Finally, on Sunday, May 23, 1830, Bronson Alcott at the advanced age of thirty was married to Miss Abigail May at King’s Chapel on Tremont Street by the Reverend Francis Greenwood. Their honeymoon was the walk from the chapel back to Newall’s boardinghouse on Franklin Street, where Abigail moved in with her impecunious dreamer of a husband. In January, as was his habit, Bronson had made a list of his hopes for the New Year. There were seven: meeting men with great minds, influencing public opinion, self-improvement, writing a book, running the school, and the last two—a good marriage and enough money. A year later, the Alcotts’ first child, Anna, was born, and Louisa May Alcott—named after one of the distinguished May aunts—was born the following November.
By the time the Alcotts returned to Boston after the failure of the Germantown school in 1835, the economy was growing, land speculation was feverish, and the city, formally incorporated in 1822, expanded around the new Court House, a Greek Revival building with wide steps and impressive Ionic columns. This symbol of civic pride joined the dome of the impressive Charles Bullfinch Statehouse at the top of the Boston Common. The Common was the city’s center, where cows grazed, children played, and great men took morning walks. Once a year during the general election in May, vendors set themselves up in rows by products, with the alcoholic beverages closest to the polls.
In the spring of 1835, with Bronson Alcott’s new Temple School—his fourth school in five years—triumphantly opening, the family moved into a spacious boardinghouse owned by a Mrs. Beach at 3 Somerset Court. Their loyal friend Elizabeth Peabody, who was Alcott’s assistant at the school, left the house where she had been staying and moved in with them rent-free in lieu of her postponed Temple School wages. Peabody was one of three daughters of a Salem, Massachusetts, doctor, sisters whose history would be twined around the history of nineteenth-century literature and ideas: her older sister, Mary, eventually married educator Horace Mann, and her younger sister, Sophia, married Nathaniel Hawthorne. Elizabeth, who never married but ran a bookstore and taught, became a kind of favorite maiden aunt for many of the century’s literary lights.
One of her first projects was the Alcotts. She got along well with Abigail Alcott, and sometimes babysat for Louisa and Anna. On June 24, after a difficult pregnancy, so difficult that the naughty little Louisa was sent away to live with her cranky old grandfather at Federal Court for the final weeks, Abigail Alcott gave birth to her third daughter. The baby was named Elizabeth Peabody Alcott after the family friend and her father’s greatest admirer.
Living at the Alcotts’, Peabody began work on a book about the growing Temple School titled Record of a School. Peabody worked directly from her schoolroom notes, and both she and Alcott were thrilled by the emerging portrait. The book’s publication in September brought more success. It was reviewed in a New York magazine, the Knickerbocker. The bestselling book, infused with Elizabeth Peabody’s literary enthusiasm and her passion for the subject, became the instruction manual for a new era in American thought. As Peabody biographer Megan Marshall has suggested, Record of a School was a nineteenth-century version of educator A. S. Neill’s Summerhill, a 1960 book that was read for its revolutionary attitude toward children and education.17
Buoyed by the Temple School’s success, Bronson Alcott optimistically expanded the enterprise rather than paying off old debts. The Alcott family moved into a big house on Front Street, and again Elizabeth Peabody moved with them, into a large upstairs room with a view through the trees toward Dorchester. Reading in her perfectly arranged room with its rugs and a bookcase borrowed from the Alcotts, Peabody began some dreaming of her own. The review of Record of a School in the Knickerbocker had called her a woman of genius, and she began to imagine starting a school herself and doing more of her own writing.
The first sign of trouble for the Temple School came from close to home. Slowly, and perhaps inexorably, the Alcotts and Elizabeth Peabody began to get on each other’s nerves. To some extent, they had always disagreed. Bronson’s aim was to bring his students into a harmonious society, the perfect community that remained his transcendent vision. Community would always be his goal, his religion, and his finest creation. Elizabeth was more interested in bringing each student to maximum individual intellectual and spiritual consummation.
