Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  The teaching at Plumfield is exactly like the teaching at the Temple School in Boston. The boys, and ultimately a few girls, are taught by example and by the discipline of their love and respect for Jo and her professor. They learn to read through enjoyment. They learn mathematics out of a desire to please. They learn to be good by following the unsullied direction of their own good hearts. Alcott, like her father, believed that children are born angelic.

  At Plumfield there is no memorizing by rote. In one scene, when a boy needs to be punished, Professor Bhaer forces the boy to hit him with a ruler, just as Bronson Alcott sometimes asked his students to hit him, knowing that this would be much more frightening than the other way around. The ghost at Plumfield is less the shade of the benevolent John Pratt than the specter of the progressive Bronson Alcott at the dinner table pushing aside his own dinner and publicly going hungry in order to punish his children for some transgression of theirs.

  Plumfield is the personification of Bronson Alcott’s pedagogy, and it’s a sweet, romantic book. Some of the boys are good, some bad, some talented, some almost—almost—beyond being civilized even by the loving comfort offered by their beloved Aunt Jo. But in making the character who is her stand-in older and wiser, Alcott expressed her own tiredness. While writing Little Women, she had been a daughter. In spite of everything she had been through, she was still a young, rebellious, and difficult girl forced to write something she didn’t care for. By the time she wrote Little Men only a few years later, she was an old woman, a mother of her own family, shouldering the economic and emotional burdens of all of them.

  The book is moving, with many vivid scenes, but it has none of the richness and surprise of Little Women or even of Hospital Sketches. The only real adversary in the novel is poverty. Years before she was to make a habit of visiting boys’ homes and reform schools, Alcott had a vivid idea of what it was like to be an impoverished and abused child. She was one. Also, in watching her mother’s various charitable organizations ebb and flow, she had seen her share of poverty and abuse in conditions far worse than what she and her sisters experienced.

  The poverty and abuse of children obsessed Alcott, and this gave her the energy to write a book about them. In Little Men, the boys come to Plumfield with the suspicious natures and beaten-down souls and filthy starved bodies of children of the streets. Nat, a wide-eyed twelve-year-old, has been abandoned and abused. His late father and sleazy partner made him play the fiddle for pennies on street corners. At Plumfield it turns out that the loan of Professor Bhaer’s violin is all it takes to transform him. Under the calluses and layers of grime is a talented musician. Boy after boy comes to Plumfield in trouble and is soothed by the loving and abundant routine of the place.

  Once they get there, it is only a matter of time before the March magic turns them into adorable, loving versions of themselves. They reconnect with the clouds of glory they were trailing at birth. Longfellow rules! There is an occasional hard case. One boy, Dan, has to be sent away for a while to a harder country school before he can fit in at Plumfield.

  Alcott is no innocent. She describes the boys as having deep scars of anger and inability to trust that come from their lives of adversity. Still, in this novel poverty and the scars of abuse are easy enemies to defeat. All it takes to reform the damaged boys is love and a few simple comforts. The complexity of Little Women, in which the real enemy is the glorious and dangerous perversity of the human soul—the desire of a sister to kill a sibling or the inability to love a man whom it would be convenient to love—is missing in Little Men. Alcott was no longer hungry, no longer yearning for the recognition she despaired of ever finding in her lifetime.

  “I want something new; I feel restless, and anxious to be seeing, doing, and learning more than I am. I brood too much over my own small affairs, and need stirring up, so as I can be spared this winter I’d like to hop a little way and try my wings,”1 Jo March confided in her mother soon after the pressures of realizing that Beth was sick again and that Laurie was in love with her. Life at Orchard House was becoming uncomfortable and the fictional Jo needed a break. The answer? New York City.

  Most of the two sections of Little Women bear the same graceful, tenuous relationship to real life. Although Alcott often protested that all she did was write down what happened, this wasn’t strictly true. She based the book on the lives of her sisters and her parents, but she shifted house and events and—most important—she made a happy story out of a story that had sometimes been grim and dreadful. She made herself popular when she was not. She made the Marches’ poverty seem voluntary and high-minded, when the Alcotts’ poverty was often desperate.

