I shall never forget the day of our parting — Mish sad, almost stupefied by his sadness, holding my hand as we sat on a cold bench in a little park, Jardin de Quelque’chose — I remember the names of nothing from Grenoble, I rejoice that I will never see that horrible town again.
For some time we talked, almost idly, of the Divine. I told him how dear George Ripley had enlarged my thinking years ago when he insisted that the Revealed Truth of the Gospels does not require a belief in the miraculous & that all of the events of Christ’s life may be explained by science. Mish was indignant in defense of miracles.
Very gently, I told him of a man I had just met in Rome — a young man, Ossoli, of good family, of his republican sympathies, of his kindness. Of what the Springs & all who had met him thought of his character & his sincerity in his addresses to me.
Mish said, “It is as I imagined for you — as I hoped. Since we cannot continue — this is what I would have wished. If he is worthy, only if he is worthy.”
“You give me away so easily, then?”
“Not easily but I will not lie — it is a relief, to know that you will be cared for. He has money? He will help you continue your work?”
“He admires me, but he cannot read a word of English. He — it is odd, it is perhaps the Italian way — he seems almost to worship me, as he would the Madonna or his own mother.”
“Ah. Then you must never tell him.”
How did I continue on my travels, & continue to work, after this parting? What tears & what dismal future I saw, all my golden dream of life with my Great Polish Bear sunk in a pit of tar.
I will never know how it is that the human body can continue, a soldier answering the winded horn of Necessity, tho’ the spirit has lain down to die. & Yet within a week or two it was as Mish had predicted — travelling throughout the north of Italy without a chaperone, I spoke more to the people, my conversation improved, I was the American Lady, or more often if inaccurately, the Inglese, an oddity & nonetheless a personage, wherever I went. I made many a friend in the villages & cities, strangers eager to talk to me & feed me & offer me a room for the night with their families — laughing or solemn, as their education had prepared them, at the sight of a copy of my American newspaper. I think it was stranger to them that I was an American & a journalist than that I was a woman. The city sophisticates I met included Horace Greenough & Madame Arconati, the Storys, the painter Hicks & alia.
By October, I was ready to return to Rome, to see again my new ardent friend there, & to make a new chapter in my life.
I cannot write any more. I will see if my Nino is awake & take him up on deck for fresh air.
24 June
Always, always money! The men are arguing about their pay, who gets what share if the marble we carry is sold at such a price, who deserves what, who is working harder, what the late captain promised —! My poor husband, frightened by loud talk, by anything loud, retires to the cabin to brood. He is in the bunk behind me as I write — not asleep, but perfectly still & curled up like a mouse under the rug. Nino is with the cook, & Mrs Hasty keeps them both in hand. It appears that Celesta is growing fond of one of the Italian sailors.
A History of My Life’s Economies
I am born in 1810, the eldest of nine children, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My ancestors are a muddle of Tories & Colonial Rebels, agitatingly always in politics as well as business & farming. My father, Timothy Fuller, was so eager never to shrink from a fight that he was known to start them with no provocation whatsoever. His marriage to my mother was a love match. It was not economically expedient, as he was a politically ambitious lawyer & she came from an altogether humbler & quieter family, the Cranes. His eventual rise to State Senator & then to Representative to the Congress of the United States cost more than these positions paid into the family coffers tho’ he continued his legal practice.
My little sister Julia’s death in 1814 (she was 2 years of age) was an emotional expense. I was not aware of things in terms of cost at the time. Life has been eager to educate me in such economies since. As the number of children grew, we occupied a large house in Cambridgeport & when Father went to Washington for many months of the year we lived comfortably but also sparingly. In winter Mother set our beds around the chimney at night, explaining that even sticks of wood & coals were costly so we must warm one another.
I read everything. Father had trained me from the age of 3 to read English, Greek, & Latin. Later I acquired German, Italian, French, Hebrew. I read Schiller & understood the words long before I understood the meaning. I had head-aches from the age of 5 & occasional convulsions from the age of 13 tho’ my health never impeded my studies if I remembered to take air & vigorous long walks.
