Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Then one evening after dinner, Bronson walked upstairs and knocked on Elizabeth’s door. Standing in the doorway, he began to berate her about her educational views and the views of her sister Mary. He scolded her in words that sounded eerily familiar. Slowly, Elizabeth realized that the information he was using could only have come from private letters from her sister Mary that she kept in her desk drawer in her room.

  Incredulous, she began to realize what must have happened while she was out during the day. The Alcotts had been snooping around her room and going through her private drawers and reading her letters—it was the only way that Bronson could have known the things he was talking about. When she tentatively asked Bronson if it was possible that the Alcotts had read her private correspondence, he baldly admitted to the whole thing.

  Yes, the Alcotts had read the letters that they had found while going through her room. What was the problem? Privacy in the Alcott family was equated with secrecy and furtiveness. Although all the Alcott daughters kept journals in which they were urged to confide their innermost thoughts, for instance, their parents routinely read the journals and commented on them in the margins. Elizabeth Peabody did not have this tolerance for sharing. For her, privacy meant, well, privacy. She was furious. The Alcotts, who had found in the private letters a great deal of criticism of Bronson Alcott and even one letter from Mary Peabody urging her sister Elizabeth to distance herself from Bronson’s “mistaken views,” were equally furious. Both Peabody and Alcott felt betrayed.

  “Don’t you think Mrs. Alcott came into my room & looked over my letters from you & found your last letter to me and the one to Sophia and carried it to Mr. Alcott—& they have read them,”28 Elizabeth howled in a letter to her sister Mary. Far from apologizing for rifling through Elizabeth’s room, Abba Alcott turned on her with the force of her famous temper, saying that Elizabeth was condemned to eternal damnation and had committed the greatest crime she had ever heard of—the crime of doubting Bronson Alcott. What made the situation even more painful for Elizabeth was that her own sister Sophia continued to worship the Alcotts and to take their side in the argument. Sophia claimed that her sister Elizabeth had often gone through other people’s private mail. Furthermore, she was sure it had only happened once. Now betrayed by her sister as well as her friend and employer, Elizabeth hid many feelings when she reassured Mary about Sophia: “She will be protected by heaven—in her purity and innocence of intention.”29

  Angry and worried about Alcott’s definition of privacy, a definition which also seemed to be ruling his questioning of the students at school, Elizabeth Peabody abruptly moved out of the Alcott house in August 1836 and, in spite of an invitation from the Emersons to visit Concord, decamped for Salem. The Alcotts promptly renamed their third child. She was no longer Elizabeth Peabody; from now on she was Elizabeth Sewall, and she was named after Judge Samuel Sewall. Sewall, a distinguished ancestor of Abba’s, was famous for presiding at the Salem Witch Trials and later regretting his actions and apologizing to the survivors of the nineteen executed so-called witches. Elizabeth Peabody turned the Temple School job over to the pliant Sophia, who was less seasoned in assessing public opinion. Sophia also took over the job of transcribing the new book. “Sophia is compensated for any pain of thinking ill of me—by being able to keep up her adoration of Mr. Alcott,” Elizabeth wrote to Mary.30

  Elizabeth Peabody’s angry departure may have been the beginning of the end for the Temple School. Peabody was an honorable woman, and she did not publicly tell the whole story of her friendship with the Alcotts. Nevertheless, children began to be drawn out of the school. Peabody also wrote Alcott asking him to remove her name from the new book. Boston too had changed. Boom had been followed by bust. The angry conflicts over race that would eventually blow up the relatively new country in a civil war were beginning to gather steam. For all their progressive ideals in prosperous times, Bostonians were still at heart religious conservatives, not too far from the Calvinism of their forebears. This was the Boston where anti-Catholic mobs roamed the streets and yet an anti-Catholic man named Abner Kneeland would later be thrown in jail for ridiculing the concept of a virgin birth as manifest in the Immaculate Conception.

