At a birthday party, held jointly for her and her father at the Temple School, Louisa endured another lesson in self-denial. Bedecked with a crown of flowers, Louisa had been told to pass out cake to the other children. Discovering that there was one piece too few, Louisa held on tightly to the last plate. Having watched the tragedy unfold, Abba stepped forward. “It is always better to give away than to keep the nice things,” she said. “I know my Louy will not let the little friend go without.” Louisa handed over “the dear plummy cake” and received a kiss from her mother.59 It was but one of the countless times in her childhood when the love of a family member was the only consolation for an unfilled stomach.
Her father, however, was finding consolations aplenty. Alcott gave Emerson his 1835 journal and his manuscript of “Psyche.” Emerson sought out Alcott’s opinions on his own work, a long essay called “Nature.” They were mutually enthusiastic, and it seemed for a while as if, almost simultaneously, the two works might emerge as complementary pillars of the new New England philosophy, Emerson’s work exploring the external world and Alcott’s revealing the inner.
Alcott called Emerson’s manuscript “a beautiful work,” evincing a “high intellectual character.” He delighted in Emerson’s demonstration that the physical world is an emblem of the soul and that the mind “animates and fills the earth.” He also saw his own influence in the book. He observed, “Mr. E. adverts, indirectly to my ‘Psyche,’ now in his hands, in the work.”60 In the last chapter of his essay, Emerson included a long passage that he claimed to have received from an anonymous “Orphic poet.”61 The fact that, a few years later, Alcott published a collection of “Orphic Sayings” in Emerson’s magazine, The Dial, makes it still more likely that Alcott was Emerson’s Orpheus.
Emerson’s Nature remains the quintessential statement of transcendentalism. Alcott’s “Psyche,” however, has never been published. Emerson thought that the work contained some splendid passages and that his friend’s work sometimes reflected “the rare power to awaken the highest faculties, to awaken the apprehension of the Absolute.” However, he thought it was too long a book for one idea and that Alcott’s style was labored and pedantic. Alcott had a regrettable fondness for verbs ending in “eth.” He liked using vague, prophetic-sounding words like “mirror forth,” “shape forth,” and “image” just when a concrete phrasing was desperately needed.62 When he wrote in his journals, Alcott’s language was often graceful and cogent. He could also teach and speak with genius. Yet when he tried to write for an audience, his powers abruptly fled.
Emerson urged Alcott not to give up on “Psyche,” counseling him instead not to “let it sleep or stop a day.”63 His school a brilliant success, and his manuscripts capturing the attention of some of America’s best minds, there seemed no reason why Bronson Alcott should not proceed from triumph to triumph. Instead, the very confidence that had carried Alcott so high was about to induce errors of hubris that would soon lead to catastrophe.
Alcott’s pride first became visible in the disdain he began to show toward the efforts of those who were helping to raise his children. The various maids hired to assist Abba never met with his approval, and his disparagements in his journals of parents who delegated the care of their children became frequent. Far more disturbing to the family, however, was the critical eye that Bronson turned toward the parenting skills of Abba. Apart from Bronson’s strict and fastidious judgments, there is little evidence that Abba was anything less than a loving and able mother, as well as a firm supporter of her husband’s theories. Over the coming decades, events would attest to her fierce devotion to her children. Yet Bronson’s journals give her scant praise. When reflecting on what he called “the inadequacy of maternal culture” in his home, Bronson found particular fault with Abba’s reluctance to discipline the girls.64 Abba had, he felt, foresworn “positive discipline,” leaving all matters of punishment to him. He was convinced that if he had supervised the children continually, no corporal punishment would ever have been necessary.65 To stop the flood of animal nature, he wrote, “must be the work of great skill…. [T]heir strength and impetuosity must be guided and tamed by the hand of genius alone.”66 Although he occasionally admitted that Abba’s influence was loving and beautiful, it was clear to him that only one parent under his roof possessed such genius.67
Alcott’s stubborn sense of authority cost him much more dearly in his relationship with Elizabeth Peabody. Initially, all was well between them. Perhaps feeling awkward for having failed to pay her for her services, Alcott invited his assistant to move in with his family. Little dreaming that increased proximity could ever produce ill feeling between her and the employer she so greatly worshipped, Peabody accepted. She initially relished her comfortable room with its handsome fireplace and view of Dorchester Heights. As she took her meals at the Alcotts’ table and played with her infant namesake, she gloried in the privileged position she enjoyed within this family that seemed to her the pinnacle of enlightenment.