At the age of 9 years I am sent to day classes at the Port School. It costs $12 for the term. I show some improvement in penmanship under the writing master, Mr Gould. From him I learn that ink from the shop is a luxury but that we can mix our own with linseed oil, chimney soot & pine spirits.
At the age of 11 I am sent to live with a family friend in Boston & attend Dr Park’s School during the week. I take top honors & do not make friends. This costs $15 for a term. I also attend dancing school, twice a week, $1 a week.
For reasons perhaps related to the cost, Father removes me from the school at Christmas & brings me home to live with Mother. In a make-shift school-room in the back parlor, I begin to teach my brothers & my sister Ellen how to read & write. At 13, I accompany Mother to my first afternoon parties. I seem to remember that two new dresses were required for each season. I do not remember the exact numbers, but estimate each dress made by a dressmaker for hire is nearly $5. Those we make at home cost considerably less. I am clever with my hands & become the family seamstress tho’ Mother is unhappy when I make myself a dress of crimson satin which she says is unsuitable for my age. When Father comes home from Washington he forbids me to wear it in company.
In 1824 I am sent to board at Groton School in the country. For some reason I never hear the cost. It is possible that Father traded my education expenses for some political or family favor once shown the owner, Miss Prescott, as this school is in the town where Father grew up & knows everyone. In 1826, Father buys a grand “palace” on Dana Street in Cambridge. The President & Mrs John Quincy Adams come to dinner.
The baby of the family, Eddie, dies in my arms from a fever in September of 1829.
By 1831, Father’s political career is unsteady but he says that his legal practice still clears him $20 a day. Nevertheless he decides to retire & become a gentleman farmer; he sells the Dana Street house for $8,000. As the family is temporarily homeless, I am sent to live with my Uncle Abraham in his Brattle House, a mansion-cage. I have a mystical vision of the All & resolve to forget the self & selfishness. It is clear that I will need to earn money to support the family now.
Father buys a 28-acre farm in Groton. It costs too much (I never know exactly how much) & will require the employment of himself, his wife, & his now 7 children to make it prosper. I do all the sewing & work in the dairy with Mother & we save school costs by my teaching Ellen & my brothers. I look for work translating in the hopes of earning extra money.
Upon Father’s death, in 1836, we learn that the estate is worth nearly $20,000 but that most of it is tied up in the land. Mother cannot continue to run the farm by herself but with the boys & with two tenants to help, she can get by. Once the Uncles sort it all out, my portion is less than $1,500, not even enough to finance a trip I had hoped to take with friends to Europe. (I was going by a calculation offered by a knowledgeable friend, that it would cost $5 a day, with an additional “cushion” of $500 for unforeseen expenses.)
At the advice of Harriet Martineau, whom I have met through my Boston friends, I embark on a biography of Goethe. It is around this time that I first meet you, my little friend! & All your wonderful Peabody clan: Your fine mother & sisters & dozens of friends as well. Meanwhile, I have taken courage from the example of your sister E
lizabeth, who hosts “Conversations” in Boston, lecture-classes for ladies, for which she charges $15 a “series” or “term.” By moving to Boston & living with an aunt, & with Elizabeth’s kind tutelage, I am able to do the same. With a combination of German tutoring & Conversation classes I acquire 25 students! About half my income I send home to Mother. Through the help of Elizabeth & of Mr Emerson, I am able to sell three literary reviews to Boston magazines. ($9!) I am “launched.”
At the same time, Mr Alcott opens his Temple School in the upper floors of a Masonic Temple in Boston. I teach languages there in the mornings — and my other job is to record as secretary Mr Alcott’s own “Conversations on the Gospels” with the young students. It becomes clear after the first few days that for prudence’s sake I need to stop writing down what he says & what the children reply. He is a large-minded man but he seems to have a knack for making trouble.
He does, in spite of my discretion; students are withdrawn & the school is shut down after one year. I am offered another teaching post, in Providence, at the handsome annual salary of $1,000 but hope I need not take it. I certainly can support myself on my private pupils & am eager to make progress on my Goethe biography. Alas in the Greater World finances crumble; I see my first “economic slough,” & Mother & the boys need my money if they are to be tutored & go on to College. I take the job at the Greene Street School in Providence.
