Marmee & Louisa (8 page)

During the week that Bronson resided with the Mays, Samuel Joseph observed that his sister could not take her eyes off their guest. This and certain “indications of a mutual attraction” pleased the minister. He and his wife had the satisfaction of a child; now his sister had the possibility of a husband and a family of her own.

At the end of the week Mr. Alcott departed for his home seventy miles to the west, leaving Abigail with her dreams. She felt she had finally found a suitable male companion, to whom she might grow as close as she had been to her mother and sisters, with whom she might open a school. Over the subsequent months she did not see him in person but sent him many letters. Men “are beginning to see that we are intelligent, accountable beings,” she wrote to him. “That we are instruments in the hand of the great Artificer [Creator] cannot be denied. Let us then be used as such. Let . . . women be treated as divine agents, not merely as objects of pleasure or sense, created only for convenience and admiration,” as were her mother and many of her peers.

In letters she elaborated on the need for women’s education, but in her journal she revealed her adoration of her new acquaintance: “He shall be my moral mentor, my intellectual guide . . . my benefactor; he shall see . . . that I am not only his lover, his mistress, but his pupil, his companion.”
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She hoped Bronson would take her brother’s advice to seek work in Boston.
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Then she might see him. As she told Lucretia, “abundant news from Boston,” presumably in regard to a school that Bronson might start, prompted Abigail to consider taking a trip there.
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That fall, though, Bronson took a teaching position in Bristol, Connecticut.
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As before and probably for similar reasons, some of his pupils’ parents complained and he was asked to leave. Meanwhile, Abigail wrote to him of her desire to be his “female assistant,” should he teach in Boston. If he would only “instruct” her, she would be “pleased to associate myself with you for that purpose.”

She meant more. “It would add much to my happiness to form an arc in your social circle wherever you may be,” she continued.
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“My words come dripping off my pen so fast that their component parts are lost. You will, I fear, be puzzled to read and more puzzled to understand; but the fear that my thoughts will be chilled by too much attention to their
expression, has made my language incoherent, my writing shameful.” She may have feared that voicing her feelings was not feminine. “But if amidst the scrawl, you can make out what I most wish to convey, I shall be satisfied.” Finally, “I shall pass the winter here and hope to hear from you (if not see you) often.”

They did not see each other much that winter, if at all. He visited Boston the following spring, armed with letters of introduction from Samuel Joseph to other ministers and notable men.
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Bronson called at the mansions of her relatives and family friends, each one more unlike his boyhood farmhouse than the last. He heard a sermon by the Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Joseph’s friend, and met a gifted young teacher named Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a sister of Abigail’s friend Mary. Bronson called on Samuel Joseph’s mentor, the esteemed Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, and spent an afternoon in his parlor on Mount Vernon Street discussing educational and religious reform.

At Channing’s urging, Bronson went to hear him sermonize at the Federal Street Church. “How ardent was my drawing toward some . . . ideal friend,” Bronson recalled later—unaware perhaps that Abigail longed for that role. “I was led providentially to visit my brother May at Brooklyn, and through him was introduced to Boston” and Channing, “he more than any mind at that time answering to my ideal.”
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Channing told his Harvard roommate Dr. Joseph Tuckerman, whose wife was now Abigail’s stepsister, of the young Mr. Alcott. The Reverends Tuckerman and Channing agreed that Alcott might be the man to organize the “infant school” that Boston badly needed. Infant schools, established in urban centers in the 1820s to educate poor children as young as age two, were becoming attractive also to middle-class parents.
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Bronson, “flattered by the prospects” before him, accepted the offer and prepared to open the Salem Street Infant School in Boston’s North End.
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In Connecticut Abigail prevailed upon Lucretia, who had regained her “strength & health” since Joseph’s birth, to join her in traveling to Boston.
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By the first of May the two young women and eleven-month-old Joseph May were ensconced amid the stately furniture, English carpets, and fine glassware of Abigail’s childhood home. Abigail “says it is quite pleasant at the [house on Federal] Court & that they are very kind to her,” Lucretia wrote to her husband, “but there is a something, I can’t
tell what, there.
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I don’t feel at my ease.” Lucretia sometimes felt uncomfortable with her father-in-law and his young wife, whom they all nonetheless called “Mother.” One afternoon, eleven-month-old Joseph sat at the feet of Lucretia, Abigail, and Louisa as they took tea with Mother. As Lucretia recounted, “What did Joe do but
piddle
on the carpet. Your Mother, Abba, Louisa and I [were busy] with cloths, diapers & I can’t tell what. You would have screamed to see our distress.”

