The Annotated Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

  “Well, last evening we went up to the castle about sunset,—at least all of us but Fred, who was to meet us there after going to the Poste Restante33 for letters. We had a charming time poking about the ruins, the vaults where the monster tun34 is, and the beautiful gardens made by the Elector, long ago, for his English wife.35 I liked the great terrace best, for the view was divine; so, while the rest went to see the rooms inside, I sat there trying to sketch the gray-stone lion’s head on the wall, with scarlet woodbine sprays hanging round it. I felt as if I’d got into a romance, sitting there watching the Neckar rolling through the valley, listening to the music of the Austrian band below, and waiting for my lover,—like a real story-book girl. I had a feeling that something was going to happen, and I was ready for it. I didn’t feel blushy or quakey, but quite cool, and only a little excited.

  “By and by I heard Fred’s voice, and then he came hurrying through the great arch to find me. He looked so troubled that I forgot all about myself, and asked what the matter was. He said he’d just got a letter begging him to come home, for Frank was very ill; so he was going at once, in the night train, and only had time to say ‘good-by.’ I was very sorry for him, and disappointed for myself,—but only for a minute,—because he said, as he shook hands,—and said it in a way that I could not mistake,—‘I shall soon come back,—you won’t forget me, Amy?’

  “I didn’t promise, but I looked at him and he seemed satisfied,—and there was no time for anything but messages and good-byes, for he was off in an hour, and we all miss him very much. I know he wanted to speak, but I think, from something he once hinted, that he had promised his father not to do anything of the sort yet awhile,—for he is a rash boy, and the old gentleman dreads a foreign daughter-in-law. We shall soon meet in Rome; and then, if I don’t change my mind, I’ll say ‘Yes, thank you,’ when he says, ‘Will you, please?’

  “Of course this is all very private, but I wished you to know what was going on. Don’t be anxious about me; remember I am your ‘prudent Amy,’ and be sure I will do nothing rashly. Send me as much advice as you like; I’ll use it if I can. I wish I could see you for a good talk, Marmee. Love and trust me.

  Ever your AMY.”

  1. Our Foreign Correspondent. When she wrote Little Women, Alcott had visited Europe once. The trip lasted precisely a year, from July 19, 1865, to July 19, 1866. Alcott traveled as the companion and nurse of a wealthy semi-invalid, Anna Weld, whose frailties and peevish temper sometimes lessened Alcott’s enjoyment of her travels. Many of Amy’s experiences in Europe are closely modeled on Alcott’s own adventures.

  2. “Bath Hotel.” The Bath Hotel, Piccadilly, stood at 25 Arlington Street in the city of Westminster, an easy walk to Pall Mall, St. James’s Palace, and Fortnum & Mason. Although Amy deprecates the hotel itself, the neighborhood was, and remains, a highly elite and desirable one.

  3. “very kind to me.” Alcott’s own passage was less convivial. She encountered “no pleasant people on board so I read & whiled away the long days as best I could” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 141).

  4. “ ‘Kate Kearney.’ ” “Kate Kearney” is an Irish tune, written by the novelist Lady Morgan, née Sydney Owenson (1781?–1859), best known as the author of The Wild Irish Girl (1806). “Kate Kearney” was frequently anthologized in collections of Irish songs and lyrics.

  5. glad to leave it. Like Amy, Alcott was taken aback by the griminess of Liverpool. She wrote, “I never saw so many beggars nor such desperate looking ones” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 141).

  6. “knee-deep in clover.” Amy’s opinion of English cattle and chickens echoes that of Alcott herself, who wrote to her father, “The very cows in America look fast, and the hens seem to cackle fiercely over their rights like strong minded old ladies, but here the plump cattle stood up to their knees in clover, with a reposeful air that is very soothing, and the fowls cluck contentedly as if their well disciplined minds accepted the inevitable spit with calm resignation” (Louisa May Alcott, Selected Letters, p. 111).

  7. “Kenilworth.” Kenilworth Castle was built in the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire and was the home of both King John and Henry V. It was also the home of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, into whose mouth Shakespeare placed the “this earth, this realm, this England” speech in Richard II. Its ruins became a tourist site in the eighteenth century, and interest in it increased after the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth in 1821. When Alcott was twelve, her mother read the novel aloud to her (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 54).