  “Power corrupts,” wrote Lord John Acton years after the founding of Bronson Alcott’s school. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”31 The story of the mighty and their falls is such a cliché that it’s hard to believe it happened to a mind as informed and original as Bronson Alcott’s. Did his inability to see what was happening around him start when he began calling his students “disciples”? Was it the way he conducted discussions around the family dinner table, which often included a few students and Elizabeth Peabody, so that no one was allowed to contradict him? Or did his humility vanish when the great Emerson begged him to visit in Concord? Was the turning point the visit of the English reformer Harriet Martineau on a journalist’s tour of the United States? Was he a profligate narcissist unable to deal with adversity, or was he a prophet without honor in his own country? Was he an innocent pawn of a changing economy, or was it that Bronson Alcott was a man ahead of his time, as his daughter Louisa believed?

  “My father’s school was the only one I ever went to,” Louisa May Alcott wrote fifty years later, “and when this was broken up because he introduced methods now all the fashion, our lessons went on at home, for he was always sure of four little pupils who firmly believed in their teacher, though they have not done him all the credit he deserved.”32

  The publication of what was to be the second triumphant book from Alcott’s great Temple School, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, happened in a different world from that of the earlier publication. Bronson Alcott was a man who didn’t care what anyone thought—that was one of the things about him that fascinated Emerson. But a teacher serves his community as well as his students.

  When it was published in December of 1836, Conversations with Children on the Gospels was received by the Boston community with horror. The Boston Daily Advertiser, the Boston Courier, and the Christian Register all took off after Alcott, calling the book “radically false,” “indecent and obscene,” and its author “half-witted or insane” and “an ignorant and presuming charlatan.”33 Alcott had some prominent defenders, including the principled Elizabeth Peabody, who put aside her personal anger; the glamorous intellectual Margaret Fuller, who had also taught at the Temple School, and Bronson’s new friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson wrote Alcott: “I hate to have all the little dogs barking at you, for you have something better to do than to attend to them.”34 But the community had made up its mind. This book was just too much for them. What was this man doing with their children? What disgusting question had Alcott asked innocent little Josiah Quincy that caused the boy to answer about the “naughtinesses of other people” putting “together a body for the child”?35 Almost immediately the thriving Temple School began to die. Enrollment dropped from forty to ten.

  By April of 1837, when Louisa was four, Bronson was forced to auction off many of the wonderful things that he had bought for the school on credit in happier and more prosperous times. The national economy was in a slide and even the auction was a disappointment. The three hundred books, the busts of Plato and Socrates, the perfect little desks and chairs, were all on the block. Some things didn’t sell. The total netted less than $200, a drop in the school’s $6,000 bucket of debt. Whatever her ambivalence, Louisa adored her larger-than-life father. In Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England, the author tells the story of Louisa lashing out at the sheriff who had come to collect the schoolroom’s furnishings. “Go away bad man,” the little girl yelled with an obstinacy and passion which, in happier times, might have been the subject of a new experiment. “You are making my father unhappy.”36

  In a world before birth control, when women could not vote or own property, when it was illegal for a woman to speak in public for money, marriage was often more like prison tha
n liberation. The ubiquitous Godey’s Lady’s Book, a nineteenth-century compendium of social rules and observations that was used in child-raising as well as for adults, urged married men to “Be to her faults a little blind; Be to her virtues very kind; Let all her ways be unconfined, and place your padlock on her mind.”

  American marriage had incorporated all the moral and intellectual repression of English marriage and added more. Although Abigail May had waited to marry for love at the age of twenty-nine, she was no rebel when it came to this institution. She was luckier than most in her choice of husband. “It is a glorious thing,” she wrote in her journal, “after moments of misunderstanding, even of reciprocal transgression, to rest again heart to heart and to feel, to deeply feel that there is a certainty in the world, in spite of all the power of Hell, a certainty which is heaven on earth—that they love each other, that they belong to each other, that nothing, nothing in the world shall separate them who have found each other again in true in perfect love.”37 Although there was plenty of hell in her marriage to Bronson Alcott, she continued to love him passionately in spite of their problems.