Abigail had not yet seen Bronson, but she delighted in news of him from her sister Louisa. “My dear brother,” Abigail wrote to Samuel Joseph, “[I] Hope you get on [in Brooklyn] to your heart’s content, wifeless, childless, sisterless.
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Noiseless . . . I can as yet tell you no news [but] Louisa tells me Mr. Alcott is all the ‘rage’. The Cabots are head over heels enamored with his system” of teaching, which involved the Socratic method, much discussion and journal writing, and minimal structure and routine. “Susan Cabot says, ‘the Infant [school] may make us much [advantage] as they have a mind to if Mr. A[lcott] will only take the school.’ . . . Louisa has only seen him once. He is constantly with some of the grandees . . . I have not seen him, do write to him.”

Again Abigail wrote to Bronson to offer him her services. In response, he called on her at her father’s house in early June “in relation to the Infant School, for which she has applied as assistant teacher,” according to his journal.
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He politely refused her, without divulging his reason. In his journal he admitted that he was afraid of losing “Miss May” if he were forced to depart a school in which she worked. Referring to himself in the first person plural, as was his habit, Bronson felt “unwilling she should engage in this school with hopes of continuing in it when we leave, for we are very desirous—and are becoming every day more interested in her—that she should assist in the more desirable situation which we propose for ourselves in a school of higher order. And we have reason to think that she herself is more interested in the latter situation than in the former, and would assist us with pleasure.” He was “devoted to the teaching of Infant Schools, and female assistance, if the right kind, is our chief hope. In the acquisition of this lady to assist us we think we should obtain that kind of help which is indispensible.” The assistance he envisioned from Abigail was as his wife.

Disappointed by his response to her overture, Abigail defied social norms further the next day. She walked unescorted through the North End, hoping to encounter him there as if by accident. Abigail’s boldness may have inspired a grown Jo March near the end of
Little Women
to walk out alone in hopes of running into an older man she loves, Professor Friedrich Bhaer. “I always do take a walk toward evening, and I don’t know why I should give it up, just because I often meet the Professor on his way out,” Jo thinks to herself, not quite admitting her feelings.
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In the North End decades before Louisa wrote those words, Bronson spied Abigail on her solitary walk. He said nothing to her, but several days later wrote to her, “I shall hope that you will sometimes visit my little circle in Salem Street.
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I thought I caught a glimpse of you in that vicinity the other day. Shall I add that only my diffidence prevented me from accosting you there?”

July was agony for both Abigail and Bronson. Feeling melancholy and fearing rejection, he felt unable to speak to her of his feelings. She found him “too vacillating.”
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She knew she loved him. Did he not love her? Each time she broached the subject, he did not know what to say. He alternated “between doubt and certainty.” The prospect of marriage “calls forth the most gloomy and afflicting scenes” in his mind. “What a peculiar temperament is [mine]!”

On August 2, seeking somehow to express his feelings, he handed her his journal.
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She read through the entries explaining his refusal to hire her. This “had the very effect which [he had] hoped.”
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Without delay she spoke the words that eluded him, and he supplied the yes. He revealed to her that “he has been attached to me from the evening” of their first conversation, in Brooklyn, “but circumstances have prevented the disclosure of his feelings.
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I found it remained to me to make all conscious with him or give him that encouragement and promise that should secure to him my future interest.” In addition to defying convention by voicing the proposal, Abigail did not wish him to ask her father for her hand, as all her sisters’ suitors had done. Triumphantly she wrote to her brother and Lucretia, “I am engaged to Mr. Alcott, not in a school, but in the solemn, the momentous capacity of friend and wife.”
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It would be a marriage of opposites: “He is moderate. I am impetuous. He is prudent and humble. I am forward and arbitrary. He is poor. But we are both industrious. Why
may we not be happy?” This description would prove prescient in that Bronson and Abigail were opposites. Over the years, though, Bronson would demonstrate little of the prudence, industry, and humility that she had ascribed to him. She, on the other hand, would remain as she saw herself then, industrious, impetuous, and forward.

