Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Louisa allowed herself a few days to rest and to play the role of the returning heroine, but it was not possible to remain idle for very long. She was not surprised to find the family accounts once again in arrears. Among the debts to be repaid was a sum of four hundred dollars, which Abba had borrowed to extend Louisa’s stay in London. It had seemed only right to her that Louisa should enjoy a little ease after nine months of “hard work and solitary confinement.”50 By August, Louisa was churning out copy for the many papers and magazines that wanted something of hers to grace their pages. Two long tales for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated brought in two hundred dollars. Her travel sketches for The Independent netted her another seventy-five dollars. All in all, she sent twelve stories to press in less than three months. The work was comfortingly steady but not glamorous. The éclat of Hospital Sketches and the promising reception that had greeted Moods were now distant memories. Even if Louisa’s work was now to be purely literary, the ceaseless dashing off of stories to satisfy creditors instead of serving an inner muse must have felt like grubbing all the same.

  In November, Bronson received melancholy tidings from an old acquaintance. William Oldham, who had kept Alcott House afloat when Charles Lane and Henry Wright had gone with Bronson to America, wrote to say that Bronson’s namesake school was no more. Oldham wrote that, after finally returning to England, Charles Lane had reestablished himself at Alcott House but had then embroiled himself in some kind of scandal. Oldham was too delicate to offer details. He confided only that the matter involved Lane’s “moral character” and had reflected fatally on the entire school. Oldham, “no longer able to endure the consciousness of evil,” had dissolved the school, and all its constituents had “scattered to the winds.”51 Lane had slunk back to London to finish as he had begun, as the editor of a financial newspaper. His career as a tyrannizing moralist was over.

  The winter of 1866–67 brought bad weather and ill health to Orchard House. The family plunged into a period of doldrums and did not emerge for six months. In the late autumn, Bronson had set off with high hopes for another visit to his philosopher friends in St. Louis, giving conversations as he went. His absence meant that Louisa had to assume the primary role in dealing with her mother’s ill health, all the while trying to write as much as possible to keep up with the family’s obligations. During December, she was frequently ill and constantly worried by a stack of bills whose end she never expected to see. Far away in Missouri, sampling Rhine wines and attending concerts of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Bronson did not guess the strain Louisa was undergoing. It is true that the respect he felt for her was now enormous, and that she was constantly in his thoughts. When he wrote home to Abba, he was certain to send his love to the Author and Artist, namely, Louisa and May. However, his admiration for Louisa’s abilities had its unfortunate side; he thought she could do almost anything. “Louisa is an arsenal of powers,” he counseled Abba, “if you will but call them forth to your assistance. I hope the blaze of her Genius is kindled with that of her chamber-fire.”52

  As was often the case, a yawning gap stood between Bronson’s ability to observe general truths and his capacity for realizing how those very truths affected the people closest to him. He wrote to Abba that one of the topics on which he had been offering a conversation was “Woman,” a subject about which, he thought, “the philosophers here along with the common men, I suspect, as every where [sic], need enlightening.” It seemed to him that, in the West, as elsewhere, the women paid the dearest price for “all good that is going.”53 His observation aptly described what went on under his own roof, yet he took no discernible steps to correct the imbalance.

  Bronson’s tour met with unaccustomed financial success, bringing in two hundred dollars. Nevertheless, when he returned home just five days before Christmas, grateful for a cup of his homemade cider and Abba’s sympathetic embrace, he was hungry, dirty, and exhausted. Sadly, Bronson’s homecoming did little to cheer a house where everyone was tired and ill, including Louisa. Complaining of heavy colds and neuralgia, she blamed her year of milder weather in Europe for having weakened her resistance. Her distress continued long into the new year.

