: The first fictional recreation of Thoreau was by a woman, Louisa May Alcott (MOODS). The first book, to my knowledge, published by an outsider to the transcendentalist circle that celebrates nature as a refuge from hypercivilization with explicit invocation of Thoreau as model and precursor was written by a woman: Elizabeth Wright’s LICHEN TUFTS, FROM THE ALLEGHANIES (1860). The first Thoreau Society was founded by a group of young women (1891)....
December 24, Saturday: A story by Louisa May Alcott appeared in the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, entitled “Mrs. Podgers’ Teapot, a Christmas Story.”
The first ten copies of Louisa’s MOODS were delivered hot off the press of the firm of A.K. Loring to her and she inscribed the first one for her mother Abba Alcott’s 64th birthday on this day, Christmas Eve. This was Louisa’s favorite novel, in which her memories of Henry Thoreau were the basis for one character. Although this was her most serious work, it had had to be cut almost in half so it could be issued as a saleable one volume rather than as an unsalable two. The “happy, very happy” dutiful daughter wrote: Now if it makes a little money and opens the way for more, I shall be satisfied, and you in some measure repaid for all the sympathy, help, and love that have done so much for me in these hard years. I hope Success will sweeten me and make me what I long to become more than a great writer — a good daughter. ALCOTT FAMILY The sanctimonious publisher had insisted on the omission of a reference to a character reading Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS. Her biographer refers to this novel as “a love story about Henry Thoreau” and as a stormy, triangular love story based on her long-term, secret infatuation with Henry Thoreau. It was a story from the heart, lingering over passionate possibilities and displaying Louisa’s desire for an absorbing, erotic love. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY Was it possible that Louisa was in love with Henry Thoreau? I, for one, would need to know whether she ever had even the faintest inkling of who this man had been, would need to discover that for instance she had studied WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS with sufficient perception over the years to have benefited from some of the spiritual material that is present in those books at a deep level, rather than merely utilizing the trip framework of WEEK for the framing of the romantic dialogues of one chapter in her romance! And I simply have not yet been able to see that in her.
James Thomson, an upstate New York farmer, had made no mention of any Christmas gifts in a diary which he had been keeping 1838-1840 and 1857-1864, but then we see this single entry in 1864: 26 Monday- This was a warm day thawed the snow some Snowed a little while in the morning. I went to Delhi with Bob and the Cutter. took the wool for flannel in exchange for it left 8 yards to be dressed into womans ware- paid for dressing it. it was noon when I got to Delhi. got home a little before 8 o’clock P. M. it was foggy- the Snow was drifted on the mountain- I got a Bonet for Jane Since in many years he made no mention of the Christmas holiday or celebration, it is likely that for the Thomson family this was not a significant tradition. This should not be seen as unusual, as there are other 19th- Century diaries and very few make any mention of any gift exchange at Christmas. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1876
May: After a visit to Boston, Lydia Maria Child stopped by Concord to visit with the Alcott family.
(As “Lydia Maria Francis” and “Abigail May,” she and Abba Alcott had been girlhood friends.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
1877
July: The widowed Anna Alcott Pratt and her two young sons Frederick and John Pratt moved into the Yellow House at 73 Main Street in Concord; soon they would be followed by Bronson Alcott, the dying Abba Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott. ALCOTT FAMILY THOREAU RESIDENCES
November 25, Sunday: At Harpers Ferry, high water caused considerable damage to the C&O Canal and closed the old Shenandoah Canal for good. The flood crest was 29.2 feet.
Abba Alcott died. The body would be placed in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery near the grave of Elizabeth Sewall Alcott (died March 14, 1858 from the aftereffects of scarlet fever). ALCOTT FAMILY
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Abigail May HDT WHAT? INDEX
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY 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 2010. 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. 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
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
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
ABBA ALCOTT ABIGAIL MAY
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