  8. “ ‘Capt. Cavendish.’ ” Cavendish, or, The Patrician at Sea, was an 1831 novel by William Johnson Neale (1812–93). Neale, who joined the Royal Navy at twelve, and went on to author a dozen or so rather purple and overwrought works of historic naval fiction.

  9. “Regent Street.” Completed in 1825, Regent Street was and remains one of the major shopping streets in London’s West End. By the end of the nineteenth century, the small shops of Alcott’s time had grown outmoded. With the exception of All Souls Church, all of the original buildings were razed to make way for more modern emporiums.

  10. “Hansom cab.” A horse-drawn carriage, the hansom cab was patented by Joseph Hansom in 1843.

  11. “Hyde Park.” One of the largest parks in central London, Hyde Park was the site of the Great “Crystal Palace” Exhibition of 1851. It is also the home of the famous Speakers’ Corner and is a traditional venue for large political gatherings and protests.

  12. “Duke of Devonshire.” William Cavendish, Seventh Duke of Devonshire (1808–91), was a member of Queen Victoria’s Privy Council. He was also serving as the chancellor of Cambridge University when Amy March went to England. He endowed the building of the University’s Cavendish Library, which is named for him.

  William Cavendish, seventh duke of Devonshire. (© Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees)

  13. “Duke of Wellington’s house.” Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), served twice as the British prime minster under King George IV. He is most famous for his defeat of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo (1815).

  14. “Punch.” Arguably the greatest magazine of humor and satire in the English language, Punch was founded in 1841 and published until 1992. Revived in 1996, it failed again in 2002.

  15. “Jeameses.” Footmen or flunkies.

  16. “it was sublime!” Alcott’s own first impression of Westminster Abbey was more ambivalent. Though she wrote that “one does not forget it and feels the richer all his li[f]e, for having seen it,” she also called it “a gloomy old place with tombs and statues, and chapels and stained windows” (Louisa May Alcott, Selected Letters, p. 111).

  17. “Fechter.” Charles Albert Fechter (1824–79) was an Anglo-French actor noted for his performances of Hamlet and Othello, as well as other roles. If Alcott herself saw Fechter onstage when she passed through London in August 1865, it was in the title role of an English translation of Victor Hugo’s tragedy Ruy Blas, which “reigned [in London] until the close of the summer season in 1865.” Of him one critic wrote, “Fechter’s Ruy Blas was the nearest approach to perfection . . . that we have seen in England in later years.” (Field, Charles Albert Fechter, p. 57).

  18. “Hampton Court and the Kensington Museum . . . Raphael’s Cartoons.” Much favored by Henry VIII, Hampton Court is a royal palace in the London borough of Richmond upon Thames. It has not been used as a royal family residence since the eighteenth century. The Kensington Museum to which Amy refers was, at the time, called the South Kensington Museum. It was renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899. Far from being cartoons in the ordinary sense of the word, Raphael’s “Cartoons” are so called in reference to the Italian word “cartone,” which alludes to the strong, heavy paper (in this case many sheets glued together) on which the work is executed. The Raphael Cartoons were commissioned by Pope Leo X as models for tapestries to be hung in t
he Sistine Chapel. Originally ten in number, they depict scenes from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Tremendously admired in Alcott’s time, they were hailed as “the Parthenon sculptures of modern art” (Wölfflin, Classic Art, p. 108). The seven surviving cartoons belong to the British Royal Collection and were on display at Hampton Court until they were transferred on loan to the South Kensington Museum in April 1865. That loan has now lasted more than 150 years. Alcott would have seen them in their new installation at the South Kensington, not at Hampton Court. Her placing them at the palace at the time of Amy’s visit was apparently a minor lapse in memory.

