Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

In October, Bronson traveled to New York, where he compared philosophical notes with Henry James Sr., and called on the evangelist minister Henry Ward Beecher. But the more important activity that fall belonged to Louisa. Eager to earn money for the family, she set herself the task of publishing her first book. Instead of trying her luck with The Inheritance, she chose to revise the fanciful little stories she had extemporized seven years earlier for the pleasure of Ellen Emerson. She shared her manuscript with her father, who liked it enough to discuss it with a Boston publisher named George Briggs. The conversation set forces in motion that must have seemed marvelous to Louisa, for on December 4, Flower Fables was released to the public. With great pride, she presented one of the first copies to Miss Emerson. Only later, when the initial elation of being an author had subsided, did Louisa stop to consider the economics of her triumph. Although the book was published in an edition of sixteen hundred copies and, in Louisa’s own opinion, “sold very well,” she received only somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-five dollars from the publisher.65 In her journal she railed at Briggs’s dishonesty. More privately, she probably cursed herself for not having made a more favorable contract. Like her father, she had sold her mental labor for much less than it was worth. She might have seen herself as a fighting May, but at this early phase of her publishing career she was looking like an impecunious Alcott through and through.

  Nevertheless, it was a thrill to be able to place a copy of Flower Fables in her mother’s Christmas stocking. In the note that she left along with the gift, Louisa lavished thanks and credit on Abba. “Whatever beauty or poetry is to be found in my little book,” she wrote, “is owing to your interest in and encouragement of all my efforts from the first to the last.” Louisa knew, however, that Flower Fables was only a small beginning, significant more for what it might portend than for its own artistic value. She also wrote to her mother, “I hope to pass in time from fairies and fables to men and realities.”66 Instead of a book, Louisa gave Bronson a pair of slippers, along with a comic poem, inscribed to the family’s “Attic philosopher.” Her lyric tells of how Santa Claus, passing through Greece, caught sight of Plato’s sandals. Santa, she writes, first decided that this footwear would make a wonderful gift for Alcott. On reflection, however, “feeling the ancient sandals to be / Out of keeping with modern hose / He changed them into these slippers you see, / More fitting a land of snows.” Despite her jocular tone, Louisa could not resist a jibe or two at her father’s lack of worldliness and his habitual neglect of the less visible portions of his wardrobe. The slippers, she adds, would serve not only “to shield the ten philosophical toes,” but also “to hide from the eyes of the peeping old world / The holy Platonic blue socks.” Louisa’s poem concludes by wishing her father a long life “no matter how empty” his purse may be.67

  The humor directed at Bronson, though of the gentlest kind, may suggest something important about Louisa’s strategies for handling familial frustrations. Though still a strong-willed young woman, she was no longer the little girl with a violent temper she had once been. She had learned above all to address painful subjects with wit instead of fury. The mildly biting joke had become a standard means of responding to the aspects of her father’s character that most exasperated her. In her teasing comparison of her father to Plato—indeed, “Plato” became a common nickname for Bronson in her journals—Louisa adopted a mock-reverential tone far preferable to outright confrontation.

  The Christmas of Flower Fables and Platonic slippers was the last Christmas the family spent together in Boston. In the spring of 1855, Abba was driven to seek further ways to economize. A fine opportunity arose when Benjamin Willis, who had been married to Abba’s now-deceased sister Elizabeth, offered the family the use of one of his houses in Walpole in southwestern New Hampshire, rent free, for two years. Everyone under the Alcott roof, according to Louisa, had had enough of Boston. They were in no position to decline Willis’s proposal. In June, Louisa made the move a month ahead of the rest of her family. She initially thought Walpole “a lovely place, high among the hills.” Helping in her cousin Louisa Willis’s garden, she took delight in the smell of the fresh earth and the touch of green leaves. She liked to rise early and run up and down a nearby ravine, observing the woods as they woke up around her.68 On July 16, the rest of the family came to join her. In the early days in Walpole, Louisa wrote happily of picnics, pleasant people, and good neighbors. Her greatest enjoyment, however, took the form of the amateur plays in which she and Anna took part, playing to audiences as large as one hundred and performing well enough to receive notices in the Boston papers.

