During these months, Alcott was less interested in Abba’s condition than he was in a new piece of reading, which was raising him far beyond the immediate concerns of life. Two months before Louisa was born, he read for the first time Aids to Reflection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a book that soon rivaled The Pilgrim’s Progress in its importance to him and, in his view, marked a new era in the life of his mind.20 Though now chiefly remembered as a poet, Coleridge exerted a profound influence on American transcendentalism through his philosophical prose. He was the most eloquent English spokesman of an idealist movement that attempted to refute the conclusions of empiricist philosophers like John Locke. Locke had argued that human beings entered the world with their minds as empty slates and that the experience of the senses was the only source of human understanding. Locke’s view might logically be taken to show that there was no relevant reality beyond the physical world. To understand themselves, human beings needed to look no farther than the data of their natural faculties.
Locke’s thesis was understandably upsetting to those who believed that there was some deeper reality in the cosmos. His theory left no room for intuition or for the divine spark that, according to religious believers, animates and sanctifies the soul. Coleridge agreed with Locke that human beings were limited to their natural faculties. However, he argued, there existed a human faculty, reason, that was superior to mere physically based understanding. Reason emanated from the single, indivisible divine word of God, perfect and unchanging. Coleridge declared that this ability for perceiving divine truth was the highest capacity of human thought. Coleridge’s concept of the reason resembled the Puritans’ idea of grace; it was the regenerate portion of the person, the part that enabled a mystical communion with heaven. Despite Alcott’s overall dedication to the life of the spirit, his thinking about child development had heretofore been basically Lockean. His emphasis on behavior and the senses is evident in the “Observations” he wrote regarding Anna. After reading Coleridge, though, Alcott never again supposed that empirical understanding and the life of the senses were paramount in human existence. Ironically, he was swept up by the tide of idealism at the very moment that his wife was about to give birth to the most intensely practical of his children.
On November 29, 1832, a half hour past midnight, Abba gave birth to a second daughter, whom Bronson described as “a very fine healthful child, much more so than Anna was at birth.”21 To his mother, he described the baby as “a very fine, fat, little creature…with a firm constitution for building up a fine character.”22 As Bronson had selected the name for his first daughter, it was Abba’s turn to name the second. She chose Louisa May, in memory of her departed sister. To Abba, it was a name that, according to Bronson, connoted “every association connected with amiable benevolence and exalted worth.” He hoped that its present possessor would rise to equal attainment.23 Bronson, a man not indifferent to signs and portents, found it “a most interesting event” that Louisa May shared her father’s birthday, entering the world on the day he turned thirty-three. When he wrote to his mother that Louisa had been born, Bronson underscored the words “on my own birth-day.” Was there to be, perhaps, a supernatural bond between them that, from the first, transcended that of father and daughter?
If so, that bond was not to be one of physical similarity. In marked contrast to her blue-eyed, flaxen-haired father, Louisa had the dark features of her mother. She had something of an olive complexion and eyes that some called gray and others thought were black. The differences went deeper still. Even when Louisa was an infant, Bronson observed qualities in her that, in his own character, were all but absent. He noticed her “unusual vivacity and force of spirit” and the “wild exuberance” of her “powerful nature.” In her father’s eyes, she was a girl “fit for the scuffle of things.”24
On the day Louisa was born, Bronson thought deeply about what family meant to him. It tied him to the physical world. Without a family, it seemed to him, his inner wants would have become morbid, and his affections would have been “dimmed and perverted.” He concluded that few could find happiness if they were “shut out from the Nursery of the Soul.”25 However, the happiness of Louisa’s birth almost crumbled into tragedy. Abba did not begin to lactate until Louisa was five days old, and the child’s weight declined ominously. Making matters worse, the nurse hired by the family neglected to bathe the baby, so that the meconium was not washed from her body for several days. Nevertheless, even as a newborn, Louisa possessed unusual vitality, which neither hunger nor the threat of infection could fatally diminish. Soon she was thriving, a “sprightly merry little puss—quirking up her mouth and cooing at every sound.”26
Bronson now commenced a second set of “Observations,” dedicated to Louisa. New babies, of course, tend to draw attention away from their older siblings. Whereas he had filled more than 300 pages of observations on Anna during her first year, he wrote only about 120 pages on her in each of the two following years. His record of Louisa reached nearly 300 pages in the first twelve months, though it was palpably different from what he had written about Anna. His writings about Louisa are more the work of a philosopher than a behaviorist. Continually, his observations on Louisa go spiraling off into general reflections on the nature of the spirit. His recording of detail is far less meticulous.
