I was taught to sew before five, little patchwork squares, in the tiniest of “over-and-over” stitches. When about eight, buttonhole-stitch was added to my accomplishments, and here occurred my first invention, genuine enough, though slight. As taught, the thread was looped about the needle before pulling it through, and I discovered that the same effect could be produced by pulling it through first and then picking up the thread in a certain way, with the advantage of being able to use up a shorter end.
We children were so violently well brought up that we cherished an Ishmaelitish resentment against “grown-ups.” Young women we called “proudies,” and for young men I found a lovely name in a book— “fops.” Of all the record of malicious mischief which distinguishes those early years the utter worst is this: we would roll our hoops in mud and trundle them against the voluminous crinolines of the period. When angry ladies turned on the aggressors they were met by such sweet-faced, polite apologies as abated their wrath instantly.
In a New York boarding-house, for description of which see Henry Alden’s Old New York — he even mentions “little Charlotte Perkins” — we established a record for infant iniquity, but it lacked the Machiavellian quality of those apologies. In later school-life my brother remained a source of ingenious misdemeanors, while I was well behaved, so I truly think that he, the older, was mainly responsible for our pranks, but one crowning outrage there in New York was wholly mine. The house was one of those tall, narrow ones with a four-story staircase winding back and forth in pinched loops scarcely a foot wide. Down this slit one could look, or drop things, from the top floor to the basement. To Mrs. Swift, the landlady, doubtless a worthy soul, we imps had taken a dislike. She had reproved us as we well deserved, for our sins against the boarders. We objected also to her little red-eyed poodle, Pinky, and did horrid things to his food.
On one sad occasion I, looking over the banisters on the top floor, perceived Mrs. Swift similarly leaning over on the ground floor, directly below me.... If you were a mischievous child — she had the beginning of a bald spot on the crown of her head — what would you have done? Or at least wanted to do? I did it. It was too tempting — Down softly from story to story sailed the little white drop, and landed, spat! exactly on that bald spot....
That was the time when a distracted mother insisted that my father, who happened to call that evening, should whip me. He did, with a small whip she had purchased for our chastisement.
“Hold out your hand!”
I held it out, as flatly stretched as I could make it.
He struck the little hand several times, told mother that he would never do that again, and never did.
Among our pleasantest visits were those at the new big house of Aunt Harriet Stowe in Hartford. She had built it, to suit her eager fancy, out of the proceeds of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. There was a two-story conservatory in the rear, the great entrance hall opened on it, the back parlor, and the dining-room; upstairs a gallery on three sides allowed access from bedrooms and hall. Aunt Harriet used to sit at a small table in that back parlor, looking out on the flowers and ferns and little fountain while she painted in water-colors. From her dainty flower pictures I got my first desire to paint, and an eager love for Windsor & Newton’s little china dishes.
One splendid memory of those years stands out above all others. We were with the aunts in Hartford, at the time of the Grant and Colfax election. There was a torch-light procession, houses were illuminated, much money was spent in decoration by those who had it to spend. We had not, but determined to make as good a show as we could. In every one of our tiny window-panes we stuck a candle, making a manyfaceted glitter more effective than fewer lights in larger panes.
“The Stowe girls,” Hattie and Eliza, came to help us. Across the front door we placed a large table, and behind the narrow windows on either side set a large lamp. In the full light of those lamps stood a Goddess of Liberty — eight years old! A white dress, a liberty cap, a liberty pole (which was a new mop-handle with a red-white-and-blue sash tied on it and a cornucopia of the same colors on its top), and a great flag draped around me — there I stood — Living. One crowded hour of glorious life, that was, to a motionless, glorified child.
The procession seemed to go on forever. I think it took at least an hour to pass a given point, but to that fixed little figure at one given point it was none too long. They were soldiers, real soldiers in uniform, who had been in the war but three years since, who cared passionately about the General they wished to elect. As each company passed a specially illuminated house the leader would turn and march backward, keeping time with his sword, and it was: “ONE! TWO! THREE! U! S! G! HURRAH!”...
I can hear them now.
Might not our educators consider if such a soul-expanding experience is not of lasting value to a child; and if, some day, we may not learn how to accustom our children to large feelings instead of keeping them always among little ones....
If I was a pretty child no hint of it was allowed to enter my mind. Mother cut off the fat little brown curls at an early age, lest I should be vain — and kept them as long as she lived.
My passion for beauty dates far back; in picture books the one or two that were really beautiful; in the colors of the worsted mother used, loving some and hating others; in bits of silk and ribbon, buttons — children used to collect strings of buttons in those days; I keenly recall my delight in specially beautiful things. There was a little cloak of purple velvet, deep pansy-purple, made over from something of mother’s, that enraptured my soul.
