ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT PRATT • 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 Anna Bronson Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT 1829 By this point Minot Pratt was at work as a printer in Boston. He and his bride were married by the Reverend Waldo Emerson at his 2d Unitarian Church on Hanover Street in the North End — quite possibly this was the first couple which Emerson united in matrimony.1 NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT 1. They would have three sons, one of whom, John Bridge Pratt, would become an insurance man and marry an Alcott daughter, Anna Bronson Alcott. Their two grandsons by John and Anna, or “Meg,” were thus the little men of Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE MEN, named “John Brooke” and “Thomas Bangs” in the book [need to verify this] and Frederick Alcott Pratt and John Sewall Pratt in real life. HDT WHAT? INDEX ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT 1831 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 2 ARCHIVES OF PALERMO, 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 NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE 2. Note that this is a completely different play than 1827’s TANCRED; OR, THE SIEGE OF ANTIOCH, which never was performed. HDT WHAT? INDEX ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT 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 ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT 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. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Anna Bronson Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT ANNA BRONSON 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 “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Anna Bronson Alcott HDT WHAT? INDEX ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT 1847 HDT WHAT? INDEX ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT Lecture 113 DATE PLACE TOPIC February 10, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (I) February 17, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (II) January 3, Monday, 1848, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “An Excursion to Ktaadn” 3. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT Narrative of Event: The records of the Concord Lyceum state, “Concord Feb 17 1847 A lecture was delivered by Henry D Thoreau of Concord. Subject — Same as last week. A. G. Fay Sec[retary]”4 The lecture was the twelfth of the season’s sixteen offerings. TIMELINE OF WALDEN Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: See lecture 10 for a discussion of Miss Prudence Ward’s favorable comments on this lecture, which she reported, perhaps erroneously, to be a repetition of Thoreau’s lecture of the previous week. Lyceums very rarely allowed repeat performances, and at this time Henry Thoreau almost certainly had a draft of the 2d of his 3 early WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS lectures. But whether Prudence was right or wrong about the duplication, this second lecture attracted “a very full audience,” as Ward reported (quoted in Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, page 187), and was well received.