Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  In February 1841, Abba’s father passed away, leaving her a little more than two thousand dollars, which he had stipulated could not be used by Bronson or taken to satisfy his debts. Nevertheless, Bronson’s creditors challenged the restriction, and the modest bequest was placed in escrow, beyond the family’s reach for another four years.37

  As it became apparent that Alcott could not meet his obligations, Emerson made a generous but rash proposal. He offered to dismiss his servants and take the Alcott family into his own house. Abba and Emerson’s wife Lidian would manage the house together, and Bronson would work Emerson’s land in lieu of rent. Abba, however, vetoed the proposal. She knew that such an arrangement would soon subordinate her family to the Emersons. She also knew how unsuited she was for getting along with another man’s wife in such close quarters. Sounding rather ungrateful, she exclaimed, “I cannot gee and haw in another person’s yoke, and I know that every body [sic] burns their fingers when they touch my fire.”38 Thoreau, not the Alcotts, moved in with the Emersons. Samuel May also offered lodging nearer him in a fine house, but Bronson, wishing to remain free, was not prepared to accept.

  In 1841, on the first day of spring, Emerson published his towering Essays, First Series. He wrote and lectured brilliantly on “Self-Reliance,” “The Method of Nature,” and “The Poet.” By contrast, it was a hard, slow year for the Alcotts. The previous summer, Bronson had talked with Emerson about a college that the two of them might found along with Fuller, George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and some of the other new thinkers of Massachusetts. For a while, Emerson had thought well of this “University which Mr. A. & I built out of straws,” but nothing concrete issued from the scheme.39 After such flights of dreamy creativity subsided, threadbare reality always rushed back in on Alcott. He was beginning to wear down both physically and mentally. In December, Abba’s aunt Hannah Robie came from Boston to visit the cottage and was surprised to find the family living on nothing but “coarse brown sugar, bread, potatoes, apples, squash, and simple puddings.”40 Abba confided to her aunt that she was anxious about Bronson’s health. She feared that the lack of sympathy and encouragement the world had shown her husband might finally depress him more than he could bear.41

  January 1842 was a time of personal loss for the philosophers of Concord. On New Year’s Day, Thoreau’s brother John cut himself on a razor. He contracted tetanus. Racked with pain, he died ten days later in Henry’s arms. On Monday the twenty-fourth, Emerson’s beloved five-year-old son Waldo contracted scarlet fever. Three days later, he was dead. The next morning, Louisa innocently bounded up to Emerson’s door to ask if her friend was feeling better. The gaunt man came out to meet her, so worn with watching and changed by sorrow that his appearance startled her. She could only stammer her query. “Child, he is dead,” came the reply. Louisa remembered the moment always as her first glimpse of a great grief.42 That same morning, Emerson announced the news to Margaret Fuller. “All his wonderful beauty could not save him,” he lamented. The man who had published an essay called “Love” the year before now wondered whether he would ever dare to love anything again.43 At Hosmer Cottage, there were no acute outward tragedies. However, Abba sensed a dark drama unfolding in her husband’s mind. She wrote ominously to Samuel, “If his body dont fail his mind will—he experiences at times the most dreadful nervous excitation—his mind distorting every act however simple into the most complicated and adverse form—I am terror-stricken at this.”44 Yet even in this winter, with little food on his own table, Bronson chopped wood free of charge to fuel the fireplace of a woman with four children whose drunken husband had disappeared.45

  Bronson always believed in a Providence that would rescue him. That Providence did not fail him now, though relief came from a most unlikely quarter. In 1837, when Harriet Martineau brought back to England her skeptical report of the Temple School, she had also brought with her a copy of Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School, which found its way to a merchant-turned-educator, James Pierrepont Greaves. Greaves, who had lost his business during the Napoleonic Wars, had traveled to Switzerland in the 1820s to study under Pestalozzi, the same reformer whose writings inspired Alcott. After returning to England, he had established a school at Ham Common, Surrey, which he had unknowingly run on principles similar to Alcott’s. Perusing Peabody’s Record, he found a kindred spirit. Greaves sent Alcott a thirty-page letter raving about Alcott’s method and requesting more copies of both the Record and Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Greaves pronounced the Conversations an “invaluable” text and circulated it among his own circle of admirers.

