While Bronson worked on conversations and sayings in his front parlor, his moody, romantic, daughter poured her energy into stories in the back room. Beset with feverish dreams of fame and love, Louisa came into her own as a woman while the family lived at Hillside. At first, when the dreaded Charles Lane returned to visit for a few weeks, she found Hillside to be too crowded. “More people coming to live with us,” she wrote in her journal. “I wish we could be alone and no one else. I don’t see who is to clothe and feed us all, when we are so poor now.” But a few days later, after a run in the Concord woods, she felt her heart lift in the rustling of the pines and the view of the hills. “My romantic period began,” she wrote later of this time in Concord, “when I fell to writing poetry, keeping a heart-journal and wandering by moonlight instead of sleeping quietly.”28
In her own room at last, Louisa mooned to think of Emerson sleeping in his solid white house down the way. In his library, Emerson pointed out to the impressionable Louisa Goethe’s recently published Correspondence with a Child, a book of letters from the thirteen-year-old Bettina von Arnim to her “master,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This book, about a presumably platonic love affair between a young teenager and her much older love, was a sensation in New England in 1843. Many young girls wrote “Bettina” letters to older men. Louisa began wandering dreamily down to the Emerson’s house at all hours of the day and night, and haunting the library. At home she read and began her own writing and dreamed of Emerson. Emerson, although he probably didn’t respond to Louisa with the physical hugs and kisses that Goethe lavished on his Bettina, seems to have been affected by his neighbor’s longing. “Give all to love,” he wrote that fall, although he may have been thinking more of the elusive, sexual adult Margaret Fuller than of the all-too-present adolescent Louisa.
Obey thy heart:
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-fame,
Plans, credit and the Muse—
Nothing refuse.29
In and out of school and tutored by anyone who volunteered, the four Alcott girls had enough time to write stories and put on increasingly elaborate plays for anyone who cared to attend. “Love, despair, witchcraft, villainy, fairy intervention, triumphant right, held sway in turn,” remembered Edward Emerson, one of the Emerson children who eagerly played along with the Alcott girls. “In those days a red scarf, a long cloak, a big hat with a plume stolen from a bonnet, a paper-knife dagger, a scrap of tinsel from a button card, a little gold paper for royalty, tissue paper stretched on wire hoops for fairy wings, produced superb effects.”30 The new barn became Louisa’s Globe Theater and the residents of Concord her audience.
The barn is now the visitor center of the National Park Service, and the ranger who gives tours of the house repeatedly emphasizes that Louisa May Alcott was indeed Jo March. Certainly the events that became the basis for Little Women happened at Hillside—later renamed the Wayside—in the three and a half years the Alcott family lived there, years in which Louisa spent a lot of her time writing in the little room at the back of the house.
When she went to write about these years, twenty years later, she transposed the events of the 1840s to the house next door, Orchard House, which has now become a shrine to Little Women. She made the Alcotts the Marches. She would be more famous than Jenny Lind, and that fame would be tied to a ramshackle clapboard house she passed hundreds of times without noticing it. It was the Moores’ house in those days, surrounded by elms and too close to the busy road.
When Emerson was away, Louisa’s longing had another, shaggier object, Henry Thoreau, who was also a hero and close friend of her father’s. In the spring of 1845, at Emerson’s suggestion, Thoreau began building a hut on a woodlot of Emerson’s on the shore of Walden Pond. The Alcotts and the Hosmers were among the neighbors who helped Thoreau raise the timbers. From July 4, 1845, to September 6 of 1847, with time out for a trip to Maine, Thoreau lived at the northwest edge of Walden Pond in the hut he built in a clearing near Wyman’s Meadow. The site was in a small rise looking out at the deepest part of the pond, which legend contended was bottomless but which Thoreau had measured at 102 feet.
To the west, Thoreau had a clear view of the shoreline that had been filled in to accommodate the new railroad track. To the east, he looked into the woods where Route 2 now funnels drivers on their way to Boston. Some of his nearest neighbors as the crow flies were the Alcotts at Hillside. A series of well-worn paths led to their house at the bottom of a ridge, and he often dropped in on them on his walks into town. Their three and a half years at Hillside—critical years in Louisa’s young life—coincided with his two years, two months, and two days at Walden. Bronson Alcott and his daughter often returned Thoreau’s visits. What seemed like a short walk—just over a mile—brought this passionate young woman face-to-face with the man who had first shown her the miracles of nature, a man who reminded her of the perspective of the natural world. “Young women seemed glad to be in the woods,” Thoreau wrote after a visit. “They looked in the pond and at the flowers and improved their time.”31
Bronson also made many visits to Walden that Thoreau wrote about in the journal that became his book. “I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings,” Thoreau wrote. Alcott provided good company; Thoreau provided some much-needed admiration. “One of the last of the philosophers—Connecticut gave him to the world,” Thoreau wrote. “He peddled first her wares, afterwards as he declares, his brains. . . . I think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with.”32
Alcott and Thoreau, in spite of their differences in background, had a common love of upbeat aphorisms. Some of the phrases in Walden read like clearer, better-written versions of Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings.” “However mean your life is, meet it and live it. . . . It looks poorest when you are richest.”33 Thoreau did not move to Walden Pond to write Walden; while living at Walden Pond, he planned to work on his book about a river trip with his beloved brother John, who had died in 1842.
