Marmee & Louisa (28 page)

Suicide was on her mind. Louisa wondered if mental illness ran in her family, as it does in some of her stories.
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Her mother’s brother Charles, the mariner, was said to have a mental disturbance.
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Uncle Junius, her father’s brother, seemed strange and unhappy. Grandfather May fell into depression after he lost all his money. Louisa knew that both of her parents had suffered from depression.

Meanwhile, Louisa’s beginnings as a writer were deepening her bond with her mother. The proud matron whose health was declining and whose ideals were out of favor sensed that her daughter was genuinely gifted. Louisa, who knew that her mother had dreamed of writing herself, saw Abigail as her only reliable constant, just as Abigail in her youth had seen her own mother.

“I found one of mother’s notes in my journal, so like those she used
to write me when she had more time,” Louisa wrote in the summer of 1850, when she was seventeen. “It always encourages me; and I wish someone would write as helpfully to her, for she needs cheering up with all the care she has. I often think what a hard life she has had since she married—so full of wandering and all sorts of worry! So different from her early easy days, [as] the youngest and most petted of her family. I think she is a very brave, good woman, and my dream is to have a lovely, quiet home for her, with no debts or troubles to burden her. But I’m afraid she will be in heaven before I can do it.”

Louisa may have based a scene in
Little Women
on dialogues with her mother during those painful Boston years:

“Why don’t you write? That always used to make you happy,” said her mother once, when the desponding fit overshadowed Jo.
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“I’ve no heart to write, and if I had, nobody cares for my things.”

“We do. Write something for us, and never mind the rest of the world. Try it, dear, I’m sure it would do you good, and please us very much.”

“Don’t believe I can.” But Jo got out her desk and began to overhaul her half-finished manuscripts.

An hour afterward her mother peeped in and there she was, scratching away, with . . . an absorbed expression, which caused Mrs. March to smile and slip away, well pleased with the success of her suggestion.

Jo wonders why her writing gives readers pleasure. “There is truth in it,” her mother replies. “That’s the secret; humor and pathos make it alive, and you have found your style at last.” Letters of encouragement from her mother, Louisa observed years later, “show the ever tender, watchful help she gave to the child who caused her the most anxiety, yet seemed to be the nearest to her heart till the end.”

In Boston in 1850, as Louisa and Abigail leaned on each other, Bronson, now fifty, began a “romance” with a wealthy young woman only a few years older than his daughters.
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Twenty-four-year-old Ednah Dow Littlehale first appeared in Bronson’s journal that January, when she called on him in Boston to discuss his conversations, some of which she
attended. As she prepared to depart, he offered to escort her home. “The company of intellectual women has a certain freshness and zest one seldom tastes from intercourse with cultivated men,” he wrote afterward. “Sexual qualities seems as needful to the propagation of thought as of human beings.”
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He took Ednah on long walks around the Common and wrote her effusive letters. After a lengthy analysis of her opinion of Thomas Carlyle, in one instance, Bronson promised to await a visit from “My dear Miss Littlehale” in Concord, where he would soon venture.
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He signed off, “Were I the unforgettable, I should be yours, forever, A.
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Bronson Alcott.”

Bronson’s wandering eye troubled Louisa. Although she would befriend Miss Littlehale after the latter’s marriage in 1853 to an older artist named Seth Cheney, Louisa remained uncomfortable, it seems, with her father’s behavior toward the attractive young woman. Their mutual friend Franklin Sanborn, a Harvard graduate and Concord schoolteacher, remembered being brought by Miss Littlehale to call on the Alcotts in Boston one autumn evening in 1852. The encounter felt formal and stiff to Sanborn. “All through that ceremonious call,” he wrote, “Louisa sat silent in the background of the family circle, her expressive face and earnest, almost melancholy eyes . . . fixt on” Miss Littlehale.
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Louisa left no record of her feelings that evening. Did she resent her father’s flirtation? Was she simply tired? She was, at the very least, busy. Fueled by “the inspiration of necessity,” she and Anna had joined their mother at the controls of the family moneymaking machine.
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Chapter Ten

