ELIZABETH PEABODYSEWALL ALCOTT
• Mr. Amos Bronson Alcott born November 29, 1799 as Amos Bronson Alcox in Wolcott, Connecticut married May 23, 1830 in Boston to Abigail May, daughter of Colonel Joseph May died March 4, 1888 in Boston
• Mrs. Abigail (May) “Abba” Alcott born October 8, 1800 in Boston, Massachusetts died November 25, 1877 in Concord, Massachusetts
• Miss Anna Bronson Alcott born March 16, 1831 in Germantown, Pennsylvania married May 23, 1860 in Concord to John Bridge Pratt of Concord, Massachusetts died July 17, 1893 in Concord
• Miss Louisa May Alcott born November 29, 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania died March 6, 1888 in Roxbury, Massachusetts
• Miss Elizabeth Sewall Alcott born June 24, 1835 in Boston, Massachusetts died March 14, 1858 in Concord, Massachusetts
• Abby May Alcott (Mrs. Ernest Niericker), born July 26, 1840 in Concord, married March 22, 1878 in London, England to Ernest Niericker, died December 29, 1879 in Paris
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Elizabeth Peabody Alco 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.
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
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
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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CHARLES. God is spirit, we are spirit and body. JOSIAH (5 years old). He differs from us, as a king’s body 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.] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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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 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.
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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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
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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.
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.
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
ELIZABETH PEABODY ALCOTT ELIZABETH SEWALL ALCOTT April 1, Wednesday: For the first time the Alcott girls began to attend a school not taught by their own father. Anna Alcott was a student, probably a scholarship student, of John Thoreau, Jr. and Henry David Thoreau at Concord Academy, while Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Louisa May Alcott were at the kinder-school run by Mary Russell in the Emerson home. We have a record of this period from a 10-year-old new student that summer who was John Junior’s student rather than Henry’s, Horace Rice Hosmer. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson described Horace as a child who “craved affection.” As a grown-up, Horace would inform Dr. Emerson that
Henry was not loved in the school. He had his scholars upstairs. I was with John only. John was the more human, loving; understood and thought of others. Henry thought more about himself. He was a conscientious teacher, but rigid. He would not take a man’s money for nothing: if a boy were sent to him, he could make him do all he could. No, he was not disagreeable. I learned to understand him later. I think that he was then in the green-apple stage.
Another pupil was Thomas Hosmer of Bedford, who would grow up to be a dentist in Boston, but who at the time was walking to Concord for classes with another Bedford boy, B.W. Lee, who would later relocate to Newport, Vermont. Thomas Hosmer wrote Dr. Emerson to relate of Thoreau that:
I have seen children catch him by the hand, as he was going home from school, to walk with him and hear more.
One of the outings the class had this spring was a walk to Fairhaven Hill, where they did a survey of the hill and the adjacent shoreline of the river. A student’s comment on this field-work with surveying instruments was that of the brothers, Henry was the more active during the surveying.
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June 24, Friday: Lieutenant Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly, British officers in the custody of Emir Nasrullah Khan of Bukhara on the Silk Road, were executed as spies.
Elizabeth Sewall Alcott’s 7th birthday. A shed at Dove Cottage was draped with sheets and with green boughs and furnished with vases of flowers for the occasion, and there was a candlelight supper in this bower, attended by Waldo Emerson and others.
Lizzie declared:
My life shall be one constant act of love.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1843
Volume I of John Ruskin’s MODERN PAINTERS defended the paintings of J.M.W. Turner (Thoreau would not read Ruskin’s MODERN PAINTERS until October 1857).
J.M.W. Turner’s “Approach to Venice” appeared.
Benjamin Robert Haydon’s “Curtius Leaping into the Gulf” depiction of the self-sacrifice of Marcus Curtius,1 “Uriel and Satan,” and “Meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society” (now in the National Portrait Gallery).
Thomas Cole’s second version of his “Voyage of Life” series of paintings depicting life as a journey through space was placed on display in Boston, in New-York, and in Philadelphia. (It would then be purchased by George K. Shoenberger of Cincinnati, Ohio. After his mansion would be converted into a sanitarium and become part of Bethesda Hospital, this series of paintings would be rediscovered hanging in the chapel of the hospital and would, in 1971, be transferred to the National Gallery of Art.)
The board game “The Mansion of Happiness” was developed by S.B. Ives of Salem, Massachusetts: landing on a space designated for “Charity,” “Industry,” or other desirable traits would speed players up a spiral track toward eternal happiness while landing on the spaces marked for vices such as “Sloth,” “Cruelty,” and ingratitude would send them tumbling backward.