Dolls were never lovely enough, most of them were mere babies, china heads and flat-jointed, sawdust-stuffed bodies; I wanted people, boy and man dolls as well as girls, and named my favorites Lady Geraldine, Lady Isabel, and so on. I wanted queens, and thrones to play with, murmuring a little jingle about “Burnished brass and polished glass” — I did not see why dolls could not be like the kings and princesses I read about. Their meager bodies especially distressed me. “Why don’t they make them like little statues?” I demanded. Only once, calling somewhere with mother, did I find a girl who played as I did — an unforgetable pleasure. And once I conceived a devoted affection for a schoolmate, a pale, long-haired Sunday-schoolish child — Etta Talcott was her name. When we as usual moved away, I sent her a sacrificial offering, a box adorned with decalcomania which I thought lovely, and in it my dearest toys.
For real growth there were two notable steps during a brief school period, when I was eight — my total schooling covered four years, among seven different schools, ending when I was fifteen. This little patch was in a public school in Hartford, quite a big one it seemed to us. Floods of children I remember, going down some stairs, and beauty — a girl with a rich mane of wavy chestnut hair. There was a carrot-headed Irish boy who read in a halting sing-song about “the yellow catkins hanging on the willows in the spring,” and gave a touching version of “Lo, the poor Indian’s” speech thus: “Then came the timid whiteman, asking to lie down on the Indian’s bare skin.” We thought the white men far from timid.
I had reached long division, and learned how to prove the examples, a keen delight to the rational mind. Taking the slate to be marked by the teacher, she said, “This one is wrong.” “I have proved it,” I replied confidently. Then she showed me her book with the answers. “See, here is the answer, yours is wrong.” To which I still replied, “But I have proved it.” Then she did the example herself, and proved it, and I was right — the book was wrong! This was a great lesson; science, law, was more to be trusted than authority.
Then, one day when that big light room was quiet save for the soft buzz of many hushed voices muttering over their lessons, the speculative Charlotte said to herself: “I wonder why we all have to keep still.... I wonder what would happen if any one spoke out loud.... I’m going to find out.” But I was cautious as well as experimental, and selected the shortest word I could think of. Across the low-murmuring room arose a clear, childish voice remarking, “It
.” “Who said that?” Up went my hand. “Come here.” I went there. The teacher put her arm around me (my brother and I usually stood well with our teachers on account of general information and decorum). “Why did you do that?” she asked.
“I wanted to see what would happen,” I truthfully replied.
Nothing happened. She said I must not do it again, for which indeed there was no occasion. So I learned another great lesson, long remembered and acted on — that things debarred may sometimes be done — in safety.
Of all those childish years the most important step was this, I learned the use of a constructive imagination. Under mother’s careful regimen we children had a light and early supper, and then were read to for a while, too short a while, inexorably cut off by bedtime. The reading was interesting, sometimes thrilling, Oliver Twist for instance, to an eight-year-old. But that painfully early bed hour stopped the story, perhaps in the middle of a chapter; off we went, dumbly, but with inward rebellion.
You may lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. Bed is one thing, sleep is another. Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive. Lying there, not a bit sleepy, full of eager interest in the unfinished chapter, following the broken adventure to possible developments, I learned the joy of brain-building. Balboa was not more uplifted by his new ocean.
Beauty and splendor were mine at last to pile and change at will. The stern restrictions, drab routine, unbending discipline that hemmed me in, became of no consequence. I could make a world to suit me. All that inner thirst for glorious loveliness could be gratified now, at will, unboundedly. Not all this was clear to me at the time, but one thing was — this was so delightful that it must be wrong.
Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!
I arranged it with my conscience thus: every night I would think only of pleasant things that really might happen; once a week I would think of lovelier, stranger things, once a month of wonders, and once a year of anything I wanted to! This program was probably soon forgotten, but it shows conscience wrestling with fancy at an early age.
The dream world grew apace. Sometimes it was “having my wishes.” Here with sagacity I avoided all those foolish mistakes made by the misguided persons in the fairy-tales, who had their wishes and made a mess of them. My first one was: “I wish that everything I wish may be Right!” To be Right was the main thing in life.
Most of the wishing was childish pleasure in having things of glittering gorgeousness, but what comes up most clearly was the laying in of copious materials to work with, as paper, pencils, paints. There was a stationer’s store in Hartford then, Geer & Pond’s, wherein was a big sample case of Windsor & Newton’s water-colors — I wished for the whole case! They had also a pen of unparalleled beauty, a gold pen with a handle of pink pearl — that never-attained pen lasted me for years as a type of beauty.
Soon, among the delights of having things, grew the greater delight of doing things. In the attic were piles of Harper’s Weeklys with the powerful cartoons of Nast. I browsed among them, became deeply impressed with civic crime and the difficulty of stopping it, and when my schoolmates would crowd around me at recess and say “Let’s tell,” my preferred topic was the capture and punishment of Boss Tweed — this at about ten. I did not compose, make stories like Frances Hodgson in her childhood, but was already scheming to improve the world.
In 1870 we went to live in the country near Rehoboth, Massachusetts. After a summer with friends mother took a house by herself, and there we lived, for about three years, on what I do not know. Clothing was mostly given to us, though mother made the brown-checked gingham dresses and drawers in which I played untrammeled, and knitted long woolen stockings and mittens for us both. We ran barefoot in summer, reveled in snow-drifts in winter. My brother kept hens, from which he made enough to buy himself an overcoat, besides furnishing us with eggs and fowls to eat.