A Dead, Decaying Thing

I
n late 1849 or early 1850, at Abigail’s office on the ground floor of the Alcotts’ house on High Street, a well-dressed lawyer requested her services. Scores of people tramped each day through her employment agency, which Bronson, from his upstairs study, called “a confusing business below.”
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The lawyer, James Richardson, sought a young woman to serve as a companion for his invalid sister, with whom he lived. The young woman would be expected to do light housekeeping and be treated as a member of the family in a large, comfortable house in nearby Dedham. After he departed, Abigail turned to Louisa and asked if she knew anyone suitable for the job.

“Only myself,” Louisa replied. Like Anna, who had spent the previous summer as a nanny and was now teaching at a school in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, Louisa would do anything in her power to help pay the bills.

So that winter eighteen-year-old Louisa moved to Dedham. Once she was living in his house, James Richardson tried to seduce her. When she resisted his advances, he ordered her to scrub floors, split wood, and black his boots.
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After seven weeks of labor she had been paid only four dollars, far less than he and Abigail had agreed. Louisa quit and went home.

Abigail was incensed at the lawyer. She and Louisa agreed she should return his four dollars. Abigail admired Louisa for being “free . . . I am glad the connexion was so loosely sustained, so soon dissolved.”
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But the other side of pride was shame. Louisa hated the unfairness of poverty. Having to black anyone else’s boots made her angry.
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In her journal she railed against the “male lords of creation” who rule the world.
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And she continued to worry about her mother. Abigail, in her early fifties, exhausted from four years of public service, was in poor spirits and “failing” health. Abigail sometimes felt, she said, that she was “a dead, decaying thing”—the lot of most women, it seemed.
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“Sad that so much time is irrevocably gone—and so little remains,” Abigail wrote in her journal. “I am very stupid—stolid—fat and indolent, caring for little, accomplishing less.”
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The sale of Hillside the next year to Nathaniel Hawthorne enabled the Alcotts finally to move up to Beacon Hill, where their Sewall cousins lived, in 1852. Hawthorne paid $1,500 for the Concord property—$1,000 to Abigail’s trust for the house, $500 to Emerson for the land.
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Emerson gave Bronson the $500, while Abigail’s brother and cousin, as her trustees, controlled her $1,000.
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Abigail used some of her money to rent number 20 Pinckney Street, a Beacon Hill townhouse with room for her family and several paying boarders. Having lost her enthusiasm for social work, she said, “It is more respectable to be in my family than a Servant of the Public in any capacity.”
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To be “used
by
[the public] is
ignoble
.”

Meanwhile, Bronson spent several months in Connecticut trying to learn more about his family background and genealogy, according to the late Alcott scholar Odell Shepard. As Bronson earned only $164 that year, “it is not clear how Alcott secured the funds for these extensive researches.”
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Louisa summed up the year in her own journal under “Notes and Memoranda” for 1852: “Father idle, mother at work in the office, Nan [Anna] & I governessing.
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Lizzie in the kitchen. Ab [May] doing nothing but grow. Hard times for all.” Over their four years in Boston, Bronson had earned almost nothing. “Mr. Alcott gave Conversations at various places,” Abigail commented in her journal, adding tartly, “I find myself less congenial in these higher harmonies and look on this banquet of beauty and exquisite elegance with incredulity.”

