There was, of course, one renowned nineteenth-century American author who would never have existed at all without Bronson Alcott: his daughter, Louisa May. But even in his own daughter’s work, Bronson is represented as a compromised figure, sometimes caricatured for the sake of comedy and sometimes wholly absent even when circumstances cry out for his presence. Most famously, when Louisa transformed herself and her sisters into Little Women, the March family’s patriarch is almost absent from the narrative. Even when Mr. March at last makes his grand entrance in chapter 22 of the novel, almost the first words devoted to him are, “Mr. March became invisible….”9
Indeed, to examine Alcott and his influence on those around him is sometimes to have a sense of dealing with an invisible man. This invisibility forms a key part of Bronson Alcott’s curious destiny. The workings of his mind were misunderstood even by many of those who were closest to him, and the bulk of his writing was barely known to anyone, even in his own time. The one medium of communication of which he was an acknowledged master, the spoken word, vanished the moment he created it. The grand, ambitious projects by which he hoped to establish his name and unveil his ideas before the world tended to collapse into humiliation and futility. So long as Alcott could move within the sphere of the ethereal and evanescent, he moved with radiance and grace. As soon as he stepped into the world of things and actions or tried to project a durable image of himself, he began to lose his balance. When he attempted to astonish the world by performing a truly great task—and he found such tasks almost fatally irresistible—his ease, common sense, and good fortune deserted him entirely, and he fell to earth with a thud. The people who laid the best claim to understanding Alcott seem to have regarded him as a word made flesh, as a collection of ideas and principles that seemed only coincidentally to have lodged inside a body.
But this spirit did have a body. Bronson Alcott was slender and stood six feet tall. Anyone who, on meeting him, expected to shake the smooth, soft hand of a poet-philosopher would have been surprised by the muscular firmness of Alcott’s grasp. The son of a Connecticut farmer, he believed that moral virtue could be strengthened by working the soil. In the bleakest periods of his life, he found comfort as well as income in tending his garden and chopping firewood for himself and his neighbors. It was through horticulture, more than through anything else except his family, that the philosophical Alcott maintained firm contact with the physical world.
His hands were rough. His manners were not. In his youth, when he was old enough to get off the farm, Alcott traveled five times through the South as a peddler of Yankee notions. The experience of meeting southern gentlemen and ladies and often sojourning in their homes made a profound impression. Alcott studied the grace and politeness that were shown him and acquired an almost courtly civility. One of his English friends, Thomas Cholmondeley, reported with some surprise that the American possessed the social polish of a British nobleman.10 Surprisingly, however, for a man so dedicated to the world of the unseen, Alcott nursed a surprising weakness for fashion, although he usually lacked the means to indulge that interest very lavishly. After one of his youthful peddling excursions in the South, he squandered his earnings on a fancy suit of clothes. Around Boston, he was known for a somewhat outrageous taste in hats, and the cane he habitually carried was a concession more to style than to infirmity. Farm boy turned gentleman, peddler turned philosopher, Alcott defied attempts at categorization.
People disagreed as to whether Alcott’s hair had been blond or reddish in his youth, and by the late 1830s it was already hard to settle the argument because his hair had whitened. It was growing thinner on the top of his head as well, although it extended long and carelessly down the back of his neck, as if by way of compensation. In his most appealing photographs, Alcott wears a calm but expectant expression, and a smile that seems both intelligent and profoundly trusting. Most acquaintances agreed that his most memorable features were his eyes—gentle, pale blue, and deeply set beneath a brow that in some photographs looks faintly Lincolnesque, although the face as a whole lacks Lincoln’s gravity and shrewdness. Perhaps the most fascinating description of Alcott, however, came in verse form from the poet John Townsend Trowbridge, who, later in life, edited some of Louisa May Alcott’s writings:
Do you care to meet Alcott? His mind is a mirror
Reflecting the unspoken thought of his hearer.