  Thoroughly spent from her frenzied burst of story writing, she spent January doing little more than sitting in a dark room and aching, her head and eyes “full of neuralgia.”54 Her condition was basically unchanged in February, and when she tried to get back to work in March, the effort was too much for her and she retreated again to her bed, worse than ever. On February 23, Frank Sanborn had written to a friend that Louisa had been alarmingly ill. Though no one had feared for her life, Sanborn had worried about the effect on her “writing organs.”55 It was not until mid-April that Bronson was able to write that Louisa was recovering her strength and spirits.56 At the same time, Abba suffered a rheumatic fever, and her eyes continued to trouble her. Bronson, too, battled ill health in the new year and was able to do essentially nothing during a month’s confinement.57 Nevertheless, he remained optimistic. In April, following the death of a mutual acquaintance, one of Bronson’s friends observed, “Death is the one universal fact.” “Except life,” Bronson replied, and his listener promptly agreed.58

  Louisa was not fully back to work until the late spring. She prepared a triptych of travel sketches for The Independent and accepted a proposal from Horace B. Fuller, a Boston publisher, to write a collection of children’s stories, which he hoped to have ready for the Christmas season. Louisa’s efforts on the project, which she called “Morning-Glories,” experienced a thankful interruption when her uncle Samuel May sent her and May fifty dollars each for a summer trip. In August, after dutifully handing over half her sum to her mother to settle still more bills, Louisa departed with May to Clark’s Island near Plymouth for what she called “a harem scarem fortnight.” When she returned, however, she plunged back into the dozen stories required for Fuller’s book. She confided to her journal: “I dread debt more than the devil!”59

  In September 1867, two offers came, though neither initially held much interest for her. Horace Fuller, evidently pleased with Morning-Glories and Other Stories, asked her to become the editor of a children’s illustrated magazine known as Merry’s Museum. At virtually the same time, another suggestion arrived from Thomas Niles, a partner in the publishing firm of Roberts Brothers, whose offer for Hospital Sketches Louisa had rejected four years earlier. Niles, seeking to fill gaps in the public demand for books, had been intrigued by the general absence of good books for girls, and it seemed to him that Louisa might be the right person to write one. Although Louisa had made a few experiments in writing for children, most notably in her early collection Flower Fables, she had never thought of herself as a writer of juvenile books. Still, the Merry’s Museum post offered a salary of five hundred dollars a year, and a few dollars might also be gathered from Niles’s inspiration. Thus, Louisa told both Fuller and Niles that she would try. She soon found that she did not care for either task.60 Even though she obediently started a manuscript for Niles, she referred to the project as a “job” and, not liking it, soon put it aside. Perhaps because it is harder to abandon an ongoing commitment, and because of the firm prospect of five hundred dollars a year, she was less ready to turn her back on Merry’s Museum. Fuller assured her that the work would be fairly light, requiring only that she read manuscripts and write a short tale and an editorial every month.

  The compensation was generous enough that she could afford to move out of Orchard House and live on her own. Louisa settled into a room at 6 Hayward Place in Boston, an address that she jauntily nicknamed “Gamp’s Garret” in honor of a favorite character from Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. She relished the convenience of her new confines. The Garret, for which she proudly purchased her own furniture, was not far from Fuller’s offices. More importantly, she was well removed from Concord, which she now associated with ill health and having to satisfy the unceasing needs of her parents.

  Louisa rang in 1868 with eager expectations an
d cheerful confidence. Her burdens were eased by the fact that May was earning an income by teaching drawing classes and Anna’s husband John was more than capable of providing for his wife and two sons. Warm and secure in Gamp’s Garret, Louisa finally had quiet, freedom, sufficient work, and, for the moment, the strength to do it. Despite the illness that had prostrated her for the first four months of the previous year, she had managed to write twenty-five stories since the previous January. If her health remained good, there seemed no limit to what she might now accomplish.