In the winter of 1846, after the move to Walden, Thoreau gave a lecture on Emerson’s friend the English writer Thomas Carlyle. Like Emerson, Carlyle believed that the world was populated with great men from whom all others might learn. Thoreau began to form a more universal idea of what a hero might be. “Are we not all great men?” he wrote, as he developed the idea of a hero as an ordinary man, a man who would represent everyone. “Working himself slowly free of the still-admired friends, Thoreau’s next book presented himself as American hero,” explains Robert Richardson in his wonderful biography of Thoreau. Thoreau and Emerson; Thoreau and Bronson Alcott; Emerson and Hawthorne—each of the brilliant writers and thinkers in the Concord community had inestimable effects on each other’s work. Louisa May Alcott was there, soaking up information about the simplicity of great writing and the possibility of an ordinary character becoming a hero or heroine.
By 1848, the wolf again appeared at the door of the Alcott house. Abba’s inheritance had been spent on the original purchase of Hillside, but not enough money had been set aside for the family living expenses. Bronson’s garden produce was delicious but scarce even in the summer. Abba and her daughters’ sewing and teaching were not enough to support the family. As the winter approached in New England, as the air began to cool and the leaves turn their brilliant golds and reds, as the light began to fade earlier in the day and the apples ripened and fell from the trees, Abba Alcott became more and more determined to move.
Visiting friends who were shocked at the poverty of the Alcott family in Concord organized a job for Abba in Boston as the head of a new charity. The job would enable her to support her family—a task that her husband was clearly unable to accomplish even with income from his daught
ers. In October, a former patron of Bronson’s, Mrs. James Savage, visited the family in Concord and urged them to move. Would they leave Hillside empty? That week a tenant offered to rent the house for $150 a year. Abba and Bronson had talked of splitting the family again, but this way they could all be together in Boston.
Louisa, visiting friends, found out about the move when she got a letter from her father announcing that her family had left Concord and settled in three cramped rooms on Dedham Street, and that he would be giving Conversations on West Street above Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore.
No one thought to consider Louisa, nor did she think of herself, either as a sixteen-year-old girl or later as a fifty-year-old woman. With the Alcotts, family came first and individuals came second. Bronson had created a powerful family myth, and individual problems were swept away when it came to the good of the family or the survival of the family. They were Alcotts. So Louisa gave up her favorite thinking place, an old cart wheel half hidden in the grass where she used to go to work out her stories or rail at her fate and promise the gods that she would amount to something, somewhere, somehow. She gave up the space to run free and her friendships and her connection to the natural world, all without thinking twice. Although she was still the age of many students, she resolved to be a teacher in the city.
“My sister and I had cherished fine dreams of a home in the city,” she wrote in her Recollections years later, “but when we found ourselves in a small house in the South End with not a tree in sight, and no money to buy any of the splendors before us, we all rebelled. I was left to keep house, feeling like a caged sea-gull as I washed dishes and cooked in the basement kitchen where my prospect was limited to a succession of muddy boots.”34 Until the move to Boston, Louisa had somehow avoided feeling the straitened circumstances and desperate scrimping and saving and occasional brinksmanship by which Abba and Bronson kept the family going. Now, she understood. All the family theatricals and stories written for fun could not obscure the family poverty.
“We were now beginning to play our parts on a real stage,” she wrote, “and to know something of the pathetic side of life with its hard facts, irksome duties, many temptations and daily sacrifice of self.”35
4
Boston. “Stick to Your Teaching”.
1848–1858
Eighteen forty-eight was a year of European revolution and colonial expansion. In France the workers revolted and unseated Louis-Philippe. In Austria, Italy, and Germany, liberal revolutions unseated emperors and kings, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels issued The Communist Manifesto, an appeal to workers everywhere to throw off their chains. The workers responded. The spirit of revolution swept right across the Atlantic and inspired the second-most-oppressed class of Americans—women.
Although the domestic slavery of women in the nineteenth century was hidden by the institution of marriage and family, and not as severe as the institution of southern slavery, it was an appalling source of injustice. American women had almost no legal privileges. They could not own property or vote. They were essentially owned by their fathers, who passed them on to their husbands as if they were possessions. The disaster of the Civil War would sweep away all talk of women’s rights for at least a decade, but in the 1840s women were as eager to work for justice at home as they were to fight for justice in the South.