The tone and focus of this set of “Observations” reflect the change that reading Aids to Reflection had wrought on Bronson’s mind.27 He was now more inclined to regard the visible human body as the mere outer clothing of the soul. During Louisa’s infancy, Bronson was devouring idealist philosophy, particularly Coleridge and Plato. Although his lack of German prevented him from reading Kant, he did his best to absorb his thought through commentaries written in English. It would have been surprising if Bronson’s writings about Louisa did not reflect this redoubled enthusiasm about unseen worlds, emphasizing the spirit over the body.
Anna did not take well to the new intruder, who seemed to have displaced her from the center of the family. The attentions once lavished on her were further eroded by the fact that, having lost the support of the late Mr. Haines, the family was compelled to take in boarders. Anna’s behavior generally worsened, and she developed a habit of hitting her mother and of striking and scratching her sister. Believing that a twenty-month-old could be successfully reasoned with, Bronson responded by lecturing Anna, firmly but gently, on the impropriety of her conduct. After one such conversation, Bronson left the room. Anna promptly struck Louisa again and ran out after her father, entreating, “Father, punish! Father, punish!” Alcott saw the episode as evidence that Anna’s conscience had awakened. It seems more likely that Anna, with a child’s need for structure, was asking for a firmer boundary than her father had cared to set. Perhaps, too, she preferred negative attention to none at all. In any event, the scratching and hitting continued.28
Meanwhile, the Germantown school was breathing its last. Only eight pupils remained, far short of the twenty that, at a tuition of eighty dollars each, Bronson thought minimally necessary to support the family. William Russell had already decamped, returning to Boston. Alcott, for his part, decided to have one more go at Philadelphia. There, at least, he would have access to the excellent Loganian Library, and Abba might find more stimulating neighbors. Life in a boardinghouse would liberate Abba from the kitchen, enabling her to spend more time with her daughters. A wealthy Philadelphia acquaintance, Roberts Vaux, agreed to sponsor a small school in the city. On April 10, 1833, the Alcotts journeyed back to the City of Brotherly Love.
Unfortunately, Bronson’s new school of fifteen pupils failed to inspire him. He had never had more than “limited faith in the moral intelligence of the Philadelphians as efficient patrons of early education.” The above-average minds of the city seemed devoted to pecuniary gain. They were interested in “physiology and natural science,” not psychology and ethics.29 Unexpectedly, the move to Philadelphia had cast Alcott’s career into the doldrums. It had also thrust his plan
for raising the perfect family into chaos. His ideal of child culture required freedom of movement, and his cramped city apartment made such freedom impossible. Having no separate room for his study, a luxury he had enjoyed in Germantown, Alcott found that a “positive want of [his] being” had been taken from him.30 The effect on Abba and the girls was just as bad. Bronson later recalled:
[In Philadelphia] our arrangements were such that opportunity for free, uninterrupted thought was almost impossible. My companion suffered from the same cause. We were thrown in each other’s way. The children were thrown in our way. The effect on all was depressing…. The space and freedom…we ought to have had, was denied us. Intellectual progress was retarded, and health prostrated thereby.31
Yet, the closer quarters meant that Anna now slept in her parents’ room, and this arrangement improved her temper. However, she was still inclined to act more like a two-year-old than the avatar of divinity Bronson wanted her to become. At times, Bronson confessed, she was almost ungovernable. For her part, Louisa was more willful and wayward than Anna had been at the same age. Prone to fierce tantrums, she would throw herself on the floor and shriek when her desires were thwarted. Bronson’s obsessive attention to parental behavior had also begun to undermine Abba’s confidence in her motherly skills. “Mr. A. aids me in general principles,” she told her brother Samuel, “but nobody can help me in the detail.” Too often, Bronson’s fastidious criticisms caused her to wonder, “Am I doing what is right? Am I doing too much?”32 Committed in principle to her husband’s theories of noncoercive parenting, she at last found that she could maintain order only by spanking. She even resorted to slapping Anna as a corrective measure. Observing Anna’s new experience of what he gently called “power and pain,” Bronson surmised that Abba’s use of force was only making matters worse.33
