Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Beneath this condemnation, the Temple School promptly withered. Only months after Alcott’s Conversations were published, the once-thriving enrollment dwindled to ten pupils. Some of the families whose august social positions made them less vulnerable to criticism, like the Shaws and the Quincys, stayed longer than the first wave of defectors, but they, too, eventually found it not in their interest to continue. In April came the sad spectacle of the auction described in the prologue of this book. It had taken Bronson Alcott more than a decade to establish his reputation as a visionary educator. It took fewer than a half dozen pages of dialogue to destroy it.

  Even so, he was not without friends. One of his most loyal defenders was Margaret Fuller. Only twenty-six when the Temple School scandal erupted, Fuller had not yet won fame as the editor of The Dial or as the author of her work on women’s rights, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Nevertheless, she was already highly respected among the leading transcendentalists and had acquired some personal interest in Alcott’s reputation, having briefly taken over as his teaching assistant after Elizabeth Peabody resigned. Although she had once written privately of her “distrust” of her employer’s mind, Fuller now championed Alcott as “a true and noble man…worthy of the palmy times of ancient Greece.”83 When she found out that Frederic Henry Hedge was planning to write an essay that would “cut up” Alcott, she wrote him a sharply worded letter. “There are plenty of fish in the net created solely for markets,” she told him, “& no need to try your knife on a dolphin like him.” She expressed her fervent wish that Hedge would not side with “the ugly, blinking owls who are now hooting…at this star of purest ray serene.”84 A few months later, Fuller further showed her appreciation of Alcott by taking a job at the Greene Street School in Providence, where the children frequently began the day with a “sacred” reading from Conversations on the Gospels.85

  Peabody herself, despite strong reasons for no longer liking Alcott personally, stood up for his professional reputation. She wrote to the Christian Register in support of Alcott’s Conversations, which she considered an important statement of resistance against “tyrannical custom, and an arbitrary imposition of the adult mind upon the young mind.”86 Emerson wrote a brief but spirited defense of Alcott and his book. He insisted that, if one were actually to read the Conversations, one would discover “a new theory of Christian instruction,” emanating from “a strong mind and a pure heart.” To Alcott himself, Emerson wrote, “I hate to have all the little dogs barking at you, for you have something better to do than to attend to them.”87

  But it was not only dogs that were barking. A host of creditors soon added their voices to the uproar. In his firm confidence in his school’s continued success, coupled with his desire to make it an educator’s paradise, Bronson had borrowed and spent with abandon. At a time when one could live comfortably on two thousand dollars a year, Bronson Alcott owed approximately six thousand. There seemed no way out.

  It got worse. On Friday evenings at the temple, Alcott had been hosting a series of conversations for Sunday-school teachers. As the furor over his book reached its peak, word circulated that, on an appointed Friday, a mob would descend on the temple. It had not been in Alcott’s nature to fight back directly against his detractors. He was convinced that, as a man of honor and dignity, he should preserve “unbroken silence” in the face of slander.88 And yet, he was not a man to back down. As Emerson later wrote of him, “If there were a great courage, a great sacrifice, a self-immolation to be made, this & no other is the man for a crisis.”89 Alcott continued to hold his conversations, not knowing if the door might suddenly burst open or the windowpanes suddenly shatter. In the end, no attack took place, and Alcott observed with relief that “the minds of the disaffected” were at last “settling into quietude.”90

  Louisa may have been responding to tensions in the home or, perhaps, to the spirit of adventure that never entirely deserted her. Whatever the cause, around this time she developed a fondness for running away from home, a practice that she later called one of the delights of her childhood. She had, it seems, a preference for straying to the poorest neighborhoods, for her adult recollections were filled with images of great ash heaps where Irish beggar children shared their crusts, cold potatoes, and salt fish with their wayward visitor. At least once, she became lost. As the city streets darkened, the only ally that came to her side was a large curly-haired Newfoundland dog, which watched over her as she sobbed into its fur. At nine o’clock, the town crier found her fast asleep on a doorstep, snuggled comfortably against the still-vigilant animal.91

  Episodes like this must have added some gray hairs to Abba’s head, and they were assuredly the despair of Bronson. With the conviction that a carefully monitored environment was essential to the shaping of his children, he had tried to shield his daughters from the destructive influences of the city, a place that he described as “feculent” and infested with “seventy plagues.”92 He insisted that his girls were “suffering for the want of purer air” and that the corrupt urban landscape was making them “morbid in sensitivity.” But whatever pollution or morbidity Louisa encountered on her flights from home, she evidently wanted more of it.

  Louisa was at an age when girls tend to love their fathers desperately, when the mist of infallibility that encircles one’s parents has not yet dissipated. Louisa lived with a father whose best friend called him an archangel and who did not bother to correct another man’s child who compared him to Jesus Christ. Whether or not she knew these things, Louisa was given every encouragement to see Bronson as a godlike being. He was not a god who dispensed blessings freely. Whereas Bronson sought always to impose discipline on himself and his environment, Louisa seems to have sensed from the earliest age that her education lay partly in the rough and tumble precincts of the world. Her love of adventure struck her parents as curiously masculine. Within the family, she acquired the boyish-sounding nickname “Louy.”