Increasingly, Elizabeth was bothered by one of Bronson’s imaginative punishments. He would invite students to disobey, suggesting, for instance, that they would rather go sledding on the Common in the winter than go to school. When they said they would like to go sledding, he exiled them to the hallway—denying them for a time the stimulation and fun in the schoolroom.
Many of the New England Transcendentalist writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Ellery Channing—were educated at Harvard. Most of them believed that holiness would be achieved through the cultivation of the individual in communion with nature or with other men. “Know thyself,” was one of the Transcendentalist commandments. Writers like Thoreau imagined man at his best alone in a natural landscape. Alcott, perhaps because he had no formal education, came at the world from a different direction—he believed in community. To him man was at his best working with other men.
Living with the Alcotts, Elizabeth Peabody discovered, made admiration for the family patriarch harder to sustain. Alcott, a tall slender man in his thirties with his graying blond hair worn long, was brilliant with children and sometimes less than brilliant with adults. He didn’t like being disagreed with, especially at his own dinner table. One evening, Elizabeth felt she had to argue with Alcott’s preaching of the principles of the faddish Sylvester Graham. Graham, a Connecticut zealot, would soon cause riots in Boston as the town’s butchers and bakers protested his recommended diet of crumbly brown graham flour—his own concoction—and fruits and vegetables. This was the diet served by Abba Alcott at the dinner table, although Abba occasionally provided chicken or meat for her daughters on the sly.
Alcott had heard Graham lecture in February at the Swedenborg Chapel in Cambridge, and he asked Peabody what people thought of Graham in Salem, her hometown. She responded that Graham’s claims of two-century life spans for those who followed the Graham diet didn’t sound inviting. Alcott called her desire to die before the age of two hundred suicidal. Peabody, whose father was a doctor, angrily shot back that Alcott was against doctors in general. Alcott, she reminded him, had once said that doctors were like vampires feeding on society. Then Peabody retired to her room in distress.
Added to the complications in the Alcott household was Abba Alcott’s famous temper. This temper and its results in a household of young women became a character in Little Women and one of the things Louisa refused to sentimentalize. “Jo’s hot temper mastered her, and she shook Amy until her teeth chattered in her head; crying, in a passion of grief and anger—You wicked, wicked girl! I can never write again and I’ll never forgive you as long as I live!”18 Jo March gets so angry with her sister Amy that she leads her into danger on the frozen Concord River, and Amy almost drowns. When Jo weeps with remorse, Marmee, the sisters’ loving mother, tells Jo that she too had a ferocious temper that she has learned to control with the help of their father. But the real Bronson Alcott didn’t have the calming effect on his wife that Father has on Marmee. There were times when Abba’s irrational temper had an uncanny resemblance to her formerly three-year-old daughter’s tantrums.
Elizabeth Peabody described all this in letters to her sister Mary, and Mary began urging Elizabeth to sever ties with the Alcotts, even offering to take her place at the school and in the house. Mary Peabody was no fan of either of the Alcotts, and both she and Elizabeth were also writing passionate letters to another educator, Horace Mann, who had mixed feelings about Bronson Alcott’s revolutionary ideas. Alcott lacked modesty, Mary wrote to Elizabeth, and she was certainly right about that. It was time for Elizabeth to stop “sacrificing your own comfort for his convenience,”19 she wrote.
Elizabeth Peabody seemed to
agree in her letters to Mary, but she wasn’t ready to act. In the meantime, she was shoulder-to-the-wheel taking notes for a sequel to her great success, and trying desperately, since her name was on the book, to rein in Bronson’s wilder, more narcissistic tendencies. Mary was too busy with her own school in Salem to intervene, so instead, in the spring of 1836, she sent their younger sister Sophia to Boston as an ally against the Alcotts—a move which was to backfire in a painful way for the beleaguered Elizabeth.