To the great, he is great; to the fool he’s a fool—
In the world’s dreary desert a crystalline pool
Where a lion looks in and a lion appears,
But an ass will see only his own ass’s ears.11
But neither a wise man nor a fool would ever truly know Bronson Alcott without becoming acquainted with his family. At the time his library was sold, Alcott had been married almost seven years to Abigail May, a woman who, every bit as much as her husband, believed in the perfectibility of human beings. Abba, as her husband called her, believed that people had been given their weaknesses in order that they might triumph over them, and she stood perpetually ready to aid selflessly in the mighty causes of reform. Though she loved the world enough to change it, she was not always patient with it, and she frequently lost her composure when society refused to know what was good for it. For her husband and children, however, she had almost limitless tenderness and patience, and she had particular esteem for her husband’s virtues. In her eyes, he was “an intelligent, philosophic, modest man.”12 She considered him “peculiarly sober [and] temperate,” untainted by even “a single habit of personal indulgence.”13 In her letters, he was her “dear husband” and her “savior.”14 In truth, his refusals to compromise with the world sometimes exasperated her. Nevertheless, even when he did not earn enough to supply his family’s wants—and such times were alarmingly frequent—she continued to find integrity in his willingness to “starve or freeze before he will sacrifice principle to comfort.”15 He returned her admiration. It was she, he wrote, “who first kindled me into that sweeter and holier birth—the gentler and fragrant life of Love.”16 When they had been married almost forty years, he wrote of his abundant reasons “to thank the Friend of families and Giver of good wives that I was led to her acquaintance and fellowship when life and a future opened before me.”17
In April 1837, the couple had three daughters, ranging in age from six years to twenty-one months. As a supremely dedicated educator, fascinated by the undiscovered secrets of child development, Bronson had traced the progress of each of these girls literally from birth, compiling notes and commentaries that ran into the thousands of pages. It could justly be said that no father in America knew his children more thoroughly. Knowing them so well, he was keenly aware of how different they were. The eldest daughter, Anna, and the third daughter, Lizzie, had their father’s even, placid temperament. Bronson had striven consciously to rear what he thought were perfect children, and Anna and Lizzie were living testaments to his theories of infant culture. But the middle daughter, now nearly four and a half years old, defied her father’s attempts at understanding. Highly energetic, resistant to discipline, she had an innate turbulence that her father had tried without success to tame. She was, in Bronson’s view, a creature of “impatience, querulousness, forwardness.” From an early period, she had been “the undisciplined subject of her instincts, pursuing her purpose, by any means that will lead her to their attainment.” Her father saw in her “signs of impending evil.”18
Yet if this second daughter was fierce in her passions, she could be equally zealous in her loyalties. The critic Van Wyck Brooks told a story, more valuable perhaps for its mood than for its literal truth, of the day when, in preparation for the Temple School auction, the sheriff came to empty the premises of the fine books and furnishings that the schoolmaster had bought on credit and could no longer afford to keep. Brooks reports that the sheriff was going about his work when, suddenly, the teacher’s daughter strode across the room toward him shouting, “Go away, bad man, you are making my father unhapp
y!” The anecdote ends with the schoolmaster, leading this daughter with one hand and her older sister Anna with the other, walking down the stairs “with mournful steps and slow.”19 The impatient, forward daughter who is said to have defended her father’s classroom and his feelings with such ferocity was named Louisa May.
When he used the words “mournful steps and slow” to describe the Alcotts’ exit from the temple that had so recently housed the father’s wondrous school, Brooks intentionally echoed the closing lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the disgraced but wiser Adam and Eve, “with wandering steps and slow,” make their way out of the lost Garden of Eden.20 Brooks chose aptly, for few Americans have ever tried so passionately to construct a latter-day Eden than Bronson Alcott, first in his attempts to create the ideal school for young children, and later in his efforts to establish a saintly community of scholars in which money would be unknown, where no creature would profit by the suffering of any other, and where every participant would be received and loved as a member of an enormous family. By the same token, however, few have paid so high a price for trying to find perfection in a fallen world.