  At least a dozen books have been written about the Alcotts since Louisa May Alcott’s death at the end of the nineteenth century. Biographers disagree sharply over the true nature of Bronson Alcott. To some he is the Platonic ideal sketched by Emerson, a man too innocent to navigate the modern world. To others he is the self-regarding so-called genius whose refusal to compromise and whose inability to make money drove his daughters, especially Louisa, into domestic slavery as teachers and governesses and paid companions.

  In his own journal, Bronson admitted that one of the reasons for his dismissal from an earlier school in Cheshire, Connecticut, had been the parents’ disapproval over his “caressing the students—especially the females.”38 By modern standards, this is a damning admission with far-reaching implications, yet this information appears in Bronson’s own journal. Did Bronson Alcott let himself handle his students and his daughters in sexual ways? Did he take advantage of nineteenth-century children’s helplessness and powerlessness? We know now that being molested can create permanent psychic and sexual scars—scars of defensiveness, self-doubt, and an inability to connect with others that might easily be applied to the character of the adult Louisa May Alcott. Can we apply a twenty-first-century context for a few scraps of nineteenth-century journal?

  Bronson was an intensely physical and sexual man whose journals are sprinkled with his own struggles to be an ascetic and to define his desires—struggles not unlike his little daughter’s struggles with the apple. “Mettle is the Godhead proceeding into the matrix of nature to organize man. Behold the creative jet,”39 he wrote in his journal in as close a description of sex as anyone tried in the nineteenth century.

  Where posterity is concerned, Bronson’s greatest failing may be the dreadful quality of most of his writing. Teaching and conversations are ephemeral and, from the opinions of people like Emerson, we can assume that Alcott’s were something special. Books last forever. Emerson, urging Alcott to morph from a teacher to a writer after the failure of the Temple School, was taken aback by the manuscript his protégé presented. Reading Alcott’s writing, one critic aptly said, “was like watching fifteen boxcars go by with only one passenger in them.” The clever James Russell Lowell even wrote a poem about the difference between Alcott’s spoken and written words:

  While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper

  If you shut him up closely with pen, ink and paper;

  Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night,

  And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write;

  In this as in all things a lamb among men,

  He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.40

  It wasn’t his writing that brought about the death of the Temple School and the end of Alcott’s teaching career. It was his belief in the inherent wisdom of the children he taught, and his inability to gauge the mood of the people around him. Read today, Conversations with Children on the Gospels includes nothing that suggests impropriety. The use of the children’s first names does not seem intrusive; instead it enables readers to come away with an idea of who each one is from the talkative Charles to the adorable six-year-old Josiah. Each conversation ranges from two to ten pages and begins with a reading from the New Testament Gospels. Then, the conversation of the children with Mr. Alcott is written as dialogue. Occasionally a third voice, the voice of the Recorder (Elizabeth or Sophia Peabody) chimes in to add an interesting fact or even to correct Mr. Alcott.

  The conversation that set off a landslide of negative opinion begins with Bronson reading from Matthew 1:18. This is a problematic passage for anyone. Joseph and Mary are about to be married, when as the reading explains without comment, she found she was with child of the Holy Ghost. The passage describes Joseph’s surprise and distress; he and Mary had not yet slept together. Then an angel appears telling Joseph that the situation was not what he assumed. Behold a virgin shall be with child.

  After reading the passage, Bronson asked the children what interested them. Josiah said he thought it was about Jesus being born. When Bronson asked what being born was, the innocent Josiah responded, “It is to take up the body from the earth. The spirit comes from Heaven, and takes up the naughtiness out of other people, which makes other people better.”41 The true import of the passage from Matthew—the fears of a man presented with a pregnant fiancée—were neatly sidestepped by Bronson, who led the conversation into a sweet discussion of the differences between the spirit and the body.