  The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, one of the Raphael cartoons. (HIP / Victoria & Albert Museum / Art Resource)

  The Raphael cartoons being transported to the South Kensington Museum in 1865. (V&A Images, London / Art Resource, NY)

  19. “Turner, Lawrence, Reynolds, Hogarth.” For Turner, see Part Second, Chapter III, Note 5. Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) was a leading portraitist who presided over the United Kingdom’s Royal Academy from 1820 until his death. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) painted portraits in the idealistic “Grand Style.” He was a cofounder and the first president of the Royal Academy. His painting of David Garrick appears on page 329, supra. A painter and printmaker, William Hogarth (1697–1764) ranks among the greatest of all pictorial satirists. The only Reynolds painting at Hampton Court in the 1860s was Saint Michael the Archangel Slaying the Dragon (1750). The only canvas there by Lawrence at the time was his portrait Frederick, Baron von Gentz (1818–29). The Royal Collection has no record of any Hogarth works on display at Hampton Court in the 1860s.

  20. “Richmond Park.” Created by Charles I in 1634 and enclosed in 1637, Richmond Park is the largest park in London.

  21. “for he speaks French.” Amy’s traveling party has moved on to Paris. Alcott did not pass through France on the outward portion of her 1865 European tour. She arrived on the Continent at Ostend, Belgium, on her way to Germany and came to Paris only near the end of her journey. Her sixteen days there were mostly spent with Ladislas Wisniewski, a young Polish man whom she had met in Switzerland and who surprised her by catching up with her in Paris. They took long walks in the Bois de Boulogne and heard afternoon music in the Tuileries Garden. Alcott called it “a very charming fortnight” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 151).

  22. “Napoleon’s cocked hat . . . Charlemagne’s sword.” Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), self-crowned emperor of France, was a highly influential legal reformer and one of history’s foremost military geniuses. Austrian-born Marie Antoinette (1755–93) was queen of France from 1774 until the monarchy was abolished in 1792. She died at the guillotine the following year. A third century Christian martyr, Saint Denis is the patron saint of Paris. Charlemagne (742?–814) founded the Carolingian Empire and ruled over much of Western and Central Europe.

  23. “Palais Royale.” The Palais-Royal was the site of extensive shopping arcades. A centerpiece of the Palais was the Galerie d’Orléans, “a lofty hall paved with marble and roofed with glass, extending between a double range of shops, over which a double terrace, bordered with shrubs . . . serves as a promenade to the inmates of the palace” (Galignani’s New Paris Guide for 1859, 217). Amy’s eyes would have been tempted in particular by the goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewelers’ shops of the Galerie de Beaujolais. The Champs-Élysées is the world-renowned grand boulevard that terminates at the Arc de Triomphe.

  The Galerie d’Orléans in Paris’s Palais Royale. (Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

  24. “hard-looking man.” Napoléon III (1808–73) was initially elected president of France following the Revolution of 1848 but ruled as emperor from 1852 to 1870. Alcott’s impression of his ugliness may have been deepened by the memories of his ruthless repression of the Roman Revolution in 1849, which had horrified Margaret Fuller and her fellow Transcendentalists, and by the authoritarian policies that he pursued during the first half of his reign. His wife, a Spaniard, was the impressively named María Eugenia Ignacia Augustina de Palafox-Portocarrero de Guzman y Kirkpatrick (1826–1920), more commonly known as the Empress Eugénie de Montijo. The “purple” dress described by Amy would likely have been specifically the color magenta, created for the first time from coal dyes in 1859. Magenta was the Empress’s signature color. Because the hue was named for the Battle of Magenta in northern Italy, at which her husband’s army defeated the Austrians, it held special meaning for her. [(I am indebted to Thomas Hayes for this information.) The royal couple’s son, Napoléon Eugène, Prince Imperial (1856–79), was killed at age twenty-three in an ambush by Zulu tribesmen in the present South Africa.

  25. “Tuileries . . . Luxembourg.” Created by Catherine de Medici in the sixteenth century, the Tuileries Garden became a public park after the French Revolution of 1789. The even older Luxembourg Garden is the second largest public park in Paris. Long before Amy’s fictional visit, it was the scene of Marius’s and Cosette’s first meeting in Hugo’s Les Misérables. Père Lachaise is perhaps the most famous cemetery in the world. There, Amy might have visited the burial sites of the novelist Honoré de Balzac, opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, pianist Frédéric Chopin, and painters Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, and Eugène Delacroix.