Alcott’s second daughter was too young to attend her father’s ideal academy at the temple. Nevertheless, her relationship with her father, acted out within an unusually close and interdependent family, was to be made still closer by a series of astonishing coincidences. Bronson and Louisa May Alcott shared the same birthday, November 29. Although they were born thirty-three years apart, the books that made their literary reputations were published in the same month. And at the end of it all—well, perhaps that coincidence is best reserved for the final chapter. In any event, the similarities in their lives were more than a matter of timing.
For Louisa as well as for Bronson, life was a persistent but failed quest for perfection. First, she was to labor vainly to conquer her fierce temper and stubborn willfulness, trying to find the paradise that her father always swore lay within her. Then, she would struggle to bring happiness and comfort to a family continually besieged by want. Later, she would go to war, doing all in her power, if not to make America a paradise, then at least to make it a place where all people would be free. Still later, as a novelist, she would strive to produce in fiction what she could not bring about in the world: a vision of humanity enriched by personal sacrifice and enlightened by unselfish love. Both Bronson and Louisa May had ambitions of altering the world through literature. In ways that neither anticipated and in widely varying degrees, they succeeded. Yet it was in the lives they lived, rather than in the words they wrote or spoke, that they fought hardest for redemption: both to redeem themselves from their perceived failures and to redeem the world at large from the wickedness that both father and daughter sought earnestly to reform. They wanted perfection. In their search for it, they inevitably discovered flaws both in the world and within themselves. Pursuing paradise, they continually confirmed themselves as Eden’s outcasts.
“Outcast” was a word Alcott used to describe himself in 1837, and he did not exaggerate. His fall was all the more devastating because it had been so sudden. In February, he had written of his lofty hopes of redeeming the world. His “present purpose” was “to restore to the perverted and debauched sense of man, some of the worthier conceptions of [the] divine relations, and of the instinct, from whence they take their rise. I would, first, attract the notice of man to the original nature of childhood, as the fit means of quickening the parental sentiment, which slumbers, or is overlaid, in the hearts of too many mothers.” Almost daring fate, he had proclaimed, “the winds and waves of the terrestrial reach not the stable foundation of my faith; nor can they overthrow or efface [the] one purpose of my heart.”21
Barely a month later, however, his journal reflected a terrible change. His patrons were withdrawing their support. The public, swayed by “vague and false accounts of my enterprise,” had turned against him. Alcott could not find “a single individual who apprehends my great purpose, and is ready to step forward and aid me in this hour of need.”22 Alcott knew that, in the early months of 1837, something more precious than a library had been lost. The crisis at his school had arisen from a scandal of his own creation, a scandal touching on matters of sex and blasphemy. The newspapers and the pulpits were resounding with claims that he was depraving his students with impious and filthy ideas, casting scorn on the Bible, and schooling young children in the “naughtiness” by which babies were made. According to the press, he had, from a sheer love of notoriety, defied the sentiment of the wise and good and polluted the moral atmosphere.23 Even many of Alcott’s most loyal supporters, who had eagerly greeted the opening of the school and lauded its novel, progressive mission, were wondering privately whether their friend had lost his direction. His reputation was in ruins.
He had never laid an improper hand on any of his pupils, and no one insinuated that he had. His intentions toward the children had been only the best, and he had never, in his own view, breathed a corrupting word to them. It was with Alcott’s words, however, that the people of Boston had taken issue, so violently that he could no longer cross the Common without overhearing whispers or having boys jeer at him. There had even been talk of mob action. Only a year before, his teaching methods, which had not changed, had made him one of the most admired men in the city. The sudden reversal of fortune was all but inconceivable. Alcott confided to his journal, “what my future movements shall be, time must decide. At present, I see not my way.”24 When present and future are equally in doubt, there is only one other vista upon which to gaze. One must begin, therefore, with a backward glance along the road that had led Bronson Alcott both to glory and dishonor.
