More praise for
EDEN’S OUTCASTS
“One of the pleasures of the book is to be taken back to a time and place of intellectual and moral grandeur…. In producing such a rounded, detailed and compelling portrait of Louisa, [her father] Bronson, their family and their times, Matteson has provided us with a valuable context for appreciating that enduring masterpiece Little Women.”
—Martin Rubin, Los Angeles Times
“A splendid new dual biography…[a] lively tour of the early 19th century, when American humanistic optimism flowed, fed by an aquifer that lay in New England. There, powerful voices—including Bronson Alcott’s—condemned slavery, war, greed and convention…. Compassionate and compelling.”
—Daniel Dyer, San Diego Union-Tribune
“Matteson’s engrossing biography of the Alcotts achieves a rare fusion of intellectual precision and emotional empathy.”
—Madeleine B. Stern, author of Louisa May Alcott
“Matteson’s portrait of Bronson and Louisa is painted on a large canvas, capturing an era when ideals and practice collided as never before in the history of the American nation.”
—Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters
“[An] engrossing dual portrait…. An interesting take on a well-known family. Summing Up: Recommended.”
—Choice
“Matteson tells the odd, fascinating story of the über idealistic Bronson Alcott and the impact of his life decisions on his daughter, beloved children’s book authoress Louisa May Alcott…. Particularly for those unfamiliar with the Alcott story, this is a journey of much interest.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“John Matteson paints a compelling portrait of one of the most well-known and well-connected transcendentalist philosophers of the 19th century.”
—Bookmarks
“Matteson’s book is gracefully written, a solid contribution to the bookshelf of New England literature.”
—Steve Goddard’s History Wire
“Matteson removes the roof from the home of this one-of-a-kind American family, revealing both the tragedies and the triumphs of its two most famous members. He gives a well-deserved dignity to an original American philosopher, Bronson Alcott, and offers scholars and the general reader one of the finest biographies to date of Louisa May Alcott. Eden’s Outcasts is the true story of the much-beloved little women.”
—Daniel Shealy, editor of The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott
“Eden’s Outcasts is impossible to put down.”
—Jamie Spencer, STLtoday.com
“Carefully researched and sensitively written. Essential.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Matteson gracefully interprets an astounding family drama of compassion and creativity, folly and courage. Matteson’s lucid, commanding biography casts new light on an unusual father-daughter bond and a new land at war with itself.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
“In Eden’s Outcasts John Matteson represents father and daughter as fallible, fascinating, and lovable people who in the dramatic interplay of their lives came to accept and appreciate themselves and each other. Against the backdrop of Transcendentalism, Abolitionism, and the Civil War, peopled by the leading lights of their times, theirs is a family romance full of incident and surprise, told by Matteson with skill, erudition, and insight.”
—Harriett Reisen, author and codirector of The Louisa May Alcott Project
EDEN’S OUTCASTS
IN A PAGE FROM BRONSON’S JOURNALS, OUTLINES OF HIS AND LOUISA’S HANDS OVERLAP.
(COURTESY OF HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY)
EDEN’S OUTCASTS
THE STORY OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT AND HER FATHER
JOHN MATTESON
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York • London
Copyright © 2007 by John Matteson
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton 2008
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matteson, John.
Eden's outcasts: the story of Louisa May Alcott and her father/
John Matteson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07757-5
1. Alcott, Louisa May,
1832–1888—Family. 2. Authors, American—Family relationships.
3. Fathers and daughters—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PS1018.M34 2007
818'.403—dc22
2007013707
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, W1T 3QT
FOR
Rosemary, Michelle, and Rebecca
FAMILY IS BUT THE NAME FOR A LARGER SYNTHESIS
OF SPIRITS.—A.B.A., 1836
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
Disgrace
CHAPTER ONE
Beginnings
CHAPTER TWO
A Birthday in Germantown
CHAPTER THREE
The Temple School
CHAPTER FOUR
“Orpheus at the Plough”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Sowing of the Seeds
CHAPTER SIX
First Fruits
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lost Illusions
CHAPTER EIGHT
Father and Daughter
CHAPTER NINE
Destitution
CHAPTER TEN
Orchard House
CHAPTER ELEVEN
War
CHAPTER TWELVE
Shadows and Sunlight
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Journeys East and West
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Miracles
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“The Wise and Beautiful Truths of the Father”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Come Up with Me”
Notes
Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WRITING A BIOGRAPHY REQUIRES THE AUTHOR TO LIVE with his subjects. I am thankful to all the Alcotts and their friends for being such genial and buoyant company. A student of the Alcotts is also fortunate to be part of another family, consisting of those who have dedicated themselves to the study and preservation of the Alcott legacy. In the course of this project, I have been blessed by my associations with Madeleine B. Stern, Jan Turnquist, Sarah Elbert, Daniel Shealy, Joel Myerson, Katharine Houghton, and the late Leona Rostenberg. The staff of Orchard House, especially Jenny Gratz and Maria Powers, were always there with all the answers I needed. I would also like to thank everyone at Houghton Library for their impeccable assistance. Ann Shumard (my big sister) and Lizanne Garrett at the National Portrait Gallery moved with lightning speed to provide images and permissions. Mike Volmar at the Fruitlands Museum was always at the ready when needs arose. To all these extraordinary people, I am profoundly grateful.
