CHAPTER NINE
DESTITUTION
“Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes.”
—LOUISA MAY ALCOTT,
Little Men, chapter 14
THE ALCOTTS DID NOT SELL THE HILLSIDE HOUSE. THEY could not find a buyer. Despite Bronson’s substantial improvements to the house and grounds, the best offer came from a tenant who agreed to rent the property for one hundred fifty dollars a year. It was better than nothing. On November 17, 1848, the family moved back to Boston. Still not fully cognizant of their financial straits, the girls had dreamed of a fine home in the hub of New England. Instead, they found themselves in a basement apartment on Dedham Street. Even Bronson conceded that existence there was a “cramped and unvaried life.”1 Their new domain consisted of three rooms and a kitchen. There was a small backyard but not a tree in sight. The splendors of the city danced tantalizingly before Louisa’s eyes, but she had no money with which to make any of them hers. Along with her sisters, she yearned for the country again. The bustle and dirt of Boston made it harder for Louisa to think. “Among my woods and hills I had fine free times alone,” she remembered, “and though my thoughts were silly, I daresay, they helped to keep me happy and good.”2
The move to Dedham Street ushered in the bleakest era in the Alcotts’ lives. For the next several years, they would have no home of long duration. During the summer, when cholera and other diseases hung threateningly over the city, they were sometimes able to stay with wealthier relatives, who feared for the family’s health. Otherwise, they were to inhabit a succession of dreary, cramped abodes in struggling, graceless neighborhoods. The apartment on Dedham Street gave way to another on Groton Street, and Groton Street was followed by even worse quarters on High Street, which bordered on one of the most appalling slums in Boston.3 Whatever their address of the moment, they were to be, in Louisa’s description, “Poor as rats & apparently quite forgotten by every one but the Lord.”4
Anna Bronson Alcott, Bronson’s eldest daughter, whom he called a “peacemaker…beloved of all.” During the lean years in Boston, Anna’s income as a teacher and governess helped keep the family fed.
(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
Everyone in the family, except for Louisa, soon had a place to go. Having buried the hatchet with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bronson leased an additional room downtown, next door to the bookstore that his old colleague had established. In his rented space, Bronson offered daily conversations and lessons, bringing in a trickle of cash.5 Peabody also provided lessons to Lizzie and May, now thirteen and eight, respectively. Abba was offered a job as a missionary to the poor at a salary of thirty dollars a month. The position had been created for her through the agency of Hannah Robie, whose kindness during the Fruitlands episode was but one instance of her continuing interest in her niece Abba. Robie organized a cadre of philanthropic sponsors to guarantee Abba’s salary, thus assuring that a wealth of good would be done both for the indigent of Boston and the nearly indigent Alcotts. Abba later opened an “intelligence office,” the nineteenth-century equivalent of an employment agency, devoted principally to finding positions for the indigent. Economically speaking, there was little to separate her from her clients.
Anna, now old enough to work, took a situation as a governess. It fell to Louisa to keep the house in order. She felt “like a caged sea-gull as I washed dishes and cooked in the basement kitchen where my prospect was limited to succession of muddy boots.”6 Her work and surroundings supplied a metaphor for her inner life. She imagined that her mind was a room in confusion that she must put in order. No matter how she tried to sweep out the useless thoughts and foolish fancies, the mental cobwebs still got in. She judged herself to be a poor housekeeper of the soul, and she feared she would never get her room set right.7
For the first time in a few years, Louisa started keeping a journal. Bronson criticized her entries, observing that Anna’s diary was principally about others, whereas Louisa wrote mostly about herself. It was an ironic critique, coming as it did from a man whose own journals were often indefatigably solipsistic.8 While acknowledging that her father was right, Louisa defended her inward focus. Since she never spoke about herself, her journal was the one place where she could get a hold of the willful, moody girl she was forever trying to manage and see how she was progressing. Her journal was also a ready receptacle for the frustrations that heaped upon her when she considered “how poor we are, how much worry it is to live, and how many things I long to do and never can.” With a flourish of drama but also with more than a hint of truth, she added, “Every day is a battle, and I’m so tired I don’t want to live; only it’s cowardly to die until you have done something.”9
