Now in 1852 it was almost ten years later and everything had changed. The Hawthornes, a family led by the famous author of The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithe-dale Romance, decided to return to Concord. They had moved enough, from Concord to Salem to the Berkshires and back to Salem. Recently they had been living in Newton, where they stayed with Sophia’s sister and her husband—Mary and Horace Mann. By then Margaret Fuller was dead. Perhaps gently guided by their old friend Emerson, they zeroed in on Hillside, the dear old wreck that was the Alcotts’ only asset in the world. In April, Hawthorne made arrangements with Abba’s executor Sam Sewall and with Emerson, who owned the eight-acre plot across the road from the house, to buy the place for $1,500 with a down payment of $750 to be set up by Emerson and Sewall as trusts for Bronson and Abba, and the balance to be paid within a year.
The Hawthornes were appalled by the condition of the house and employed a dozen carpenters to remodel it, but Bronson Alcott’s landscaping and gardening was one of the things that attracted them. Hawthorne, a tall, remarkably handsome man who stayed mysterious and distant even to those who knew him best, came to love the walks along the terraces on the hill behind the house and the high ridge that looked out over the fields and town. “I have bought a house,” Hawthorne wrote, “and feel myself for the first time in my life, at home. . . . Alcott called it Hillside as it stands close at the base of a steep ascent; but, as it is also in proximity (too nigh, indeed) to the road leading to the village, I have re-baptized it ‘The Wayside.’”14
By 1852 the Hawthornes’ early troubles were behind them, and they had settled into the sympathetic, considerate married love, chronicled later by their son Julian, in a way that was both touching and romantic. Sophia guarded her husband’s time and serenity as if they were her own most precious possessions. When visitors came to the front door of the house, as Sophia welcomed them, Hawthorne used the back door, the door of Louisa’s old bedroom, to escape as she had to the natural wonderland created by the man who had failed at every other thing he had tried.
Both Hawthornes, for the first time, found themselves in touch with the delicious consequences of nature tamed by an imaginative human hand. “The clearest picture in my mind is that of my father and mother stepping side by side about the grounds,” wrote the Hawthornes’ daughter, Rose, in a later memoir. “He talked then. Her head was almost always lifted; she was looking straight ahead or up at a height of summer loveliness.”15 The Hawthornes left the house in 1853 when Hawthorne’s good friend from Bowdoin College Franklin Pierce became president and rewarded Hawthorne—who had written his campaign biography—with the consulship at Liverpool, England. When they returned in 1860, Hawthorne dramatically changed Wayside architecturally, building a “sky parlor,” a room at the top of the house with long windows facing in all four directions from which he could see Walden Pond to the south and the spires of Concord to the west.
Eventually, after the Hawthornes and their children had lived in the house, and after her parents’ deaths, Rose Hawthorne sold it in 1883 to Daniel Lothrop, a well-known publisher. Lothrop’s wife, Harriet, who met him when he agreed to publish her work, was the author of The Five Little Peppers and other children’s books under the pen name Margaret Sidney. Little Women was the historical precedent for the Peppers in more ways than one. That the five little Peppers and the four little Alcotts and Marches and the three little Hawthornes had all played and learned under the same roof, albeit in different decades, seems more like God’s purposes than man’s accidents, as Sophia Peabody might have thought.
Touring the house in the summer of 2008 with a group of professors, I imagine that we are all looking for some kind of air pocket that will release the secret to the creativity that drove all the families who lived here. The house is dark, with low ceilings and all shades drawn against the light. In the kitchen, we hear about the shower Bronson Alcott rigged up for his family’s frigid morning ablutions. On the wall, we squint at the original of Bronson’s beautifully handwritten “Order of In-door Duties,” a schedule for his four daughters—even when Bronson Alcott wasn’t running a school, he was running a school for his family. (The National Park ranger explains that the “Order of In-door Duties” at Orchard House next door is a copy.) At 5 A.M. the girls were to rise, bathe, and dress, and at 9 join their father in the parlor for studies. After dinner at noon, they were to sew, read, and have conversations with their mother and Miss Foord, and after supper at 6 there were more conversations and instruction in music.