  By 1840, the year the Alcotts made their exodus from Boston, Greaves’s school had been christened “Alcott House.” Perhaps in part because Greaves and his friends, unlike Alcott, had had considerable experience in business, Alcott House was a thriving success, boasting a full subscription of pupils and the enthusiastic endorsements of the English reform community. Greaves and the rest of his reform-minded cadre maintained a steady and worshipful correspondence with Alcott, to whom they had extended a standing invitation to come to England and observe their progress.

  Alcott, of course, could never have paid for such a journey. There was one institution, however, where his credit was still strong, and that institution was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson offered five hundred dollars to send his friend to Alcott House for the summer.46 Emerson hoped that Alcott might not only find rejuvenation and support at the school that bore his name; perhaps, too, Alcott might find a kindred spirit in Thomas Carlyle. Emerson hoped that a rendezvous between Alcott and Carlyle, the two minds he respected above all others, might produce an astounding synergy. Yet Emerson also feared that the two might not find common ground, and he tried to find words to provide a lubricant for a meeting from which friction might well be expected.

  Bronson had no trouble accepting Emerson’s proposal. As Alcott readied himself for the voyage, Emerson labored over the letter of introduction he would send to Carlyle. Finding the task a hard one, he took up his journal and began jotting observations about his friend. The rambling, fitful entry reveals a divided mind, as if Emerson did not know whether to defend his friend to the death or disown him at the first opportunity. He called Alcott “a man of ideas, a man of faith [who] speaks truth truly.” When he had a loving, intelligent audience, Emerson continued, Alcott’s “discourse soars to a wonderful height, so regular, so lucid, so playful…that the hearers seem no longer to have bodies or material gravity, but…they [almost] mount into the air at pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar system.” But this rhapsody had barely subsided before Emerson noted less complimentary traits. He discerned a pair of damning flaws in Alcott’s character that might come fully to the surface in a deeper crisis. The first was Alcott’s utter insistence on his own character as the fundamental topic of all discourse. Emerson complained, “Unfortunately, his conversation never loses sight of his own personality. He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17 October; today, Alcott on the 18 October; tomorrow, on the 19th.” The other signature failing held potentially ominous consequences for Abba and her four daughters. Emerson observed, “He is quite ready at any moment to abandon his present residence & employment, his country, nay, his wife & children, on very short notice, to put any new dream into practice which has bubbled up in the effervescence of discourse.” Near the end of his character study, Emerson washed his hands of it all: “This noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more such persons to exist.”47

  Emerson ended up not using these notes. In the end, he asked only that Carlyle put out of his mind anything he had previously heard about Alcott and, more importantly, anything by him that he might have read. He counseled Carlyle, “Permit this stranger…to make a new & primary impression.”48 Carlyle might love or hate Alcott, Emerson admitted, but he should not let the American go until he had seen and understood him.

  Alcott a
rranged for his brother Junius to move in with Abba and the children during his absence. He packed a quantity of apples and homemade bread, and took passage aboard the Rosalind, sailing from Boston on May 8. He carried not only Emerson’s recommendation but also a letter from William Lloyd Garrison. With pride, he copied Garrison’s words into a letter he sent home to Abba: “I am sure you will greatly admire the sweetness of his spirit the independence and originality of his mind, and the liberality of his soul.”49 After some initial queasiness, he had an easy voyage, passing the time with Wordsworth’s The Excursion and Emerson’s Essays. These books, as well as his fantasies, gave him better company than his fellow passengers. He lay awake at times, enraptured by sublime thoughts, “planting Edens—fabling worlds—building kingdoms and men—taking the hands of friends and lovers—of wives and babes.”50 It seemed more than likely to him that his long-sought path to paradise would lead past the gates of Alcott House.

