1860
John Pratt and Anna Alcott are married, May 23. Emerson and Thoreau attend.
Alcott finishes a draft of what will become her first full-length, published novel, Moods.
Dickens, Great Expectations begins serialization.
Abraham Lincoln elected president
South Carolina secedes from the Union, December 20.
1861
John Brown’s daughters board with the Alcotts.
Alcott begins to write another novel, later to be called Work.
Alcott sums up the year as “writing & grubbing as usual.”
Confederate cannon fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, April 12, commencing the Civil War.
Concord sends a company of soldiers to Washington.
Union defeats at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff.
1862
Alcott receives a $100 prize from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper for her story “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.”
Alcott applies for and receives a commission as a nurse in the Union Army. She arrives at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown to begin her service on December 13, the same day as the heaviest fighting at Fredericksburg.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and other Poems.
Union victories at Fort Donelson and Shiloh; defeats at Second Bull Run and Fredericksburg.
Thoreau dies, May 6.
1863
Alcott contracts typhoid pneumonia and becomes deathly ill. Bronson retrieves her from the hospital and returns her to Concord, where she lies bedridden for two months. She is poisoned by treatment with mercurous chloride (calomel) and never fully recovers her health.
Alcott publishes Hospital Sketches, a fictionalized account of her nursing service, to a warm reception.
Her poem “Thoreau’s Flute” appears in the Atlantic Monthly.
Anna’s first son, Fredrick Alcott Pratt, is born.
Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia.
Emancipation Proclamation takes effect, January 1.
Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga turn the tide of the Civil War.
Gettysburg Address, November 19.
1864
Alcott publishes Moods, December.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground.
President Lincoln is re-elected.
Hawthorne dies, May 19.
1865
Anna’s second and last child, John Sewall Pratt, is born.
Alcott publishes “V.V., or, Plots and Counterplots” and other sensationalist stories in The Flag of Our Union. She leaves for Europe in July as the traveling companion of Anna Weld. In Vevey, Switzerland, she meets Ladislas Wiesniewski, on whom she will partly base Laurie in Little Women.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
President Lincoln is assassinated, April 15.
1866
Alcott spends the first four months of the year in Nice. She then travels to Paris, meets up with Wiesniewski, and has “a fine time for a fortnight.” She returns home in July and writes twelve tales in less than three months.
Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Alfred Nobel invents dynamite, patented the following year.
Beatrix Potter born, July 28.
1867
Alcott assumes editorship of a children’s magazine, Merry’s Museum.
She attends a reading by Dickens and is disappointed.
Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers invites her to write a book for girls.
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach.”
Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin.
Johann Strauss II, “The Blue Danube.”
United States purchases Alaska.
Wilbur Wright and Frank Lloyd Wright born.
1868
Alcott writes “Happy Women,” an essay asserting that marriage is not essential to a woman’s fulfillment.
Alcott publishes Morning-Glories and Other Stories.
Alcott publishes Little Women, Part First, earning robust sales and staggering acclaim.
Dostoyevsky, The Idiot begins serialization.
Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
President Andrew Johnson is impeached and acquitted.
Fourteenth Amendment ratified.
Heinrich Schliemann announces discovery of ancient Troy.
W. E. B. DuBois and Nicholas II of Russia born.
1869
Alcott publishes Little Women, Part Second, released in England as Good Wives.
She pays off all the family’s debts.
An Old-Fashioned Girl begins serialization.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad.
Cincinnati Red Stockings become first professional baseball team.
Jesse James commits his first bank robbery.
Transcontinental railroad completed.
Suez Canal opens.
Wyoming becomes first American territory to grant women suffrage.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, André Gide, and Henri Matisse born.
1870
Alcott publishes An Old-Fashioned Girl in book form.
Alcott departs on a tour of Europe with May and Alice Bartlett and narrowly misses being in France at outbreak of Franco-Prussian War.
John Bridge Pratt dies, November 27.
Alcott learns of Pratt’s death during an extended stay in Rome.
John D. Rockefeller incorporates Standard Oil.
Vladimir Lenin born, April 22.
Dickens dies, June 9.
1871
Alcott writes Little Men to raise money to support her widowed sister Anna. Published in England in May; American publication follows in June.
Alcott returns to America, June 6.
George Eliot, Middlemarch begins serialization.