  For his part, Bronson returned to a life much like the one he had known when he first came to Concord in 1840. He worked in the fields, did odd jobs as a carpenter, and traded observations with townspeople. He took pleasure in the frankness and practicality of his new neighbors. He wrote, “There is profit in working with labouring men, and wholesomeness. Their wits are so handy and their senses so parallel to the world they work in and measure so well…. ’Tis refreshing to yoke one’s idealism with this team of tug-along-the-rut of realism, and so get practical wisdom out of it, and sanity.”69

  Yet fall and winter told a different tale. The family soon was forced to recognize that both Anna and Louisa would have to earn a wage in order for ends to meet, and Walpole was hardly the place for a young woman to seek her fortune. In October, Anna went back to teaching in Syracuse, leaving her father “sad when so much goodness and grace leaves [sic] our house.” The following month, on a rainy day, Louisa left for Boston with her small trunk of homemade clothes, hoping to sell her new manuscript, “Christmas Elves,” which she thought superior to Flower Fables. Bronson was, however, for once the more practical of the two; although he helped Louisa prepare the work for submission, he feared that she was setting out too late in the season to succeed with a Christmas book. He was right. To her disappointment, Louisa peddled “Christmas Elves” in vain. Although she vowed to make a more timely effort on its behalf the following year, and although Bronson himself offered it to Phillips, Sampson of Boston, “Christmas Elves” was never published. Nevertheless, both Louisa’s ambition and the unsatisfied wants of her family counseled the impossibility of turning back. If she was in Boston, then she would find a way to make Boston pay her. Taking a room that was offered her by her cousin Thomas Sewall and his family in their home on Chestnut Street, she took in sewing and began to turn out a steady stream of stories, which she sold for a pittance to the Saturday Evening Gazette.70 So long as she had “a head and a pair of hands,” she would neither sit idle nor go home in defeat.71

  Now that Walpole’s summer vacationers were long gone, Bronson found it a duller, emptier place. The departures of Anna and Louisa made it all the more so. Separated from his cadre of Boston intellectuals, and with only Abba and his two younger daughters to cheer him, Bronson found it a challenge “to make the most of myself and them in this little river town and its quiet population.”72 He discovered that the bonds of understanding that he thought he had forged with the working people of the town were not nearly as strong as he had hoped. Walpole was not Concord, and not even Bronson’s optimism could make it so.

  The day before she turned twenty-three, Louisa wrote a long, thoughtful letter to her father to mark their joint birthday. Her distance from home had prompted her to think deeply about the father with whom she shared a birth anniversary but, it often seemed, so little else. Their contrasts, she supposed, had existed from the hours of their respective births. She imagined her father in infancy as “a serene & placid baby” who had “descended from on high” instead of being born in the typical bloody, squawling fashion and who had almost immediately begun his “wise meditations…looking philosophically out of [his] cradle” at the great world beyond. The man who had grown from that serene infant seemed to her miraculously unaffected by the cares and sufferings that disfigure other mortals:

  Fifty six years have passed…& that peaceful b
aby’s golden head is silver now, but the man looks as serenely…and meditates as wisely as he did in his cradle, & nothing but the lines on his face where troubles have been & four tall women at his side, show that years and trials have changed the wise child into a wiser old man.

  Surely, Louisa thought, some good angel had dropped a charm into her father’s cradle, enabling him “to walk thro[ugh] life in quiet sunshine while others groped [in] the dark,” and she wished that she could learn its magic.