  Bronson had no idea what to make of London; from the moment he first saw it on June 5, its sheer vastness and energy awed and offended him in approximately equal measures. His ears and eyes were met by a city of din and smoke, in which the costly and magnificent collided improbably with the convenient and the plain. The only way to remain superior to his new surroundings was to judge them morally. In his letters to Abba, he denounced the city for its raw physicality. “All is for the body,” he complained, “all seems body.”51 His senses had been stimulated to the point of pain, and the brusque, restless striving of the citizenry left him gasping. In their voices and manners, they betrayed a forceful, warlike temperament. Alcott expected neither repose nor tenderness, and he found none. “Every Englishman,” he concluded, “is a fortification.”52 From this sweeping dismissal, however, he was more than ready to exempt the Alcott House reformers.

  On June 7, Alcott called at the office of the London Mercantile Price Current, where he was cordially received by Charles Lane, one of Greaves’s most ardent supporters. Lane, however, had some shocking news: Greaves had died of an unspecified cause shortly before Alcott had sailed for England. Nevertheless, Henry Gardiner Wright, who had taken charge of Alcott House, was waiting at the school to make Alcott’s acquaintance. Lane proudly escorted Bronson there that same afternoon. Alcott, more intrigued by ideas than appearances, gave no more detailed description of the school than to call it a “charmed spot.” Bronson immediately settled into a guestroom on the property. After a week in residence, he was in ecstasies. He felt as if he were again at the Temple School, but for his sense that “a wiser wisdom direct[ed], and a lovelier love preside[d]” over this English counterpart.53

  Bronson was enthralled by Wright, whom he proclaimed “the first and only man whom I have found to see and know me even as I am seen and known by myself.” It is wonderful to be understood. Little surprise, then, that Bronson, who had baffled almost all attempts to comprehend him, thought that he had discovered “a younger disciple of the same Eternal Verity which I have loved and served so long.” Yet Alcott reserved even more elaborate praise for Lane, who, in his eyes, possessed an even greater wisdom and incarnate love. Casting aside such acquaintances as Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Channing, Alcott called Lane “the deepest, sharpest intellect” he had ever met. Emerson, he thought, would feel as rich in the acquaintance of Lane as in the friendship of Carlyle.54

  Thomas Carlyle. Emerson hoped that the great English essayist would form a friendship with Bronson. Instead, the two got on together “almost as ill as it was possible for two honest men kindly affected towards one another to do.”

  (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  When he first compared Lane with Carlyle, Alcott had not yet met the latter, knowing him only from his writings and Emerson’s praise. Alcott visited the great Scotsman numerous times during his trip, but each encounter confirmed more resoundingly than the last that the two had nothing in common, either in philosophy or manners. Carlyle approached philosophy through a strategy of fierce, relentless disputation. He saw truth as the synthesis of colliding opposites, and he wanted ideas that proved their worth in practice. Alcott expected truth to be unitary, unchanging and transcendent, and he did not mind if it were more beautiful than useful. He also thought that discussion should be polite and harmonious. The interviews between the two were thus fated for misunderstanding. Even Alcott’s manners, with which he had disarmed more than one detractor, struck Carlyle as deficient. One day, when the tall American stayed for a meal, Carlyle was aghast to see Alcott take a helping of strawberries and mix them with his mashed potatoes. Carlyle soon concluded that he and Alcott got on together “almost as ill as it was possible for two honest men kindly affected towards one another to do.”55 Alcott, for his part, lumped Carlyle into his general assessment of Englishmen of letters, whom he saw as “all ridden by the hag Melancholy or the dragon Need,…wasting the costly gifts of genius in adorning the sepulchres of the dead.”56 Alcott was also put off by Carlyle’s emphasis on grueling mental labor. He complained, “Work! work! is with him both motto and creed; but tis all toil of the brain…instead of devotion to living Humanity.”57

  Not wanting to wholly disappoint Emerson, Carlyle mustered some praise for the Connecticut Yankee. Alcott, he told Emerson, was “a genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to me.” In Carlyle’s view, Alcott was “a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom no one can even laugh at without loving.” Carlyle was bemused, however, by Alcott’s obsession with vegetarianism and his evident belief that humankind could be revolutionized by dietary reform. Alcott seemed “all bent on saving the world by return to acorns and the golden age.” He saw in Alcott’s endless theorizing only a “Potatoe-gospel, a mere imbecility which cannot be discussed in this busy world.”58