  Nevertheless, she still thought it wisest to do a host of moderately compensated smaller jobs, instead of trying for one major success. On New Year’s Day, she carefully counted up her likely resources for the coming year. In addition to the five hundred dollars from Merry’s Museum, she could expect twenty dollars a month for the stories she intended to write for The Youth’s Companion. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper would never be interested in high art, but it was willing to pay fifty to one hundred dollars for all the thrillers she could churn out.61 Above all, she wanted independence for herself and solvency for the family. If she could reach these goals by a steady stream of piecework, then so be it. On the same day that she worked out her financial prospects for the year, her indoor hyacinth bloomed. In the new flower, she allowed herself to detect an omen—a little flag of truce, she imagined, “from all the enemies with whom we have been fighting all these years.”62

  Louisa did not confuse her newfound freedom, which she treasured, with isolation, which she dreaded. Even in the midst of an ambitious writing schedule, she pursued projects that kept her closely connected with her family. She made a bonnet for May and cut a flannel wrap for her mother to shield her from the Concord snows.63 Clearly, her choice to live apart from the family implied no rejection of them. Rather, the need for separateness came from her starting to accept what had once been inconceivable to her: the fact that her energies were finite. At the same time, the demand for her stories was making her time more valuable than ever. She could now accomplish more good by writing than by seeing to the daily management of Orchard House.

  The concept of family was very much on Louisa’s mind during these days. While accepting that married life was not the best vocation for her, she nevertheless considered a successful marriage “a woman’s tenderest ties.”64 Comparing her life with her sister Anna’s during January 1868, she wrote, “She is a happy woman! I sell my children, and though they feed me, they don’t love me as hers do.”65 In February, Louisa had a chance to enter the public debate on the Woman Question. She arrived home on a snowy Valentine’s Day to discover an agent from the New York Ledger waiting for her. Proffering a hundred-dollar bill, he invited her to write an article of advice for young women. Louisa wrote that a hundred dollars in cash was enough incentive for her to tackle writing a Greek oration.66 She accepted the advance and promptly wrote a column calculated to show, as she put it, that “liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.”67 Titling her article “Happy Women,” Louisa claimed a broad range of meanings for her adjective. She told her young readers that, too often, the loss of happiness and self-respect that comes with an ill-considered marriage “is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called ‘Mrs.’ instead of ‘Miss.’”68 She called their attention to a class of “superior women” who, for diverse reasons, had elected to remain single and to devote themselves to whatever higher calling their tastes and talents had decreed for them. The bulk of the column was devoted to sketches of four women who had found their highest purpose in exercising their talents outside the home. The first three were a doctor, a music teacher, and a home missionary, a woman “ordinary in all things but one—a cheerful, helpful spirit, that loves its neighbor better than itself.”69 Although each had pursued vocation instead of romance or domesticity, none had lived a loveless existence. Each, in her own way, had found an affection as enduring and sincere as any husband could bestow.

  The last of the quartet of happy women, identified only by the initial “A,” was a self-portrait. Louisa introduced “A” as “a woman of strongly individual type, who in the course of an unusually varied experience has seen so much of…‘the tragedy of modern married life’ that she is afraid to try it.” She called herself “one of a peculiar nature” who, realizing that an experiment in matrimony would be “doubly hazardous” for her, had instinctively chosen to remain unmarried.70 As in her journal entry about Anna, Louisa spoke of her writings as a metaphorical family. Perhaps, she suggested, the offspring of her devoted union with literature might be unlovely in the eyes of others. Nevertheless, they had been a profitable source of satisfaction to her own maternal heart. Love and labor, she said, accompanied her like two good angels and her divine Friend had filled her world with strength and beauty. Thanks to these kind influences, she pronounced herself “not unhappy.”71

  Much meaning can be intuited from double negatives, though in this case the inferences are far from clear. Earlier in the column, Louisa had not hesitated to confer the label of “happy” on her three figurative sisters in celibacy. Her self-assessment was more ambivalent and guarded. Was her self-deprecation merely a modest observance of authorial etiquette, or did she really doubt her contentment more than that of the other independent women she knew? It was very much in character for Louisa to understate her sense of good fortune. In any event, it would have been more comforting if Louisa had advanced more positive reasons for not marrying. Her argument would have been more appealing if she had refrained from calling her own situation “peculiar” and from confessing her own dread of matrimony. Nevertheless, she sounded an inspiring note when she urged her young readers to choose their paths without fear of loneliness or ridicule, to cherish their talents, and to use them, if they chose, for higher, greater purposes than convention decreed. The world was full of work, she wrote, and never had there been a greater opportunity for women to do it.