The schedule’s largest admonition seems directed at Louisa, reminding her of the importance of vigilance, punctuality, perseverance, and prompt, cheerful unquestioning obedience. The girls are also urged to remember government of temper, hands, and tongue and gentle manners and words. There was to be no playing during work times. All this rigidity must have been a tall order for a young woman who was so wild that she thought she was born to be a horse, a girl in love with an older neighbor, a girl just finding ways to channel her prodigious energy into the writing she began at the table in her private bedroom.
Our group crowds into the sky parlor at the top of the house, leaving our guide at the foot of the narrow stairs. It’s a warm afternoon and the air seems thick in the enclosed space. Although Hawthorne wrote nothing of note in this parlor or at the standing desk he built for himself, the room seems haunted by his ambition, by the wild intention of a great man building an Italianate tower at the top of a New England farmhouse. This man dreamed great dreams. I am standing at the desk, a simple shelf against the chimney, when someone lifts a window shade to peer into the woods and the thing snaps open and up with a bang. We all jump, and for a moment the room seems to vibrate with spirits.
Another day I climb to the top of the ridge. Alcott’s careful terracing has almost been obscured; the terraces are only visible if you know what to look for. The rangers warn about poison ivy, but as I slide on the pine needles, it’s the trees that seem villainous. Forest sprawl has taken over New England, which was once pasture and meadow cleared with the blood, sweat, and tears of the first settlers. I find myself hating the railroad that brought the industry that eventually eliminated the picturesque agricultural way of life. At the top of the ridge, with my back to the Alcott and Hawthorne house at the bottom, I stand looking at what would be the view if it weren’t for the trees. I stand where Hawthorne often stood. Ahead of me is a large, new yellow house. Can I blame the builder? What could be better than owning a house at the edge of land owned by the National Park Service? In the backyard a gleaming basketball net reminds me how different childhood is now from the nineteenth-century childhood I have left behind at the bottom of the hill.
The money from the Hawthornes’ purchase of their old house saved the Alcotts once again. Just at the time that Abba had concluded that her mission to help the poor in Boston had failed, the family was able to move out of the High Street slum and into far nicer rooms in a four-story brick house on Pinckney Street on the back side of Beacon Hill, near the dome of the Massachusetts State House.
The financial brinksmanship that had characterized their lives had taken its toll. After the move in 1852, an exhausted and depressed Abba Alcott collapsed into despair. She thought that nothing she had done for the poor made any difference; her employment agency had failed. “It makes me feel sad that so much time is irrevocably gone,”16 she wrote. Suddenly she was a tired old woman.
Since Fruitlands, Louisa had often dreamed of fame, or riches, or at least of earning enough money to comfortably support the beloved six people she referred to as the pathetic family. She longed for some kind of creative self-expression. Sometime during the years of deprivation and illness and discouragement in the family’s second decade of living in Boston, during bitter days of remembering Bronson Alcott’s triumphant Temple School as she walked across Boston Common to this or that demeaning job, the dream of becoming a writer began to take over Louisa’s idea of her own future. In the resuscitated f
amily newspaper, she published a full-fledged melodrama, “The Rival Painters.” Slowly the $5 and $10 payments she got for her shorter published pieces in magazines began to catch up with her earnings as a seamstress and a teacher. Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental, affecting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by the unprepossessing wife of a Bowdoin College professor, inspired Louisa as an abolitionist. It also inspired her as a young woman writer, providing a thrilling model of a woman with no distinguished degrees writing a popular and financially successful book.
While Abba sewed and cooked and organized paying lodgers in their new house on Beacon Hill, Louisa wrote new melodramas under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard in the spare time from her own sewing and teaching. One, “The Masked Marriage,” was published in December in Dodge’s Literary Museum, and she was paid $10—this in a year when she made $80 sewing and teaching. Another, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” exemplifies Louisa’s melodrama style. “To and fro, like a wild creature in its cage, paced that handsome woman, with bent head, locked hands and restless steps. Some mental storm, swift and sudden as a tempest of the tropics, had swept over her.”