With his domestic peace unraveling and his suppositions about child rearing being daily refuted, Bronson somehow found a way to press forward with his own education. As biographer Odell Shepard has observed, the Alcott who first made his way to Philadelphia in 1830 could make no claim to being a well-read man. By 1834, when he returned to Boston, he could hold his head up among the most studious people in the city. In addition to Coleridge and Plato, he was reading Pythagoras, Berkeley, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. However, it taxed him to keep up his reading while also running a school and helping to manage a chaotic household. Reluctantly, he finally did something that perhaps speaks better of his instinct for self-preservation than it does for his devotion to his family. For a brief period, he essentially ran away from home.
To be more precise, he split the family up, locating rooms for Abba and the girls back in Germantown while he took an attic room in the city. On weekends, he walked six miles each way to spend time with Abba and the girls. He was struggling to serve three masters at once: the necessity of earning a living; the care and nurture of his children; and the ceaselessly demanding appetite of his mind. Instead of intertwining, these three imperatives were tugging in opposite directions. Bronson had once complained that fathers were typically too remote from their families and “too often so much interested in personal matters that they give little time to the attention of their children.”34 Now he was learning why this was true.
Nevertheless, he was able to persuade himself that the separation was best for everyone. The girls had fresh air and room for exercise. As for Abba, he hoped that a separation would restore the “subtle ties of friendship which are worn away by constant familiarity.” For his own part, Alcott greatly enjoyed his chamber in the city, whose window opened toward the rising sun and a stand of trees whose rich foliage trembled softly in the breeze.35 Absorbing the peace and quiet of the scene, he made fine use of the time he spent alone. Branching into German Romanticism, he delved into Goethe, Schiller, and Herder and came to the conclusion that his ideas of teaching, while they had taken him in the right direction, had not gone far enough. In his 1830 essay on principles and methods, he had seen the juvenile mind as a succession of developing faculties, beginning with the animal nature and ending with the intellect. Coleridge and the great Germans showed him that he had stopped one step short of the end. The crowning achievement of education lay not in the culture of the understanding but in the perfection of the spiritual nature. Through symbolic stories and parables, he would henceforth lead his pupils to an awareness of their own divinity. He now needed only the proper venue to put his theory to the test.
It was now clear that this test would not be made in Philadelphia. Bronson had continued to try out unconventional teaching methods, including requiring his students to keep journals of their intellectual and spiritual progress. Mystified and, perhaps, faintly frightened by these kinds of assignments, parents began to withdraw their children from Alcott’s tutelage.36 By early May 1834, his school had lost forty percent of its enrollment, and further attrition was expected. In an attempt to rescue the venture, he called on all the parents who had disapproved of his methods. Decrying the evils of schools “where cunning…was made the usual motive of action” and kindness and forbearance were derided as signs of weakness, he asked them to reconsider. They refused, leaving Alcott to console himself with dire predictions concerning the children snatched from his protective arms. Of one boy removed by his parents, Alcott wrote ominously, “[H]e will doubtless fall a victim to misdirected measures. Temptations will come in his way and he will yield. The good convictions of his mind will die away.”37
He had been convinced for some time that his best chance for success was in Boston.38 To help facilitate a return, he appealed to William Ellery Channing, the eminent Unitarian minister who had helped to underwrite Alcott’s Common Street School six years earlier. Alcott’s desire to found a new school first came to Channing’s attention by means of a letter from William Russell, who swore that Alcott would inaugurate a “new era” in education. Channing arranged to meet with Alcott at his summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. The minister’s earlier favorable impressions were confirmed. Channing enthusiastically embraced Alcott’s proposed return to Boston and promised his financial backing. He promptly set about finding supporters for Alcott’s school and had soon assembled an impressive list of interested parties, including Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw and Boston’s mayor, Josiah Quincy. Both men not only pledged economic support but also agreed to enroll children in the school. Channing also arranged to send his own daughter Mary. Thus, in September 1834, the Alcott family retraced its steps to Boston. Before the month was out, Alcott had rented five rooms on the top floor of the Masonic temple on Tremont Street. With men like Channing, Shaw, and Quincy at his back, he could no longer call himself an obscure schoolmaster. Whether this School of Human Culture, known to all as the Temple School, brought its master renown or dishonor, it would do so under broad public scrutiny.