  In the first two months of 1868, Louisa behaved as if she wanted to do all of the world’s work by herself. She was finding, to her annoyance, that Merry’s Museum was demanding much more of her time than had been promised. Relations with the magazine’s management were so unpleasant that, nine years later, she still described them as “very disagreeable…throughout.”72 She wrote eight long stories and ten short ones, read and edited stacks of manuscripts for Merry’s Museum, and found time to act in a dozen stage performances for charity. On February 17, she had been buoyed by a visit from her father, who was eager to share his plans about his own book, which was finally near enough to completion that he was ready to show the manuscript to prospective editors. This book, Tablets, was the philosophical volume about gardening and domesticity that Bronson had first conceived near the start of the Civil War; it had been a protracted labor of love for him ever since.

  Bronson escorted Louisa to a meeting of the Radical Club. One assumes that Louisa bore the evening’s entertainment graciously. Afterward, however, she told her journal that she had been regaled by “a curious jumble of fools and philosophers.”73 After passing the night in Gamp’s Garret, Bronson called on Roberts Brothers. To his great delight, Roberts responded warmly to Tablets and agreed to publish it. Always ready to put in a word on Louisa’s behalf, Bronson also mentioned the book for girls that the firm had proposed to Louisa the preceding fall. Although Louisa had evidently given up on the project, Roberts Brothers was still under the impression that the book was going forward and was expecting at least two hundred pages by September at the latest—the same month they meant to publish Tablets. The literary partner of the firm spoke highly of Louisa’s abilities and prospects; obviously they were expecting great things from her.

  Bronson was still unfamiliar with the names at Roberts Brothers when he told Louisa the news. At first, he wrote that the partner who had spoken so warmly of his daughter was Mr. Nash. Before sending the letter, Bronson scratched out his mistake and wrote in the name that Louisa already knew: Thomas Niles. Bronson’s usually horrendous bu
siness sense was, for once, leading in the right direction. He saw correctly that Niles had sensed enticing possibilities in handling both his work and Louisa’s simultaneously. Bronson wrote to Louisa that his visit to the firm had turned “a brighter page” for both himself and Louisa, both “personally and pecuniarily.”74 He urged her to come home and get to work on the story.

  Louisa was reluctant to make any change. However, for reasons that are not precisely clear, she concluded that, once again, she was needed at home. Thus, on February 28, she packed up her belongings, spent one last evening acting for charity, and rode back to Orchard House the next day. Contrary to her father’s wishes, Louisa did not begin at once on her girls book. The steady income from her other tales and from Merry’s Museum was serving to provide her mother with a host of comforts. The sight of the aging woman, nestled in her sunny room and free from the anxiety of debt, meant more to Louisa than any personal success. Months passed, and still Louisa procrastinated. In May, Bronson was again in touch with Niles. Since Louisa had made no progress on the book for girls, he asked whether she might satisfy Roberts Brothers by writing a fairy book instead. Niles, however, remained firm. Louisa still balked at the idea. “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” she wrote. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters.”75 Perhaps a good story might be fashioned out of the Alcott girls’ lives, but Louisa thought it unlikely. She consulted her mother, Anna, and May and found that they all approved, and she might go ahead with the idea.

  “Plod away” was Louisa’s own phrase for it.76 Ever since Moods had failed to win the critical adulation she had wanted, she had found it hard to think of her writing as an aesthetic pursuit. Increasingly, it was her professional discipline, not her creative spirit, that fueled her vortices and kept her at her task for hours at a time. Nevertheless she acknowledged that Niles was right in principle: there were too few simple, lively books for girls. With no particular enthusiasm for her task, in a mood not much better than that of the character she was about to create, she picked up her pen and began to write: “‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.”