6. Sanford Salyer, Marmee, p. 100.
7. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 47.
8. Letters from Fruitlands to Sam and Charles, November 11, 1843, Abigail May Alcott Family Letters.
9. Bedell, The Alcotts, p. 228.
10. Saxton, Louisa May Alcott, p. 149.
11. Matteson, Eden’s Outcast, p. 158.
12. L. M. Alcott, Transcendental Wild Oats, p. 59.
13. Ibid., p. 55.
14. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 130.
15. Abigail May Alcott to her brother, Sam May.
16. Bronson Alcott to Abigail May Alcott from Oriskany Falls, N.Y., where he is traveling with Anna Alcott, July 19, 1844, Letters of A. Bronson Alcott.
17. B. Alcott to his brother Junius, June 15, 1844.
18. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993), p. 112.
19. P. Brooks, The People of Concord, p. 112.
20. A. Bronson Alcott Journals, ed. Shepard, p. 172.
21. Bedell, The Alcotts, p. 236.
22. Cornelia Meigs, Louisa May Alcott: Invincible Louisa (New York: Scholastic, 1965), p. 39.
23. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 59.
24. Dr. Berry Brazelton, Cultural Context of Infancy (New York: Ablex, 1991).
25. L. M. Alcott to Sophia Gardner, Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, September 23, 1845, p. 4.
26. Journals of Bronson Alcott, pp. 188, 190.
27. H. D. Thoreau, Walden, p. 126.
28. Journals of Louisa May Alcott,
29. R. W. Emerson, Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), p. 90.
30. Edward W. Emerson, Alcott in Her Own Time (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), p. 91.
31. Thoreau, Walden, p. 126.
32. Ibid., p. 223.
33. Ibid., p. 270.
34. L. M. Alcott, “Recollections of My Childhood,” p. 9.
35. Ibid., p. 10.
4: BOSTON. “STICK TO YOUR TEACHING.” 1848–1858
1. Declaration of Sentiments. The Dial, July 1848.
2. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, May 1850, in a section of the Journal titled “The Sentimental Period,” p. 62.
3. Matteson, Eden’s Outcast, p. 202.
4. L. M. Alcott, “Recollections of My Childhood,” p. 9.
5. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, April 8, 1851. This meeting of fervent abolitionists that Louisa attended with her father also appears in Bronson’s journal, p. 65.
6. Alcott loved cats. In an essay, “Seven Black Cats,” she describes her favorites—the Czar, Blot, Imp, and Cuddle Bunch.
7. Journals of Louisa May Alcott.
8. Ibid.
9. Bronson Alcott. In the unpublished diaries of Bronson Alcott archived at the Houghton Library as quoted by Bedell in The Alcotts, p. 305.
10. L. M. Alcott, “When I Went Out to Service,” in Louisa May Alcott: An Intimate Anthology, p. 12.
11. Ibid., p. 14.
12. Ibid., p. 17.
13. Ibid., p. 21.
14. N. Hawthorne. Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), p. 160.
15. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897).
16. Journals of Abigail May Alcott, Houghton Library.
17. L. M. Alcott to Alf Whitman, June 22, 1862, Letters of Louisa May Alcott, p. 79.
18. The late Madeleine Stern, who wrote a Louisa May Alcott biography in the 1970s, and her partner Leona Rostenberg, are responsible for discovering this new dimension of Louisa May Alcott. Through determined sleuthing in the Alcott papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard, Rostenberg unearthed a large cache of hidden material—the potboilers that Alcott had written early in her career under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These stories, first published in 1975, are important for two reasons. With their melodramatic tone and extravagant plots, which Alcott adopted in writing for magazines that paid for such stories, they seem to reflect Alcott’s inner yearnings and conflicts. They are also solid evidence of the work she had to do—work she was ashamed of—in order to help support her family.
19. L. M. Alcott, “How I Went Out to Service,” p. 21.
20. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, 1854, p. 71.
21. Saxton, Louisa May Alcott, p. 196.
22. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 109. The way this is phrased in the journal entry of May 1862 suggests that it happened in the past: “School finished or me. . . . I went back to my own writing which pays much better, though Mr. F did say, ‘Stick to your teaching, you can’t write.’”
5: ORCHARD HOUSE. 1858–1862
1. Journals of Bronson Alcott, September 18, 1858, p. 308.
2. N. Hawthorne to Charles Ticknor, Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. 15 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), p. 127.
3. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 98.
4. Scarlet fever begins with the exotoxins of the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes, spread from human to human through contact or sneezing and coughing. The swine and filth at the house where the Halls lived did not cause scarlet fever. Nowadays the first signs of strep throat, caused by the same type of bacteria as scarlet fever, send us to a doctor who does a strep test or culture and treats our children with antibiotics; we have forgotten the problem within a week. The Alcott sisters only slowly recovered, May completely and Lizzie enough to think that perhaps she was all right.
