“There’s no need for me to say it, for every one can see that I’m far happier than I deserve,” added Jo, glancing from her good husband to her chubby children, tumbling on the grass beside her. “Fritz is getting gray and stout, I’m growing as thin as a shadow, and am over thirty; we never shall be rich, and Plumfield may burn up any night, for that incorrigible Tommy Bangs will smoke sweet-fern cigars under the bedclothes,13 though he’s set himself afire three times already. But in spite of these unromantic facts, I have nothing to complain of, and never was so jolly in my life. Excuse the remark, but living among boys, I can’t help using their expressions now and then.”
“Yes, Jo, I think your harvest will be a good one,” began Mrs. March, frightening away a big black cricket, that was staring Teddy out of countenance.
“Not half so good as yours, mother. Here it is, and we never can thank you enough for the patient sowing and reaping you have done,” cried Jo, with the loving impetuosity which she never could outgrow.
“I hope there will be more wheat and fewer tares every year,” said Amy, softly.
“A large sheaf, but I know there’s room in your heart for it, Marmee dear,” added Meg’s tender voice.
Touched to the heart, Mrs. March could only stretch out her arms, as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself, and say, with face and voice full of motherly love, gratitude, and humility,—
“Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!”
(Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
1. joyful things possible. The Bhaers’ school at Plumfield combines the best aspects of two of Bronson Alcott’s reform-minded projects: his academy for children at the Temple School and his agrarian utopia at Fruitlands. From the Temple School, Plumfield borrows its emphasis on holistic education instead of rote learning. From Fruitlands, it takes its pastoral setting and the inspiration for its name. Alcott wrote that Plumfield’s inspiration came from “the wise and beautiful truths” of her father.
2. Socratic method. The Socratic method of teaching involves asking a series of questions of the student in order to elicit information or to reach a logical conclusion. Bronson Alcott’s teaching methods hinged on Socratic dialogue. He wrote, “Education, when rightly understood, will be found to lie in the art of asking apt and fit questions, and in thus leading the mind by its own light to the perception of truth” (A. Bronson Alcott, Conversations, 2:266).
3. “cow with a crumpled horn.” The original cow with the crumpled horn appears in the nursery rhyme “The House That Jack Built.”
4. “Bhaer-garten.” Alcott puns on “beargarden.” From the time of Queen Elizabeth I through the Restoration, London’s Beargarden was an arena in Southwark used for bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and other inhumane animal sports.
5. merry little quadroon. Alcott’s inclusion at Plumfield of “a merry little quadroon,” meaning a child of one-fourth African ancestry, recalls her father’s unsuccessful attempt at scholastic integration. After the Temple School collapsed in June 1838, Bronson Alcott carried on briefly with a school that he established in his family’s home on Beach Street in Boston. He promptly scandalized his pupils’ parents by admitting Susan Robinson, an African-American girl. The parents of all but one of Alcott’s white pupils angrily withdrew their children from the school, causing it to fail for lack of revenue in June 1839, putting an effective end to Bronson’s once-promising career in teaching. The quadroon, however, makes no appearance in either of Alcott’s two novels set at Plumfield, Little Men and Jo’s Boys.
6. “winey juice.” Thomas Tusser (1524?–1580) wrote verses on farming and country living. Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) was an English poet and essayist much enamored of gardening and other pastoral pleasures. The first-century Roman Lucius Junius Columella was the author of De Re Rustica, a treatise on gardening and farming. Bronson Alcott’s Tablets contains a long philosophical section on gardening that cites Tusser and quotes extensively from Cowley and Columella. Alcott slightly misquotes the following couplet from a Cowley poem, which her father correctly quotes in Tablets: “He bids the ill-natured crab produce / The gentler apple’s winy juice” (A. Bronson Alcott, Tablets, p. 25).
7. pair of Pomonas. Epitomized by a pruning knife, Pomona is a wood nymph devoted to gardening and the raising of fruit, especially apples. Bronson Alcott alluded to Pomona in Tablets, where he wrote of the apple, “It is a noble fruit: the friend of immortality, its virtues blush to be tasted” (A. Bronson Alcott, Tablets, p. 21).
8. “grandma’s sixtieth birthday!” Abba Alcott turned sixty in 1860. She was sixty-eight when her daughter finished writing the second part of Little Women.
9. “three times three!” A form of cheer, like “Hip, hip, hooray” repeated three times.