Throughout the writing of this book, I have had the pleasure and privilege of teaching in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City University of New York. I have benefited in particular from the wise counsel and enthusiastic encouragement of three wonderful department chairs, Bob Crozier, Timothy Stevens, and Jon-Christian Suggs, who have always done everything possible to make my ix professional path a smooth and rewarding one. I would be less than what I am if it were not for the wise counsel and selfles
s support of Marc Dolan and Karen Kaplowitz. If kindness and humor help to make a job worth doing, then virtually every one of my colleagues deserves mention here, but to the following I am especially grateful: Ira Bloomgarden, Effie Cochran, Betsy Gitter, Richard Haw, Ann Huse, Livia Katz, Adam McKible, Marny Tabb, and Cristine Varholy. I also thank Jacob Marini for ably ferreting out grant money for this project during lean times. My thanks go as well to David Yaffe, whose friendship, humor, and encouragement are pearls beyond price.
I would like to thank Bill McPhaul for teaching me to write with precision and Victor Brombert for teaching me how to write with love. I shall be forever grateful to Dan Rodgers, Sacvan Bercovitch, and George Gopen, who embody in my eyes the very best of the teaching profession. I have been enriched beyond measure by the friendship and guidance of my mentors in the Columbia Ph.D. program: Andrew Delbanco, Ann Douglas, Karl Kroeber, Jonathan Levin, John Rosenberg, Priscilla Wald, and, primus inter pares, Robert A. Ferguson.
This book would not exist if it were not for the brilliant professionalism of my agent, Peter Steinberg. At W. W. Norton, I would have been lost without the superb, sensitive editing of Amy Cherry and the advice of Lydia Fitzpatrick. My copy editor, Elizabeth Pierson, was meticulous and supportive throughout the process.
With deep appreciation, I acknowledge a research grant from PSCCUNY.
My wife, Michelle, never threatened to throw me out, even in my worst moments of authorial crankiness. I would have had far less inspiration to write this book if it were not for our daughter, Rebecca, who has probably done more than anyone else to help me understand Bronson and Louisa.
My mother, Rosemary Hamilton Matteson, always wanted to write a book. But life surprised her, and she raised a son who wrote one instead. This is her book.
EDEN’S OUTCASTS
PROLOGUE
DISGRACE
“The saints are popular alone in heaven, not on earth; elect of God, they are spurned by the world. They hate their age, its applause, its awards, their own affections even.”
—A. BRONSON ALCOTT, “Orphic
Sayings,” The Dial, 1840
AT THE HOUGHTON LIBRARY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, there sits a massive collection of letters, news clippings, and other memorabilia compiled over the span of seven decades by Amos Bronson Alcott, a dedicated educator and reformer, a close friend of Emerson and Thoreau, and the father of the four sisters whom his second daughter, Louisa May Alcott, immortalized as Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy in Little Women. Among these documents, neatly folded and carefully preserved, is a sales receipt from an auction that occurred when Louisa was only four years old and her father thirty-seven.1 Bronson Alcott believed that every aspect of life had a lesson to impart, and he saved documents that reminded him not only of his successes but also of his most painful defeats. He kept this receipt long after any dispute might have been raised concerning it. He kept it, it seems, to help himself remember the cost of his pride, of his idealism, and of his all-too-ready faith in the capacity of ordinary people to embrace unfamiliar ideas.
The auction took place in Boston on April 13, 1837. The national economy was in the throes of a financial panic, and the prices asked for the merchandise were not high. Inspecting the lots before the sale began, a bargain hunter with scholarly leanings would have delighted in the richness of the sale: globes, school furniture of the highest quality, and busts of Socrates, Shakespeare, and Milton. And then there were the books—at least three hundred volumes, painstakingly assembled by their collector, too often with borrowed money. Many of them were literary classics. Some of them were English editions with the best leather bindings—a rare sight for American eyes, even in literary-minded Boston. Prospective buyers gazed upon the essays of John Locke and the poems of Byron and Shelley. Commentaries on the Bible sat side by side with books on elementary education. An appraising eyebrow or two were probably raised at a five-volume set of the dialogues of Plato. Without any particular ceremony, the sale commenced. A two-volume set of Coleridge’s letters went for $2.25. A six-volume edition of Sir Walter Scott’s novels changed hands for $1.50, and a book of family prayers went for thirty cents. Book by book, piece by piece, the library, the furniture, and everything else came under the hammer until all was gone. After the auctioneer deducted his commission and other expenses, the net proceeds of the sale came to $158.64. Alcott wrote in the aftermath of the sale, “their value in coin will, at this time, release me from pecuniary embarrassment.”2 Although the high-sounding phrase may have served for a moment to mask the starkness of his situation, Alcott well knew that he was losing far more than he was getting.