In July of 1848, while the Alcotts ate produce from Bronson’s garden, a convention of 300 women and a few men gathered in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls, New York, to issue their own manifesto. Led by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and inspired by Margaret Fuller’s The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women, first published in The Dial, the convention issued a Declaration of Sentiments. This was based on the Declaration of Independence, replacing that declaration’s anger at King George with an indictment of “all men.”
The sentiments in this declaration are not polite, accusing men of oppression of all kinds, including the denial of the right to vote, and the imposition of laws in the formation of which women had no voice. “He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men,” it reads. “He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.”1 Inspired by Quaker teachings and by Transcendentalism, the women of Seneca Falls began a movement that would parallel abolition in fits and starts during the second half of the century.
For Louisa May Alcott, female equality was both a longed-for dream and a foregone conclusion. She lived in a family of women run by a woman; by this time Bronson’s power as the head of the family had been diminished to almost nothing. Yet she had no formal education, and college was not open to her. The jobs available for a young single woman were domestic and often demeaning. Even teaching was often glorified babysitting. It required no formal degree and was usually done by young women.
The Boston to which the family returned was a different city than the one they had left for Concord when Louisa was a little girl. No longer a protected agricultural provincial capital and sleepy seaport, Boston had become a swirling center of world events. The Alcotts returned to Boston on the promise of a salary Abba could make by running a mission for the poor. The mission also became an employment office. The community of poor families Abba knew from doing good works as a girl from Federal Court were very different than the poor who flooded Boston in the early 1840s. Industry had created thousands of low-level jobs in the mills and factories both in Boston and in outlying towns, and these jobs attracted families who were then barely able to support themselves. At the same time, these industries had created new wealth for a few owners and managers, and as the slums expanded, so did the mansions of the new rich as they marched down Commonwealth Avenue and up Beacon Hill.
Nearly 50,000 refugees from the Irish potato famine flooded the city, almost doubling its population in just a few years. By 1850, 26 percent of the population of this once high-minded, homogeneous city was made up of uneducated, untrained Irish immigrants and immigrant families. In Boston they lived in appalling conditions, often fourteen people to a room. The exiled Irish were farmers who had only agrarian skills, illiterate people who often had nothing to lose and brought with them their foreign religion—Roman Catholicism. Many of them made scant livings legally selling liquor—this in a city where temperance had previously thrived. Because of the crowded quarters and unsanitary living conditions of the immigrants, smallpox and cholera, which had been well controlled, now swept the city in a series of epidemics.
Earlier in the century, a different kind of Irish immigrant had built the railroad and helped construct the thriving city of Boston. In those days, in the 1830s and early 1840s, Boston was being built on land reclaimed from the sea, and a building boom depended on cheap labor. The immigrants of 1848 were a new and desperate kind who had fled from their own country after witnessing the horrors of the potato famine, a holocaust of starvation.
The potato blight had begun at the end of the summer of 1846, spreading through Ireland and rotting potatoes before they could be pulled from the ground in the harvest months of August and September. Thousands of Irish families left, many on infamous “coffin ships”; hulks so heavily insured by their British owners that they were worth more if they sank than if they survived. Nevertheless, so many ships made it to Canada that the St. Lawrence River was backed up with ships and floating bodies.
Then in the summer of 1848 when Irish farmers, thinking the blight had passed, planted nothing but potatoes, the blight came back with a vengeance. This time tens of thousands of the remaining people who weren’t too sick or debilitated to move boarded ships for new ports, one of them being Boston.
Abba Alcott arrived in Boston and opened her Mission and Relief Room on Washington Street just in time to receive the masses of new, starving poor. This flood of strangers with their insuperable problems threatened to overwhelm even the great and charitable heart of Abba Alcott. As a Protestant from Puritan stock, she was prejudiced against the Catholic Church, yet she couldn’t
turn her back on the needy Irish families.
In Boston, cooped up in tiny rooms in a crowded city, the Alcott family’s robust psychological health again began to break apart under the force of circumstance. There was no gorgeous natural world to balance the indignities and ugliness of the city, no distinguished and loving Emerson and playful Thoreau to talk with about what was happening. Daily teaching that Louisa took on as well as the housework was exhausting. “Every day is a battle, and I’m so tired I don’t want to live; only it’s cowardly to die till you have done something. I can’t talk to anyone but my mother about my troubles, and she has so many now to bear I try not to add any more. I know God is always ready to hear, but heaven’s so far away in the city.”2 She was of an age when another girl might be thinking of parties, frocks, and eligible men, but the Alcotts’ situation instead compelled her to think about how they would eat and pay the rent.
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