Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Alcott had come back to Concord partly to care for her aging mother, and the novel gave her a chance to pay homage to Abba in making her the irresistible Marmee. The sisters were easy. Anna would be beautiful Meg, Lizzie the quiet and perfect Beth, and May, headstrong May, became the obnoxious niminy piminy Amy. A little exaggeration, a little cleaning up of the rough edges, and she had a cast of characters.

  The March family is clearly modeled on the Alcotts, but in writing this book Alcott allowed herself to create, instead of her real family, the family she had always dreamed of having. There would be a loving, loyal domestic—Hannah—to do much of the grunt work of washing, cleaning, and mending that had always been Alcott’s job. Instead of the eccentric, difficult Alcott father, the March father would be heroic and far enough away not to intrude on this female idyll. Instead of Louisa May, the difficult child who was treated as if she belonged in a different family, the rebel who irritated her mother and her father equally until she started supporting them, Alcott created Jo, who shared her love of apples and cats and who, miraculously, was beloved even though she was a rebel.

  As the month of May progressed, Alcott sank into the familiar creative vortex. Her journal entries stopped; she often forgot to eat or sleep. In June she sent Thomas Niles her first twelve chapters. She wasn’t sure if the book could become a novel since its opening pages seemed to be a series of character sketches without a defining narrative. But chronology provided a narrative, and on July 15 she sent 402 pages to Niles at Roberts Brothers on Washington Street. Niles had thought the opening chapters dull when he received them, and Alcott was tempted to agree with him. The characters and the story seemed so ordinary. Alcott sent in her pages without much hope that the publisher would ask for a sequel.

  Thomas Niles accepted the pages and Alcott took the train in to confer with him at his office, while her sister May got to work on illustrations for the book. In the small offices on Washington Street where Lewis A. Roberts created photograph albums out of leather and published books on the side, Alcott and the slender Niles went over her manuscript and began planning publication. Back in 1851, Alcott and Niles had been in a similar office on Washington Street when James T. Fields had told her to stick to her teaching.

  Thomas Niles explained to Louisa that she could take payment one of two ways—either as a $300 fee with royalties of 6.66 percent on each copy sold,10 or $1,000 to sell the manuscript outright. Niles recommended the royalty arrangement and in spite of what $1,000 would mean to her—her annual salary at Merry’s had been $500—she agreed. After all, the book had only taken two months to write.

  On August 26, proofs of the book arrived in Concord along with the first positive words about the story. Niles had given the story to his visiting twelve-year-old niece, Lillie Almy, and she had devoured the book, both laughing and weeping as she read. Encouraged, Niles had given the proofs to a few other young girls, who all adored it. An old suitor and friend, George Bartlett from the Concord Amateur Dramatic Company, stopped by, and Louisa, as she discouraged his romantic fantasies, pressed him into service as a proofreader. By this time in her life, Alcott had clearly made up her mind that marriage was not for her. On September 30, just four months after she began writing it, for the price of $1.50 with three illustrations by May, Alcott’s book was finally published with the title Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. The Story of Their Lives. A Girl’s Book.11

  Almost immediately, letters began to arrive. Thomas Went-worth Higginson wrote that he had loved Little Women, and Bronson mused in his diary that he worried his daughter did not take her genius seriously enough. There were good reviews in The Nation and the Youth’s Companion. People were talking about the book—speculating on whether Laurie was Thoreau or perhaps Julian Hawthorne. Niles sold out the first printing and had orders for a few thousand more, as well as an order from a London publisher, so he asked Alcott to start writing her second volume.

  Alcott was pleasantly surprised. “Much interest in my little women who seem to find friends by their truth to life,”12 she wrote in her journal. Another kind of fan letter she found less pleasing. Dozens of young women wrote ecstatically to praise the book and to urge Alcott to allow Jo to marry Laurie at the end of the second part. To this Alcott responded with fury. “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life,” she complained in her journal in November. “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.”

  No, but she was prepared to marry Jo to a good-hearted professor with a strange accent. She had moved back to Boston, to a room on Brookline Street near Jamaica Plain, and she began the second part of the book with Meg’s marriage to John Brooke, who took his happy bride to live in the Dovecote Cottage. Amy would win a trip to Europe and experience the trip on the Rhine that Louisa had made with Anna Weld five years before. Louisa May Alcott’s thirty-sixth birthday was spent alone in Boston; the November cold made her grateful she wasn’t in the country. Her one gift was a copy of her father’s Tablets, the book Niles had published at the same time that he had published Little Women.

  In December, Alcott helped her parents shut down Orchard House for the winter. Her mother was going to live with Anna and John Pratt, and her father was off to western cities to give Conversations. “A cold, hard, dirty time, but was so glad to be off out of Concord that I worked like a beaver, and turned the key on Apple Slump with joy,” Alcott wrote. She and May took a room in a new temperance hotel—an establishment that did not allow alcohol—on Beacon Street run by the fascinating, roly-poly Dr. Dio Lewis. Lewis was a medical man with ideas about health that ranged from the benefits of Turkish baths to homeopathy. Alcott was happy to be back on Beacon Street near the slow-flowing Charles, and the move was blessed by the receipt of $300 in royalties on the first part of Little Women from Thomas Niles. For the first time in her life, Alcott was able to pay the family’s immediate debts and to give her rich Uncle Sam Sewall money to invest for her.