Her refusal to approach marriage in the traditional way continued to perplex her father. Bronson was unlike every other prospective son-in-law Colonel May had considered. The young teacher was charming, no doubt, and admired by Samuel Joseph. But Bronson was penniless, without formal education or family money, and only fitfully employed. While Colonel May had rejected the pursuit of wealth for its own sake, he never questioned the social norm that a man support his family. It is possible that Abigail’s father detected in Bronson a quality that Ralph Waldo Emerson would later define: encounters with Alcott invariably ended with his demand, “Give us much land & money.”
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In answer to Colonel May’s concerns about Bronson’s ability to support her, Abigail indicated that neither she nor Bronson worried about money. She had great faith in him. His new school was indeed flourishing; by late summer its enrollment had tripled, to sixty students.
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Despite Bronson’s continuing indebtedness, of which Abigail was likely now aware, he aimed to establish what he called a “reign of truth and reason” by “arrang[ing] society—or systems of education—in accord with the laws of our nature.” His projects were “opposed to the ruling opinions and prejudices of the age, [so] we shall render ourselves unpopular,” he conceded, but “we care little about these things.”
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Abigail told her brother and Lucretia, “The connection I have found with Mr. Alcott is very essential to me.”
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During their marriage she anticipated that Bronson would guide and improve her character by smoothing her edges. “He is tranquil and firm,” she said, “which you know is directly opposite to my constitution, [so] full of emotion, strong prejudices. . . . My dislikes are antipathies, my prepossessions, loves.” Her deep emotions and firm convictions, which she shared with her brother and doubtless their late mother, whom she “loved with all the ardor of” her heart and from whom she “imbibed much” of her character, were among their legacies as Sewalls.
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“With this temperament,” she went on, “how important that my future companion should be tranquil and equable.
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He is all this, which gives me a hope that I too may one day
become what my friends may wish.” Enumerating her perceived failings, she added, “I do feel most exquisitely. . . . It is a pardonable sin, for it is a natural response. But I have moral strength which restores the equilibrium, and I go on cheerfully.”

Conversations with Bronson strengthened her hope that women might play a new role in society. “No woman’s intelligence should be trammelled and attenuated by custom as her body is by fashion,” Abigail believed.
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She intended to join her husband in bringing her talents and opinions before the world, which her mother and sisters could not do. “Reason and religion are emancipating woman from that intellectual thralldom that has so long held her captive,” she observed.
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“She is finding her place by the side and in the heart of man, thus compelling him by the irresistible force of merit to accept her as an intellectual companion.”

In late summer she escaped the heat by visiting relatives in Hingham on the coast. Upon her return in early September, Bronson called on her at Federal Court. “I do love this good woman,” he wrote in his journal. “I love her because she loves me.”

Abigail introduced Bronson to all her Boston relatives, including Aunt Q, who invited the couple to dine. “Servants!” Aunt Q exclaimed when a servant she summoned failed to appear, according to Bronson.
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She praised him for eating two servings of her apple pudding: “You shall have enough, I say!” Her cider-sauce was better than Abigail’s mother’s, she boasted. While carving her “fine roast beef” she said she’d learned to carve because of Governor Hancock’s lame wrist. Aunt Q stuffed Bronson with bread and potatoes and requested he “come again and take tea with her.” This “eccentric . . . old lady,” he observed, “still considers herself invested with the honors of Revolutionary respect” and “is constantly admitting persons of her acquaintance to see her, being too much absorbed in her own Madamism to call on others.” A woman of “fancied greatness,” she presumed to entertain him with “her august presence,” her table, and her “My Mr. Hancock.” Aunt Q’s manners demonstrated to Bronson “the influence of station upon weak and ignorant minds, how much circumstances give tone and quality to untaught natures.”