10. “castles in the air?” In referring back to the “castles in the air” of which Laurie and the March sisters dreamed in Chapter XIII of Part First, Alcott not only brings her narrative full circle but also makes a moral point worth noting: the surviving members of the group are all contented, even though none of them got what they wished for. Their happiness has come not from gratifying their wants, but from having grown into loving, unselfish adults.
11. frail little creature. Amy’s daughter’s health improves, and she remains alive and well in the sequels to Little Women. May Alcott’s own daughter, born more than a decade after Little Women was published, was anything but frail. Louisa May Nieriker, born November 8, 1879, lost her mother less than two months later to an infection May sustained in giving birth to her. She was then brought to America, where Alcott adopted and raised her until Alcott herself died in 1888. Known as “Lulu,” Nieriker returned to Europe, married Emil Rasim, and had a daughter, Ernestine May Rasim. Lulu outlived the last of the “Little Women” by more than eighty years and died in 1975. Toward the end of her life, she gave an interview in which she stoutly averred, “The Alcotts were large!” (Bedell, The Alcotts, p. xv.)
12. “and sad, and dreary.” The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), a great favorite of Alcott’s generation, concluded his poem “The Rainy Day” with the lines, “Into each life some rain must fall, / Some days must be dark and dreary.”
13. “cigars under the bedclothes.” In Little Men (1871), the second book of the Little Women trilogy, the young scapegrace Tommy Bangs plays a prominent role. He does, indeed, nearly burn Plumfield down by smoking under the bedsheets. He continues his career of mishaps as a young man in the last of the three books, Jo’s Boys (1886).
An Alcott Chronology
Year
LMA
Contemporary Events
1799
Amos Bronson Alcott born in Wolcott, Connecticut, November 29
Discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
Napoleon seizes power in France.
George Washington dies, December 14.
1800
Abigail May born in Boston, October 8.
Thomas Jefferson elected president.
Alessandro Volta announces invention of first chemical battery.
Napoleon defeats Austrians at Battle of Marengo.
1830
Bronson Alcott marries Abigail May, May 23 in Boston.
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People.
Joseph Smith organizes predecessor of Mormon Church.
July Revolution begins in Paris, July 27.
Peter Cooper builds Tom Thumb, the first American steam locomotive.
Emily Dickinson born, December 10.
1831
Anna Bronson Alcott born in Philadelphia, March 16.
Nat Turner’s Rebellion.
William Lloyd Garrison founds The Liberator.
Daniel Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne.”
1832
Louisa May Alcott born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, November 29 (her father’s 33rd birthday).
Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
Charles Dodgso
n (“Lewis Carroll”) born, January 27.
Leslie Stephen, British writer and father of Virginia Woolf, born November 28.
J. W. von Goethe dies, March 22.
1834
Alcott family moves to Boston. Bronson opens his famed Temple School, September.
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot.
Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz.
Alexander Pushkin, “The Queen of Spades.”
1835
Elizabeth Peabody Alcott born June 24. (Middle name later changed to Sewall.)
Bronson publishes the warmly received Record of a School, a book about his teaching practices at the Temple School
Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales Told for Children.
Samuel L. Clemens (“Mark Twain”) born, November 30.
1836
Bronson publishes Conversations with Children on the Gospels, touching off a public uproar that jeopardizes his future as a teacher.
Charles Dickens, Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club begins serialization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”
1837
The Temple School scandal intensifies. Bronson sells off his library and is threatened with mob violence.
Dickens, Oliver Twist begins serialization.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales.
Panic of 1837.
1839
Bronson closes the Temple School, March 23.
Abba Alcott gives birth to a son, who dies within hours, April 7.
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle.
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma.
The daguerreotype becomes the first publicly announced photographic process.
1840
Alcott family moves to Concord, Massachusetts, April.Abigail May (“May”) Alcott born there, July 26.
Bronson publishes “Orphic Sayings.”
The Transcendentalist journal the Dial, its name proposed by Bronson, begins publication.
J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship.
First postage stamp becomes available in the United Kingdom.
1841
Bronson and Abba decline an invitation to move in with the Emersons.
Family debts reach $7,000.
Alcott and Lizzie attend school at Emerson’s home.
Emerson, Essays, First Series.
Brook Farm, a Utopian Transcendentalist colony, is formed in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.
1842
Bronson sails for England in May to exchange ideas with British reformers and visit a school, Alcott House, devoted to his educational ideas. He returns October 20, accompanied by reformers Charles Lane and Henry Wright.