CHAPTER ONE
BEGINNINGS
“His father had no patience with him, called him a shiftless dreamer, and threatened to burn the beloved books.”
—LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, “Eli’s Education,”
Spinning-Wheel Stories
IN A NUMBER OF SIGNIFICANT WAYS, LIFE DID NOT FULLY BEGIN for Bronson Alcott until the year 1828, when three defining events occurred within months of one another: he paid his first visit to the city of Boston; he first heard the preaching of a young Unitarian minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson; and he proposed marriage to a fascinating woman named Abigail May. The city was to speak to his most celestial dreams, only to reject him when he dreamed too boldly. The minister was eventually to become his dearest, most understanding friend, and the woman was to become his loving companion for nearly fifty years. During the twenty-eight years that preceded this time of changed horizons, his life had been gradually taking one form. The city, the friend, and the lover altered that form profoundly, but the young man on whom they acted was already unusual.
Born Amos Bronson Alcox, he entered the world before dawn on Spindle Hill in the town of Wolcott, Connecticut, in the rugged hill country west of Hartford, on November 29, 1799, the eldest in a family that would eventually boast of eight children. The town had been incorporated only three years earlier, so recently that some people were still getting used to calling it Wolcott, instead of the previous name of Farmingbury.1 The new baby’s family, too, was still working out just what to call itself. His paternal great-grandfather, the first white man to settle in the area, had spelled his name Alcock, after the fashion of his English ancestors, but by the time of Bronson’s father’s generation, the name had changed to Alcox. It continued in this form until the early 1820s, when Bronson and his cousin, Dr. William A. Alcox, agreed to change the name to Alcott. Around the same time he took the name Alcott, he ceased calling himself Amos and thereafter routinely signed his name A. Bronson Alcott. In the interest of clarity and at the risk of anachronism, the boy whom everyone called Amos will be referred to here by his adult name of Bronson.
If it took the Alcox family some time to work out the details of their name, there was little doubt in their minds as to who they were. While growing up, Bronson learned from his parents, Joseph and Anna, that he was directly descended from
one of the men who had crossed the Atlantic on the Arbella in 1630 with Governor John Winthrop. It was on that voyage that Winthrop had given the sermon that first identified Puritan New England as “a city upon a hill.” Winthrop had cautioned his shipmates that, as they set out to do the work of the Lord in a forbidding wilderness, the eyes of the world would be upon them. If the people of New England broke faith with God and fell away from a standard of moral perfection, he warned, “we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world [and] we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants.”2 Those early New Englanders saw it as their mission to found a spiritual Eden that would enlighten and redeem the world. Reform and redemption, in a different sense, were also to be the missions of Bronson Alcott’s life.
Bronson considered the natural surroundings of his youth surpassingly beautiful, and as a grown man he loved to recall “the light, blithe season of my boyhood and youth…breathing the air of my native hills…treading their summits at morning’s dawn.”3 It is still an attractive place, where maple and cherry trees still rise lush and tall and ferns grow thick as grass. However, Alcott preferred not to recall that the soil was rocky and inhospitable to farming, and even he could not romanticize the relentless cold of the winter. The town was a still further cry from paradise. The year Bronson turned seventy-five, a history of Wolcott was published. The local pastor who wrote the introduction confessed “there is but little that is interesting in these remnants of a farm life which must, at its best, have been unusually prosaic and dreary.”4 Wolcott generally distrusted new ideas, and the notions of Deism and dissent that were making inroads in northeastern cities placed some of the residents literally in mortal fear. When Bronson was still a baby, one of the church deacons solemnly foretold that, if that dangerous infidel Thomas Jefferson were elected president, “the meeting houses would be burned to the ground, and Christians would be burned at the stake.”5 The city on a hill that Bronson romanticized was only a struggling town on a wind-beaten slope.
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