  Louisa followed her fanciful account of her father’s babyhood with a contrasting history of her own. Unlike her golden-haired sire, she had been “a crass crying brown baby, bawling at the disagreeable world where on a dismal November day” she found herself. Scrambling up to childhood, she had fallen “with a crash into girlhood.” After countless falls “over fences, out of trees, up hill & down stairs” and being strengthened by such violent exercise, the “topsey turvey” girl now found herself an equally helter-skelter young woman, “big brown & brave, crying, not because she has come into the world but because she must go out of it before she has done half she wants to.” She vowed that, “as the brown baby fought through its small trials so the brown woman will fight thro [sic] her big ones.” If the fight did not end with her becoming queen of the world, at least she might end up knowing how to rule herself.73

  Louisa had chosen her self-descriptive metaphors with care, knowing that they would resonate deeply in her father’s mind. Her repeated emphasis on falling was, of course, a comic touch, but it was also likely meant to comment on her father’s personal theory of genesis. Bronson had long been formulating the idea that the physical world had originated through a moral devolution of the divine spirit. Mankind, which had had its origins as a perfect, nonphysical entity, had become incarnate through having sinned. Nonhuman nature was the result of a further falling off from the spirit; it was nothing more than the excess and unnecessary matter that had been cast off by humanity. “Nature,” Bronson was later to write, “is the waste man. The soul instinctively frees herself from all superfluous matter generated in building forth her own body, and, from this surplus-sage of substance, organizes in descending series the natural kingdoms.”74 In Alcott’s cosmology, a physical person was a lapsed soul, a debased descendant of pure being.

  Speaking of her father as having descended from on high, Louisa alluded to her father’s own supposed descent from pure spirit. Writing of her own repeated physical falls, she called attention to her own fall from grace, and she insinuated that she had descended much farther than he from their perfect origins. Closer to nature than her father, she was also commensurately more distant from a divine origin. If one accepted Bronson’s theory of the universe, Louisa seemed to be intentionally positioning herself as an inferior being. The letter feels as if it has been addressed to a seraph by a mere mortal. Nevertheless, Louisa took some earnest pride in the bold tenacity that she identified with her brownness. If, in some sense, she had been born for struggle and adversity, her trials had given her a spirit and a resiliency every bit as enviable as her father’s golden-haired serenity.

  Louisa still defined her success according to parental sanction and approval. She wrote, “the thought of what you all at home hoped & expected of me makes me careful of my words & actions that you may not be disappointed now as you have often been.” The thought that she might disappoint her parents—more broadly, that her entire topsy-turvy nature might render her forever inadequate in their eyes—was for Louisa a real and continual source of worry. She cared enormously about redemption and vindication. She was determined to prove herself worthy, both to her family and to the world. As yet, she was not confident that she would succeed.

  Some evidence of parental approval was on its way even as Louisa wrote her birthday missive. In writing his birthday letter to Louisa, Bronson reached for agricultural metaphors to express his appreciation for her. He told her, “as the sere stems regoice [sic] and pride themselves in the bloom and fragrence [sic] of the branches and flowers they still claim as theirs…so thy Childs’ courage and spirit,—yours, and Anna’s too—are daily prides and satisfactions to me.” Extending his trope, he ventured to suggest that the deprivations of their upbringing might finally be to their advantage. After all, he noted, the fairest and best fruits tended to grow “not in the blandest climes, but in those attempered of sun and shower, of heat and cold.” Similarly, thanks to the hard seasoning that they had had from their beginning, he hoped that these Alcott plants would turn out “all the more mellow and mature.” To Bronson’s mind, concerned as it was with growing things, his daughters were indeed the fruits of a garden, one that he had found harder to maintain than his literal ones. As his letter reveals, he was hardly oblivious to “the trials, moral and social,” to which his eccentric way of life had subjected them.75 What had been done, for good or ill, was irretrievable. He could only hope for the best.

  Meanwhile, the environment of Walpole was continuing to display its limitations. Bronson was finding his country life “all too dull and prosy to be very interesting.”76 Louisa, with typical bluntness, supposed that a winter in Walpole could only be “a nice stupid winter,” since lectures and meetings were lost arts there.77 In March, she sent her father a photograph that she had had taken of herself. Presumably, it was the daguerreotype that is now invariably associated with the young Louisa. The image corresponds fairly closely with portions of the description she was to give to Sylvia Yule, the heroine of her first mature novel, Moods:

  The face was full of contradictions; youthful, maidenly, and intelligent, yet touched with the melancholy of a temperament too mixed to make life happy…. A most significant but not a beautiful face, because of its want of harmony, for the deep eyes among their fair surroundings disturbed the sight as a discord jars upon the ear; even when they smiled the shadow of black lashes seemed to fill them with a gloom never quite lost.78