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems.
1843
Alcott family, with Lane and a few followers, establish the vegetarian commune Fruitlands, near Harvard, Massachusetts, June 1.
Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
Henry James born, April 15.
1844
Fruitlands colony collapses, early January.
Bronson suffers a breakdown.
The Alcotts sojourn in Still River and then return to Concord.
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.
Emerson, Essays, Second Series.
Samuel F. B. Morse sends first telegraphic message from the Capitol.
1845
Alcott family moves to Hillside house in Concord.
Alcott attends John Hosmer’s school.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.
Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven.”
1846
Alcott is given her own room at home for the first time.
Dickens, Dombey and Son.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse.
Henry David Thoreau takes up residence on Walden Pond.
Mexican War begins.
1847
Alcotts harbor a fugitive slave at Hillside.
Alcott reads Jane Eyre, as well as books by Hawthorne, Dante, Shakespeare. In addition, she reads Bettina von Arnim’s correspondence with Goethe and, at Emerson’s suggestion, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair.
1848
Alcott writes “The Rival Painters,” her first story.
Alcotts move to Dedham Street, Boston.
Alcott reads and supports the Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments.”
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Gold discovered in California.
Revolutions erupt in France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere.
First American women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York.
1849
Alcott writes her first novel, The Inheritance, which remains undiscovered until 1988.
Alcott sisters form their “Pickwick Club.”
Dickens, David Copperfield begins serialization.
Frances Hodgson Burnett born, November 24.
Poe dies, October 7.
1850
Alcotts move to one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, where the entire family contracts smallpox, but recovers.
Abba Alcott starts an employment agency.
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers.
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 enacted.
Margaret Fuller drowns off Fire Island, July 19.
1851
Alcott’s poem “Sunlight” appears in Peterson’s Magazine under the nom de plume Flora Fairfield.
Alcott hires herself out to service in Dedham. She is paid four dollars for seven weeks’ work, which her family indignantly returns.
Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
Giuseppe Verdi, Rigoletto.
The New York Times begins publication.
1852
The Alcotts move to yet another Boston address, this one in Pinckney Street, where Ann and Louisa open a school in the parlor.
Alcott publishes “The Masked Marriage.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
1853
Alcott works as a domestic and a teacher.
Bronson embarks on a Midwestern speaking tour.
Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave.
Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe.
Commodore Matthew Perry arrives in Japan.
1854
Bronson returns with disappointing earnings.
Publisher James T. Fields rejects a collection of Alcott’s fairy tales, with the recommendation, “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write.”
Bronson takes part in a failed attempt to free Anthony Burns, a convicted fugitive slave.
Alcott publishes her first book, Flower Fables.
Maria Cummins, The Lamplighter.
Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Boston Public Library opens.
The Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War.
1855
Alcott family moves to Walpole, New Hampshire.
Alcott and her sister Anna act in amateur plays.
Alcott hears Thackeray lecture.
Dickens, Little Dorrit begins serialization.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (first edition).
1856
Alcott publishes stories and poems in the Saturday Evening Gazette.
Lizzie and May contract scarlet fever while assisting a family of paupers. Lizzie only partly recovers.
Gregor Mendel begins research in genetics.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary serialized.
L. Frank Baum and Sigmund Freud born.
1857
Alcott resolves to write a novel about her father’s life, to be titled The Cost of an Idea. She never completes the project.
Bronson purchases Orchard House in Concord and commences renovations.
Dred Scott v. Sandford declares that black Americans have no rights that whites are “bound to respect.”
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal.
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
Elisha Otis’s first elevator installed.
1858
Lizzie Alcott dies, March 14, at age 22, of the lingering effects of scarlet fever.
Anna is engaged to John Bridge Pratt, April 7.
Alcott family moves into Orchard House, July.
Alcott takes a tutoring job in Boston, falls into depression, and considers suicide.
Her will to live is restored by her parents and the Rev. Theodore Parker.
Alcott begins correspondence with Alf Whitman, one of the models for Laurie in Little Women.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.
Tom Taylor, Our American Cousin.
Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Theodore Roosevelt born, October 27.
1859
Bronson is appointed superintendent of Concord schools, his first regular employment in twenty years.
Bronson speaks at a memorial service for John Brown, December 2, which Alcott attends.
Darwin, On the Origin of Species.
Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King.
John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes.
The Annotated Little Women Page 76