Verdi, Aida.
James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (“Whistler’s Mother”).
The Great Chicago Fire leaves almost 100,000 people homeless.
1872
Alcott publishes first two volumes of the Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag series: My Boys and Shawl-Straps.
Fire damages Emerson’s house. Alcott helps rescue his belongings and important papers.
Susan B. Anthony arrested for attempting to vote.
The Great Boston Fire destroys 65 acres of the city.
1873
Alcott publishes Work: A Story of Experience, and her third Scrap-Bag, Cupid and Chow-Chow. She also publishes “Transcendental Wild Oats,” a fictionalized memoir of Fruitlands.
“A dull hard time . . . Concord more like a tomb than ever.”
May copies Turner canvases in London’s National Gallery.
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell.
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: a Tale of Today.
Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days.
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founded.
1874
Alcott suffers ill health. She publishes the short story “How I Went Out to Service.”
May returns to America in March.
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd.
Winston Churchill, Robert Frost, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Gertrude Stein born.
1875
Alcott publishes Eight Cousins, or, The Aunt-Hill.
Alcott visits Niagara, New York, and a Women’s Congress in Syracuse. “Write loads of autographs, dodge at the theatre, and am kissed to death by gushing damsels.”
Bronson makes a successful speaking tour of the Midwest “riding in Louisa’s chariot, and adored as the grandfather of Little Women.”
Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Georges Bizet, Carmen.
Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic.
Claude Monet, Snow at Argenteuil.
1876
Alcott publishes Rose in Bloom.
May departs for Europe, never to return.
Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.
1877
Alcott anonymously publishes A Modern Mephistopheles in Roberts Brothers’ No-Name Series.
The Alcotts move out of Orchard House, November 14.
Abba Alcott dies November 25 at age 77. Alcott writes, “My duty is done, and now I shall be glad to follow her.”
Flaubert, Three Tales.
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty.
Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake.
Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India.
Reconstruction ends.
1878
Alcott publishes Under the Lilacs.
May Alcott is married to Swiss entrepreneur Ernest Nieriker in Paris.
Hardy, The Return of the Native.
Henry James, Daisy Miller.
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
1879
Alcott publishes Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag: Jimmy’s Cruise in the Pinafore and begins serialization of Jack and Jill.
She becomes the first woman in Concord to register to vote.
Bronson opens the Concord School of Philosophy.
May Alcott gives birth to Louisa May (“Lulu”) Nieriker, November 8.
May dies at age 39 of complications from childbirth, December 29.
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House.
George Meredith, The Egoist.
Thomas A. Edison demonstrates incandescent lightbulb, December 31.
Albert Einstein, Leon Trotsky, and Wallace Stevens born.
1880
Alcott publishes Jack and Jill in book form.
May’s death enfeebles Alcott. She calls herself “a used up old woman.”
Lulu Nieriker arrives in Boston, and Alcott becomes her guardian.
Henry Adams, Democracy.
Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Wabash, Indiana, becomes first electrically lighted town.
W. C. Fields, Helen Keller, and Lytton Strachey born.
1881
Alcott’s health worsens.
She rejects the suggestion that she write Bronson’s biography.
She begins a tradition of summering by the ocean in Nonquitt, Massachusetts, returning each summer through 1885.
She tries without success to form a suffrage club in Concord and grows weary of the town’s indifference to reform movements.
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party.
Alexander Borodin, String Quartet No. 2.
President James A. Garfield and Czar Alexander II are assassinated.
Pablo Picasso born, October 25.
1882
Emerson dies, April 27.
Alcott publishes Aunt-Jo’s Scrap-Bag: An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving and starts work on Jo’s Boys.
Bronson suffers a paralytic stroke that partially disables him for the rest of his life. Alcott handles much of his care during the remaining years.
Wagner, Parsifal.
Oscar Wilde tours America.
A. A. Milne, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Franklin D. Roosevelt born.
1883
Alcott looks after Bronson and Lulu and struggles to employ adequate caregivers. She tells her journal, “Shall never lead my own life.”
Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island.
Twain, Life on the Mississippi, the first significant book submitted as a typewritten manuscript.
Brooklyn Bridge opens.
1884
Alcott sells Orchard House, reporting that she is “glad to be done with it, though after living in it for 25 years it is full of memories. But places have not much hold on me when the persons who made them dear are gone.”
