The Annotated Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

  “Are you going to help about the fair, dear?”11 asked Mrs. Carrol, as Amy sat down beside her with the confiding air elderly people like so well in the young.

  Director George Cukor goes over a point in the text with the four stars of the 1933 Little Women. (Photofest)

  “Yes, aunt, Mrs. Chester asked me if I would, and I offered to tend a table, as I have nothing but my time to give.”

  “I’m not,” put in Jo, decidedly; “I hate to be patronized, and the Chesters think it’s a great favor to allow us to help with their highly connected fair. I wonder you consented, Amy—they only want you to work.”

  “I am willing to work,—it’s for the Freedmen12 as well as the Chesters, and I think it very kind of them to let me share the labor and the fun. Patronage don’t trouble me when it is well meant.”

  “Quite right and proper; I like your grateful spirit, my dear; it’s a pleasure to help people who appreciate our efforts; some don’t, and that is trying,” observed Aunt March, looking over her spectacles at Jo, who sat apart rocking herself with a somewhat morose expression.

  If Jo had only known what a great happiness was wavering in the balance for one of them, she would have turned dove-like in a minute; but, unfortunately, we don’t have windows in our breasts, and cannot see what goes on in the minds of our friends; better for us that we cannot as a general thing, but now and then it would be such a comfort—such a saving of time and temper. By her next speech, Jo deprived herself of several years of pleasure, and received a timely lesson in the art of holding her tongue.

  “I don’t like favors; they oppress and make me feel like a slave; I’d rather do everything for myself, and be perfectly independent.”

  “Ahem!” coughed Aunt Carrol, softly, with a look at Aunt March.

  “I told you so,” said Aunt March, with a decided nod to Aunt Carrol.

  Mercifully unconscious of what she had done, Jo sat with her nose in the air, and a revolutionary aspect, which was anything but inviting.

  “Do you speak French, dear?” asked Mrs. Carrol, laying her hand on Amy’s.

  “Pretty well, thanks to Aunt March, who lets Esther talk to me as often as I like,” replied Amy, with a grateful look, which caused the old lady to smile affably.

  “How are you about languages?” asked Mrs. Carrol of Jo.

  “Don’t know a word; I’m very stupid about studying anything; can’t bear French, it’s such a slippery, silly sort of language,” was the brusque reply.

  Another look passed between the ladies, and Aunt March said to Amy, “You are quite strong and well, now dear, I believe? Eyes don’t trouble you any more, do they?”

  “Not at all, thank you, ma’am; I’m very well, and mean to do great things next winter, so that I may be ready for Rome, whenever that joyful time arrives.”

  “Good girl! you deserve to go, and I’m sure you will some day,” said Aunt March, with an approving pat on the head, as Amy picked up her ball for her.

  “cross patch, draw the latch,

  sit by the fire and spin,”13

  squalled Polly, bending down from his perch on the back of her chair, to peep into Jo’s face, with such a comical air of impertinent inquiry, that it was impossible to help laughing.

  “Most observing bird,” said the old lady.

  “Come and take a walk, my dear?” cried Polly, hopping toward the china-closet, with a look suggestive of lump-sugar.

  “Thank you, I will—come Amy,” and Jo brought the visit to an end, feeling, more strongly than ever, that calls did have a bad effect upon her constitution. She shook hands in a gentlemanly manner, but Amy kissed both the aunts, and the girls departed, leaving behind them the impression of shadow and sunshine; which impression caused Aunt March to say, as they vanished,—

  “You’d better do it, Mary; I’ll supply the money,” and Aunt Carrol to reply decidedly, “I certainly will, if her father and mother consent.”

  1. Calls. In nineteenth-century New England, the etiquette of paying calls was highly developed, with social behavior manuals devoting full chapters to the subject. Eliza Farrar, the wife of a Harvard professor well known among the Concord intelligentsia, addressed the topic in her influential book The Young Lady’s Friend: “As a general rule, it is safe and proper to conform to the customs of the place you live in. All calls should be returned, and the more promptly this is done, the more civil you will be considered.”

  2. “Shylock.” In Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is a moneylender who makes a loan to Antonio, requiring the latter to compensate Shylock with a pound of Antonio’s own flesh if he cannot repay the debt with money.

  3. organdie. Organdy is an extremely sheer, crisp cotton cloth, highly prone to wrinkling.

  4. “a joy forever.” Keats begins Endymion, his long poetic romance of 1818, with the lines, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness; but still will keep / A bower quiet for us, and a sleep / Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

  5. “Maud’s” face. In his 1855 monodrama “Maud,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes of his prim heroine, “she has neither savour nor salt, / But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past [sic] / perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault? / All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen) / Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.”

  A portrait of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), and his signature on a check. The author of In Memoriam A. H. H. and Idylls of the King, Tennyson was the British Poet Laureate when Alcott published Little Women. (From the collection of the editor)

  6. “because it sells.” Alcott was equally frank regarding her own penny fiction. Just before Little Women became a publishing sensation, she wrote to an admirer, “I should very gladly write this sort of story altogether, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t pay as well as rubbish” (Louisa May Alcott, Selected Letters, p. 118). Later, she was equally dismissive of her children’s fiction, telling another fan, “Though I do not enjoy writing ‘moral tales’ for the young, I do it because it pays well” (Louisa May Alcott, Selected Letters, p. 232).

