The disaster that Elizabeth Peabody predicted hit fast. After volume two of Conversations appeared in February, “Pope” Andrews Norton blasted it as “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene,” and assailed its author as “an ignorant and presuming charlatan,” either “insane or half-witted.” The book was “more indecent and obscene,” a second reviewer charged, “than any other we ever saw exposed for sale on a bookseller’s counter.” By then, Margaret had given up keeping a record of Bronson’s further conversations; he had so far omitted to pay her salary, and while she would make good on her commitment to teach through the end of term in April, she began making plans to leave, as most of the pupils would. For the remainder of the school’s brief existence, Bronson was forced to move into the Masonic temple’s basement, where only a handful of children, including his oldest daughter, Anna, and an African American child whose presence brought even more defections, continued through the following year, after which the Temple School closed and Alcott, who had once dreamed of reforming the American system of education, left the teaching profession for good.
Privately, Margaret had no dispute with Alcott’s philosophy or methods, although she considered him “one-sided” and “impatient of the complex.” Alcott was a “star of purest ray serene,” she argued to Henry Hedge, whose “elevated aim” had been undercut by his “practical defects” : he was inclined to become “lost in abstractions, and could not illustrate [his] principles,” she told her former employer outright a few years later. But Margaret shared Bronson Alcott’s inclination to form collegial relations with his students and had instinctively developed a teaching style that featured the give-and-take of conversation rather than the conventional memorize-and-recite method. Even if she didn’t fully agree with Alcott that her students already possessed profound knowledge, she preferred to cultivate in them—particularly the girls—the ability to express what they learned from her, to ask questions and find the answers.
If Margaret learned anything from working with Alcott, it was to drive a harder bargain when negotiating her terms of employment. When another idealist in the field of education from Providence, Rhode Island, Hiram Fuller (no relation), learned that Margaret was free of her Temple School obligations and offered her work at his new Greene Street School, she insisted on a salary of $1,000 per year, the equal of a Harvard professor’s yearly income, and the freedom to teach as she pleased. A few years younger than Margaret and as charismatic with investors as Alcott had been with his young pupils, Hiram Fuller had successfully raised funds to build a schoolhouse, modeled after a Greek temple, on one of the city’s main streets. When Hiram Fuller agreed to Margaret’s conditions, she had reason to believe he could deliver. Despite misgivings about leaving Boston’s more stimulating intellectual atmosphere, when the Greene Street School opened in its new quarters in June 1837, Margaret was there for the start of the new term—along with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
9
“Bringing my opinions to the test”
IF BOSTON WAS OLD MONEY AND NEW IDEAS, PROVIDENCE was simply money. Or so it seemed to Margaret after her first weeks in the city fifty miles to the south, with one quarter the population. “Here is the hostile element of money getting but with little counterpoise” of cultural or spiritual aspiration, she wrote to Bronson Alcott. Providence seemed “low” on intellectual stimulation compared with even some of the “villages” surrounding Boston—Concord or Cambridge, she must have been thinking. Margaret missed the “liveliness of mind” in the Temple School children, which she attributed not so much to their innate genius, as Alcott had, as to their enlightened parents. Yet the solid prosperity of the Greene Street School families increased her confidence in the school’s success—and in receiving her pay—and their relative lack of intellectual sophistication promised relief from the scrutiny of a cannier Boston elite: “there is an affectionate, if not an intelligent sympathy in this community with Mr. Fuller and his undertaking,” she reported to Alcott.
Margaret had ended her teaching days in Boston pleased with all she had accomplished in her first “public position”—and suffering a raging headache. Yet that too was something to boast about: “all my pursuits and propensities have a tendency to make my head worse,” she wrote to James Clarke, still in Kentucky. “It is but a bad head; as bad as if I were a great man.” Although she still hadn’t accomplished anything worthy of greatness, an ambition evident in all her letters to James, “I flatter myself it is very interesting of me to suffer so much.” Margaret had retreated to Groton to be coddled by her mother, whose habitual submissiveness was receding along with her grief. Margarett Crane had married at twenty, “too young,” in her older daughter’s view, stunting her own development while “growing to earthly womanhood with your children.” The forty-eight-year-old widow would soon launch a successful appeal to Uncle Abraham for the funds to keep Ellen in school, and while it still fell to Margaret to lecture her sister on the need to accustom herself to wearing “faded frocks” in company—“Now that every one knows our circumstances it is no disgrace to us not to wear fine clothes, but a credit” —Margaret could “vegetate” this spring, for perhaps the first time in her life, in her mother’s “sunny kindness.” Margarett Crane saw to it that her overtired daughter “had a grand reading time at home,” broken only by a week’s visit to Waldo and Lidian Emerson and their new infant son in late April.
