Marmee & Louisa (30 page)

Samuel Joseph was in Boston because of a recent demonstration against the Fugitive Slave Act in which his brother-in-law had participated. Although not easily persuaded, Bronson was now an abolitionist who supported violence to promote the cause. In late May 1854 Bronson joined a vigilante company that stormed a Boston courthouse and killed a U.S. marshal in an attempt to free an escaped slave, a preacher from Virginia named Anthony Burns, who had been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act.
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Armed troops escorted Burns back into slavery in Virginia, enraging many Americans, even those who were not abolitionists. Attempts by the government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act proved “a potent propaganda weapon” for abolition and the Underground Railroad, and strengthened Garrison’s movement.
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Many northern states, including New York and Massachusetts, responded by passing laws that freed slaves within their borders. But a few years later, in the infamous Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional all state laws against slavery. The court, Samuel E. Sewall would lament, “has just decided that a negro is not a citizen of the United States, and that Southern slaveholders can carry their slaves through the free States without making them free. . . . I feel ashamed of living in a country
where there is such a contemptible President [James Buchanan] and judges.”
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The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened western territories to slavery by allowing their settlers to vote on the matter, also served to unite the North in resistance to southern encroachments. “We have at last come to the point where the slaveholders must be driven back,” Samuel E. Sewall wrote to Samuel Joseph that year. “I cannot doubt that the triumphs of freedom are about to commence, and that they will be as rapid as those of slavery have hitherto been.”
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Home in Syracuse on June 20, 1854, in the study where he received parishioners, with his niece Anna Alcott “well & happily” at his side, Samuel Joseph wrote to his son Joseph, “I have not recovered my serenity, which was so much disturbed by the occurrences in Boston. The most angry, warlike [feelings] have at times been stirred within me. But I know they are not right and so I have been in conflict with myself.”

In July, at the Church of the Messiah in which he preached, his daughter Charlotte married Alfred Wilkinson, a young banker she had met on the railroad station platform on her arrival in Syracuse when they were eleven and thirteen years old.
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There is no record of the wedding guests, but Anna, Louisa, and Abigail would surely have been present. Charlotte May Wilkinson was twenty-one, the same age as Louisa, and similar to Louisa in appearance, according to a family recollection.
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Five feet, six inches tall and slender, Charlotte had pale skin, “expressive brown eyes, and brown hair rich with tones of red and gold.” She was more demure than Louisa, whom a neighbor described as “a big, lovable, tender-hearted, generous girl, with black hair, thick and long, and flashing, humorous” eyes, blessed with good humor, common sense, and the character of “a leader.” Charlotte’s husband, a son of a Syracuse banker active in Samuel Joseph’s church, was a recent graduate of Rochester Polytechnic Institute.

Two months after the wedding Louisa was still in Syracuse.
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Lucretia wrote affectionately to Joseph, now a Harvard sophomore, on September 29, “I have exchanged your gloves and will send them and your other goods and chattels by L.
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Alcott who goes [to Boston] next week I suppose. . . . I leave the rest of the [letter] paper at 11 p.m. for your father to fill and hope he will send you something better than my poor brains have been able to, dearest Jody. Ever your loving ‘Mum,’ L.F. May.”

At seven fifteen the next morning, in his study, Samuel Joseph continued
the letter to his son while his wife, other children, and niece Louisa slept late. “Our folk not up yet. The savor of a nice beefsteak is ascending from the kitchen, and that will soon bring them down.” He went on to give his son advice not unlike that from Abigail to her daughters. “I hear indirectly that you have been called on to deliver an address, or lecture, or speech of some sort. Let us know all about it. The more thoughts you express, the more you will have. And there is no exercise of the mind that is so quickening and strengthening to all our mental faculties as carefully arranging and clearly expressing our thoughts on any subject worth thinking about. I hope too you will take pains to acquire an excellent locution. Do learn to read well, and speak well. Accustom yourself to speak extempore in common conversation, cultivate the habit of saying exactly what you mean to say, of using clear and appropriate language and of finishing your sentences. A slovenly slipshod style in conversation will be very likely to insinuate itself into one’s extempore speeches.”

That month in Boston, Abigail told Bronson she was terribly worried about money. She had said this to him a thousand times, and he had never known how to respond. Now, though, Anna and Louisa were laboring for the Alcotts’ daily bread. In his private opinion, “our good girls are” more capable of earning a living than their mother, who possessed only “the wifely washerwoman’s arts and pains-takings.”
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Although Bronson and Abigail owned no land or property, their daughters were becoming their “live-estate.” He remarked, “We have reason to be thankful and take in our live-estate since it yields so fair an income.”

Chapter Eleven

Left to Dig or Die

O
n Christmas Eve in 1854, before slipping her first published book into her mother’s stocking, Louisa wrote on the title page, “Into your Christmas stocking I have put my ‘firstborn.’ ” At age twenty-two, old enough for marriage and babies, Louisa asked Abigail to accept her compilation of fairy tales,
Flower Fables,
“with all its faults” because “grandmothers are always kind.”
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To “my earliest patron, gentlest critic, [and] dearest reader,” Louisa continued: “Whatever beauty or poetry is to be found in my little book is owing to your interest in and encouragement of all my efforts from the first to the last, and if ever I do anything to be proud of, my greatest happiness will be that I can thank you for that, as I may do for all the good there is in me, and I shall be content to write if it gives you pleasure.” She requested that Abigail consider this slender volume “merely as an earnest of what I may yet do; for, with so much to cheer me on, I hope to pass in time from fairies and fables to men and realities.”