Boarding with the mother of a colleague & teaching in Providence, I am in exile. Providence might as well be Borneo. Letters from Mr E, Caroline, & a few other friends are my sustenance. I teach Latin, composition, elocution, natural history, ethics & the New Testament to 60 pupils. (Twice the 30 I was originally promised.) I try to celebrate my exile by taking advantage of solitude: In the evenings I work on my life of Goethe & on a translation of Eckmann’s Conversations With Goethe, which I hope to sell to a Boston publisher.
I am privately convinced that the Uncles are preventing Mother from selling the farm — if she did she could move back to Cambridge, which she would prefer. Also the sale of the farm would free my brothers to earn their own money for their studies. The Uncles say that the economic crisis of the country forbids the sale of the farm. Meanwhile they make threats to Mother that they will take her boys away & send them to live with wealthy relatives. I write to her that I will never let this happen.
In August, when I am on vacation from teaching, I spend some days in Concord with the Emersons; on August 31, 1837, I hear his Phi Beta Kappa Address, our “intellectual Declaration of Independence,” in the First Parish Church of Cambridge. I discover that, by virtue of my association with Mr E, Mr Alcott, & others, I along with they have been dubbed “Transcendentalists” in the journals. This term of derogation (suggesting as it does a denial of Christian principles) shocks both enemies & friends sufficiently that my dear companion Caroline, who was to have come to Providence with me for the winter term to study at the school as a special student, is prevented by her parents from so doing.
This is both a personal & an economic blow as I was to have received $28 for her tutelage.
Uncle Abraham releases some funds from the estate to allow schooling only for Arthur & Lloyd in the fall. My sister Ellen comes to me in Providence to study with me privately, & Mother visits me as well. We are only a little crowded in my one room as I spend most of my day at the school. Meanwhile I embark on teaching weekly evening classes in German. This money is all for Mother.
29 June (or is it 30?)
I have lost the thread these several days. Sea-sickness, mild for me & more pronounced in the cases of Mrs Hasty & my husband. In the last two days the winds righted themselves & all felt better, but by then it had become imperative we address the matter of the lice. Mrs Hasty & I set up a sheep-shearing station & cut the hair of all the men who would allow it, close to the scalp, & then we greased everyone with pork fat. Poor little Nino cried at the smell — it was fierce — & Then Mrs Hasty & Celesta & I combed & greased one another’s long hair & braided the tresses & pinned them up. Two days having passed, with the aid of the cook’s stove we set up our station again, this time to wash away the grease — along with the dead lice & their eggs — from our heads, & the bed-linens, all! Two more days for this chore! & An extra set of sails strung across the decks! It is to be hoped we shall not have to go through this tedious & smelly exercise again this voyage. I am not sure the men would agree to it again in any case.
30 June
No longer scratching, I return to my financial reckoning:
A gift of friendship & a savings of summer expenses! In 1838, the Emersons invite me to spend my three summer months with them in Concord. I cannot say enough about the recuperation I experience in these blissful months, free from immediate money troubles & solaced at all times by the friendship, instruction, & conversation of Mr E. Since Henry Thoreau is never far from their house himself (working as handy-man for the house-hold & general poetic interlocutor for Mr E) I get to know him well; he has an independent philosophy about Economy that he tested by two years of living in a cabin, scratching beans from the field & pulling fish from the pond.
Come the fall, our family finances are worsening. My brother Eugene has had to leave law school. Only Arthur, enrolled at preparatory school in Waltham, can be educated this year outside the home. Mother at last is able to sell the Groton farm. I sell two Goethe poems in translation. Total income from poems, my own & in translation, thus far: $3.50.
Things are very confusing in these months: I become exhausted by teaching, I leave the school at the end of a year & a half. I go home to Groton (where the farm is sold but the family may stay on for a few months) & work on my Eckmann translation, finally giving it to my publisher, Mr George Ripley, with a long essay on Goethe’s work & life — this is the last I ever see of my “biography,” alas! — as a preface. The book is praised, my essay is lauded, but it never sells well enough to repay the publishing costs & I do not see, as they say, “one thin dime” for all my labors.