Margaret had last seen the Emersons on a brief stopover in October, a few weeks before the birth of the couple’s first child. In advance of that visit, Waldo had urged her to come “as soon as you can,” writing that Margaret’s company was sure to be more healthful to the ailing Lidian than “poppy & oatmeal,” referring to the opium that both women sometimes took to ease headaches. But the visit itself proved to be a disappointment for Margaret. Her aim was friendship with Waldo, whom she saw as her intellectual counterpart and potential soul mate, not with Lidian, much as she esteemed her “holiness.” Once she arrived, Waldo maintained a surprising reserve after the past summer’s volubility, retreating to his study to keep to a regular work schedule and responding coolly to Margaret’s verbal sallies. “We lead a life of glimpses & glances,” he had written to Margaret afterward, in oblique apology—and warning. He might have been referring to himself rather than to his fleeting thoughts: “We see nothing good steadily or long, and though love-sick with Ideas they hide their faces alway.”
Leading up to this third stay in Concord, Margaret had turned the tables, playing Waldo’s game. “I am sure you will purify and strengthen me to enter the Paradise of thought once more,” she wrote effusively in advance, while privately “schooling” herself—her “heart,” she specified—“not to expect too much.” Lowering her expectations helped. This time in Concord, evening conversation proved so stimulating that “the excitement . . . prevents my sleeping,” she wrote to one of her Boston language students. The resulting headaches brought good cover too: if Waldo withdrew to his study during the day, Margaret, when feeling unwell, could seal herself up in the first-floor guest room across the hall. Alternatively she could earn her host’s gratitude by playing with the six-month-old “beautiful” baby boy, who “looks like his father, and smiles so sweetly on all hearty, good people.” She was rewarded at the end of the week with a Sunday-morning drive, alone “with the Author of ‘Nature’” on his way to Watertown, several villages away, to deliver a guest sermon. All “care and routine” were forgotten as the pair wound through the woods, the tall pines sighing “with their soul-like sounds for June.” It was to be one of the last sermons the renegade minister preached from a pulpit.
Margaret was eager for June as well. Waldo had agreed to deliver the inaugural address at the opening of the Greene Street School’s new building at the start of the month, filling in for Hiram Fuller’s mentor, the recently disgraced Bronson Alcott. Stopping again in Concord for a night at the end of May on her way to Rhode Island, Margaret left armed with a stack of books loaned by
Waldo—Coleridge, Milton, Jonson, Plutarch, Goethe—and the draft of a poem, Waldo’s “Compensation,” which reverberated with Margaret’s own sense of solitary mission:
Why should I keep holiday
When other men have none?
Why but because when these are gay
I sit and mourn alone.
And why, when Mirth unseals all tongues
Must mine alone be dumb?
Ah late I spoke to the silent throngs
And now their turn has come.
Many had predicted it, but few saw just how it would happen: a crash of the fragile new American economy. On May 4, the first bank suspension took place in Natchez, Mississippi, followed within the week by sharp reductions in lending at banks in Alabama, New York, Connecticut, and finally Boston and Providence. By the end of the month, nearly all American banks were conducting business only in specie—gold or silver. Enormous paper fortunes, all based on speculation, were lost. The Panic of 1837, which brought the worst recession in the history of the young nation, not to be matched for another forty years, was under way.
When Waldo Emerson spoke on June 10 at Providence’s Westminster Unitarian Church in honor of the opening of the Greene Street School, he told the overflow crowd that attempting to make sense of such unprecedented calamity felt to him like “learning geology the morning after an earthquake.” The world had split apart, and he would read the “ghastly diagrams” of “cloven mountain and upheaved plain.” Margaret, who had been thinking of little but “Concord, dear Concord” since arriving in Providence the week before, was in the audience, buoyed already by a letter from Waldo. “These black times,” he had written, as news of the bank suspensions reached him in the village, “discover by very contrast a light in the mind we had not looked for.” He would shine that light to good purpose in Providence.
The “peculiar aspects of the times,” Waldo Emerson informed his listeners, “advertise us of radical errors somewhere” that can be corrected only by “reform of our culture”: a new system of education. A moment like this one, of “calamity and alarm,” when “a commercial or political revolution has shattered” the calm of daily life, was no time to be “afraid of change, afraid of thought.” It was time, instead, to throw off the “desperate conservatism” that “clings with both hands to every dead form in the schools, in the state, in the church.”