  But in Part II of Little Women, in Chapters 33 and 34, “Jo’s Journal” and “Friend,” Alcott flung herself entirely into the world of the imagination. She had never been to New York City for more than a night on her way to Washington, D.C., and on her way to Europe. Yet she imagined that Jo, restless and discontent in Concord, might spend the winter in New York City at a friendly boardinghouse run by a friend of her mother’s named Mrs. Kirke. This leap into the imaginary, fueled by the scraps of confidence Alcott was beginning to have as copies of the first part of Little Women continued to sell better than anyone had predicted, is her only real plot device.

  What happens in New York neatly furthers the narrative and brings in the character of the forty-year-old professor Frederic Bhaer. The pressure on Alcott to marry off Jo was fierce as more and more young women wrote her fan letters that sounded as if the characters in Little Women were real and Alcott had the power to make them live or die, marry or stay single. Alcott refused to yield, but New York City and Professor Bhaer were her compromise.

  In October of 1875, Alcott decided to attend the Women’s Congress in Syracuse, New York. She had intended to observe and be company for her cousin Charlotte Wilkinson, her beloved Uncle Sam May’s daughter, but instead she became a reluctant center of attention, a celebrity whose presence swept away the more serious concerns of the audience. “When the meeting was over, the stage filled in a minute . . . with beaming girls all armed with Albums and cards and begging to speak to Miss A.,” she wrote in a letter to her father. One fan wanted a kiss, another lifted Alcott’s veil to see her face. “I finally had to run for my life with more girls all along the way and Mas clawing me as I went,” she wrote.2 In her journal, she noted that she had been “kissed to death by blushing damsels.” Alcott’s ambivalence about her fans did not obscure her delight and gratitude about the money that continued to pour in.

  Many writers will tell you that the imagination has strange powers and that scenes they have imagined sometimes strangely appear to come true. My father wrote a plane hijacking in a story of his, three years before the first plane hijacking, for instance. Alcott’s imaginative powers seem even fiercer. Although Mrs. Kirke’s boardinghouse did not exist, and Alcott had never been to New York City for more than a night, on picturesque Mac-Dougal Street there is a group of brownstones, one of which once bore a plaque saying that Louisa May Alcott lived there and that she wrote some of Little Women there. The pretty buildings, owned by New York University and used currently as Law School dormitories, are called the Alcott Houses, but the excellent NYU archivist Nancy Cricco has no idea where this name came from. She calls the story an “urban myth.”3

  Whoever named the buildings created a historical monster of inaccuracy. The so-called fact that Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women while she was living on MacDougal Street has spread like a virus to Wikipedia and many other Internet sites. Many sites add that the houses were owned by an Alcott uncle. This is also impossible, since the Alcott name was fabricated by Bronson Alcott, who began life as Amos Alcox and decided that A. Bronson Alcott was a name more fitting a man of his progressive and elegant ideas and appearance.

  But this error is not restricted to the often-criticized Internet—it also appears in Frommer’s guide to New York and many other print books. At least on Wikipedia, a search using differe
nt words uncovers the true story, which is, as you know, that Alcott wrote her book in her upstairs bedroom in Concord, Massachusetts. The Alcott Houses look very much like the sets of the four movies made of Little Women in which, as in the novel, the intrepid and fictional Jo March meets and, without knowing it, falls in love with the bearlike Professor Bhaer.

  Much is made of the ways in which fact seeps into fiction—novels are sometimes read as if they were autobiography. But fiction also bleeds over into fact. The Alcott Houses are a nice example of this. Historically, their name is entirely inaccurate. Imaginatively they can be taken as the originals of Mrs. Kirke’s imaginary boardinghouse.