  Louisa May Alcott: a face “full of contradictions,—youthful, maidenly, and intelligent, yet touched with the unconscious melancholy that is born of disappointment and desire”

  (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  The intensity of his daughter’s stare may have made Bronson fear that Louisa was pressing herself too hard, for he proposed that she soon return to Walpole. All the bills had been paid for the time being, he told her, and he intimated that the pleasure of her company and the knowledge that she was getting some rest from her writing mattered more to him than the dollars she could send home. It seemed to him that Louisa was “bent on making as long a stay from good bread and fine air and early hours as you can with any grace about you.”79 He missed her, and he wanted her back home again.

  It was clear that Bronson thought of Walpole as a place of good health and wholesome living. Yet Walpole was to ruin the health of the gentlest Alcott. In June 1856, Abba, still dedicated to good works, found herself ministering to the needs of the Halls, one of the town’s poorest families. The family inhabited a space above a cellar where swine had recently been kept. The landlord—a deacon of the church, as Louisa bitterly noted in her journal—had not troubled himself to have the cellar cleaned, and he did so only after Abba threatened legal action. Two small children in the flat had come down with scarlet fever, and Abba came to their aid. At her side stood two Alcott daughters still living at home, Lizzie and May. What followed was almost a reenactment of the Alcotts’ exposure to smallpox in 1850, which had also resulted from contact with one of Abba’s charity cases. This time, however, the consequences were more devastating. Both Lizzie and May caught the disease. May recovered quickly and completely. Lizzie, however, did not, and by the time Louisa was able to return home from Boston, her sister was seriously ill. For a time she lay near death. The fever did not kill Lizzie, but it left her perilously weak. Understating the case considerably, Louisa called the months that followed an “anxious time.” She nursed Lizzie, took over her housework, and, amid the bustle and worry, managed to write a story a
month during that careworn summer.

  The Alcotts chose not to call in traditional doctors to treat Lizzie’s illness. They were much taken at the time with the theories of Samuel Christian Hahnemann, the German physician credited with founding homeopathic medicine. Anticipating that Lizzie would soon throw off her illness, Bronson put much faith in the fact that she had never tasted animal food. By August 5, Lizzie’s condition had improved enough that Bronson was able to write to his mother, “We are all well.”80 There remained little reason for the entire family to hover near Lizzie’s bedside. With nothing to keep her in Walpole, Louisa laid plans for another winter in Boston. Bronson, now driven stir-crazy by the want of intellectual friendship in Walpole, planned a conversational tour of Boston, New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia.

  Once on the road, he kept to a strict budget; eating only two meals a day and bravely resisting the temptations of the New York bookstores, he managed on a dollar a day.81 Bronson avidly read his wife’s letters for reports on Louisa’s literary progress and confessed that her prospects gave him good hopes. He was developing confidence in her energy and creative powers. He declared, “I hope to be a Spectator of her triumphs fairly soon.”82 For her part, Louisa watched the newspapers for accounts of her father’s conversations and took great pleasure in discovering that New York was receiving him well. On their birthday, she wrote to him that she loved “to see your name first among the lecturers, to hear it kindly spoken of in the papers and inquired about by good people here—to say nothing of the delight and pride I take in seeing you at last filling the place you are so fitted for.” She thought it would be wise and creditable for the Gothamites to erect a statue to her modern Plato.83

  The praise Louisa gave in one paragraph, however, she all but took back in the ensuing ones. Dryly writing about May’s latest achievements in music, French, and drawing, she ventured to say that her youngest sister might become “what none of us can be, ‘an accomplished Alcott.’” As to her own strivings, she claimed that her goal was to “prove that though an Alcott I can support myself.”84 Bronson’s family history was a matter of deep pride to him. In 1852, he had spent months tracing the lines of his father’s and mother’s ancestry as far as the American records would allow him to go.85 For Louisa to suggest that an Alcott was by definition a ne’er-do-well was to aim her joke at an especially sensitive spot.