This electric knot of connections and disconnections, men and women struggling to find their place in the world, sisters, great men arguing with each other, civic ferment, debt and wealth, and passionate personal relations, was the rich atmosphere in which Louisa May Alcott began life in the 1830s. Louisa wrote in a short memoir that one of her earliest memories was playing with her father’s books, building towers and bridges, and scribbling on blank pages when she could find a pen or pencil.
Another early memory was the day before her fourth birthday, the Saturday she and her father celebrated in the sunny upper rooms of his triumphant new Temple School. Louisa and her father were both born on November 29, under the sign of Sagittarius the horse-man. According to astrologers, Sagittarians are steady, hardworking, are good at bearing burdens, and make great friends. The end of November in New England is a gray time following the vivid show of red and gold when the leaves change color in the early autumn. The air smells like apples. Crowds of geese vee their way south; squirrels and rabbits disappear; there are days that foreshadow the bitter winter freeze of the coming months.
The day of the celebration, a day early because the birthday was on a Sunday, the Alcotts left the boardinghouse and headed down Bowdoin Street toward Temple Place. The young Louisa was shown the school’s delightful playthings, the globes and blocks, books and hourglass. Then the students gathered to crown their teacher and his daughter with laurel wreaths. Bronson Alcott held the students spellbound while he told them the story of his own education, his upbringing in Wolcott, Connecticut, his marriage to Abigail May, and the birth of his three daughters. Everything about him seemed to fascinate his audience, and the birthday girl listened too as if nothing could be more gratifying than hearing her father’s story.
Carried away by his own eloquence, her father told the happy story of his visit to Concord to walk and talk with the great Ralph Waldo Emerson and the unhappy story of his recent visit to see the noble William Lloyd Garrison in Boston’s Leverett Street Jail. Garrison, the editor of an abolitionist paper, the Liberator, had been incarcerated after being pursued by a mob outraged at his antislavery beliefs. The morning ended with refreshments and a recitation by one of the girls in honor of the double birthday: with hearts of happy mirth; we’ve sallied forth from home to celebrate a birth.20
It was during the serving of the refreshments—small cakes—that Louisa was taught another complicated lesson about sharing to add to the already implicit lesson of the day: that her biggest gift on her own birthday was to celebrate her father’s birthday. The toddler had been given the important job of passing out the cakes to the children who marched past her. As the last child approached, Louisa saw that there was only one cake left. Should she give it to Lucia, a guest, or keep it? It was her own birthday! But with a reminder from her mother that “it is always better to give away than to keep the nice things,” Louisa, famous in her family for her aggression, her tantrums, and her temper, quietly handed over the “dear plummy cake”21 and got a kiss from her mother instead.
This test of conscience—had the wrong number of cakes been engineered by Bronson Alcott?—was one of many small tests conducted on Louisa and her sisters by their father in his scientific approach to the human soul. Alcott questioned his students and experimented on some of them, but his daughters were his prime laboratory rats and pigeons, his double-blind clinical trials.
In one experiment, Bronson produced an apple just before dinnertime, when his subjects were especially hungry, and asked Anna pointedly if little girls should take things that did not belong to them without asking. No, Anna responded obediently, they should not. Then he asked both Anna and Louisa if they would ever do such a thing as take an apple without asking for it. They both agreed that they would not.
Yet when Bronson returned to the room after dinner, the apple had been reduced to a core next to Louisa’s place at the dinner table. Bronson asked what it was. “Apple,” admitted the honest Louisa. Anna, always the pleasing child, blurted out the whole story, a story in which she and Louisa had both tried to get the apple, but Louisa had gotten there first. Then Louisa had eaten some of it. Anna had grabbed it and thrown it into the grate, but Louisa had fished it out and eaten some more. Louisa as usual was the villain of the piece. Bronson always believed Anna. Louisa confessed that she had eaten the apple “because I wanted it.” Then, sensing that she had somehow failed, she added, “I was naughty.”22
In another apple experiment, Bronson left an apple on the wardrobe alone with Louisa, who put up a valiant struggle as her father and mother secretly listened and took notes. During the course of the morning, Louisa’s mother reported that she several times took the apple in her hands and caressed it wistfully. “No—no—father’s—me not take father’s apple—naughty—naughty,” said the toddler. Then she succumbed and ate the apple. When confronted by her mother, she explained, “Me could not help it. Me must have it.”23
Although the apples were eaten, Bronson was delighted at his children’s show of conscience. They had struggled against their desires, evidence that children are born with a well-developed moral sense. Bronson tried similar experiments with apples as well as, especially in Louisa’s case, different kinds of punishments. Once when she pinched him, he pinched her back. That didn’t seem to calm her down. At other times, he spoke sternly to her. He took her bodily from the dinner table to her room, undressed her and coldly put her to bed, exiling her from the family.