  The poet Robert Browning happened to call on Carlyle one day when Alcott was present, and he took the scene as a rare slice of comedy. He wrote, “a crazy or sound asleep—not dreaming—American was [there]—and talked! I have since heard, to my solace, that my outrageous laughters have made him ponder seriously the hopelessness of England.”59 Given a rough reception from London’s best and brightest, Alcott found himself ever more closely attracted to his admirers at Alcott House. There, he was made to feel like a genius instead of a rustic, provincial crank. Wright and Lane were a wondrous support to a traveler in a strange land. The one other comfort that Alcott enjoyed was in his thoughts of home. He was as far from Abba as he was ever to be in his life, yet he felt closer to her than ever.

  In Concord, without her husband, Abba was prey to a series of powerful emotions. In the days leading up to Bronson’s departure, she had doubted whether she could manage the household without him. “Oh how great a task this is,” she reflected. “It is with a trembling hand I take the rudder to guide this little bark alone.” On her first morning without him, she awoke feeling sick and sad.60 During her first few days on her own, she lost her appetite and wept uncontrollably. Walking alone through the fields near the cottage, she prayed aloud that her soul would be sustained by patience and her heart cheered by hope.61 During Abba’s marriage her children often gave her the strongest reason for resisting sadness, and for their sakes she now did her best to seem brave and happy.

  After a while, however, she found that her appearance of contentment was not mere pretense. She began to feel that her husband’s absence was not so terrible after all. Bronson’s brother Junius proved to be a welcome assistant. Moreover, Bronson wrote often, and after twelve years of marriage, he had not forgotten how to write a love letter. From aboard the Rosalind, he wrote, “I have not left you; you have been my companion and company all the way, and have grown more and more precious to me, as the winds wafted us together across the seas.” Nearing the end of his voyage, he wrote of the “mysterious sentiment, surpassingly humane and tender in this alliance of husband and wife. Now, my love mate, do I feel the sweetness of
your regards, the preciousness of your love.”62 In London, it occurred to him that he had needed to put distance between himself and his wife and daughters to see them in all their actual beauty. He saw Anna looking with deepest meaning from her large eyes, Lizzie wearing her sweetest smile, Louisa running her swiftest to serve her mother and sisters. Interestingly, whereas he recalled the faces of Anna and Lizzie, he pictured Louisa in terms of her physical energy and her desire to win praise by helping others. Though she sometimes baffled him, he knew her basic character well. As his daughters became dear in his memory, invested, he said, “with a new and holier charm,” words flowed from his pen to make them dearer in their mother’s sight as well.63

  Bronson wrote, too, of brighter days to come. He assured Abba, “Love and sacrifice like yours cannot baulk their possessor. Whatsoever the loving heart yields, it shall find again.” Bronson felt as if his letters home were part of a second courtship. “Again, am I a youth,” he wrote, and he added his belief that his and Abba’s separation would help them rediscover “that intercourse which was ours in the prime and innocency of our espousals.”64

  Abba cherished these letters, delighting in what she called “his soul and heart in the full melody of his rich words.” His loving phrases satisfied her “even more fully than…the grand diapason of his sweet voice and the rich deep harmony of serene looks.”65 Perhaps the best part of Bronson had always been his words, and these he was still able to give her. As time went by, she caught herself beginning to savor this fleeting time of independence. With some money released from her father’s estate, she was able to pay off a dozen of the family’s Concord creditors. When she was not sewing for money or minding the house, she had time to read magazines and novels. To encourage her daughters to write, she set up a family “post office” where the girls could leave notes for her and one another. She took simple human pleasure in observing “the lives and progress of our children—Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth and Abba, are so many epitomes of my life—I live, move, and have my being in them.”66 Two months after the Rosalind set sail, Mrs. Alcott may have surprised herself when she wrote in her journal, “I am enjoying this separation from my husband.”67 Her husband’s trip was giving her time to be herself, as well as to reflect on their marriage and the person into whom it had shaped her.