  “What is birth?” he asked the children, and Charles responded that birth is when the spirit is put into the body. Finally, Alcott told the children what he thought—but only after they had a chance to explore the question. His theory was that the spirit made the body even as a rose created rose leaves. After most of the children had their say, a student named George added a comment that may have caused more trouble than all the talk about sex and childbirth. He said that he thought Joseph and Mary were probably poor because poor people were generally happier.

  This line of questioning may have been even more offensive to the burghers of the new Boston than any sexual investigation. To be honest about sex is tricky; to be honest about money is taboo. It’s not the sex that shocks in these conversations; it’s the openness of Bronson to question everything and anything, even the authority of his students’ parents. “I want each of you to ask yourselves this,” he says, “are my father and mother spiritual persons—are they devoted to the culture of their own and other people’s spirits, as much as they should be, or do they care more than I wish about outward things.”42 This invitation from a teacher to students to question the wisdom and circumstances of their own families is pedagogical dynamite. Of course, a teacher’s first responsibility is to the truth and to the development of student hearts and minds. Still, at the Temple School, Bronson Alcott seems to have been oblivious to the fact that he was biting the hand that fed him. A teacher is responsible to parents, who pay the bills, as well as to students.

  Although the powers that controlled Boston may have been offended by Bronson’s challenge to their authority, they fastened on the sexual element of Conversations with Children on the Gospels and mounted their attack. Worse, they withdrew their children from the school. By the spring of 1837, the Temple School as it had once been, with its high hopes and optimistic beliefs about the nature of children, was gone. Bronson Alcott moved from the airy rooms at the top of the Temple to a dark basement room where he taught his dwindling class.

  Bronson had been a teacher for years, but this would be the last formal classroom teaching of his life. His great dream—to change the way children were taught—was over. Within a few months, the school was forced to move out of the Temple entirely, and Bronson continued to teach a few students—his three daughters and a few others—in the parlor of the less elegant house to which the family had moved on Cottage Street.
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  In the fall of 1839, Bronson enrolled an African-American student in his dying school, a girl named Susan Robinson. It made perfect sense. Bronson was an early abolitionist, a friend of William Lloyd Garrison’s, and one of the first members of the Anti-Slavery League. He knew the South from his peddling days, and he had seen the injustices of slavery at first hand. Bronson had mounting debt, angrily frayed friendships, an impeached reputation, and only a few increasingly hysterical defenders, but he never let go of his principles. The enrollment of Susan Robinson was too much even for the Alcott diehards, and by the winter of 1839, Bronson Alcott had only his own daughters as students. His daughters were entirely loyal to their father, but the young Louisa May was forming her own secret opinions and thoughts. Her journals are entirely loyal to her father. As a daughter, she never spoke a word against her father, against his irresponsibility or his bullying or his prejudice against her. As a writer, she expressed her feelings in a far more effective and literary way. She left him out of her masterpiece.

  2

  Concord. Louisa in Exile.

  1840–1843

  In the winter of 1840, as life in Boston became less and less affordable for the Alcotts, Emerson redoubled his efforts to get them to move to Concord. He located a small run-down cottage in Concord near the slow-flowing Concord River on the estate of Edmund Hosmer, secured it for a rent of $52 a month, and offered it to the Alcott family for nothing.

  “It was a tiny house, with a little garden behind, and a lawn about as big as a pocket handkerchief in front,” Louisa May Alcott wrote years later in describing the Hosmer Cottage, where she installed the fictional Meg March and John Brooke as newlyweds in Little Women. “The shrubbery consisted of several young larches, who looked undecided whether to live or die. . . . The hall was so narrow it was fortunate they had no piano . . . the dining room was so small, that six people were a tight fit, and the kitchen stairs seemed built for the express purpose of precipitating both servants and china pell-mell into the coal bin.”1