  Louisa’s unscheduled excursions were far from the greatest of Bronson’s worries. Disgraced and penniless, he sank into a depression. Emerson tried to rally his friend, urging him to hone his writing skills and find his true vocation as an author. “Whatever you do at school or concerning your school,” Emerson advised, “pray let not the pen halt, for that must be your last & longest lever to lift the world withal.”93 Obligingly, Alcott turned his energies toward refining the ill-starred manuscript of “Psyche.” He labored so furiously that Abba feared that, in giving life to “Psyche,” he would cause the death of his own body. He expectantly handed the fruits of his labors to Emerson. Turning over the pages, Emerson sadly discovered that the work was not only filled with rhapsodic excess, but that Alcott’s tone now reflected the bitterness of his recent experiences. The wounded self-righteousness of the following passage was all too typical:

  Reformer! thou findest thyself amidst thine age, yet alone. No living soul doth apprehend thy purpose. None sympathizes with thee…. Thou dost yearn for their good, but yet means are denied thee, by which thou canst realize thine ideal! Sad is the trial; yet needful! It will prove thy faith.94

  What comes easily to us, we suppose must be effortless for all. Emerson wrote with relative ease. Having heard the fluency of Alcott’s speech and having read the moody play of light and dark in the pages of his journals, he thought it no great task for Alcott to conquer the world in print. But the words that came at Alcott’s bidding when he wrote for himself or spoke continued to elude him when he tried to write for others.

  In the meantime, Alcott struggled on with the remnant of the Temple School. To reduce expenses, he first moved the school from its beautiful upstairs space to a darker, smaller room downstairs. Bronson himself was slipping into a darker, more introspective period. He was, he wrote, “an Idea without hands.”95 When the downstairs school also proved too expensive, he closed it in June 1838. At the urging of a few loyal constituents, he tried teaching one more time, opening a school for the poor in his own parlor at 6 Beach Street, the
less fashionable home to which the family had recently moved. This new school showed early promise, and the initial enrollment of fifteen rose encouragingly to twenty. However, the deathblow to this school was soon in coming.

  As Bronson tried to face the collapse of his career with dignity and calm, his spirits were buoyed by the hope that, at last, he might have a son. As Abba’s delivery time drew near, Bronson wrote to his mother that, despite all appearances, he found the future “bright and encouraging.” He proclaimed himself “still the same Hoper that I have always been” and declared that he would continue to hope “through the tombs.” He told his mother that, before he wrote again, another hoper would have joined the family. “I have the promise of a Boy,” he added, and he predicted that the newborn’s sisters would “jump for joy.”96 On April 6, 1839, Bronson and Abba had their boy. But the joy evaporated almost immediately. Though fully formed and outwardly perfect, the baby lived only a few hours. Bronson could barely bring himself to mention the loss. For years afterward, Abba observed April 6 as a personal day of mourning.97

  History has little to say about the parents of Susan Robinson—little more than that, in the first half of 1839, they asked to enroll their daughter in Alcott’s school and that they were black. Most teachers of Alcott’s time would have dismissed the Robinsons out of hand. Alcott welcomed Susan. To his everlasting credit, he seems to have regarded her as neither more nor less deserving of special notice than any other new student. Indeed, no one would even remember the girl’s first name if Anna Alcott had not mentioned it in her journal. However, the parents of Alcott’s white students wasted no time in sending Bronson an ultimatum: if Susan remained, they would depart. Bronson’s notation of the exchange was contemptuously brief: “My patrons, through Dr. John Flint, urge dismissal of the Robinson Child. I decline.”98 Overnight, Alcott’s remaining support eroded. All of the parents except for the Robinsons and Bronson’s longtime colleague William Russell withdrew their children. Of the five children available for him to teach, three were his own daughters.

  It was over. By standing up for the humanity of Susan Robinson, Alcott had at last committed professional suicide. However, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that the end had come, not under a cloud of disgrace, but in a small but significant blaze of courage. When he closed his books and dismissed his class on June 22, 1839, his career as a schoolteacher had come to an end.

  Although he tried to maintain an outward stoicism in the face of his misfortunes, Bronson’s private thoughts were resentful. Mentally, he took refuge in a fortress of self-righteousness, issuing scathing judgments against even the most mundane of worldly affairs. When Abba sent him to the butcher for a piece of meat and the tradesman sold him a more expensive cut than he requested, his condemnation was merciless. “What have I to do with butchers?” he snarled. “Death yawns at me as I walk up and down in this abode of skulls. Murder and blood are written on its stalls…. I tread amidst carcasses. I am in the presence of the slain.”99 When Emerson wrote him a check for groceries, requiring him to venture into a bank to cash it, Alcott reacted as if he had been forced to enter a house of prostitution. Before his distracted eyes, the bank building transformed into “Mammon’s Temple” where clusters of pagan devotees consulted “on appropriate rites whereby to honour their divinity.”100 He rejected an invitation to dine with Emerson, Fuller, and the historian George Bancroft, scorning, as he saw it, to descend to “the tables of the fashionable, the voluptuous, the opulent.”101 The simplest of kindnesses were now wicked temptations; the most moderate pleasures were damning indulgences. To carry his martyrdom to its apotheosis, Bronson had to be utterly in the right; the world had to be thoroughly wrong.