This would be played by the girls of the Alcott family.
1. According to Titus Livius, in 362 BCE a chasm opened in Rome. After attempting to deal with this through the offering of various sort of votive sacrifices, the people came to suspect that the chasm would close only if they put into it their “most precious thing of all.” Marcus Curtius, a young eques, understanding correctly that this most precious thing could only be the courage and strength of the Roman soldier, mounted his horse and, wearing all his weapons, rode into the chasm — which obediently closed upon him. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ELIZABETH SEWALL ALCOTT ELIZABETH PEABODY ALCOTT June 1 (Pentecost Thursday): Joseph Smith, Jr. “got married with” Elvira Anie Cowles.
Go East, 46-year-old black woman, go East: Isabella2 experienced a command to “go east” and testify, adopted the monicker Sojourner Truth, and departed New-York with but an hour’s notice, with two York shillings in her pocket, carrying her worldly belongings in a pillowcase, to move on foot through Long Island and Connecticut, testifying to whatever audiences she was able to attract. –It is the life of a wandering evangelist, is mine. In the course of attending Millerite meetings to testify, she would accommodate to a number of the apocalyptic tenets of that group.
As Louisa May Alcott has reported in later life, on this same day quite another journey was taking place:
On the first day of June, 1843, a large wagon, drawn by a small horse and containing a motley load, went lumbering over certain New England hills, with the pleasing accompaniments of wind, rain and hail. A serene man with a serene child upon his knee was driving, or rather being driven, for the small horse had it all his own way. Behind a small boy, embracing a bust of Socrates, was an energetic looking woman, with a benevolent brow, satirical mouth and eyes full of hope and courage. A baby reposed upon her lap, a mirror leaned against her knee, a basket of provisions danced about her feet, and she struggled with a large, unruly umbrella, with which she tried to cover every one but herself. Twilight began to fall, and the rain came down in a despondent drizzle, but the calm man gazed as tranquilly into the fog as if he beheld a radiant bow of promise spanning the gray sky.
The Consociate Family of Bronson Alcott was on its way from Concord to “Fruitlands” on Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts, in the district then known politely as “Still River North” and impolitely as “Hog
2. Isabella Bomefree van Wagenen, “Bomefree” being the name of her first husband which by virtue of enslavement she had been denied, and “van Wagenen” being the name of the white family which she assumed and used for a number of years. (“Wagener” was a consistent misspelling perpetrated by the printer of the first version of her NARRATIVE in 1850.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Street,” with its prospect of Wachusett and Mount Monadnock and its prospect of “ideals without feet or
hands” (an apt phrase said to have been created by Waldo Emerson,3 who himself, if anyone ever metaphorically lacked them, metaphorically lacked feet and hands and other essential body parts), ideals such as “a family in harmony with the primitive instincts of man.” In her fictional account of the journey, Louisa May Alcott invented an additional child and placed it on her father’s knee, obviously where she would have wanted to be, and made it a “serene” child, what she never was but longed to be. The bust of Socrates actually rode between the father Bronson, who was holding the reins, and Charles Lane, on the wagon’s bench. There was no room in this wagon for William Lane or for Anna Alcott, who for all 14 miles of the journey had to walk alongside it.
At this point the Association of Industry and Education had 113 members, a large proportion of whom were children:
3. But we may note that in Bronson Alcott’s journal for Week 45 in November 1837, Alcott had himself termed himself “an Idea without hands.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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COMMUNITARIANISM Membership
April 1842 41 May 1842 65 End of 1842 83 June 1843 113 Winter 1844 120 Spring 1845 120
Having had enough after less than two months of attempting to teach almost entirely without teaching supplies and without adequate classroom space, Sophia Foord threatened to resign as teacher at the Association. (Promises would be made that would keep her teaching while efforts were made to convert a barn into classrooms, but the problem eventually would be resolved by the need of the community to use its children as a cheap source of incessant factory labor. After Miss Foord left Northampton, she became tutor to the children of the Chase family (Elizabeth Buffum Chace) of Valley Falls, Rhode Island; “she taught botany; she walked with the children over the fields … and made her pupils observe the geographical features of the pond and its banks, and carefully taught them to estimate distances by sight.”)