As a result of their poverty and their mother’s poor health, the older Alcott girls were desperate to make money. For a few months nineteen-year-old Louisa, who now knew that she did not like teaching, “opened a school” at home.
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She was also submitting short stories to magazines in the hope of making a sale. Her sister Anna, twenty-one, had moved
to their aunt and uncle’s house in Syracuse to teach classes at an asylum for the insane, where she would work for the next several years. “Self-sacrificing” Anna “disliked it, but decided to go,” Louisa noted.
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In Syracuse Anna’s panicked state worried her aunt Lucretia. “I wish the poor child could raise a little more of her own earnings so as at least to have a good supply of meat under clothing,” Lucretia wrote to her son Joseph. “But [her] family contrive to use it almost all.
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She has already anticipated her wage & sent her mother $25. Your Aunt Abba as usual was full of debts & in want of money.” Samuel Joseph still sent checks to his sister. “I pity her with my whole heart,” he confided to a cousin, “and the more I think of her strange husband, the more I am shocked at his selfishness.” From Abigail’s brother these were harsh words. As loyal as he was, Samuel Joseph “did not understand during the Alcotts’ hardscrabble years how Bronson could not put family first,” according to the scholar Catherine Rivard.
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“Even the great causes, Sam May felt, might consider standing in line behind feeding the children.”

The two younger Alcotts were less driven to work, probably on account of their age. Elizabeth, a teenager when they moved to Beacon Hill, spent her days sewing, reading, and keeping house, so that Louisa called her “the home bird” or “our angel in a cellar kitchen.”
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Abby May, a budding artist, was enrolled in a Boston public school in the fall of 1851, at age eleven, and two years later began “getting prizes for drawing,” Louisa noted.
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A crayon drawing of Abigail by Abby May a few years later was “a very good likeness. . . . All of us [were] proud as peacocks of our ‘little Raphael.
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’ ” Abigail hoped that Abby May’s “more structured education would prepare [her] for . . . teaching in the elementary or primary departments of our Schools.
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She bears the drill of the formal education better than the other girls would have done.” Bronson agreed that Abby May’s schooling gave her “prospects somewhat fairer than fell to her elder sisters, who, with gifts no less promising, have yet been defrauded of deserved opportunities for study and culture, by the social disabilities under which we have been struggling since the close of my Temple School.
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It was my hope in that, and afterwards in the Fruitlands endeavour,” he continued, “to provide the means of an improved culture in which my children might participate with others to the extent of an enthusiast’s dream; but these plans were frustrated, and at the greatest
personal hazard and domestic cost. Nor have years of toil and anxiety been adequate to repair the damage.—But the dear intent is all the dearer for its hurts and delays, and shall nevertheless fructify and ripen in some distant generation, of which it is the germ and seed.” Little did he suspect that repairing the damage would occur not in “some distant generation” but instead within his own home.

Louisa had just begun to profit from her writing. Her first paid publication, a poem entitled “Sunlight” by the pseudonymous “Flora Fairfield,” appeared in
Peterson’s Magazine
in the fall of 1851, when she was still eighteen.
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The same year she sold a short story for the first time. “The Rival Painters. A Tale of Rome,” which earned Louisa five dollars, begins with a mother blessing her artist son Guido as he leaves home to make his fortune in the city—just as Abigail had done for Louisa. The mother’s advice could have come from Abigail: “Carve thine own fortunes by untiring efforts, . . . Set not . . . too great value upon riches. Walk calmly in the quiet path that leads to thy duty, envying none, loving all. . . . Fear nothing but sin and temptation. . . .” Guido soon falls in love with a beautiful young woman to whom a count has already proposed. The young woman’s father tells the two suitors, both of them painters, that they must compete for his daughter by painting a portrait. The Count produces a brilliant painting of the young woman. But Guido wins the contest—and his beloved—with a “strangely beautiful” painting of his revered mother. “The silvered hair lay softly around the gentle face, and the mild dark eyes seemed looking down on her son with all a mother’s fondness. . . .” His mother possessed almost godlike powers as nurturer and protector. “And while noble painters and beautiful women paid their homage to the humble artist,” Louisa wrote, “high above all the calm, soft face looked proudly down on the son, whose unfailing love for her had gained for him the honor and love he so richly deserved.”