by Julie Dobrow
Up until the time of her marriage to David, Mabel’s life was almost entirely focused on herself. When later in life Mabel wrote a series of memories of her earliest years, she recalled that “my childhood was a rather lonely one, and the trees and sky were to me quite the same as playmates.”4 Mabel was home schooled; she noted that her parents limited her playfellows to those who were the children of Harvard professors or others whose parents were deemed by her own parents to be “refined.”
Although she was young and living a fairly sheltered life, Mabel was nonetheless deeply affected by the Civil War, as were almost all Americans of the era. She recalled her uncle John Wilder writing letters home to his mother before his death, and how anxious her grandmother was to receive them. And though she was but nine years old, Mabel retained a strong memory of the time in 1865 when President Lincoln was assassinated: “to all of us in the north, the tragedy pre-eminent. All I can recall of this nationwide sorrow is the somber decorations in Harvard Square when I went there hand in hand with my father.”5
After the conclusion of the Civil War, Eben set off for Florida, where he had invested his meager savings in a cotton plantation partnership. The enterprise failed within a year, perhaps not surprisingly since it was an odd investment to have made given the labor implications of the war. To make ends meet, Molly sold the Wilder family home and moved herself, her mother and her daughter into a boardinghouse in Cambridge. Eben then moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a clerk at the Nautical Almanac Office, bringing in little but at least some income. Molly refused to join him until 1868, wanting him to be more solvent and not wishing to leave her native New England. But when she eventually conceded and the three generations of Wilder women arrived in D.C., Molly found that her family still had to live in boardinghouses to get by.
Mabel’s family led a peripatetic existence, moving from one boardinghouse to the next. This was not uncommon: as American cities grew in the nineteenth century, between a third to half of urban residents were either boarders themselves, or took boarders into their homes, according to some contemporary social historians.6 But for Mabel, however common it was, living in a boardinghouse would become something she associated with her parents’ inability to ascend into a solidly middle-class existence.
There was also another consequence of such an upbringing. As an only child living in these conditions, Mabel spent an inordinate amount of time around adults. She passed the winter and spring seasons in Washington, and then went with her mother and grandmother for several months back to New England. Historian Polly Longsworth observes that this effectively put Molly “in authority” half the year and Eben in charge the other half, setting up a loose structure of parental supervision that the strong-willed young Mabel quickly learned to subvert. Molly and Eben couldn’t have been more different: she, practical, frugal, obsessively doing what she could to economize all the while touting the importance of her Wilder family heritage; he, a dreamer, an intellectual who “had the manner of a gentleman scholar [who] read and studied and observed acutely throughout his life, but never acquired academic training nor achieved professional standing in any of the several vocations he admired and emulated.”7
Mabel adored her father. Despite his insolvency and his lack of formal education, in Mabel’s eyes Eben was a brilliant, thoughtful man who supported his daughter at every turn and whose nature was in sync with her own. Mabel always thought of him as “a lovely, saintly character” with whom she had an exceptionally close relationship.
But her relationship with her mother was more complex. Though they were in some ways extremely close and she was quite dependent upon her mother, Mabel also grew to believe that Molly’s values did not align with her own. For example, although Mabel left behind approximately a thousand letters she’d written to her mother between 1879 and 1910, many of these letters better document what Mabel was doing rather than what she was feeling. Mabel often complained in her journal that while she loved her mother, Molly fundamentally did not understand her and that it was easier to keep their relationship on an even keel if Mabel didn’t reveal her mind and heart.
In a reflection on her childhood written in 1933, Millicent expounded upon the relationship between her mother and grandmother: “Though my mother was her only and adored child, my grandmother never quite understood her. Her gaiety was not the trouble, not even her love of dress. . . . With temperaments strangely similar, a different slant on the Eternal Values forever kept them apart.”8
Despite the differences in her relationships with her parents, Mabel knew that they were very supportive and protective of her. They tried to provide her with the best education that they could afford, and they were extremely nurturing of her growing love and incipient talent for art, music and writing.
As a young child, Mabel’s parents encouraged her aptitude for drawing. Eben hoped his daughter would someday become a well-known artist.9 Though Mabel often recorded in her journals the praise others heaped on her paintings (“I am painting a great deal and everybody is ecstatic over my pictures”), she also frequently posted blistering critiques on the back of her sketches (“Failure! An attempt at something I cannot at present do, an example of perspective.”)10
Mabel wrote that as a child “my delight was in picking out not only tunes and melodies played by ear on my mother’s sweet old piano, but in dissecting as it were the keyboard, and finding out the connections of the different keys, one to the other, and the relation of their minors to each major.” Somehow, even as a child without any conventional instruction, Mabel formed a fairly sophisticated understanding of the principles of harmony and chord formation, an understanding so nuanced it surprised her music theory teachers years later.11 Recognizing her daughter’s inherent musical talents, Molly struggled to find ways to provide formal training. In 1873 she managed to scrape together enough savings to pay for Mabel to have several weeks of piano lessons at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
Because literature was highly valued in the Loomis household, it’s little surprise that Mabel began to write essays early in life. An avid reader, Mabel often tried to emulate the styles of many of the authors she most admired. Around the age of fifteen, Mabel began maintaining both diaries and journals, a practice she would follow throughout her life. The diaries tended to record the day-to-day details of her life, while the journals often recorded what her daughter Millicent later referred to as “what lay beneath the surface.” Mabel often embellished her diaries and journals with sketches, fragments of music she wrote out on tablature in the margins, and flowers gathered and flattened. Superstitious throughout her life, Mabel also dried and pressed lucky four-leafed clovers into the pages she penned, saving them and placing them on days of particular importance to her.
