Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Bronson Alcott, although he pulled himself together to give his Conversations on West Street, had patched up things with Elizabeth Peabody, and had even been made the librarian of a new intellectual club—the Town and Country Club—began to veer toward the emotional extremes that were all too familiar to his family. Abba could do little more than provide physical support as her husband began to unravel. He began working feverishly on a series of arcane charts showing invisible forces. He refused to sleep or eat. He thought he was God. “Bronson was experiencing mental states and visions that suggest a frighteningly disturbed mind,”3 writes biographer John Matteson in his chapter about these years, titled “Destitution.”

  Louisa’s only respite was the family gatherings of parents and sisters at the end of the day, gatherings that she often enlivened with a drama performed by the four girls: The Captive of Castile, or The Moorish Maiden’s Vow. Sometimes the sisters acted out Shakespeare, memorizing long speeches for these evening performances. Louisa began to dream of acting her way out of poverty. Her other dream, which gathered steam during the first desperate winter in Boston, was to be a writer. She began keeping a record of everything she earned each week.

  Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, The Inheritance, was written before she was twenty. A short romantic Cinderella story written in girlish, sentimental prose, it is weirdly enlivened by the desperate feelings of its author. The heroine of the novel, Edith Adelon is a penniless orphan working on an English country estate for the fabulously wealthy Hamilton family. As it turns out—as it so often turns out in fiction about penniless young women—Edith is the true heir to the Hamilton estate, where she has been working as a servant. Yet the family has treated her lovingly. When the document proving her legitimacy comes to light, Edith tears the document to pieces. “She tore the will and, with a calm smile on her pale face and a holy light in her soft eyes that shone through falling tears, she dropped the fragments saying, ‘Now I am the poor orphan girl again. Can you love me for myself alone?’” Of course they can, and a handy nobleman stands by to rescue Edith from her self-imposed poverty.

  This fantasy of a double rescue from poverty and from the mindless adoration accorded the wealthy reflects Louisa’s deep confusion about both money and fame. In a contest between money and her family’s love, including her father’s often ambivalent feelings, family would win every time. At the same time, the Alcott family was starving to death. And the Alcotts were as proud as they were poor.

  Bronson had made a kind of religion out of the family, and his daughter Louisa was one of the principal worshipers at that sometimes bankrupt shrine. After all, in not going with Charles Lane after Fruitlands ended, Bronson had chosen his family. Only by elevating that choice to spiritual status was he able to make sense of his life.

  No matter what their circumstances, Alcotts always remembered their principles. Although many women like the Alcott sisters might have angled to marry for money or security, that was not what Alcotts did. Although thousands of young women at this time in history entered the indentured servitude offered by the factories and mills of the Industrial Revolution, such work was not for the Alcott girls. They might starve, but they would starve as gentlewomen and as intellectuals, as farmers who revered the land or teachers who understood Plato, not as illiterate millworkers or factory girls. The family often was as close as Louisa got to God in those difficult years.

  In the meantime, the passionate national argument about the continuation of slavery grew more heated. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added territory that is now all or part of Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming to the United States. This treaty roughly doubled the size of the United States and in doing so doubled the size of the dispute about the existence of slavery. Suddenly there were half a dozen new states and territories that might tip the balance of whether the United States was a slave country or not. The suspense and acrimony grew. Would they allow slavery, or would they be “free states.”

  Zachary Taylor, a southern slave owner with moderate views who had earned the nickname “Old Rough and Ready” for his valor in the war with Mexico, was elected president with Millard Fillmore his vice president. Taylor would die of a mysterious intestinal disorder in 1850 while the Fugitive Slave Act was being debated in the U.S. Senate.

  The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act set both sides angrily against each other in a way that presaged the impossibility of keeping a union of all the states. The Yankees were outraged. What business did southerners have telling them how to treat men, women, and children who had been subjected to unjust laws? How could the South reach into their own New England woods and rail lines?