  By the time Louisa May Alcott visited New York City for more than the overnights required to sail to Europe, she was famous, exhausted, and often sick. “When I had the youth I had no money, now I have the money I have no time, and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life,” she wrote.4

  Everywhere she went, she was gawked at and admired. At a meeting of the Sorosis Club at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, the students had hoped that Alcott would make a speech. She declined. Instead, they asked her to stand up and turn around slowly so that everyone could see her from every angle.

  As Concord readied itself for a gala centennial to celebrate the shots heard round the world that had begun the Revolutionary War at the Old North Bridge, Alcott spent less and less time there. She hadn’t liked Concord for a while and now that she was a local celebrity, she liked it even less. More than a hundred visitors a month made the pilgrimage to Concord and then out to Orchard House to speak with Alcott or to meet her or even just to see where she lived. “A whole school came without warning last week & Concord people bring all their company to see us,” Alcott wrote a Mrs. Woods in July of 1875. “This may seem pleasant, but when kept up a whole season is a great affliction.”5

  So Alcott decided to go to a city where she would be one of many celebrities and planned her first real visit to New York in the winter of 1875, almost ten years after the writing of Little Women, and years after the writing of Little Men, Shawl-Straps and Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag as well. Although Alcott was a spinster, a category of woman marginalized and often treated with contempt in nineteenth-century New England, she was also now a famous spinster, and this made it possible for her to travel and be welcomed in a way that was rare for a single, unmarried woman in her forties.

  Alcott’s position in society as a young woman and the decisions she had to make about the direction of her life are very much like the position of young women today. Yet in other ways, there has been tremendous progress in women’s rights, progress that Alcott supported and monitored. Although women in their early forties who have never been married may be treated as if they have failed at some ineffable something, they have the freedom to travel and to make lives for themselves alone, and they are treated with respect—in fact, they are sometimes treated with more respect than accrues to a nonworking housewife living in her husband’s financial and emotional shadow. The epitome of successful womanhood in the 1870s in this country—the obedient housewife of a middle-class husband—is now thought to be a shadow woman, a woman who hasn’t bothered to develop her own identity.

  In New York, Alcott moved into Dr. Eli Peck Miller’s Bath Hotel at 39–41 West Twenty-sixth Street, a combination hotel, spa, and health club near Madison Square Park where for $2.50 a day she got meals based on Mattie Jones’s Hygienic Cook-Book—no coffee, spices, pickles, teas, or tobacco. Peck believed that disease could be avoided by living a healthy life, and health at his establishment was supplemented with dozens of special baths—hot air, vapor, Turkish—as well as Kidder’s electromagnetic machine and a Swedish Movement Cure. Alcott could spend a day between the Frigidarium and the Suditorium, ending with a friction massage while reclining on a marble couch. Alcott wandered all over the city from Madison Square down to the Bowery, and as word of her presence spread, her social life in the most social city in the world began in earnest.

  Dinner parties were given in her honor by hosts like Alcott’s long-lost cousin Octavius Frothingham. At the Frothinghams’ she chatted with Oliver Johnson, a prominent humanitarian who had known Harriet Tubman, and she talked with her new New York friend Mary Mapes Dodge. Dodge had also grown up in a family of four sisters and had written a children’s book, which was, at the time, as much a sensation as Little Women—Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates.

  The Concord country wren who had grown up in a genius cluster and had fame suddenly descend on her was perfectly comfortable chatting with politicians and other famous writers. She became friends with Anne and Vincenzo Botta. Anne Botta, whom Alcott found “lovely,” was a poet who had married a handsome Italian Cavour scholar and whose home had become a center of intellectual New York.

  Like Louisa’s Boston friend Annie Fields, Anne Botta was lighthearted and generous and gathered individuals who interested her in her drawing room. The scholar D. G. Holland was typical of New York intellectuals eager to chat with Alcott about Walt Whitman, abolition, and writing. Holland’s dinner party on Park Avenue was sandwiched between the theater—Alcott saw Edwin Booth acting at the new Fifth Avenue Theater—and ladies’ lunches at the Lotos Club and the Sorosis professional women’s club and winter drives in Central Park with another new New York friend also staying at Eli Peck Miller’s hotel, Salley Holley.