What makes someone want to be a writer? Clearly, one thing this dream requires is a ferocious hunger, a hunger for recognition, a yearning to be heard that roars through the soul with a sound so great that the stories often feel as if they are discovered rather than invented. Writing also requires a kind of divine perversity. The writer stands outside the conventional world looking in with a vision sharp enough to describe things in ways that are both recognizable and entirely surprising. Good writing is almost always subversive. It uses the nuts and bolts of the texture of everyday life to communicate truths that may be as disturbing as they are original. There is often a lot of anger in great writing; no one likes to be outside, the one left behind to tell the story, but a writer must learn to live out there in the cold, warmed only by her ability to write.
In 1853, when she was still mired in making money from teaching and had started a school for young girls in the parlor on Pinckney Street, Louisa was partway to being a writer but not quite there. She was beginning to sell her short melodramatic tales, but disdained them and dreamed of a more serious kind of writing like Mrs. Stowe’s or even Emerson’s or Thoreau’s. She wanted to write in a way that would confront the world and try to change it. Her moneymaking stories, potboilers, seemed beneath her even as she churned them out and walked them down to Frank Leslie, one of her publishers.
Louisa wrote her friend Alf Whitman that her stories were “blood & thunder tale[s] . . . easy to compose & are better paid than moral and elaborate works of Shakespear so don’t be shocked if I send you a paper containing a picture of indians, pirates wolves bears 7 distressed damsels in a grand tableau over a title like this ‘The Maniac Bride’ or ‘The Bath of Blood, a Thrilling Tale of Passion.’”17 Ashamed, Louisa May Alcott did everything she could to hide her tracks as a melodrama writer. She always used the name of A. M. Barnard and never acknowledged authorship after the stories were published, not even much later when anything she wrote was assured of an adoring audience. She systematically destroyed as much of her own correspondence as she could find. She asked others to destroy the letters she had written. The fact that A. M. Barnard was, in fact, Louisa May Alcott was not discovered until almost a hundred years later by Alcott biographer Madeleine Stern and her researcher Leona Rostenberg while researching for Stern’s book in Harvard’s Houghton Library.18
Louisa May Alcott had written and rewritten her essay about her time with the dreadful Richardson in Dedham. This was serious writing, not the ramped-up melodrama of her other pieces with their Paulines in peril, their diabolical lovers, their natural disasters, and their wild landscapes. In writing “How I Went Out to Service,” Alcott had her first try at the detailed, textured realism that would end up more than ten years later as the basis of her greatest book. This time, however, she failed.
The essay reads as if Louisa is still whining about how badly she was treated. Her account brings up many unanswered questions about Richardson’s intentions. “At first I innocently accepted the fraternal invitations to visit the study,” she writes of her employer, after a few days “feeling that when my day’s work was done I had earned the right to rest and read. But I soon found that this was not the idea. I was not to read: but to be read to. I was not to enjoy the flowers, pictures, fire, and books; but to keep them in order for my lord to enjoy.”19
Where a reader expects resolution, there is more complaining. The essay does not clarify what was really going on, and the reader suspects that Louisa wasn’t sure herself. She’s a very unreliable narrator. Bad writing is often driven by resentment, and good writing is based on authority. The essay has little authority. Although this first serious essay by Louisa May Alcott is not one that anyone reads now, it is her first foray into memoir and into a simple authorial voice that would become the empathetic, brilliant voice of her greatest books.
The Alcott family was living in relative comfort in the house on Pinckney Street (a plaque on the house today incorrectly identifies it as a house where Louisa May Alcott lived as a young girl, but she was in her twenties when the family lived there). Louisa’s life was beginning to be the money-earning patchwork of companion, tutor, teacher, seamstress, and writer that made her feel quite happy and successful as the numbers in her ledger went from two to three digits.