As a girl Mabel tried her hand at writing stories, extended letters and essays. Her first published piece, an essay entitled “My Summer at Lake Champlain,” appeared in a magazine called Our Young Folks in 1871. A few years later, Mabel published a number of pieces about time spent in Maine, and later shared these with Louisa May Alcott. “She said they were unusually well written and showed two of the great characteristics of a successful writer, viz: observation and the power of description.” This praise, Mabel reported to her parents in 1875, “formed very bright epochs in my already bright life.”12 It also served to heighten her ambition to become a recognized writer. Of all her many and considerable talents, it was Mabel’s writing in which she was most invested. Her early determination to be known as a great writer haunted her throughout her life; she always believed her “brilliance” should be focused in her writing and that this would be her historic legacy. No doubt this desire would later draw her to recognize the brilliance of Emily Dickinson’s writing and intensified a desire to connect herself to it.
Mabel’s polymath interests manifested themselves in her formal schooling. From 1869 to 1874 Mabel attended the Georgetown Female Seminary, studying literature, writing, “mental arithmetic,�
� grammar, history and botany. Mabel delighted in attending school after years of home schooling and did well in all her subjects. Her omnivorous appetite for learning was characterized in a letter she wrote to David a year before their marriage: “Do you suppose I shall be satisfied with myself when I am an extraordinary musician, & a fine artist, & a noble French, German, Latin & Greek student, & an accomplished astronomer, botanist, ornithologist and mythologist, & a thorough mistress of literature in general?”13
Not only was young Mabel Loomis bright and artistically gifted, she was also charming. Her parents’ moves to many different boardinghouses helped her to make her own mark wherever she went. Writes Longsworth, “for Mabel a public parlor or dining room comprised a small stage which she learned to dominate with her conversational and artistic gifts. . . . Adulation from adults was a sustaining element of her life.”14
In her early twenties, Mabel was well aware of her charms and their effects on people. In one typical journal entry she wrote, “If I may say so, it assumed an all-embracing genius which took entire possession of me—not a genius for painting nor for music nor for writing alone—but as if I could do any of these things with perfect sense of glorious success if I but gave myself to any one of them . . . this grand sense of power [has] pervaded every act and thought of my life.”15
Nor did it take long before Mabel realized the effect that she seemed to have on men. Her early journals are peppered with the names of various young men who walked her to and fro, were “madly in love with me” or who flattered her by saying things such as “I could do any and everything.” Mabel often recorded such sentiments as “I have had such an exuberance of spirits . . . for so many nights in succession, that I greatly fear a reaction will come, and then the ‘blues’ will keep me company for a while. But I won’t distress myself about that until they really arrive and meantime get so much out of life as possible!”16 She grew increasingly confident of her charms and her abilities to attract eligible men and seemed to revel in their attentions to her. “I . . . can’t see why I should have a power over men, but I do. I’m sure of that.”17
When Molly and Eben managed to save enough money for Mabel to return to the New England Conservatory for an extended period of study, her time in Boston served to throw open the window of her aspirations more widely. “My life is nothing but beginnings,” she wrote to her parents. In clear opposition to the traditions of the day she added, “There is no earthly reason (or heavenly either) why I should give my music up even if I should get married.” She concluded defiantly, “No man can make a drudge out of me.”18
Mabel remained in Boston until 1876, when she moved back to Washington and rejoined her parents. She never completed the coursework necessary to obtain a degree. There doesn’t appear to be any precipitating incident or any obvious reason why Mabel decided that she’d learned enough for the moment to leave the conservatory. She’d gotten what she wanted: she had won the battle of wills with her parents and established that she would pursue her own path, regardless of convention, no matter what others might think.
Twenty-year-old Mabel engaged in a torrent of social activities back in Washington. “I am very busy all the time; we have a great many callers,” she noted in her journal.19 Though she had attracted the attention of many men whom she mentioned in her private writings, none of them captured her attention fully until she met David Peck Todd. He seemed to fit all the Wilder woman criteria. Handsome, charming and articulate, David was working with noted astronomer Simon Newcomb. Newcomb served as the director of the same office in which Eben Jenks Loomis worked. David was also living with Newcomb and his family in a home that, as fate would have it, was just across the street from the Loomises’ boardinghouse.
MABEL AND DAVID TODD IN THE EARLY 1880S.