Soon, however, her increased familiarity with her employer produced friction. She found that Bronson could barely tolerate dissent of any kind. A seemingly trivial dispute with him at dinner over the merits of Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, led to a nasty quarrel. Peabody left the table wondering at Bronson’s reflexive distaste for any mainstream position, and she started to suspect that Alcott’s avowed love of reform was only a mask for envy and misanthropy. Alcott, for his part, was starting to find his friend “offensively assertive.” Their partnership was beginning to fragment.68
But it was at the Temple School itself that Alcott’s pride was setting the stage for his most poignant tragedy. Bronson had begun to carry the religious content of his instruction to a bold new level. In the spring term of 1836, Alcott added a weekly session of conversations with the schoolchildren, dealing with the biblical accounts of the life of Jesus. These discussions were limited to two hours every Wednesday morning, but Alcott soon came to regard them as the most noteworthy business of the school. As she had done in preparation for Record of a School, Elizabeth Peabody commenced a partial transcript of these conversations. Emboldened by the success of the previous book, Bronson thought that a volume of these conversations would be the ideal sequel, establishing him as a wise and original commentator on the life and teachings of Christ. In addition, the book would help to prove his dearly held postulate that divine truth was best approached through the thoughts and feelings of the very young.
The new project offered charming possibilities. Alcott had already shown his power to elicit moral gems from the mouths of babes. He would now have the chance to shine the light of infant wisdom on the highest mysteries that he knew. By calling forth the innocent voices of children, he might impart to the word of God a purer, sweeter expression than it had ever known. But there were problems almost from the beginning. Whereas in Record of a School, Bronson had trusted Elizabeth Peabody and the children to speak for themselves, he wanted this book to convey a precise, predetermined tone and message. Subverting the premise of his own project, Bronson preferred for the children to express his formulations, rather than their own. Thus, as Peabody transcribed her notes, Bronson sometimes hovered nearby, ready to reword passages that did not suit his vision. Simultaneously, however, Bronson also desired the appearance of placing the children in the foreground. Breaking with Peabody’s practice in Record of a School, where anonymity had been preserved, he wanted to publish the names of his pupils alongside their statements. Over her staunch objection, he had his way.
In the grace with which they mingled simplicity and profundity, in the gentle reverence with which he and his students shared their ideas of God and Christ, Bronson’s Conversations with Children on the Gospels may well be his most exquisite written work. Inherent in all of them is Alcott’s respect for the mental strivings of the children. Although his own views regarding the Gospels are clearly visible, the conversations seek as much as possible to question rather than assert, to d
raw an idea out instead of forcing one in. He told his class, “I have often been taught by what very small children have said; and astonished at their answers…. Has truth any age?…Is it not immortal? Truth is old…and Truth is young…. All wisdom is not in grown-up people.”69 Speaking about the story of the young Jesus in the temple, he made the following suggestion:
Children are often about their father’s business and parents are so much interested in their own, that they do not know it…. When fathers keep their children at work and give them no education, yet all the time they can obtain, the children devote to their own improvement—is not that “the Father’s” business? Very often children are absorbed in what interests them, and their parents reprove them, and yet they may be about their “Father’s business.” And you should not roughly interrupt it.70
When morality demanded it, Bronson could be firm. For instance, when one child blamed the Jewish people for the death of Christ, Bronson immediately denounced the notion as “a wicked prejudice,” to which the children added, evidently en masse, “There are no right prejudices.”71 In the main, he was open-minded and Socratic. On occasion, Bronson’s tactics frustrated his pupils; they demanded an answer, and he offered only a question. In exasperation, one of the children burst out, “I cannot tell what you think; you sometimes talk on one side, and sometimes on the other. What do you think?” Alcott replied, “I prefer not to reply to such questions, because I do not wish to influence your opinions by mine. I teach what every pure person believes.”72 More than anything, he explained, he was teaching his pupils to know themselves, and this was the most important knowledge.