Success often breeds ambition. In the spring of 1854, Louisa decided to pay a visit to James T. Fields, a venerable editor who stood for serious writing by serious writers. Perhaps he would give her some encouragement. He had gone to work as a clerk for the Old Corner Bookstore when he was fourteen, and by the time Louisa went to see him, he was a partner in the publishing venture Ticknor & Fields. He was in his thirties and had already published Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and he would soon publish Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Dickens, Thackeray and Wordsworth.
Or perhaps Louisa was provoked into visiting James T. Fields by her father’s most recent failure. Bronson had gone on a lecture tour that took him as far as Cleveland. Financed, as always, by Emerson, he had sent back good news at first. So far he had $25 saved from giving Conversations, and there would be much, much more. It’s astonishing that anyone in his family actually believed him enough to be disappointed. On his return, he was warmly welcomed, and after the hugging and kissing had died down, he opened his wallet to reveal his earnings with a rueful smile—$1. It was all other people’s fault as it always was, he explained. His overcoat was stolen, promises were not kept, and traveling was expensive. “I shall never forget how beautifully mother answered him, though the dear, hopeful soul had built much on his success, but with a beaming face she kissed him saying, ‘I call that doing very well. Since you are safely home dear. We don’t ask anything more,’” Louisa wrote of that disappointing night in her journals. We “took a lesson in real love which we never forgot, nor the look that the tired man and the tender woman gave one another.”20
Certainly the key to a successful marriage is a kind and tender acceptance of another’s failures, and certainly this was a situation in which Abba Alcott had plenty of practice. At the same time, as biographer Martha Saxton points out about Louisa’s reaction to Bronson’s habitual insolvency, “rage, anger, and disappointment were not allowed, so she had to reduce everyone, and especially her father, to the stature of a large, bumbling, adorable baby. By making him like an infant, Louisa justified his outrageous irresponsibility.”21
Someone had to be responsible for supporting the family, and Louisa reached for the role. James Fields had already met Louisa when he visited her father at the Emerson’s house in Concord, and Louisa hoped he would be a friendly audience. That morning Louisa took the mile-long walk from the family house on Pinckney Street on the back side of Beacon Hill over the rise, and through the open passage under the State House. She went down the steep hill past the Masonic
Temple where her father had had a school so long ago.
She passed the Boston Common and turned into the bustling center of downtown. There the spire of the Old South Church presided like a disapproving Puritan dowager over the teeming business of the new Boston. There was the bookshop, next to Mrs. Abner’s Coffee House, where Fields took authors and colleagues for coffee and hot buns. There was the gorgeous palace of the Music Hall with its golden gaslit interiors, where Louisa had already been to see Madame Henriette Sontag sing Rossini (the Willis family had provided the tickets) and where she had recently gone to hear Theodore Parker, one of her favorite speakers and a fervent abolitionist, demand equality for women.
Now Louisa headed for the second floor of the Old Corner Bookshop, where Fields had his office behind a green curtain that separated him from his young assistant, Thomas Niles, and the piles of manuscripts he had yet to read. She handed him the manuscript, her first and last memoir essay, “How I Went Out to Service.” He motioned her to sit and began to read. She could hear the noise of Thomas Niles’s pen scratching and the chatter in the bookstore downstairs. The air smelled of paper and ink.
Finally the great James T. Fields looked up at her and delivered the verdict that she would remember for the rest of her life. “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write.”22 Perhaps Fields, who later became a friend of Louisa’s, understood her well enough to think his criticism might push her to another level of writing. Perhaps Louisa was too different from the middle-aged men who were the key to Fields’s success for him to recognize her potential as a writer. Perhaps he thought of her as Bronson’s daughter in a way that blinded him to her talent. Louisa May Alcott wrote about what it was like to be a woman in the world, and Fields had not read anything else on that subject. Perhaps the piece didn’t engage him at all. At any rate, it was at that moment in Fields’s office that Louisa May Alcott became definitely and certainly a writer. A stubborn girl who had to fight for every privilege she had in her young life, Alcott was inspired rather than discouraged by Fields’s dismissal.
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