Work on Jo’s Boys stalls.
Spinning-Wheel Stories are published in November.
Ibsen, The Wild Duck.
Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Dow Jones Industrial Average created.
Washington Monument completed.
1885
Plagued by ill health, Alcott undergoes mind-cure treatment, with little effect.
She writes Lulu’s Library, Volume One, published the following year.
Burns much of her old correspondence.
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham.
Émile Zola, Germinal.
Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole.
AT&T is incorporated.
1886
Alcott publishes Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out, the last of the March family trilogy. The book concludes, “[L]et the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall forever on the March family.”
Alcott’s doctor orders her to refrain from writing “or anything that will need much thought.”
Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy.
Stevenson, Kidnapped and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Georges Seurat completes A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Coca-Cola introduced.
Statue of Liberty dedicated.
Emily Dickinson dies, May 15.
1887
Alcott’s journal mostly records changes in health and continual boredom.
She makes her will and legally adopts her nephew John Pratt, so he can assume her copyrights.
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals.
1888
A Garland for Girls published.
Alcott visits Bronson, March 1. Bronson says he will “go up” soon and asks Alcott to come with him.
Bronson dies March 4 at age 88.
Alcott dies March 6, at age 55.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward.
Henry James, The Aspern Papers.
Stevenson, The Black Arrow.
Wilhelm II becomes German Emperor, June 15.
T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, T. E. Lawrence, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and Harpo Marx born.
1893
Anna Alcott Pratt, the last of the “Little Women,” dies, July 17, at age 62.
Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.
Antonin Dvorˇák, Symphony No. 9, From the New World.
Verdi, Falstaff.
Edison completes construction of first motion picture studio, February 1.
Diesel engine patented, February 23.
Mohandas K. Gandhi commits his first act of civil disobedience in India, June 7.
Charles and Frank Duryea drive first gas-powered car on a public American road, September 21.
Hermann Göring, Mae West, and Mao Zedong born.
References
Alcott, A. Bronson. Conversations with Children on the Gospels. 2 vols. Boston: James Munroe, 1837.
——— . Tablets. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868.
Alcott, Louisa May. “Life in a Pension.” The Independent 19, no. 988 (1867): 2.
Alcott, Louisa May, and Pratt, Anna Alcott. Comic Tragedies, Written by “Jo” and “Meg” and Acted by the “Little Women.” Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893.
Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.
Cornelius, Mrs. [Mary Hooker]. The Young Housekeeper’s Friend. Boston: Thompson, Brown, 1871.
Dahlstrand, Frederick C. Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays & Lectures. New Yo
rk: Library of America, 1983.
——— . Letters and Social Aims. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886.
——— . The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Ralph Rusk. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.
Epps, John. “On Arnica Montana.” Lancet 2 (June 5, 1841): 362–66.
Field, Kate. Charles Albert Fechter. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882.
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.
Galignani’s New Paris Guide for 1859. Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1859.
Grier, Katherine C. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
[Irving, Washington.] The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Esq. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1846.
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Edited by W[illia]m T[orrey] Harris. Vol. 7. St. Louis: B. P. Studley, 1873.
Kanahele, George. Emma: Hawai’i’s Remarkable Queen: A Biography. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999.
Leslie, Miss. Directions for Cookery, in Its Various Branches. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1844.
Myerson, Joel, and Daniel Shealy, “The Sales of Louisa May Alcott’s Books,” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 1 (Spring 1990): 47–86.
The Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil: An American Farmers’ Magazine and Mechanics’ Guide. Vol. 9, no. 12 (June 1857).
Report of the West India Royal Commission. Appendix C., Vol. III. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1897.
Schlesinger, Elizabeth Bancroft. “The Alcotts through Thirty Years: Letters to Alfred Whitman.” Harvard Library Bulletin 11, No. 3 (Autumn 1957): 363–85.
Spillane, Daniel. History of the American Pianoforte; Its Technical Development, and the Trade. New York: D. Spillane, 1890.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly, in Three Novels. New York: Library of America, 1982.
Ticknor, Caroline. May Alcott: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1928.
Wölfflin, Heinrich. Classic Art; An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. Phaidon: New York, 1952.
Further Reading
BY LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Alternative Alcott. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
The Annotated Little Women Page 77