Social epidemiologists who study the way disease moves through populations have written a lot about the rise of Streptococcus A scarlet fever in the 1840s and ’50s and its mysterious disappearance at the end of the century. By the 1900s, scarlet fever was almost as rare as it is today. Where did it go? In many ways, the original epidemic was a result of progress, the same forces that brought the railroad to Concord and established the industrial mills downriver and made it possible for the Alcotts to live more comfortable and cosmopolitan lives. The huge immigrations of the 1840s, with their crowding, slums, and poor nutrition, created perfect conditions for communicable disease.
Slowly, toward the end of the nineteenth century, with what epidemiologists call the “hygiene revolution,” the disease lost its hold. Sanitation and public health measures were taken in cities. One of the Alcotts’ circle, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote in 1844 that doctors should wash their hands before an operation, an idea that was roundly mocked. “Doctors are gentlemen and gentlemen have clean hands,” wrote one critic. The diseases caused by Group A Streptococcus can become rheumatic fever, a disease that attacks the heart and leads to carditis, an inflammation of the heart, and congestive heart failure over a period of months and years.
5. Salyer, Marmee, p. 161.
6. Journals of Bronson Alcott, March 13, 1858, p. 306.
7. Ibid., March 14, 1858, p. 307.
8. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, 1858, p. 89.
9. Ibid., April 1858. The Alcotts first rented rooms on Bedford Street and later rented their old house from the Hawthornes while Orchard House renovations were being done and the Hawthornes were in Liverpool.
10. Journals of Bronson Alcott, p. 308.
11. Ibid., April 7, p. 308.
12. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, 1858, p. 89.
13. Ibid., and annotations twenty years later.
14. Ibid., August, p. 90.
15. Ibid., October, p. 90.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Robert Penn Warren, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (Nashville: J. S. Sanders, 1993), p. 245.
19. L. M. Alcott to Alf Whitman, Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, Nov. 8, 1859, p. 49.
20. Louisa May Alcott poem to John Brown and journal annotations made later, Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 89.
21. Anne Brown Adams, “Louisa May Alcott in the Early 1860’s,” included in Alcott in Her Own Time, p. 8.
22. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, 1859, p. 94.
23. Ibid., May 1860, p. 99.
24. Ibid.
&n
bsp; 25. Ibid., May 1861, p. 105. “Felt very martial and Joan-of-Arcy.”
26. Bruce Catton, The Centennial History of the Civil War: The Coming Fury (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 460.
27. Ibid., p. 130.
6: FREDERICKSBURG. AT THE UNION HOSPITAL. 1863–1865
1. Drew Gilpin Faust, Republic of Suffering. p. 3.
2. Memoirs of WTS (New York: D. Appleton, 1904), p. 196.
3. L. M. Alcott, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” p. 3.
4. L. M. Alcott, Moods, p. 79.
5. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, February 1861, p. 103.
6. Ibid., p. 109.
7. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 105.
8. This is actually a quote from James Boswell, who wrote that Samuel Johnson used to quote a saying of Richardson’s that “the virtues of Fielding’s heroes were the vices of a truly good man.”
9. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 104.
10. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Chiefly About War Matters,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1862.
11. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 106.
12. J. Hawthorne, Memories of the Alcott Family. Alcott in Her Own Time, p. 205.
13. Ibid., p. 189.
14. L. M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. 52.
15. There are many accounts of the sack of Fredericksburg. One that was the basis of this description is Gary Gallagher, ed., The Fredericksburg Campaign: Decision on the Rappahannock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
16. L. M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. 67.
17. Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground (Chatham, G.B.: Wordsworth Military Library), p. 188.
18. Ibid., p. 189.
19. Faust, Republic of Suffering, p. 209.
20. Alice Rains Trulock, In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 100.
21. Robert Stiles, Four Years Under Marse (Fredericksburg: Va.: Neale Publishing Co., 1904), p. 173.
22. Brenda Wineapple, White Heat (New York: Knopf, 2008), p. 113.
23. Robert Roper, Now the Drum of War (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), p. 113.
24. Faust, Republic of Suffering, p. 124.
25. L. M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. 59.
26. Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes, John R. Brumgardt, ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 112.
27. L. M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. 70.
28. Ibid., p. 71.
29. Ibid., p. 60.
30. Ibid., p. 64.
31. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 115.
32. Ibid., p. 114.
33. Ibid.
34. L. M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. 82.
35. Ibid., p. 76.
36. Ibid., p. 87.
37. Ibid., p. 82.
38. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 115.
39. L. M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. 106.
40. Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, p. 333.
41. L. M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. 107.
42. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, pp. 116, 117.
43. Ibid., p. 117.
44. Ibid.
45. Saxton, Louisa May Alcott, pp. 257–58.
46. Roper, Now the Drum of War, p. 101.
7: THE WRITER. 1861–1867
1. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 128.
2. Ibid., pp. 129, 135n.
3. Ibid., p. 131.
4. Helen R. Deese, “Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Moods’: A New Archival Discovery,” The New England Quarterly 76, No. 3, September 2003, pp. 439–55. org/stable/4289157, found by Helen Deese, Prof. Emeritus, Tennessee Tech.
5. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 132.
6. Little Women, pp. 262–63.
7. Review of Moods in L. M. Alcott, Moods, p. 219.
8. Alfred Habegger, “Precocious Incest: First Novels by Louisa May Alcott and Henry James,” The Massachusetts Review 26, No. 2/3 New England (Summer–Autumn 1985), pp. 233–62.
9. Introduction to L. M. Alcott, Moods, xxxix. Sarah Elbert is a professor of history at SUNY Binghamton and the author of Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott’s Place in American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
10. Matteson, Eden’s Outcast, p. 304.
11. Charles Lamb, “The Sanity of True Genius,” Essays of Elia (Boston: William Veazie, 1860), p. 312.
12. This account of Andrew Johnson comes from David O. Stewart, Impeached: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), and Garry Wills, “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech?” Atlantic Monthly 284, no. 3 (1999): pp. 60–70.
13. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 140.
14. Letters of Louisa May Alcott, p. 111.
15. Ibid., p. 130.
16. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 143.
17. L. M. Alcott, Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (Charleston, S.C.: BiblioLife copy of 1871 edition), p. 2.
18. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 145.
19. L. M. Alcott, Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, p. 28.
20. Martha Saxton in her biography of Alcott interprets this note differently—“sad times for A. and L.,” the note reads, and she assumes that the romance was between Anna and Laddie, who would have been closer in age and more suitable to such a romance. This seems unlikely, however, both because Alcott’s journals explicitly detail the romance between Alcott and Laddie, and because a few years later Alcott wrote a long essay about Laddie for the magazine Youth’s Companion, the essay that was later used again in the “My Boys” section of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag.
21. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 151.
22. Ibid.
23. L. M. Alcott, Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, p. 44.
24. I am indebted for this story—as for many other things—to the writer Lyndall Gordon, whom it is my privilege to have as a colleague at the Bennington College writing seminars.
25. Later, Mabel Loomis Todd and her husband David Todd moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, so that he could be a professor of astronomy at Amherst College. They became friends with the Dickinson family—Emily the poet, her brother Austin, and his wife Susan. Austin Dickinson and Mabel Todd fell deeply in love, causing all kinds of passionate anger and bitterness in the family that lasted for generations. As a result of her connection to Austin, Mabel Loomis Todd was the publisher of Emily’s first book, which might never have been published otherwise. The resentment of Austin’s rejected wife and children resulted in a scandalous lawsuit and in many of the Dickinson poems and papers being locked up for years.
26. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 155, n. 9.
27. Ibid., p. 155.
28. Ibid., p. 156.
29. Ibid., p. 160.
8: LITTLE WOMEN. 1868–1872
1. Martha Saxton’s biography Louisa May Alcott is rich in the physical and historical details of the time. Saxton’s eye for clothing and seemingly extraneous information is the source of the shimmering texture of her book. Alcott wrote about the way fashionable women dressed in many of her stories.
2. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 162.
3. Ibid., p. 164.
4. Stern, Louisa May Alcott, p. 168.
5. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 165.
6. Malcolm Gladwell in conversation. Picasso also said, “I do not seek, I find.”
7. E-mail message to me from Jane Hirschfield, October 19, 2008.
8. Watson was my great-grandfather, and the story of the battery-acid accident first appears in his brilliant memoir Exploring Life, written almost fifty years after the wires came alive that afternoon.
9. For this analysis of the sources of Little Women, I am indebted to Madeleine Stern, whose biography Louisa May Alcott is extraordinarily thoughtful and detailed on this subject.
10. For comparison, today’s writers usually receive a royalty of 12 to 15 percent on sales.
11. Roberts Brothers’ first printing of Little Wo
men.
12. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 167.
13. Alcott in Her Own Time, pp. 200–201.
14. Ibid., p. 201.
15. Journals of A. Bronson Alcott, p. 396.
16. Ibid., p. 399.
17. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 171.
18. J. M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 752–53.
19. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 166.
20. Ibid., p. 174.
21. Stern, Louisa May Alcott, p. 191.
22. L. M. Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. 167.
23. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 182.
24. Ibid., p. 179.
25. Ibid., p. 174.
26. Ibid., p. 177.
9: SUCCESS. 1873–1880
1. Little Women, p. 319.
2. Letters of Louisa May Alcott, p. 198.
3. Even the amazing NYU archivists have only been able to find references to the fact that Alcott wrote Little Women on MacDougal Street, nothing about how that fact came to be manufactured.
4. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, 1874, p. 191.
5. Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, July 20, 1875, p. 193.
6. Currently, Randall’s Island contains a sports complex and the vast Carl Icahn Stadium, where summer rock concerts blast away so loudly that they can be heard for miles.
7. Letters of Louisa May Alcott, p. 212.
8. Ibid., p. 204.
9. Saxton, Louisa May Alcott, p. 341.
10. Ibid., p. 344.
11. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 206.
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