  Although Alcott seemed to find her voice in writing the second part of Little Women—a combination of composites and fantasies laid delicately over the actual events of family life—she didn’t think that it would be as successful as the first part, which had already sold 5,000 copies. Little did she know what was about to happen. The publication of Little Women, Part II, on April 14 created a firestorm of popularity. Four thousand copies had been ordered before publication, and by the end of the month letters flooded into Boston and another 13,000 copies were sold. Suddenly, Alcott was richer than she could have imagined, as her book flooded into every bookstore and home in New England.

  Although it had been almost a year since she started writing the book, her success felt like some kind of overnight miracle. In her journal, she wrote, “I was very tired with my hard summer, with no rest for the brains that earn the money.” But the brains that earned the Alcott money had suddenly broken through into fame and fortune. Although Alcott herself seemed slow to realize what had happened, in 1932 her Orchard House neighbor Julian Hawthorne told a different version of Alcott’s experience.

  According to the young Hawthorne, Alcott had traveled into Boston to the Roberts Brothers office to see Thomas Niles after she had turned in the second part of the book. Despondent, she hoped he might give her a word of encouragement or a small check, but she found her way to Niles’s office blocked by a huge hubbub. The sidewalks were lined with packing cases of books and drays being loaded with more books. Clerks and stock boys crowded the doorway, making it hard for her to even get inside from Washington Street. Once indoors, she saw that there were many piles of books and impatient shopmen and porters; because of the chaos, Alcott feared the whole place was being seized to pay off back debts.

  Timidly she made her way upstairs where Niles himself, “curved like a Capital G over his desk,” sat writing checks and inventories without looking up. “Like the Duke of Marlborough, he was riding the whirlwind and directing the storm; something tremendous was evidently going
on,”13 as Hawthorne wrote remembering the story that Alcott had told her assembled neighbors when she got back to Concord later the same day. Approaching Niles’s desk, Alcott cleared her throat and tried to get his attention. Without looking up, he waved her away impatiently. He was much too busy to be disturbed. She stood paralyzed.

  When he finally angrily looked up from his desk and saw Alcott in her faded clothes standing there he jumped as if terrified. Louisa’s impression was that he actually vaulted over the desk and landed at her feet, leaving his spectacles in midair and grasping her by both elbows. “My dear Miss Alcott,” he sputtered, “you got my letter. Nothing to parallel it has occurred in my experience. All else put aside—street blocked—country aroused . . . a triumph of the century!” On the spot, he offered Alcott a check for any amount she might name. Her book had transformed his poky publishing house into a wildly successful business. All the fuss was about her. “Hard times for the Alcott family were forever over,” Hawthorne wrote. “We that evening saw the first flowing of the liberating tide.”14 Alcott’s success had many effects, not the least a newfound respect from her father who, after all, had been one of the people who urged her to write a book for young girls.

  Noting that his daughter’s book was one of few to focus on New England, Bronson wrote admiringly that “she takes her growing repute modestly, being unwilling to believe her books have all the merit ascribed to them by the public. Her health is by no means yet restored.”15 Always the optimist, Bronson Alcott seemed less surprised than his daughter when their life turned around. The man who called himself the Hoper had never stopped hoping. His journals reflect his conviction that her success is due to his wisdom in the way he conducted family life. She had the advantage, he congratulated himself not quite truthfully, of being raised by a man who knew enough not to send her to school. Thus, she was able to write from experience.

  Bronson’s attention was slightly distracted from the change in his fortunes by another one of his infatuations with a younger woman. Ellen Chandler, a teacher in Framingham, had sent him into a typical verbal spin. “In writing to my friend, whether man or woman, and to a maiden more especially, I may not express all I would, lest I shall be taken to imply more than I meant and offend the delicacy of the sentiment which I feel, as if it were no sentiment and were to be measured by the understanding solely,” he wrote in characteristically incoherent explanation of his feelings.16

  What happens when the financial pressures and disappointments of a lifetime vanish? Driven by adversity and stubbornness and endurance—prevailing against all kinds of discouragement and obstacles—Louisa May Alcott had finally, at the age of thirty-six, succeeded. Now she had nothing to fight for; she had won. “Paid up all the debts, thank the Lord!—every penny that money can pay—and now I feel as if I could die in peace,” Alcott wrote in her journal.17

  Personal prosperity for Alcott coincided with a burst of national prosperity that changed the character of the United States to what it is today. Just as Louisa May Alcott was being reluctantly transformed from a hardworking spinster who had devoted her difficult life to supporting her family, the expanding states went from being a scrappy survivalist nation of upstarts insistent on a bizarre democratic form of government to being the richest and most powerful nation in the world. First this primacy was territorial, as the Mexican War increased the size of the United States. With the driving of the golden spike in Promontory, Utah, that joined the western and eastern parts of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the West and the Great Plains were open to massive expansion. Huge fortunes began to be made in mining, in land acquisition, and in investment in the railroads. The land tracts to be farmed were so gigantic that agriculture began to be mechanized, and this increased profits. Mechanical reapers raced down endless rows of grain, and this country began exporting so much wheat that it ultimately became the breadbasket of Europe. The business of America became business.