  Alcott had come to like parties, but her reformer soul was more interested in society than in Society with a capital S. Her fame gave her access to anything that aroused her curiosity. In between dinners and luncheons in her honor, she arranged visits to orphanages and prisons. All the money and celebrity in the world did not change what she cared about or dim the strength of her obsession with those who had less—with those who had very little. At Christmas, she joined friends in visiting Randall’s Island, in the East River and owned by the City of New York, which held the House of Refuge for Delinquent Boys and Girls, an insane asylum, and an inebriates’ home, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a rehab.

  Bought by the City of New York in 1836, the island had been used since then for groups that required the quarantine provided by the rushing, swirling currents of the East River.6 Accompanied by James and Abby Hopper Gibbons, who had often ministered to the waifs on Randall’s Island, Alcott saw how low things could get for institutionalized children. “I’ve had a pretty good variety of Christmases in my day, but never one like this before,” she wrote her family back in Concord. The children, after ecstatically receiving the bushels of candy and presents brought by the Gibbonses, performed pieces and songs for the visitors.

  But it was the insane asylum for children, which she called the “idiot house,” that Alcott thought she would be haunted by for a long time. There, abandoned children with serious mental illnesses—illnesses that were diagnosed only as “idiocy”—lived in sad conditions ministered to by pauper women and a devoted few. “The babies die like sheep, many being deserted so young nothing can be hoped or done for them,” she wrote home. After food and presents were distributed and the ferry to Randall’s Island took the visitors back to Manhattan, Alcott realized that she had missed out on Christmas dinner. “My Christmas day was without dinner or presents for the very first time since I can remember,” she wrote home. “Yet it has been a very memorable day, and I feel as if I’d had a splendid feast seeing the poor babies wallow in turkey soup, and that every gift I put into their hands had come back to me in the dumb delight of their unchild-like faces trying to smile.”7

  In her intense New York visit, Alcott visited a New York City that few tourists ever see. At the Tombs, officially called the New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention, she was given a tour. The famously brutal city prison in an imposing neo-Egyptian building had been designed by John Haviland to suggest a huge, weighty Egyptian sarcophagus. Alcott was told that the prisoners in 148 double cells lived on black bread, tea, and coffee. The month of her visit, there were three executions at t
he Tombs.

  Alcott was particularly interested in a home for indigent newsboys where for 5 cents a day a boy could live and sleep. Called the Newsboys’ Lodging House, it was one of many institutions built to help the masses of indigent children who seemed to crowd the city streets. “One little chap, only six, was trotting round busy as a bee, locking up his small shoes and ragged jacket as if they were great treasures,” Alcott wrote her young nephews Frederick and John about boys who were not as fortunate as they. “Six-year-old Peter was being supported by his nine-year-old brother who worked overtime to keep their family of two from being separated,” wrote the boys’ beloved Aunt Weedy. “Think of that Fred! How would it seem to be all alone in a big city, with no mamma to cuddle you, no two grandpas’ houses to take you in, not a penny but what you earned and Donny to take care of?”8

  Alcott was happy to support her nephews and anyone else in her family now that she had found a way to make money. She also longed for a level of appreciation that never seemed to materialize. Her sister Anna had often asked if Louisa might help her buy a house. Louisa thought it was better to have Anna and her boys at Orchard House. Finally, in 1877, Anna prevailed and her sister bought her the Thoreau house in the middle of Concord. Anna had her dream come true, courtesy of Louisa. Louisa was generous but still feeling overlooked. “Ought to be contented with knowing I help both my sisters by my brains,” she wrote. “But I am selfish, and want to go away and rest in Europe. Never shall.”9 In spite of her huge success, Alcott felt lashed to the same old financial treadmill. Now instead of desperately struggling to pay the family bills, she was forced to struggle to keep up with the family dreams—perhaps a harder job in a family of professional dreamers.