  This self-righteousness was matched in the South. What business did northerners, who knew nothing about slavery, have telling the South that they should eliminate slavery? Property was property. Neither side could tolerate the encroachments of the other. The stubbornness and fierce love of freedom that had motivated Americans to fight a war against England now turned them against each other.

  This was a national moment that required great diplomacy and superb skills, but instead, Taylor’s sudden death left Millard Fillmore to negotiate one of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed.

  Passed in September, the Compromise of 1850 slightly soothed the agitated feelings of the southern states. In New England, it created a furor for abolition. By 1851, antislavery sentiment in Boston was passionate, especially among citizens like the Alcotts, who had personal experience with helping runaway slaves. Louisa had seen the intelligence and humanity of the men her father sheltered, “and whom her friend Thoreau spirited out of town under cover of night. Her heart connected with their distress. “Fugitive slaves were sheltered under our roof,” she wrote years later, “and my first pupil was a very black George Washington whom I taught to write on the hearth with charcoal, his big fingers finding pen and pencil unmanageable.”4

  Louisa and her family had exulted when a Boston mob rescued Shadrach Minkins, an accused fugitive slave, from a Boston jail and led him to freedom eventually in Canada. They had been horrified when a similar mob, including her father, failed to rescue a slave named Thomas Sims who had escaped from Mississippi and been arrested and was now—according to the new law—about to be shipped back to his owner in Mississippi.

  In June of 1851, the Washington newspaper National Era had begun serializing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which Harriet Beecher Stowe demonized the evil slave catchers loosed by the new laws. For the first time in American literature, Stowe portrayed blacks as serious and sympathetic protagonists. The book was a huge bestseller. Adapted for the stage, it immediately became one of the most popular plays of all time. On the evening of April 8, Louisa took time off from her teaching and sewing to hear abolitionist speakers Dr. William Channing and Wendell Phillips. “We went to a meeting, and heard splendid speaking. . . . People were much excited and cheered ‘Shadrach and Liberty,’ groaned for ‘Webster and Slavery,’ and made a great noise. I felt ready to do anything—fight or work or hoot or cry,—and aid plans to free Sims. I shall be horribly ashamed of my country if this thing happens and the slave is taken back,” she wrote.5 Sims was returned to his owners in spite of Boston protests and the plans of the Anti-Slavery League to help him escape as they had helped Shadrach escape.

  When a cholera epidemic hit the city, a May brother offered to board the family for a while in his roomy house on Atkinson Street. With a few months of having more light and space, Louisa’s spirits rebounded. She organized a family newspaper called the Olive Branch, a handwritten Pickwickian rag that presented her own hymns to her beloved cat6 and her mother’s reports on the progress of her charity work. When the epidemic passed and the family moved to another dark apartment in Groton Street, Louisa went to work helping with Anna’s teaching. Louisa’s ally in the family, her mother, was often so debilitated from the stresses of her overwhelming work and her difficult family life that she would star
t crying and be unable to stop. This bad situation got worse. Abba welcomed some starving children into the small garden of the house for some scraps of food that the family could hardly spare, and the whole Alcott family came down with smallpox.

  Medical treatment in the 1840s and ’50s was a primitive combination of experience and guesswork. There was no understanding of how disease spread or how it could be cured. There were no antibiotics, and a few progressive doctors were just beginning to talk about washing their hands before performing surgery. Surgery was almost always fatal. In the face of illness, the Alcott family creed served them well. No doctors were called. Instead, the family washed, rested, and consulted Hahnemann’s homeopathic bible Organon of the Healing Art. In spite of having no medical treatment, or perhaps because of it, the family began to recover.

  Although the Alcotts’ health improved, their finances continued to spiral downward. The Alcotts moved again to an even worse building on High Street, two blocks from the wharves. As Louisa wrote, the family was “poor as rats and apparently quite forgotten by everyone except the Lord.”7 Every day Louisa walked down to the wharves and took a horsecar to Suffolk Street to teach. The Alcott girls dressed in shabby hand-me-down and made-over clothes, which were far from comfortable.8 Women in nineteenth-century Boston staggered under the weight of a series of long skirts and layers of clothing. Poor women dressed in at least three layers of heavy fabric, while the well-dressed often smothered themselves in almost forty pounds of horsehair, crinoline, and whalebone with tight lacing inhibiting their breathing and steel hoops inhibiting their skirts.