The next morning, when Abigail reached into her stocking to find the first fruits of her long mentorship of her second daughter, she rejoiced at Louisa’s success. She was also pleased that Louisa continued to be modest, sounding “discreet” rather than gloating. “She takes her good fortune in a becoming spirit—just as you could have wished,” Bronson said to his wife.
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The book, Louisa reminded her family, was only tales invented for children.
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At the same time, it brought in far more than her usual hourly rate, and for much pleasanter work.
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The
Saturday Evening
Gazette
gave it a good review, which she happily read aloud to her mother. For the first time, Louisa noticed, people other than Abigail seemed to think that “topsy-turvy Louisa [might] amount to something after all, since she does so well as house-maid, teacher, seamstress, and
story-teller
.”
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Despite their joy at Louisa’s literary achievements, mother and daughter both sensed that Abigail was not well. Wornout by six years of work in Boston—“City life being so expensive and [its] labours so oppressive to me,” as she put it—Abigail was thinking of moving to Walpole, New Hampshire, where her sister Eliza’s widower had offered her a small house on a lane, firewood, and a garden, rent-free. Benjamin Willis, a wealthy ship owner who had lived in a mansion on Fort Hill in Boston, now occupied a spacious colonial with several outbuildings on land along Main Street in the farming village near the Connecticut River in southwestern New Hampshire where Peabodys, Endicotts, and Cabots spent summers. Willis, according to a neighbor, was a “very nervous . . . thrifty” man, who disapproved of his brother-in-law Bronson’s insolvency.
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In the late spring of 1855, Abigail moved with her three younger daughters—now twenty-two, nineteen, and fourteen years old—to Walpole, where they lived in “near poverty” for nearly two years, Richard Herrnstadt noted.
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Anna still worked in Syracuse, lived with her May cousins, and continued to send Abigail most of her salary. Bronson traveled between New Hampshire, Boston, and Concord.

That November, not long before her twenty-third birthday, Louisa told her mother that she had decided to leave New Hampshire “to seek my fortune” in the city. She found Walpole “very cold and dull now the summer butterflies have gone.”
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One rainy day in that “dullest month in the year,” with her “little trunk of homemade clothes, $20 earned by stories sent out to the ‘Gazette,’ and my MSS., I set forth with Mother’s blessing.”
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In Boston, boarding with Sewall cousins on Beacon Hill, she wrote and sold light tales and poems to the
Saturday Evening Gazette
. Like Anna, she sent home most of her earnings of five or ten dollars for each piece.
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Her writing was “well paid for,” she felt, “especially while a certain editor [Frank Leslie] labored under the delusion that the writer was a man,” an illusion that Louisa often enhanced by using only her initials, the “dashing signature L.
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M. Alcott,” or masculine or genderless
pseudonyms. “The moment the truth was known,” unfortunately, “the price was lowered; but the girl had learned the worth of her wares, and would not write for less, so continued to earn her fair wages in spite of sex. . . . I insisted that if the rubbish was ever worth a dollar a page it was so still, & had my way, steadily increasing the sum as the demand grew.” Women writers must “understand the business details of their craft,” she wrote later.
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“The brains that can earn money in this way can understand how to take care of it by a proper knowledge of contracts, copyrights, and the duties of publisher and author toward one another.” Louisa also set aside a portion of her earnings for art classes for Abby May.

During the two years her mother and younger sisters lived in New Hampshire, Louisa returned there each spring and summer. Another attraction that drew her back was the community of young intellectuals who acted in the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company. Louisa, who was tall (five feet, six inches) and lively, with gray-blue eyes, fair skin, a strong chin, and long chestnut hair that she considered her “one beauty,” had always loved to act.
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Her first dramatic experience had been as a child, directing her sisters in the “Louie Alcott troupe.”
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As teenagers she and Anna wrote and performed melodramas. Louisa adapted several Dickens novels for the stage and often assumed the identity of her favorite character, the elderly Mrs. Jarley, of
The Old Curiosity Shop,
with her menagerie of wax figurines. She auditioned for roles and submitted original plays to theaters in Boston, and in New Hampshire she took leading roles in new comic plays. In September 1855 she was Widow Pottle in a drama by J. R. Planché,
The Jacobite,
and Mrs. Bonnycastle in
The Two Bonnycastles,
a one-act farce by John Morton. The following April, having convinced her Syracuse cousins to join her, Louisa played Patty Pottle in
The Jacobite
beside her cousin Charlotte May Wilkinson as Lady Somerford.
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Charlotte’s twenty-six-year-old brother, “Mr. J. E. May,” took four small roles in
The Widow’s Victim,
a one-act farce by Charles Selby, in which Louisa played Jane Chatterly, an “extremely sensitive, extremely literary, and extremely dramatical” lady’s maid.
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The only reason Louisa did not pursue an acting career, she wrote in 1856, was that a theater manager convinced her “it was such a hard life & few succeeded.”
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In the spring of 1856 Abigail’s sixty-eight-year-old brother, Charles, who had returned to Massachusetts from sea only in the early 1840s,
died. Abigail called on Charles’s young widow and four small children in Lynn, Massachusetts, where, according to Bronson, she was feeling unwell.
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She worried that Louisa and Anna might not be able to come home that summer for clean air and rest.
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As always, Abigail wanted the family together. Lizzie was not well. The summer before she and Abby May had contracted scarlet fever. Abby May, a tall, sturdy fifteen-year-old, recovered quickly from the bacterial infection, but the fever lingered in twenty-year-old Elizabeth. Hearing from their father that Elizabeth was near death, Anna and Louisa raced to New Hampshire to help Abigail.
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Lizzie came back from the brink, but her untreated infection evolved into rheumatic fever, which permanently damaged her heart. Restoring Lizzie’s health became the center of Abigail’s life.