  All this good fortune was not lost on those who heard about it in England and Europe. Immigration exploded, with 2.5 million people arriving in the 1850s to be added to a population that had grown from five million in 1800 to nearly 40 million in 1870. Left behind in this rush to prosperity, the southern states and their newly freed black populations went their own disastrous way. Former slaves now joined the disenfranchised Native American population as U.S. problems that somehow got left behind in the great rush to prosperity. “Poised on the brink of their most confident and successful era, Americans were not being hypocritical in forgetting the losers,” writes historian J. M. Roberts.18

  Looking back on Alcott’s life in 1869 from our vantage point of almost 150 years, her story seems to reach a crescendo with the success of Little Women. Before the publication and its success, Alcott’s life is one way; afterward, it is another way. Before, she is poor; afterward, she is rich. Before, she is unrecognized; afterward, she is famous and people come to Concord in order to catch a glimpse of the great writer. Before, she has a small audience; afterward, people stop her in the street wherever she goes. Before, she sells few copies of her books; afterward, everything she writes is immediately ordered in the tens of thousands.

  This is how her life looks in our modern context, but in the context of her own experience the contrast seemed minimal. In 1868 she was a hardworking writer who was often ill, and in 1870 she was still a hardworking writer who was often ill. In the year her fortunes changed, she published even more stories than she had in previous years. Her account books for 1869 show dozens of stories written for Merry’s Museum, Youth’s Companion, and a magazine called Hearth and Home. “The Lace Makers”; “Foolish Fashions”; “Lafayette’s Visits”; “Our Owl”; “Uncle Tom’s Shipwreck”; “Playing Lady”; “Bunny’s Revenge”; “Kitty’s Cattle Show”; “In the Tower”; “Uncle Smiley’s Boys”; “Betsey’s Bandbox”; “Harriet Tubman”; “More People”; and “A Good Daughter” are some of the titles of essays and stories she wrote as Little Women sold off the charts. She couldn’t stop.

  Although her circumstances had changed, the pressure on her to write stories and novels never seemed to let up. Her last journal entry is about writing, and in her lifetime Alcott wrote more than a dozen novels under her own name including the beloved string of successors to Little Women: Little Men, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Work, Under the Lilacs, Jack and Jill, and Jo’s Boys. Under her pseudonym A. M. Barnard, she produced an impressive group of thrillers and what she called “blood and thunder” novels and stories including “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” Behind a Mask, A Modern Mephistopheles, and A Long Fatal Love Chase, first published in 1995. In between novels she wrote more than three hundred stories.

  In the summer months, she took a short vacation to visit some distant cousins in Canada at their home on the St. Lawrence River, and stopped with her sister May at Mount Desert Island in Maine for a visit. Then she came right back to Boston to work and make money for the family.

  Illness had bothered Alcott in many forms ever since her nursing stint at the Union Hotel Hospital. She had suffered from extremely painful headaches as well as pains in her legs and other joints, which often kept her from sleeping or from moving. Toward the end of her life, this muscular and skeletal pain, sometimes kept at bay by the use of morphine, was joined by severe gastrointestinal pains and acid reflux, which Alcott called “brash.” Her skin also regularly erupted in bumps and boils, and her feet became so swollen at times that she couldn’t wear her shoes.

  Then, in the winter of 1869, while boarding in pleasant rooms on Pinckney Street on Beacon Hill with May, Alcott lost her voice. This time, though, instead of homeopathic medication and hoping for the best, she had the money to afford a Dr. Bowditch who proceeded to do a series of painful cauterizations of her windpipe. Rheumatism also attacked again, causing pain in her feet and hands. Her head tormented her with pain and she was unable to sleep without drugs.

  Her newfound fortune didn’t seem to guarantee health, and her new admiration fro
m her father came with certain obligations. Her next book, he decided in between his intense correspondence and visiting with Ellen Chandler, should be about him, about a philosopher who was always ahead of his time. It should be titled The Cost of an Idea. On his latest lecture trip west, Bronson had been hailed as the father of Little Women, experiencing more audience enthusiasm than he was used to. He quickly added a section about Louisa to his stock speech.

  History has not been kind to Thomas Niles, the seemingly clueless editor who failed to see the greatness of Little Women until his own niece had to tell him what he had in hand. Yet a closer look reveals a more complicated man. Little Women was Niles’s idea, and he had to bully the author into writing it. He also came up with the title Little Women, and, more important, he advised Alcott to go for a smaller advance with a royalty percentage instead of taking a flat fee. In her annotations to her journals in 1885, she made a note of the importance of this advice, complete with mangled fairy-tale references. “An honest publisher and a lucky author, for the copyright made her fortune, and the ‘dull book’ was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling.”19