With her parents distracted by the success of the Temple School, Louisa’s curiosity grew as supervision shrank. She began to spend more and more time outdoors, first rolling her hoop on the Boston Common and then wandering away from home, where no one seemed to notice if she was gone. “Running away was one of the delights of my childhood,” she wrote later. It doesn’t sound delightful for a five- or six-year-old child to be running loose on the dirt streets of Boston in the 1830s, picking up urchins and sharing their food and getting lost before returning home. Still, Louisa describes it in holiday language. “Many a social lunch have I shared with hospitable Irish beggar children, as we ate our crusts, cold potatoes and salt fish on voyages of discovery among the ash heaps of the waste land that then lay where the Albany station still stands.”24
Louisa, who had once been one of her father’s principal objects of study, could now be gone for hours and travel miles on her little girl’s legs before anyone went after her. One day she headed for the wharves and got seriously lost. Comforted by a large, ownerless dog, she was eventually found and brought home by the Boston town crier. After that her mother tied her to the sofa to keep her from leaving the house.25
Thrilled by the success of Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School, Bronson Alcott began another more complicated and spiritual record of his teaching, and again he pressed Peabody into the hard service of amanuensis and assistant. In the new book, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, Alcott decided to get the children talking about higher subjects—religion and the nature of man and, of course, the heavenly place they had come from before landing on earth and coming to the Temple School. He told his class that they had something to teach him and the rest of the world. “I have often been taught by what very small children have said; and astonished at their answers . . . all wisdom is not in grown up people.”26
This time, the children would be named and get credit for their ideas, he decided. This decision made Elizabeth Peabody nervous. She was steeped in the Bostonian culture of privacy and priggishness in a way that Alcott failed
to understand. She was a direct descendant of the Puritans; he was a New England farm boy who had created his own culture. Peabody worried that, in the service of discovering and teaching, Bronson was sacrificing something private. “The instinctive delicacy with which children veil their deepest thoughts . . . should not be violated . . . in order to gain knowledge,”27 she had written in Record of a School.
First, Alcott gave a series of lectures for adults on the subject of the Gospels, held at the Temple School in the evening. Alcott, like Emerson and the other men and women who would call themselves Transcendentalists, believed that Jesus was an extraordinary man but that there was God in every man. This was the doctrine that would get his friend Emerson banned from Harvard after his controversial Divinity School speech in 1838. The Boston elders and their Harvard educators were horrified by the idea that God could be everywhere, not just in the churches they had built for Him.
Alcott decided that his investigations into the nature of Jesus Christ were too good to save for the adults—his beloved students must also be asked these questions, questions that also brought up the subject of childbirth and, by indirection, sex. Almost as soon as he began asking the students questions like that—“How do you think a Mother would feel when she knew she was to have a child?” and “What does love make?”—Elizabeth Peabody began to balk. She sensed that Bostonians weren’t ready to have their children discuss childbirth.
At home, the personal connection between the great teacher and his loyal assistant began to degenerate even further. Peabody’s sister Sophia had arrived to help at the school, but this made the situation worse instead of better. Sophia had become a slavish fan of the adult Alcotts at the same time that Bronson’s connection to Elizabeth was beginning to fray. Even as her sister Mary was writing letters urging Elizabeth to leave the Alcott house, even offering to pay her board somewhere else, Sophia was more and more enchanted by the family.
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