  7. “Tom Brown was a brick.” Tom Brown is the young hero of the 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days by English author Thomas Hughes (1822–96). The novel tells of a boy’s adventures at Rugby, an English public school.

  8. royal yellow-haired laddie. In 1860, at the age of nineteen, the future King Edward VII, eldest son of Queen Victoria, became the first British royal to tour the United States. Alcott saw him in Boston on October 18. In her journal, she called him “a yellow-haired laddie very like his mother. Fanny W. and I nodded and waved as he passed, and he openly winked his boyish eye at us; for Fanny, with her yellow curls and wild waving, looked rather rowdy, and the poor little prince wanted some fun. We laughed, and thought that we had been more distinguished by the saucy wink than by a stately bow. Boys are always jolly—even princes” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 100).

  9. “best bibs and tuckers.” Bibs and tuckers were both items of women’s clothing from the seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries. Bibs somewhat resembled modern-day bibs, though they were not specifically designed to protect clothes from spilled food. Tuckers were lace pieces fitted over the bodice. By Alcott’s time, “best bib and tucker” was already a slang expression for one’s finest clothes.

  10. “I shall be one if I can.” Alcott, like her parents before her, was sincerely dedicated to a variety of reformist causes, including abolition, temperance, dietary reform, and women’s suffrage. In an 1879 letter, she signed herself, “Yours for reforms of all kinds” (Louisa May Alcott, Selected Letters, p. 238).

  11. “Are you going to help about the fair, dear?” On Christmas Day 1852, May Alcott, age twelve, “spent the day at the Anti-Slavery fair and tended a table there some time.” Two days later, she went back to the fair and saw “a great many pretty things there and one was [a picture of] a
n Affrican [sic] woman going to the well. They are going to give it to Mrs. [Harriet] Beecher Stowe.” May also “sewed for the contrabands at Mrs. Horace Mann’s” in October 1862 (bMS Am 1817 [56], Houghton Library, Harvard University).

  12. Freedmen. A term for the African-American former slaves who had been emancipated symbolically by the Emancipation Proclamation and legally by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In the fall of 1863, as the Civil War raged on, Alcott considered traveling south to teach recently liberated slaves, but did not go.

  May Alcott showed her sympathy for the victims of slavery not only by helping to raise money for African-American orphans but also with her art. Her painting of a female slave, titled La Negresse, was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1879. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  13. “spin.” Polly quotes from the Mother Goose rhyme:

  Cross Patch, draw the latch,

  Sit by the fire and spin;

  Take a cup and drink it up,

  Then call your neighbors in.

  CHAPTER VII.

  Consequences.

  MRS. Chester’s fair was so very elegant and select, that it was considered a great honor by the young ladies of the neighborhood to be invited to take a table, and every one was much interested in the matter. Amy was asked, but Jo was not, which was fortunate for all parties, as her elbows were decidedly akimbo at this period of her life, and it took a good many hard knocks to teach her how to get on easily. The “haughty, uninteresting creature” was let severely alone; but Amy’s talent and taste were duly complimented by the offer of the Art table, and she exerted herself to prepare and secure appropriate and valuable contributions to it.

  Everything went on smoothly till the day before the fair opened; then there occurred one of the little skirmishes which it is almost impossible to avoid, when some five-and-twenty women, old and young, with all their private piques and prejudices, try to work together.

  May Chester was rather jealous of Amy because the latter was a greater favorite than herself; and, just at this time, several trifling circumstances occurred to increase the feeling. Amy’s dainty pen-and-ink work entirely eclipsed May’s painted vases; that was one thorn; then the all-conquering Tudor had danced four times with Amy, at a late party, and only once with May; that was thorn number two; but the chief grievance that rankled in her soul, and gave her an excuse for her unfriendly conduct, was a rumor which some obliging gossip had whispered to her, that the March girls had made fun of her at the Lambs. All the blame of this should have fallen upon Jo, for her naughty imitation had been too lifelike to escape detection, and the frolicksome Lambs had permitted the joke to escape. No hint of this had reached the culprits, however, and Amy’s dismay can be imagined, when, the very evening before the fair, as she was putting her last touches to her pretty table, Mrs. Chester, who, of course, resented the supposed ridicule of her daughter, said in a bland tone, but with a cold look,—

  “I find, dear, that there is some feeling among the young ladies about my giving this table to any one but my girls. As this is the most prominent, and some say the most attractive table of all—and they are the chief getters-up of the fair—it is thought best for them to take this place. I’m sorry, but I know you are too sincerely interested in the cause to mind a little personal disappointment, and you shall have another table if you like.”

  Mrs. Chester had fancied beforehand that it would be easy to deliver this little speech; but when the time came, she found it rather difficult to utter it naturally, with Amy’s unsuspicious eyes looking straight at her, full of surprise and trouble.

  Amy felt that there was something behind this, but could not guess what, and said quietly—feeling hurt, and showing that she did,—

  “Perhaps you had rather I took no table at all?”