It is not recorded whether Alcott bothered to attend the auction. Although he had paid out “not a little of [his] small earnings” for the auctioned items, going perilously into debt to do so, he had bought only a portion of them for his personal use. Rather, the busts and desks, as well as fully half the books, had graced the interior of a small primary school, housed upstairs in the Masonic temple on Tremont Street. Founded by Alcott less than three years earlier, the Temple School had fallen on desperate times. Perhaps with the sale of the furniture and the library, it might somehow be kept afloat a while longer. Alcott tended to suffer most indignities in silence. He did not yet speak of the possibility that the school might soon have to close forever. At the moment, he seemed saddest to be losing the volumes of Plato, which, aside from his wife Abigail and his daughters, were possibly what he held dearest in the world. Nevertheless, Alcott, his hair already graying, tried to put on a brave face. The loss of the dialogues would have caused him much more grief, he said, if he had not already acquainted himself so thoroughly with their spirit.
An otherworldly perfectionism typified Alcott, a man who continually proclaimed the unimportance of the world of things. Like Plato himself, who posited a world of ideal forms of which our own world was only the shadowy, shattered image, Alcott prized ideas infinitely more than physical objects. The fact that he was forced to live a material existence seemed at best a misfortune and at worst a cosmic mistake. Before Alcott’s marriage to Abigail May, the brother of his prospective bride had accurately observed Alcott’s fundamental bent. He wrote to his sister, “Don’t distress yourself about his poverty. His mind and heart are so much occupied with other things that poverty and riches do not seem to concern him.”3 Because he valued them so highly, understandings of the spirit tended to come into Alcott’s grasp without effort. The material trappings of the world, however, he tended to ignore, and they in turn seemed almost willfully to keep their distance from him.
And yet, for all his allegiance to the invisible, Alcott was not indifferent to appearances, and the ones he liked best were those that reminded him of himself. One day, when leading a discussion on the subject of “Angelic and Demonic Man,” Alcott entertained his listeners with his description of the kind of person who best reflected divine beauty and intelligence. The angelic man, as Alcott imagined him, had light-colored hair and clear blue eyes. He did not rely on logic, a faculty too easily contorted by evil, but on the gentler perceptions of the heart. The angelic man shunned the contentiousness of argument but delighted in the shared sympathies of genial conversation. When Alcott concluded, his description was answered with knowing smiles and probably a few rolled eyes. The speaker had just finished describing himself.4
Others who described Alcott tended to emphasize qualities that seemed not quite to belong to this world. They often discovered that they had said more about his character than his bodily presence. Alcott’s dearest friend and benefactor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called him “a God-made priest” and “a world builder.”5 Henry David Thoreau, a man renowned for the sharp lines of his descriptive prose, seemed stumped when it came to the gentle schoolmaster. After a day with Alcott, Thoreau told his journal, “He is broad & general but indefinite.” Alcott was for him “a geometer—a visionary—The Laplace of ethics.” When Thoreau called Alcott a “sky-blue” man, it was not clear whether he was referring to Alc
ott’s eye color or his idealism.6 In the first published version of his short story “The Hall of Fantasy,” Nathaniel Hawthorne immortalized Alcott with the following tribute:
There was no man…whose mere presence the language of whose look and manner, wrought such an impression as that of this great mystic innovator. So calm and gentle was he, so holy in aspect, so quiet in utterance of what his soul brooded upon, that one might readily conceive his Orphic Sayings to well upward from a fountain in his breast, which communicated with the infinite abyss of Thought.7
One should suppose that Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne knew something about their subject, for Alcott’s influence was interwoven not merely intellectually but personally into the lives of all three. Alcott was Emerson’s most constant friend for more than forty-five years. When Alcott had conversations with his pupils at the Temple School recorded for posterity, Hawthorne’s future wife, Sophia Peabody, acted as one of his scribes. In 1852, when Hawthorne was looking for a house in Concord, Massachusetts, it was Alcott’s property that he wound up purchasing. When Thoreau was preparing to take up residence on the banks of Walden Pond, he discovered that he needed to borrow an ax to cut timber for his cabin. Apparently, he borrowed Alcott’s. When Thoreau remembered the incident in Walden, however, he omitted the name of the lender. Instead he recorded, “The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye, but I returned it sharper than I received it.”8
This vignette might stand as an emblem of the kind of relationship Alcott tended to have with his better-remembered companions. Alcott cherished his theories and inspirations even more than his ax, but as with his ax, he was seldom able to hone his ideas into the form that would cut most efficiently. He shared his ideas almost as freely as he shared his tools, and it was in the hands of others that both acquired their gleaming sharpness. His contributions often received scant acknowledgment. Alcott was very likely the “Orphic poet” whom Emerson quotes at length toward the end of Nature, but his name is nowhere to be found. The spirit of Alcott pervades Hawthorne stories like “The Celestial Railroad” and the previously quoted “Hall of Fantasy,” yet the paragraph in the latter that identifies him by name was stricken from all published versions of the tale save the first. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne all would have been great if they had never met Bronson Alcott. But none of them would have been precisely the same.
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