April, 1839: Mother & the family are settled into a large but modest house in Jamaica Plain, five miles or so from the center of Cambridge, where Mother plans to take in boarders. The Emersons ask me to live with them through the summer. Relief from the immediate need to earn money is a great balm; my health is again restored in the Concord woods & fields.
& It is this summer that I first try a vegetary diet, hoping at one & the same time to train my body for higher thought & to learn to save income (in the future, when I am not a guest at a sumptuous board) by not eating meat. Henry Thoreau tells me about roasting a wood-chuck & eating the meat half-raw, I think to see if I will scream but instead I solemnly quote from the Georgics, where Virgil sings of the gifts of the earth, “Munera verstra cano …” & Henry smiles sweetly as one defeated.
Mr E thinks I am wrong-headed & mightily fulminates against my “Hindoo” practices, but Lidian joins me in the vegetary regimen for nearly a month & claims to feel freer in her mind. We both “lapse” together & laugh at our newly voracious appetite for fowl, ham, &c, but I had mastered a salutary lesson in surviving on beans & corn & greens & fruit should the time come again when it would be expedient or necessary.
July the 1st
Cont: I am quite entertained by this “autobiography in dollars & cents” tho’ I will probably spare you some of these pages dear Sophia. Soon we will return to the “autobiography of the heart” on which I initially embarked.
Quickly, then: When I left Concord to live with Mother at the end of the summer, I hatched a project with Elizabeth who would sponsor my Conversations — as you well know who were in most faithful attendance. (Had you met your princely Mr Hawthorne yet? I cannot recall.) My Conversations support me for some months in the winter & spring of 1839–1840. My first series earned me $200, & I doubled the price for the second series so was now earning nearly what my Providence salary had paid. The cost to me was an invariable head-ache, enough to fell me for two days afterwards; but I kept the work going f
or five years & had over 200 students during that time.
Meanwhile Mr E had offered me the editor’s post at The Dial, where I began work in 1840. Subscriptions sold at $3. Contributors were paid so little that I ended up writing most of the copy myself for some issues. I was paid nothing & I never labored harder at anything, before or since. (& Some money, & my as yet only dimly seen future, arrived through this as well: I wrote “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” that Mr Greeley of the Tribune offered to publish as a book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century — & which, when it came out at last in 1846, went into editions world-wide with seven translations, became my calling-card everywhere I went in Europe … & from which I earned the only money I ever made from a book thus far — $85!)
The summer of 1843 I took a long trip to the Great Lakes with friends & wrote the book Summer on the Lakes, which eventually was published but from which, again, I earned no dividends.
By the end of 1844 I was finished with the Conversations & done with the Dial, which struggled along for a year after I left it & then collapsed in obedience to the market-place tho’ Mr E swore he did not lose more money by it than he could afford. Mr Greeley pressed me to come to New York & write for his Tribune with an offer so tempting — as it seemed to me — to write essays on literature, the theatre, the conditions of women & the poor, reporting or thoughtful, as I liked — to write 250 articles, at $5 each, in a year — & to save much that I earned by living as a guest in his home, a “country” farm in Turtle Bay only a few miles north of the city. $1, 250 for a year’s work! A princely sum!
Oh what a year ensued. To earn my salary & write an article nearly every day, in a house-hold where I was chastised for my personal habits, including & most importantly, drinking tea! The Greeleys had long since given up eating meat — & I was glad of my ability to be abstemious in this regard — but they also, on the grounds of both health & spirit, forbade themselves a host of other foodstuffs, including fish, tea, coffee, sherry, honey, white sugar, eggs, cucumbers, & pepper & nutmeg. I rebelled to the extent of insisting on my tea & also kept a private stock of honey & eggs in my room. I was more sociable than I might otherwise have been in that year, angling by the rushing stream of society for any invitation to dine that might come my way, sometimes at James Nathan’s hotel, & was able thereby to get a substantial meal perhaps one day a week. It was during this year that Mother told me she no longer needed my reg’lar remittances, as the older boys were able to pitch in & with Ellen’s help she was able to keep boarders in the Jamaica Plain house.
Miss Fuller Page 9