Railroad service to Concord began. Preliminary earthmoving crews, and then crossties and rails crews, had reached Concord at the rate of 33 feet per day, filling in Walden Pond’s south-west arm to give it its present shape. 1,000 Irishmen were earning $0.50 or $0.60 for bonebreaking 16-hour days of labor. Waldo Emerson was elated because he much preferred riding in the railroad coach to riding in the stage coach which offered a “ludicrous pathetic tragical picture” (his comment from April 15, 1834; I don’t know whether he meant that he felt that he presented a ludicrous pathetic tragical appearance while riding on the stage coach or that the view from the stage coach window presented him with a ludicrous pathetic tragical perspective). He found, however, that when a philosopher rides the railroad “Ideal Philosophy takes place at once” as “men & trees & barns whiz by you as fast as the leaves of a dictionary” and this helps in grasping the real impermanence of matter: “hitherto esteemed symbols of stability do absolutely dance by you” and we experience “the sensations of a swallow who skims by trees & bushes with about the same speed” (June 10, 1834). By this time, with the railroad actually in Concord, Emerson had decided that “Machinery & Transcendentalism agree well.”4
“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
4. EMERSON’S JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS 4: 277, 4:296, 8:397. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ELIZABETH PEABODY ALCOTT ELIZABETH SEWALL ALCOTT
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
ELIZABETH SEWALL ALCOTT ELIZABETH PEABODY 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
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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
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THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Waldo Emerson to his journal, same date:
At the performing of Handel’s Messiah I heard some delicious strains & understood a very little of all that was told me.
December 19, Saturday: Friend Daniel Ricketson in Concord, to his journal:
PARKER PILLSBURY Clear and colder; accompanied Thoreau on a survey of WALDO EMERSON woodland near Walden Pond this forenoon, dined with him ABBA ALCOTT at his father’s, afternoon at my lodgings with Thoreau and Parker Pillsbury. R.W. Emerson also joined us at LOUISA MAY ALCOTT the close of the P.M. Took tea with Mr. Emerson, called on Mrs. Alcott and her daughters, whom I found very ELIZABETH ALCOTT agreeable and intelligent people; one daughter I did MAY ALCOTT not see, being quite ill, probably not to recover. Mr. Sanborn called there, with whom I returned to my room, he occupied with a sister Channing’s house. ELLERY CHANNING
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1858
March 12, Friday: Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, age 23, died of the aftereffects of scarlet fever.
The girls never forgot that night, for no sleep came to them as they kept their watch, with that dreadful sense of powerlessness which comes to us in hours like those. “If God spares Beth, I never will complain again,” whispered Meg earnestly. “If God spares Beth, I’ll try to love and serve Him all my life,” answered Jo, with equal fervor. “I wish I had no heart, it aches so,” sighed Meg, after a pause. “If life is often as hard as this, I don’t see how we ever shall get through it,” added her sister despondently. Here the clock struck twelve, and both forgot themselves in watching Beth, for they fancied a change passed over her wan face. The house was still as death, and nothing but the wailing of the wind broke the deep hush. Weary Hannah slept on, and no one but the sisters saw the pale shadow which seemed to fall upon the little bed. An hour went by, and nothing happened except Laurie’s quiet departure for the station. Another hour, — still no one came; and anxious fears of delay in the storm, or accidents by the way, or, worst of all, a great grief at Washington, haunted the girls. It was past two, when Jo, who stood at the window thinking how dreary the world looked in its winding-sheet of snow, heard a movement by the bed, and turning quickly, saw Meg kneeling before their mother’s easy-chair with her face hidden. A dreadful fear passed coldly over Jo, as she thought, “Beth is dead, and Meg is afraid to tell me.” She was back at her post in an instant, and to her excited eyes a great change seemed to have taken place. The fever flush and the look of pain were gone, and the beloved little face looked so pale and peaceful in its utter repose that Jo felt no desire to weep or to lament. Leaning low over this dearest of her sisters, she kissed the damp forehead with her heart on her lips, and softly whispered, “Good-by, my Beth. Good-by!”
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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March 14, Sunday: We learn, from Bronson Alcott’s journal, that this was the day on which offices were said for the departed Elizabeth Sewall Alcott. Lizzie had asked for ether, to help her be “forgetful of this death I feel.” During the day Alcott visited Waldo Emerson at his home, and in the evening Henry Thoreau and Waldo and Mrs. Lidian Emerson visited the Alcotts at their home. The father entered in his journal:
She lived a short, innocent, and diligent life with us, and has an early translation. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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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
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Amy Belding Brown has been told that the body of Elizabeth was one of the 1st to be deposited in this new facility.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: April 12, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with