  “Now, my dear, don’t have any ill feeling, I beg; it’s merely a matter of expediency, you see; my girls will naturally take the lead, and this table is considered their proper place. I think it very appropriate to you, and feel very grateful for your efforts to make it so pretty; but we must give up our private wishes, of course, and I will see that you have a good place elsewhere. Wouldn’t you like the flower-table? The little girls undertook it, but they are discouraged. You could make a charming thing of it, and the flower-table is always attractive, you know.”

  “Especially to gentlemen,” added May, with a look which enlightened Amy as to one cause of her sudden fall from favor. She colored angrily, but took no other notice of that girlish sarcasm, and answered with unexpected amiability,—

  “It shall be as you please, Mrs. Chester; I’ll give up my place here at once, and attend to the flowers, if you like.”

  “You can put your own things on your own table, if you prefer,” began May, feeling a little conscience-stricken, as she looked at the pretty racks, the painted shells, and quaint illuminations Amy had so carefully made and so gracefully arranged. She meant it kindly, but Amy mistook her meaning, and said quickly,—

  “Oh, certainly, if they are in your way;” and sweeping her contributions into her apron, pell-mell, she walked off, feeling that herself and her works of art had been insulted past forgiveness.

  “Now she’s mad; Oh dear, I wish I hadn’t asked you to speak, mamma,” said May, looking disconsolately at the empty spaces on her table.

  “Girls’ quarrels are soon over,” returned her mother, feeling a trifle ashamed of her own part in this one, as well she might.

  The little girls hailed Amy and her treasures with delight, which cordial reception somewhat soothed her perturbed spirit, and she fell to work, determined to succeed florally, if she could not artistically. But everything seemed against her; it was late, and she was tired; every one was too busy with their own affairs to help her, and the little girls were only hindrances, for the dears fussed and chattered like so many magpies, making a great deal of confusion in their artless efforts to preserve the most perfect order. The evergreen arch wouldn’t stay firm after she got it up, but wiggled and threatened to tumble down on her head when the hanging baskets were filled; her best tile got a splash of water, which left a sepia tear on the cupid’s cheek; she bruised her hands with hammering, and got cold working in a draught, which last affliction filled her with apprehensions for the morrow. Any girl-reader who has suffered like afflictions, will sympathize with poor Amy, and wish her well through with her task.

  There was great indignation at home when she told her story that evening. Her mother said it was a shame, but told her she had done right. Beth declared she wouldn’t go to the old fair at all, and Jo demanded why she didn’t take all her pretty things and leave those mean people to get on without her.

  “Because they are mean is no reason why I should be. I hate such things; and though I think I’ve a right to be hurt, I don’t intend to show it. They will feel that more than angry speeches or huffy actions, won’t they, Marmee?”

  “That’s the right spirit, my dear; a kiss for a blow is always best, though it’s not very easy to give it, sometimes,” said her mother, with the air of one who had learned the difference between preaching and practising.

  In spite of various very natural temptations to resent and retaliate, Amy adhered to her resolution all the next day, bent on conquering her enemy by kindness. She began well, thanks to a silent reminder that came to her unexpectedly, but most opportunely. As she arranged her table that morning, while the little girls were in an ante-room filling the baskets; she took up her pet production, a little book, the antique cover of which her father had found among his treasures, and in which, on leaves of vellum, she had beautifully illuminated different texts. As she turned the pages, rich in dainty devices, with very pardonable pride, her eye fell upon one verse that made her stop and think. Framed in a brilliant scroll-work of scarlet, blue and gold, with little spirits of good-will helping one another up and down among the thorns and flowers, were the words, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”1

&nbs
p; “I ought, but I don’t,” thought Amy, as her eye went from the bright page to May’s discontented face behind the big vases, that could not hide the vacancies her pretty work had once filled. Amy stood a minute, turning the leaves in her hand, reading on each some sweet rebuke for all heart-burnings and uncharitableness of spirit. Many wise and true sermons are preached us every day by unconscious ministers in street, school, office, or home; even a fair-table may become a pulpit, if it can offer the good and helpful words which are never out of season. Amy’s conscience preached her a little sermon from that text, then and there; and she did what many of us don’t always do—took the sermon to heart, and straightway put it in practice.

  A group of girls were standing about May’s table, admiring the pretty things, and talking over the change of saleswomen. They dropped their voices, but Amy knew they were speaking of her, hearing one side of the story, and judging accordingly. It was not pleasant, but a better spirit had come over her, and, presently, a chance offered for proving it. She heard May say, sorrowfully,—

  “It’s too bad, for there is no time to make other things, and I don’t want to fill up with odds and ends. The table was just complete then— now it’s spoilt.”

  “I dare say she’d put them back if you asked her,” suggested some one.

  “How could I, after all the fuss;” began May, but she did not finish, for Amy’s voice came across the hall, saying pleasantly,—

  “You may have them, and welcome, without asking, if you want them. I was just thinking I’d offer to put them back, for they belong to your table rather than mine. Here they are; please take them, and forgive me if I was hasty in carrying them away last night.”