Her great solace came in the evenings, when her parents and sisters returned from their various labors with their vivid and varied tales of the city. Seen through the eyes of each, Boston presented a highly different aspect. Bronson, with the aid of Emerson, had succeeded in forming an intellectual society known as the Town and Country Club. The club graciously elected Alcott its corresponding secretary and librarian and, still more graciously, discussed paying the rent for his West Street rooms.10 The club, whose membership was more or less handpicked by Alcott, included Thoreau, Samuel Gridley Howe, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the poet James Russell Lowell, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was later both a key supporter of John Brown and a mentor of Emily Dickinson. The club, which hosted lectures by such luminaries as Emerson, Henry James Sr., and Theodore Parker, kept Bronson in steady contact with the best minds of liberal Massachusetts. The stories he brought home to Dedham Street spoke to Louisa of “the upper world, and the wise, good people who adorned it.”11 The sights and sounds that Abba related were of a darker, more somber tone. She had much to say about the poor who came to her for help each day. Sometimes she came home particularly disheveled, for there were days when her sympathy with the poor and helpless prompted her literally to give them the clothes off her back. Anna brought word from a middle realm, giving modest accounts of her success in the classroom, where her patience and gentle nature were proving to be valuable assets. To all this news, Lizzie and May added their joys and woes of the passing moment, and Louisa contributed her own tragicomic musings. One of the strongest adhesives holding the family together was narrative; the tales they shared of their daily lives formed a bridge of sympathy and shared effort. They were Louisa’s only consolation amid the dirty pots and unmade beds.
Language offered another solace to Louisa during this period, for it was in the Dedham Street apartment and its successors that the girls’ family theatricals enjoyed their greatest flowering. The sisters made every kind of prop imaginable, from a harp to a fairy’s spangled wings, and they learned to recite pages of dialogue without error. Most often, the speeches came from Louisa’s pen; she authored melodramas like “Norna, or the Witch’s Curse,” and “The Captive of Castile, or the Moorish Maiden’s Vow.” Later, Louisa’s scripts gave way to scenes from Shakespeare, and she acted Hamlet with “a gloomy glare and a tragic stalk” that she thought superior to any professional performance she had ever seen.12 It seemed for a time that acting might be the swiftest way out of poverty. Since the time of Fruitlands, Louisa had dreamed of becoming as famous as the soprano Jenny Lind, and now she thought her powers as a tragedian might make her another Sarah Siddon. Anna, too, had a full-blown case of stage fever, and the two would talk excitedly about the money they could make and the glittering lives they would lead. But Abba prudently cautioned the girls that they were too young for such adventures. “Wait,” she told them, but “Wait” seemed to be the standing order regarding all ambitions and hopes for the future. “Waiting,” Louisa wrote in her journal, “is so hard!”13
Abba was still her closest ally. However, looking back on it all later, Louisa acknowledged both parents when she wrote that she and her sisters “had
the truest of guides and guards, and so learned the sweet uses of adversity, the value of honest work,…and the real significance of life.”14 The counsel and protection of both her parents mattered intensely during this period, though Abba and Bronson ministered to admittedly different needs. In this sense, Bronson served as the inspiration for Mr. March in Little Women:
To outsiders, the five energetic women seemed to rule the house, and so they did in many things; but the quiet man sitting among his books was still the head of the family, the household conscience, anchor and comforter; for to him the busy, anxious women always turned in troublous times, finding him, in the truest sense of those sacred words, husband and father.15
Bronson Alcott’s effectiveness as an anchor in matters other than ethical ones was more subject to question. Although fully capable of managing the affairs of the Town and Country Club, writing his journal, and giving conversations on a wide array of topics, he was in some ways still recovering from his post-Fruitlands breakdown. There was now a hidden emotional infirmity in the man that had not manifested itself in his younger days. Following the family’s move to Boston, he again fell prey to strange, almost hallucinatory thoughts. In the summer of 1849, he worked feverishly on a manuscript that he called “Tablets,” the most peculiar piece of writing he had yet attempted. Not to be confused with the rather successful book that Alcott was to publish in 1868, this “Tablets” was an attempt to synthesize an odd amalgam of readings that had captured his imagination. In addition to delving into the mystical philosophical work of Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Boehme and the writings of German naturalist Lorenz Oken, Alcott was also becoming fascinated with the theories of the renowned scientist Michael Faraday regarding the relation between magnetism and electricity. As he followed Faraday’s work, it seemed to him that the Englishman was laying foundations not only for a new kind of scientific inquiry but also for a new understanding of spiritual life. Alcott began searching for a bridge between the worlds of physical matter and mental and emotional experience. As biographer Frederick Dahlstrand has put it, “His reading of Faraday led him to speculate that electricity, magnetism, and light were but three states of one substance; this substance was the mysterious nexus of spirit and matter, the immediate breath of life.”16 For a man of Alcott’s utter lack of formal scientific training, some of the conclusions he drew from Faraday were remarkably astute. Whereas Faraday himself had worked out the essential identity between magnetism and electricity, many years were to elapse before science was to establish that light, too, consists of the same substance.