  Still, Louisa had recently experienced at least one triumphant moment. Llewellyn Willis, the young boy Abba had befriended back in Still River when the Alcott family left Fruitlands, had returned to board with the Alcott family while he went to Harvard. His room and board was paid by his family, and this was a part of the Alcott income. Willis was a family friend as well as a boarder and his rent was necessary, although it eliminated a badly needed bedroom.

  Willis admired Louisa, and he had privately submitted a poem of Louisa’s, “Sunlight,” written under the pseudonym Flora Fairfield, to Peterson’s Magazine. The poem was accepted. The magazine had been established to compete with the treacly, conventional Godey’s Lady’s Book, and it had quickly become the bestselling magazine in the country. They paid Louisa $5 and published the poem in September 1851. It was the first money Louisa May Alcott made as a writer.

  Abba Alcott took as her personal and professional mission the protection of the flood of young girls who came to Boston from the “lust and sharks that wait,” she wrote in her journal. She was apparently too busy to pay attention to protecting one young girl in particular, a tall girl with masses of shiny chestnut hair, glowing skin, and large deep-set eyes that often looked angry or sad. Louisa had no skills at flirting or small talk, and she was hungry for affection as well as for books and music and for all the things that had once made her life a series of private pleasures. As time passed, she retreated more and more into fantasy, and this made her more vulnerable to loneliness and the idea of rescue.

  Bronson was equally distracted. At the age of fifty, having realized that many of his dreams would never come true, reduced to giving Conversations to sometimes sleepy audiences, he did what men sometimes do under the circumstances—he fell in love with a younger woman. The object of Bronson’s affections was the twenty-four-year-old, Ednah Dow Littlehale, the youngest daughter of a successful Boston merchant. Littlehale became Bronson’s secretary, faithfully recording his Conversations, and by the summer of 1851 the two met every morning for a sunrise walk on the Boston Common. “Love is the blossom where there blows. Everything that lives or grows,”9 he ecstatically quoted in his journal. “Only bend the knee to me. My wooing shall thy winning be.” Did Littlehale return his passion? It’s hard to tell, and no one in the Alcott family seemed to guess what was going on. Certainly the arrival of trouble could not have chosen a better moment in a household in which both parents were entirely distracted and one was mooning after a girl young enough to be his daughter.

  One day at the end of the summer, an elderly lawyer named James Richardson from Dedham applied to Abba’s office looking for a young woman to help care for his sister. Louisa happened to be in the office when he made his request. Tired of teaching and sewing, the energetic nineteen-year-old offered herself for the job. “Going out to service,” as such a companion job was called, was a rung below teaching and sewing on the social ladder, and Abba was surprised that Louisa had volunteered. Nevertheless, she was too preoccupied to ask many questions. For the hungry Louisa, time in Dedham promised an adventure, a trip away from a home.

  “When I was eighteen I wanted something to do,” she wrote later. “I had tried teaching for two years, and hated it; I had tried sewing, and could not earn my bread that way, at cost of health; I tried story-writing and got five dollars for stories which now bring a hundred; I had thought seriously of going on the stage, but certain highly respectable relatives were so shocked at the mere idea that I relinquished my dramatic aspirations.”10 At that moment, those “highly respectable relatives”—her parents—who were shocked at the idea of a stage career and certainly might have drawn the line at being a paid companion, were not paying attention. Instead of a sympathetic query from her mother, Louisa got more criticism. “I fancied you were rather too proud for this sort of thing,”11 Abba warned her daughter.

  Richardson, as Louisa noted, described his home as a sort of heaven on earth with books, pictures, a piano, and many distinguished visitors. Even before the job began, he started writing the young woman long letters with worrisome overtones. He imagined her coming to his room after the day’s work so that he could “minister to her young and cheerful nature.” Presumably, Abba and Bronson, who read everything in their house, read these letters, but no alarms were sounded. So Louisa packed her three homemade dresses and a few aprons and set off in January for her new job in Dedham. There had been no written agreement about duties and wages; enticed by her own vivid fantasies, Louisa was sure all would be well.