When David first paid a call on Mabel in November of 1877, she observed in her journal that he was charming and “very good looking, a blond with magnificent teeth, pleasant manners, and immense, though innocent enough, powers of flirting. Well, so have I.”20 Mabel was drawn to him at once. David was bright (he had gone to Columbia University on a scholarship at age fifteen and then transferred to Amherst College because unlike Columbia, it had both an observatory and a program in astronomy), he was musical (a gifted organist) and he was smooth and sophisticated. At just twenty-two he had already had a fair amount of experience with women. More than Mabel knew.
Throughout the winter and spring of 1878 their relationship deepened during long walks and while attending concerts. Mabel clearly believed that in David, she had met a man who matched her interests, intelligence and passion. “I love him so! Not merely in an intellectual way—but every way you can mention—mentally, spiritually, morally & physically” she wrote. And David wrote to her, “Ah! My darling little woman, how perfectly I love you,” observing their harmonious interests in music, nature and astronomy, their paired sense of ambition and their growing physical attraction. Without doubt, David’s adulation fed Mabel’s image of herself: “Every charm, every fascination which I possess, he notes and loves, and he thinks more of than most girls’ ardent admirers in their first stage of attraction,” she noted.21
Despite David’s charisma, he had a darker side. He confided to Mabel “things I wouldn’t have known,” she wrote. He hinted at sexual indiscretions and told her of times his moods were inexplicably clouded by depressive thoughts. He referred to Mabel, by contrast, as “perpetual blue sky.”
When Mabel left for the yearly pilgrimage to New England with her mother and grandmother, she and David exchanged almost a hundred letters that continued to deepen their relationship. It was clearly important to Mabel that David not only understand but also endorse her own ambitions and that their relationship must allow her latitude to pursue her goals. Mabel confided to her journal, “There are capabilities in me, I know, which I’ve not yet begun to feel, & they shall be developed & filled, & he [David] shall help me. He is so tender & gentle that I shall have full sway—when I wish to be let alone to carry out an idea, I may be, or I can confidently count on his loving help to aid me when needed.”22 Mabel’s surety of David’s support was consistent with late nineteenth-century practice: as increasing numbers of middle-class women attained higher amounts of education, expectations within marriages about traditional divisions of labor also began to shift.23 Her attraction for David, his vow that he had “shut the door on his past,” along with her belief in his unyielding support and love for her, convinced Mabel that the relationship should go forward. She allowed herself to believe that the sunny side of David would prevail.
The couple seemed headed toward commitment, though Molly and Eben Loomis were not as enthusiastic as one might have expected, especially since they had thwarted at least one of Mabel’s previous relationships with a suitor they deemed less appropriate. But David’s family did not come from the sort of “significant” background that the Loomises hoped for, even though his forebears included the noted theologian Jonathan Edwards. Though he made more money than Eben, David’s financial future was uncertain, having failed the mathematics examination that was a prerequisite for promotion at the U.S. Naval Observatory. And there was both marital strife (his parents had separated) and mental illness in David’s close family, both relatively taboo topics in the late nineteenth century. However, Molly and Eben did not give voice to these concerns until years later, and by November of 1878, Mabel and David were formally engaged.
Two months before they married on March 5, 1879, Mabel confided in her diary, “Have only come to a knowledge—this very day—of the wonderful depth & strength of my love for him. I know myself now and what it is to love him . . . and the happiest afternoon of all our love.”24 And for the first time, she used a symbol she’d deploy many times in her private notations, a record for all times that marked when she had sex.
There are many things that become clear about Mabel Loomis Todd from reading her journals and diaries. She held strong opinions about most things that she did not hesitat
e to articulate. She exuberantly expressed her love of life. She wrote rapturous entries about her passion for nature and her joy at music, art and literature. She was supremely confident of herself and never shy about touting her own abilities. Mabel also wrote of her sensual nature and the delight she took in love’s physical expressions, frequently and explicitly.
During the early months of her marriage to David, Mabel’s diaries and journals are filled with entries such as “David and I very happy together for an hour this morning” or “the most rapturous & sacred night of all our love.” She recorded in her journal that David’s “love for me is so passionate, and yet so pure, he tries to make it just what I desire in every respect that I frequently find myself singing aloud, out of the music in my heart which is felt in emotion and dearest utterances by our deepest love for each other.”25 Mabel refined her system of symbols for recording both intercourse and orgasm in her diaries. She also meticulously recorded her monthly “time of sickness.”
Neither Mabel nor David wanted to have a child right away. On the anniversary of Millicent’s conception years later, David wrote to Mabel that neither of them had wanted children from their union for at least the first five years of their marriage.26 In letters to her mother during the summer of 1879, Mabel continued to insist that she had never thought about the idea of becoming pregnant. However, neither Mabel nor David had a very good understanding of when ovulation actually occurs in a woman’s cycle. Mabel also believed that conception could only occur “at the climax moment of my sursation—that once passed, I believed the womb would close, and no fluid could reach the fruitful point.”27