Nevertheless, Alcott’s new manuscript made Peabody nervous. Not only did she feel that Alcott was fatally compromising the honesty of the book by revising her transcriptions, but she thought he was unfairly manipulating his pupils by proposing to identify them. It troubled her as well that she now sensed an air of smug superiority about her employer, which she feared the children might be absorbing as well. What Benjamin Franklin had once called a “foppery in morals,” she now urged her partner to avoid.73
At the suggestion that he was straying into error, Alcott bristled. Peabody formed the distinct impression that the schoolmaster had no interest in any external influence, and like Emerson, she began to lament his arrogance. “It seems no part of his plan,” she wrote, “to search the thoughts and views of other minds in any faith that they will help his own…. [H]e rather avoids than seeks any communication with persons who differ from himself.”74 In June 1836, when Peabody took a leave of absence to visit friends in Lowell, her younger sister Sophia moved in with the Alcotts and took over the transcription of the schoolroom conversations. Less circumspect than Elizabeth, Sophia rapturously recorded passages of dialogue that Elizabeth would surely have prudently excised. Thus Elizabeth’s editorial touch was missing when it was needed most—when Bronson decided to use the story of the Virgin Mary as an opportunity to introduce his students to the mysteries of birth. When Elizabeth Peabody read the transcript of this conversation and furthermore discovered that one of the children had observed that babies are made out of “the naughtiness…of other people,” she was aghast.
Alcott’s intentions were pure. Although he did raise issues like conception and circumcision that a more prudent teacher would have left undisturbed, he referred to them only in a deeply respectful manner. When discussing birth with the children, he explained, “God draws a veil over these sacred events, and they ought never to be thought of except with reverence.”75 Declaring that every birth was as sacred as that of Jesus, Alcott began his discussion by asking whether any of the children had heard disagreeable or vulgar things about birth. He did not proceed before expressing the hope that none present would ever violate the sacredness of the subject.
Alcott’s discussions of the scriptural passages were in strict keeping with his general philosophy of interpretation. Alcott regarded every aspect of the physical world as a spiritual symbol. If he were to be consistent in this view, then even (perhaps especially) the most intimate facts of life must have their metaphysical lessons to teach. When he conversed with the children about circumcision, he asked them not about the physical ritual but rather, “Was there any spiritual meaning in it?” He used the episode as an emblem of self-sacrifice and a means of illustrating “that pain is of no consequence, if it makes us better.”76
Alcott’s commentary on birth had a similar object. Indeed, the passage from the Conversations that lay at the heart of the ensuing scandal was an attempt, not to lead the children into contemplation of sexuality, but to unveil the spiritual truth that Alcott assumed to exist beneath every physical fact:
The physiological facts, sometimes referred to, are only a sign of the spiritual birth. You have seen the rose opening from the seed with the assistance of the atmosphere; this is the birth of the rose. It typifies the bringing forth of the spirit, by pain, and labor, and patience. Edward B. [a boy in the class], it seems, has some profane notions of birth, connected with some physiological facts; but they are corrected here.77
Apart from this passage, most of the stir destined to arise from the Conversations resulted from the line that Elizabeth Peabody wanted to excise: the comment by one of Alcott’s most insightful pupils, six-year-old Josiah Quincy, about the naughtiness of other people. Asked by Alcott to share his understanding of birth, Josiah had replied:
It is to take up the body from the earth. The spirit comes from heaven, and takes up the naughtiness out of other people, which makes other people better. And these naughtinesses put together the body for the child; but the spirit is the best part of it.78
The hostile members of Alcott’s readership were to seize on the phrase “naughtiness…of other people” as if they had found decisive evidence. Surely, they supposed, if Alcott’s pupils had fixed their minds on naughtiness, then the schoolmaster had put it there, and certainly naughtiness could mean nothing other than sex. Alcott, far more brazenly than Socrates in ancient times, was corrupting the youth of the American Athens.