  Bronson felt he could no longer live in a city, where, he claimed, Bacchus held court and the Prince of Devils ruled the mob.102 For some time, he had wanted to dwell among people of simpler values, who spoke with “greater purity than the artificial citizen or closeted bookworm.” If there was to be a future for him, it must be close to the soil—and close to Emerson. In the first week of April 1840, with Abba expecting the couple’s fourth child, the Alcotts gathered their modest belongings, loaded them onto the stage at Earl’s Tavern on Hanover Street, and took the road that led to Concord.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “ORPHEUS AT THE PLOUGH”

  “The world’s hope is in us.”

  —A. BRONSON ALCOTT,

  “To Junius Alcott,” June 30, 1842

  THE CONCORD RIVER, WHICH FLOWS BY THE TOWN THAT bears its name, was known to the native tribes as Musketaquid, or Meadow River, because of the flat grasslands that lined its banks. In the summertime, it is from four to fifteen feet deep and from one hundred to three hundred feet wide. Around the time the Alcotts arrived, the winter ice on the river and the surrounding ponds broke up, cracking with a sound as loud as cannon fire. For some time after the ice had receded, the wind remained cold and bracing. In his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau wrote of these winds and how they “heav[e] up the surface into dark billows or regular swells,” so that the water looks like “a smaller Lake Huron,…very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to row or sail over.”1 In the more temperate months, wild grapes and cranberries grew thick there. Woodcocks, rails, and bitterns waded shyly through the marshy areas, and finches and titmice flitted through the air. A child wandering the banks, as Louisa often did, would sometimes surprise a muskrat or hear a splash as a startled terrapin plunged to safety. Her younger sister Lizzie, a few months short of her fifth birthday, took to her new pastoral surroundings with particular delight, and her father rejoiced that there were now “fields and woods, and brooks and flowers to please my little Queen.”2

  In the 1840s and for many decades thereafter, the lazy, peaceful river seemed to some visitors to have impressed its nature upon the inhabitants of the town. Even three decades after the Alcotts first set up housekeeping in the town, a visitor “could see no factory operatives going to work, dinner pails in hand,—no farmer driving his oxen afield—only two or three tranquil shopkeepers just taking down their shutters and one young lady having a ‘constitutional’ on horseback.”3 During the years that she lived there, Louisa May Alcott came to regard it as “one of the dullest little towns in Massachusetts.”4

  Yet with residents like Emerson, Thoreau, and, from time to time, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Concord deserved its reputation as the literary epicenter of pre–Civil War America. However, this reputation rested on fewer than a half dozen citizens. Take away Concord from the United States, and the United States seemed a relatively unlettered country. But take away a handful of persons from Concord, and Concord was no different from any other Massachusetts town. In Walden, Thoreau wondered aloud, “What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell…. Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord?…Alas! What with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected.”5

  Nevertheless, Bronson Alcott tended to see only possibilities in a new place, and his arrival in Concord signaled to him a rebirth of hope. In the days just after the family settled into Hosmer Cottage, the fresh spring weather gave him reason to believe in new beginnings. Eight days after Alcott first hung up his coat at the cottage, Emerson stood on the banks of Walden Pond as the south wind blew and warm light filled the woods. Emerson turned and said to a companion, “This world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.”6 Alcott was glad to be a part of this beauty, and he was also glad that the cottage met the approval of Abba and the girls. For the first time in years, Abba was going about the house singing.7 Bronson wrote to Sam May with ebullient spirits. The neighbors, he told his brother-in-law, were courteous and kind, and he found his garden rich in promise. “I sow again in hope,” he wrote, “and know full well tha
t my harvest shall come in in due season, and there shall be bread and fullness in the land.” The first harvest Bronson pulled from the soil of his new property was a metaphor. He suggested to May that his life thus far had been that of “an impatient husbandman, misauguring the signs of the spring time” and scattering his seed in the least hospitable of seasons, while the snow and frost still covered the fields. He swore that his late disappointments had taught him priceless lessons in faith, patience, and humility. Bronson claimed to have renounced all his pretenses as a moral and spiritual teacher. He wished no longer to set himself in opposition to “things as they are” and “the powers that be.” He said that he sought only to achieve peaceful relations with the soil. “[I]n the bosom of nature, under the sky of God,” he felt more certain of the fitness of his position than ever before.8

  And yet, in the midst of optimism, his departure from Boston had some of the flavor of an exile, and he made no effort to shield his children from his sense of having been wronged. Nine-year-old Anna reported in her journal:

  Father told us how people had treated him, and why we came to live at Concord, and how we must give up a good many things that we like. I know it will be hard, but I mean to do it. I fear I shall complain sometimes about it.9

  As far as education went, at least, the Alcott daughters had little cause to complain. Anna was enrolled at the Concord Academy, a school then under the management of Thoreau and his elder brother John. At the same time, Louisa and Lizzie took their lessons from a Miss Mary Russell, who taught at Emerson’s house.