Not knowing what to do with his newfound insight, however, Alcott at once veered off in an occult direction. Influenced by another current interest, astrology, he began to construct a series of arcane tables—the “Tablets” from which his manuscript took its title—that purported to explain the various aspects of the human psyche. He began to illustrate his journals with charts and diagrams, all striving to work out a theory that would unify the brain, the body, magnetism, and the stars. He was, he wrote, in a “blaze of being.”17 The next year, he remembered the giddy, obsessed zeal with which he pursued his idea:
[N]ow the mysterious meters and scales and planes are opened to us, and we view wonderingly the Crimson Tablets and report of them all day long. It is no longer Many but One with us; and all things and we live recluse, yet smoothly and sagely, as having made acquaintance suddenly as of some might and majestic friend, omniscient and benign, who…draws me toward him as by some secret force, some cerebral magnetism…. I am drawn on by enchantment.18
If Alcott’s inspirations had come to a mystic of stronger literary gifts, for instance a William Blake or a Samuel Taylor Coleridge, they might have led to an outpouring of visionary poetry. In the less capable hands of Bronson Alcott, they dissolved into a blur of disconnected thoughts and over-wrought imagery. As Alcott wrote “Tablets,” his handwriting degenerated into a furious, almost illegible scrawl. He was writing at white heat, but for an incomprehensible purpose.
As he had done five years earlier during his stay in Still River, Bronson began to think of himself as a conduit for otherworldly energies. In “Tablets,” he declared himself “a conductor of heavenly forces, and a wondrous instrument, a cerebral magnet, and electric battery, telegraph, glass, crucible, molten fluids traversing his frame—rising and bathing in his vessels.” If the excerpts offered here create the impression of an author set somewhat off his hinges, there is good reason. At the same time that he was working on “Tablets,” Bronson was experiencing mental states and visions that suggest a frighteningly disturbed mind. He found it impossible to “sleep without seeing goblins, or stumbling over the places of the dead.” One day he turned up unannounced at the home of lapsed transcendentalist Orestes Brownson and informed his astonished host that he, Bronson, was not merely God but, indeed, “greater than God.” He experienced a vision of the universe as an immense spinal cord, symbolic of the means by which God’s creatures progressed from lower to higher forms.19 Immersed in his fantastic manuscript, he rose in search of starry wisdom and electric truths, magnetically drawn by a genius that looked more and more like madness.
As the calendar moved on toward autumn, his condition worsened. He was denying himself food and rest, acting more and more as he had done in Still River. He developed a persistent cough. There came, at last, a day when some internal threshold was breached. No one knows just what happened, but he wrote a poem about it later, encapsulating his fight to recover his sanity. Aptly, he called it “The Return,” and it begins like this:
As from himself he fled,
Outcast, insane,
Tormenting demons drove him from the gate.
Away he sped,
Casting his woes behind;
His joys to find—
His better mind.