Yet Josiah Quincy’s remarks had nothing to do with sexual intercourse. Rather, he was striving to create some mythology to explain how an infant’s spirit, which he had been led to think of as perfect, came to be housed in an imperfect, sinful body. His explanation, quite logical in view of the Christian teaching that Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world, was that each originally blameless infant spirit draws into itself at birth some of the “naughtiness” of the human race, thus partly cleansing the surrounding world of its evil. This evil, Josiah reasoned, must be the stuff from which bodies were formed. The proper minds of Boston, in their prurient reading of Josiah’s speculations, showed a good deal more naughtiness than either the boy or his questioner had in mind.
Yet Peabody rightly divined that no one would pause to consider this fact. This was the Boston where, in 1834, citizens had stripped the clothes from the back of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and led him through the streets with a rope around his neck. It was the Boston that, during that same year, had looked on as an anti-Catholic mob burned down a convent in neighboring Charlestown. It was the city where, a few years later, a freethinker named Abner Kneeland would be sent to jail for ridiculing the Immaculate Conception. It was also the city across the river from a still-conservative Harvard, which, in 1838, was to banish Emerson for daring to suggest that ordinary people might be as divine as Jesus. In short, it was a city that assumed that shared religious beliefs lay at the foundation of the social order and public morality. It tolerated free inquiry so long as the questioners did not appear to strike at the beliefs that, it was thought, gave structure to social and moral existence. However, once the line was crossed, Peabody realized, Boston’s liberalism melted like April snow.
Peabody pleaded with Bronson to remove the potentially controversial passages. Bronson would compromise only by placing the questionable portions in a separate section in the back of the book. Almost at the same moment as
this professional disagreement was unfolding, a personal quarrel brought a precipitous end to Peabody’s association with the Temple School. She came home to the Alcotts’ apartments one day to find Bronson and Abba waiting for her and seething with anger. Straying into Peabody’s room, Abba had uncovered letters from Elizabeth’s sister Mary in which the latter had criticized Alcott’s methods and had advised Elizabeth to free herself from any participation in her employer’s “mistaken views.” To the Alcotts, the letters were evidence of treason. To Elizabeth, the fact of their having read them was an inexcusable trespass. The desire for a break was mutual. In almost no time, Elizabeth had given notice and packed her bags. Almost as promptly, little Elizabeth Peabody Alcott was renamed Elizabeth Sewall Alcott. When the first volume of his Conversations was published in December 1836, Bronson had no one with whom to share either credit or blame.
The credit turned out to be scarce. The blame was thunderous. The Boston Daily Advertiser ran two full pages of editorial denunciations, calling the book’s doctrines “radically false and mischievous.”79 The Boston Courier’s editor, Joseph Tinker Buckingham, had never seen “a more indecent and obscene book ([to] say nothing of its absurdity).” Pronouncing Alcott “insane or half-witted,” he advised the schoolmaster’s friends to “take care of him without delay.”80 Andrews Norton, a highly influential former professor of divinity at Harvard, echoed this view, calling the Conversations “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene.”81 When the editor of the more liberal Christian Register mildly called for sensible criticism of the generally excellent work of a “pureminded, industrious, and well-meaning man,” he was, by his own account, threatened with the Inquisition.82
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