CHAPTER THREE
THE TEMPLE SCHOOL
“I say that the Christian world is anti-Christ.”
—A. BRONSON ALCOTT,
Journals, November 1837
WINNING OVER THE LEADING CITIZENS OF BOSTON WAS not the only brilliant stroke of fortune that attended the founding of the Temple School. For his teaching assistant, Alcott secured the services of Channing’s former secretary, a young woman who stood in the first rank of New England minds. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was the eldest of a trio of sisters who were to live at the very center of New England education and letters. The middle sister, Mary, became the wife of the titan of American public education, Horace Mann. The youngest, Sophia, married the great novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Elizabeth, by contrast, chose a grander object than a husband. She was intent on “educating children morally and spiritually as well as intellectually from the first.” It was, she knew, “the vocation for which [she] had been educated from childhood.”1
Peabody was barely five feet tall, but people often had the sense that she was much taller. There was a largeness about her that expressed itself in the penetrating quality of her thought and the
size of her ambitions. At the age of thirteen, she declared her desire to write her own translation of the Bible. At seventeen, she opened her first school. She dressed unconventionally and was typically too absorbed by her inner life and practical objectives to pay careful attention to her appearance. Incurably disheveled, forever on the move, Peabody was infuriated by those who maintained that education should be parceled out according to gender. She herself was a potent argument for the capacity of women to excel in disciplines traditionally reserved for men. She eventually became proficient in ten languages, including Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Chinese.
Bronson thought Peabody blessed with “the most magnificent philosophic imagination” of anyone he knew.2 Peabody more than returned the compliment. She had first met Bronson in August 1828 and, around that time, favorably reviewed his school in Russell’s American Journal of Education. “From the first time I ever saw you with a child,” she later told him, “I have felt and declared that you had more genius for education than I ever saw, or expected to see.”3 Her opinion of him rose still higher when Bronson showed her the journals of his Philadelphia pupils. She wrote to her sister Mary that she was “amazed beyond measure at the composition” and concluded that Alcott had more natural ability as a teacher than anyone else she had ever met. She proclaimed him to be an embodiment of intellectual light and predicted that he would “make an era in society.”4
At the Temple School, Alcott’s magnetic charm with children was indisputable, and his conversational method of teaching worked marvelously at drawing out creative thought. As one of his pupils there was later to remark, “I never knew I had a mind till I came to this school!”5 Peabody provided much-needed ballast for Alcott’s lighter-than-air visions. Unlike him, she had learned a degree of caution from her previous battles with conservatively minded parents and had acquired a fairly accurate idea of when not to press an issue. She also possessed expertise in areas where Alcott was thoroughly unqualified. Alcott had no command of Latin and a precarious grasp of mathematics. Using only his own talents, he could never have mounted a curriculum acceptable to high-ranking Boston families. By contrast, Peabody was a bona fide classical scholar and more than capable with numbers. By rights, if one were to consider only the raw abilities of the two, Alcott probably should have been Peabody’s assistant, not the other way round.
Eden's Outcasts Page 7