  26. “n’est-ce pas?” “Isn’t that so?”

  27. “Rue de Rivoli.” The Rue de Rivoli, named for Napoleon I’s early victory over the Austrians at Rivoli in 1797, runs past the Louvre, the Tuileries Garden, and the Opéra Garnier before terminating at the Place de la Concorde.

  28. “moonlight night.” In her journal, Alcott was also at a loss for words regarding the Rhine. “It was too beautiful to describe,” she wrote, “so I shall not try.” At Coblentz, Alcott “was up half the night enjoying the splendid view of the fortress opposite the town, the moonlight river with its bridge of boats & troops crossing at midnight.” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 142).

  29. “Fred lost some money.” A spa town in southwestern Germany, Baden-Baden was described by Alcott in her journal as “a very fashionable place” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 143). Fred Vaughn would not have been the first or most famous victim of Baden-Baden’s Spielbank casino. Dostoyevsky is said to have written his short novel The Gambler after losing a large sum there.

  30. “Frankfort was delightful.” Alcott was similarly impressed when she visited Frankfurt am Main in September 1865 and observed many of the sights that May mentions in her letter. Alcott wrote, “Here I saw & enjoyed a good deal. The statues of Goethe, Schiller, Faust, Gutenberg & Schaeffer in the Squares. . . . Frankfort is a pleasant old city on the river & I’m glad to have been there” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 143).

  31. “Goethe’s house . . . ‘Ariadne.’ ” For Goethe, See Part First, Chapter IX, Note 5. In September 1865, Alcott herself had gone to see “Goethe’s house, a tall plain building with each story projecting over the lower & a Dutch roof” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 143). For Schiller, see Part First, Chapter XII, Note 14. A schoolmate of Schiller’s, Johann Heinrich von Dannecker (1758–1841) is best remembered for his sculpture Ariadne on the Panther. The panther is an animal traditionally associated with Dionysus, who, in Greek mythology, was Ariadne’s consort.

  Dannecker’s Ariadne on the Panther. (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, © Foto: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart)

  32. “ ‘ein wonderschönes Blöndchen.’ ” “A wonderfully beautiful little blonde.”

  33. “Poste Restante.” Translatable from French as “stationary mail,” the poste restante is a service for holding a recipient’s mail at a post office until the recipient requests it.

  34. “castle about sunset . . . monster tun.” Overlooking the Neckar River, Heidelberg Castle is a majestic ruin and one of the most significant Renaissance structures north of the Alps. In October 1865, Alcott “had a fine time roving about the ruins, looking at the view from the great terrace, admiring the quaint stone images of knights, saint, monster & a
ngels. . . . The moon rose while we were there & completed the enchantment of the scene” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 143). In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain observed regarding one of the castle’s towers, “Misfortune has done for this old tower what it has done for the human character sometimes—improved it.” The Heidelberg Tun, which Alcott visited by torchlight, is a vat of legendary size, capable of holding more than fifty-eight thousand gallons of wine. It is also alluded to in Melville’s Moby-Dick and Hugo’s Les Misérables.

  35. “for his English wife.” Frederick V, Elector Palatine (1596–1632), also ruled briefly over Bohemia as Frederick I (1619–20), though his reign was so brief that he was known as the Winter King. The Hortus Palatinus, the garden that Frederick commissioned for his wife, Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), eldest daughter of England’s James I, was known to some as the eighth wonder of the world because of its large and elaborate terraces, sculpted into a steep hillside. Now a picturesque ruin, the garden still attracts tourists and lovers.

  CHAPTER IX.

  Tender Troubles.

  “JO, I’m anxious about Beth.”

  “Why, mother, she has seemed unusually well since the babies came.”

  “It’s not her health that troubles me now; it’s her spirits. I’m sure there is something on her mind, and I want you to discover what it is.”

  “What makes you think so, mother?”

  “She sits alone a good deal, and doesn’t talk to her father as much as she used. I found her crying over the babies the other day. When she sings, the songs are always sad ones, and now and then I see a look in her face that I don’t understand. This isn’t like Beth, and it worries me.”