  “The romance opens well,” she thought as she peered into Richardson’s comfortable book-lined study.12 But what Louisa meant by romance was quite different than what Richardson meant. He watched her obsessively, and when she tried to avoid him, he remarked on the pleasure of “something tasteful, young and womanly.” His elderly sister was a silent figure wrapped in shawls. Their ancient father never spoke, and the housekeeper avoided all contact.

  At the end of each day, Richardson asked Louisa to join him in his study, the room where she had imagined being left to read in a beautiful place. Instead of reading, she was ordered to listen as Richardson complained about his life and read aloud from a variety of texts. She became “a passive bucket, into which he was to pour all manner of philosophic, metaphysical and sentimental rubbish,”13 she wrote. When she protested, Richardson reacted with rage. He ordered her to black his boots and do the most menial work available.

  The Dedham idyll quickly became a nightmare, and although Louisa lasted seven weeks, she finally was able to escape with her possessions in a wheelbarrow and her salary envelope in her pocket. At least she had hoped to make some substantial money. When she discovered that the payment she received for the entire seven weeks had been $4 she was outraged. Her family welcomed her home and their anger at the meager payment, perhaps colored by guilt, was greater than hers. Bronson was sent to return the $4 to the odious Richardson and to tell anyone he ran into about Richardson’s proclivities and cheapness. Richardson’s response to this scolding from Bronson Alcott has not been recorded.

  The Alcotts’ four years of Boston misery, years of illness and hunger and incessant work, were awful, but her seven weeks in Dedham particularly stuck in Louisa’s imagination—perhaps because it was an adventure which she had without her family. Perhaps it was such a vivid memory because it had been traumatic, or perhaps it stood out because of the strong f
eelings of fear, sexuality, and disgust just under the surface of the story. In her scant spare time, she sat down and began to write a short essay about it.

  In the spring of 1852, the Alcotts were once again saved financially at the last possible moment—this time by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne and his wife, the former Sophia Peabody, who had once replaced her sister Elizabeth at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School, had first come to Concord as newlyweds in 1843.

  Hawthorne and Sophia’s courtship had been as dark and secretive as a character in one of Hawthorne’s early stories. In Salem, where he and the Peabody family were neighbors, Hawthorne had been friends with Elizabeth Peabody, who encouraged him and helped get him published before anyone else had acknowledged him as a serious writer. One day, while Hawthorne was visiting Elizabeth, her slender, sickly sister Sophia came downstairs. Soon she and Hawthorne were secretly engaged. He saved her from a life of being a bedridden spinster, and she never stopped being grateful, even when it looked as if he would never be able to support his family, even when it looked as if he might be in love with Margaret Fuller.

  Like the Alcotts, the Hawthornes were first invited to Concord by the munificent Emerson. Their engagement had remained secret until they could find a way to set up a household together. This was a difficult task, since both were living with their parents and neither of them had any money. Emerson’s invitation to Concord made it possible for them to marry and start to keep house. There at the Old Manse, which they rented from Emerson’s step-uncle George Ripley, Hawthorne and Sophia had been very happy. On a few successive evenings they had carved their sentiments in the windowpanes with Sophia’s engagement diamond.

  But man’s accidents sometimes seemed disastrous even if they were God’s purposes. Jealousy over Margaret Fuller—who was passionately involved with both Hawthorne and Emerson—had ended the cozy arrangement by which the Hawthornes lived at the Old Manse for a token rent. Fuller, an intellectual who had assisted Bronson Alcott at the Temple School and edited the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, was an object of erotic delight for both Emerson and Hawthorne although there is scant evidence that she slept with either of them. She had been staying at the Emerson House and taking long walks with Hawthorne when Emerson discovered the two of them lying languidly on a mossy bank in the woods. Soon after that, the Hawthornes had been summarily exiled from Concord.