There were memorably delicious meals, new potatoes boiled in their jackets, all peeling and mealy, with a bowl of hot milk with butter and salt in it; and a whole dinner of “hasty pudding,” first with milk, then with butter and molasses, then with milk again and so till we could no more. These were pure delight at the time, but now look strongly like bed-rock necessities.
Three years of this country life, healthy but barren. No playmates, save two children of the farmer who lived opposite. No school, though mother still gave us lessons, and once a school-teacher came — possibly boarded a while, and taught us some arithmetic. This letter (probably fall of 1872) — I was doubtless told to make a better copy — illuminates the period.
DEAR FATHER,
Will you please send the money for July, August and September. You told me to remind you of The Princess and Goblin if you forgot it. My three kits are getting large and fat. Thomas drowned the old cat for she killed four chicks. Thomas has got a nice garden and furnishes us with potatoes, tomatoes, melons, corn, beans and squashes and pumpkins. We have apples and pears in plenty. Please write a real long letter to me. This morning Thomas found a chimney swallow in the dining room. He had come down the parlor chimney, the fireplace of which was open. I wish you would write to me often; Willie Judd and Thomas Lord write to Thomas and he to them but nobody writes to me but you. Thomas caught a little turtle about an inch big. Thomas has got his snares set again, and caught a partridge this morning. I inclose two pictures in hopes you will do the same. Your affectionately
with my little monogram for signature.
My brother, with his garden, hens and hunting had a somewhat fuller life, outside, but no one had a richer, more glorious life than I had, inside. It grew into fairy-tales, one I have yet; it spread to limitless ambitions. With “my wishes” I modestly chose to be the most beautiful, the wisest, the best person in the world; the most talented in music, painting, literature, sculpture — why not, when one was wishing?
But no personal wealth or glory satisfied me. Soon there developed a Prince and Princess of magic powers, who went about the world collecting unhappy children and taking them to a guarded Paradise in the South Seas. I had a boundless sympathy for children, feeling them to be suppressed, misunderstood.
It speaks volumes for the lack of happiness in my own actual life that I should so industriously construct it in imagination. I wanted affection, expressed affection. My brother was really very fond of me, but his teasing hid it from me entirely. Mother loved us desperately, but her tireless devotion was not the same thing as petting, her caresses were not given unless we were asleep, or she thought us so.
My dream world was no secret. I was but too ready to share it, but there were no sympathetic listeners. It was my life, but lived entirely alone. Then, influenced by a friend with a pre-Freudian mind, alarmed at what she was led to suppose this inner life might become, mother called on me to give it up. This was a command. According to all the ethics I knew I must obey, and I did....
Just thirteen. This had been my chief happiness for five years. It was by far the largest, most active part of my mind. I was called upon to close off the main building as it were and live in the “L.” No one could tell if I did it or not, it was an inner fortress, open only to me....
But obedience was Right, the thing had to be done, and I did it. Night after night to shut the door on happiness, and hold it shut. Never, when dear, bright, glittering dreams pushed hard, to let them in. Just thirteen....
CHAPTER III. THE END OF CHILDHOOD
OUR next move, in the fall of 1873, was to Providence, Rhode Island, to a little house on Vernon Street where bedridden Grandma Westcott lived with Great-grandma Perkins, who still took care of her daughter. But the valiant old lady was over eighty, and died in December, leaving mother to care for the invalid. Only a little while, however, for grandma died in March. My brother had typhoid fever at the time, but when death came to the house the Irish servant promptly departed, leaving mother to get on as
best she could.
Thomas recovered in due time. All I recall of that illness is that the doctor let him have ripe bananas as soon as he could eat anything. Thomas always “took” whatever disease came within reach, and had it severely. If unescapable I had it later and lighter, as when he had scarlet fever and lost the use of an ear, I followed with scarlatina only; when he nearly died with diphtheria I succeeded to it so lightly that I did not go to bed at all.
In June mother joined a “coöperative housekeeping” group, with Dr. and Mrs. Stevens whom she had previously visited in Rehoboth, Mrs. Isham and her two boys, with whom we had lived in Hartford, and a Mr. Wellman of Cambridge, Massachusetts. All of these people were Swedenborgians, mother presently joined that church, and had us children enter it also — an impermanent experience. There was a strong flavor of Spiritualism on the part of Mrs. Stevens, the dominant figure of the group.
Coöperative housekeeping is inherently doomed to failure. From early experience and later knowledge I thoroughly learned this fact, and have always proclaimed it. Yet such is the perversity of the average mind that my advocacy of the professionalizing of housework — having it done by the hour by specially trained persons, with the service of cooked meals to the home — has always been objected to as “coöperative housekeeping.” Upton Sinclair’s ill-fated Helicon Hall experiment he attributed to my teachings, without the least justification.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 248