Bronson centered the lines on the page, as if to emphasize the restored sense of balance that he came to feel after his inner storm subsided. But the poem begins with a moment of extreme imbalance, a psychic terror that seemed so real that the author had physically to run from it.20 In Bronson Alcott’s time, there was no neurologist or psychologist to explain his sometimes alarming states of mind. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to ask some indulgence from those who condemn Alcott’s failure to earn a living for his family. If his episodes of hallucination and delusion in Still River in 1844 and in Boston in 1849 show us anything, it is that Alcott was suffering from a recurring disability, evidently exacerbated during periods of unusual stress. It seems that there really was a limit to the amount of mental strain that he could safely withstand. At times, he may truly have been incapable of regular employment. Alcott can be seen as suffering from a condition that he could not control, as a man who was, in fact, doing the best he could to meet the demands of life, but finding that he could only do pathetically little.
Alcott was not deaf to the gossip that denounced him for permitting Abba “to delve for the family” and accused him of “indifference to its welfare.” He felt that the whisperings were unfair, but he did not know how to defend himself. “So it must seem to outsiders,” he wrote, “nor will any words of mine put fairer face on things. No explanation can take the place of deeds in their eyes, and I must stand for the time as a thriftless if not a heartless and incapable fellow. So let it seem; but let it not be so.”21 The only justification he could give was that he “had one set of gifts and not the other, and fell so obliquely on my time that none caught my point of view to comprehend the person I was.” He had left the body out of his equation for success. He now saw that this had been as disastrous an error as if he had omitted the soul.22
Bronson’s ordeal left him an invalid, and he referred to his hoped-for recovery as a “restoration from the dead.”23 He sought sanctuary in Concord. In September, he traveled there twice, staying first with Emerson and later with the Hosmers, only a short walk from the cottage where he had lived in 1840. He took morning walks with Thoreau, pausing to loaf and discourse on the grass
y hillsides. He swam with Emerson in Walden Pond and talked with him about the new book, Representative Men, that Emerson was making ready for press. Bronson found a precious tonic in the cool air, the peaceful mornings, and the invigorating sun. Being in Concord, it seemed to him, was like the touch of the earth to the mythical giant Antaeus, who lost his strength whenever his feet left the ground. Believing that Abba would be similarly rejuvenated by a visit to the town, he invited her to join him for at least “one clear day” before winter. He wanted her not only to visit Concord but also travel with him to Fruitlands, where, he reminded her, “A man once lived.”24
Between visits to Concord, he returned briefly to Boston. As during the aftermath of Fruitlands, family played a central role in his recovery. His poem “The Return,” which begins with such torment, ends with a peaceful homecoming:
Recovered,
Himself again
Over his threshold led
Peace fills his breast,
He finds his rest;
Expecting angels his arrival wait.
After that strange, distracted summer of 1849, Bronson never again experienced a mental breakdown. Now, as he returned to Boston to face the world with renewed health, the question was no longer whether his family could save him, but whether he could return the favor.
During 1849, Bronson was not the only Alcott who toiled excitedly over a lengthy manuscript. Motivated in more or less equal parts by an urge to create, a desire for escapism, and the hope of earning some money for her family, sixteen-year-old Louisa set herself to work on her first novel, The Inheritance, which was never published in her lifetime. Louisa wanted nothing more fervently than to escape poverty. Not surprisingly, then, The Inheritance is a Cinderella story. The heroine, the impeccably virtuous Edith Adelon, is the penniless hired companion of a fabulously wealthy English family, the Hamiltons. Whereas the two children of the widowed Lady Hamilton behave generously toward Edith, her beauty and grace earn her the enmity of a Hamilton niece, Lady Ida Clare, who spends most of the novel plotting Edith’s downfall. In the course of her ministrations to the poor, Edith encounters a stranger who, unbeknownst to all, harbors the secret of the heroine’s birth. He sends her a packet containing a letter disclosing that her father was the long-lost heir to the Hamilton fortune. The packet also contains the father’s will, naming Edith as the heiress to the very lands where she has been a servant. In a spectacular spirit of self-sacrifice, however, Edith contrives to destroy all evidence of her windfall, and her father’s will is saved from burning only by the chance intervention of a servant boy. When, in the book’s penultimate chapter, the Hamiltons confront Edith with the rescued document, she tears it to pieces, stating that she prefers her humble place among the loving Hamiltons to a place of rank and wealth. Providentially, a wealthy young lord is standing by to offer his own hand and fortune to her, but we are meant to understand that Edith did not expect his proposal when she gave up her fortune.
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