“The disease of which the world lies sick,” he argued, is “the inaction of the higher faculties of man.” He called on educators to provide the nation’s deliverance, but they must do more than teach numbers, words, and facts, and instead make use of the “capital secret of their profession, namely, to convert life into truth, or to show the meaning of events.” They must “teach self-trust,” allow the student to explore “the resources of his mind” and there discover “all his strength.” “Amid the swarming population how few men!” he scolded, a charge that would serve as impetus for the revelatory speech he delivered two months later to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society at commencement. In “The American Scholar” he would define the ideal citizen as “Man Thinking.”
And then he was gone, leaving a bewildered audience—few, as Margaret might have predicted, could follow or approve his train of thought—and a deeply inspired twenty-seven-year-old schoolmistress. Margaret now had to make sense of her new assignment, to somehow “convert life into truth” and “show the meaning of events” to the girls in her charge: sixty of them, ages ten to eighteen, seated in long rows filling one half of the Greene Street School’s enormous interior room and facing her expectantly. On the opposite side of the white-walled, orange-carpeted Great Hall, sixty boys worked their lessons under Hiram Fuller’s guidance.
The well-appointed schoolroom, with a grand piano against one wall and visitors’ couches ranged against another, with classical statuary and a portrait of Hiram Fuller for decoration, gave an air of theater to the experiment. Divide and hope to conquer was all Margaret could manage at first, however, organizing her pupils into Latin sections according to ability, and composition, elocution, ethics, world history, and natural history classes by age. Two other women taught mathematics, French, drawing, and dancing to the girls, so these need not be her concern. Margaret arranged for regular sessions with each group in the antechambers designed for recitations, insisting on conversation instead. The rule was simple: in order to remain in the class, each girl must be “willing to communicate what was in her mind.” Soon she was writing to Elizabeth Peabody, “I believe I do very well.”
“There is room here,” she wrote to Waldo Emerson, as if in answer to his call for reform, “for a great move in the cause of education.” Many of the girls “begin already to attempt to walk in the ways I point . . . Activity of mind, accuracy of processes, constant looking for principles, and search after the good and beautiful.” As she pushed the girls to express their thoughts vocally and in their journals each day—girls whose “hearts are right” but whose minds had previously been “absolutely torpid,” she wrote to Elizabeth Peabody—she discovered that “this experience here will be useful to me, if not to Providence, for I am bringing my opinions to the test.”
Hiram Fuller liked nothing better than to show off his Greene Street School pupils to town dignitaries or visiting celebrities, and he held public exhibitions every two weeks. But only boys participated, a convention he would not break. Margaret chafed at having her girls sit silently in the audience as the boys spoke their pieces or answered questions. She began calling attention to the girls’ superior performance in beginning Latin, her one coeducational class, and she formulated a curriculum in her other classes designed to persuade the girls of their intellectual strengths. In natural history, she coaxed them out of their “antipathy” to worms and caterpillars and told them the myth of Arachne—“an ambitious young lady who wanted to weave as fine as the goddess of Minerva,” one young student recorded in her journal—when they studied spiders.
Margaret “spoke upon what woman could do,” another student recorded, and “said she should like to see a woman everything she might be, in intellect and character.” Whenever possible, she dwelled on examples of powerful women from classical history and myth: Atalanta, who “wished to live in the enjoyment of ‘single blessedness,’” Daphne, Aspasia, Sappho, and Diotima. She required reading by women authors, from the Connecticut poet Lydia Sigourney to the British essayist Anna Jameson, who wrote on literary and historical heroines, and of course de Staël. When teaching Wordsworth, she singled out his poems about women: “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” received a full lesson and a written analysis as homework. Even Hiram Fuller seemed to catch on, calling the entire school—boys and girls—to attention at midsummer with the news of the eighteen-year-old Princess Victoria’s ascension to the British throne.
Margaret herself provided the best model of all. When she felt her students weren’t striving for original thought in their journals, she started one herself and read passages aloud. “How and when did she ever learn about everybody that existed?” one of her older students asked in her own journal. “I wonder if I shall know an eighth part of what she does.” Another student wrote to her brother, who was studying law at Harvard, “I wish you could hear her talk a few moments. I almost stand in awe of her, she is such a literary being.”
But again Margaret was wearing herself out. At least once a month, with a regularity that suggests an underlying hormonal cause of her migraines, she missed school for a half-day or more because of illness. Through her first summer at Greene Street, she held herself to a punishing daily schedule. She had been receiving books selected and shipped from Europe by the Farrars, Anna Barker, and Sam Ward, to help with her research on Goethe, and she woke herself at 4:30 or 5:00 each morning to dress quickly, then read and take notes until breakfast at 7:30. By 8:30, when she arrived at the handsome school building and passed between its enormous white columns to enter the Great Hall and take up her teaching duties, she was often exhausted and resentful at havin
g to “serve two masters”: her own inner drive for literary achievement and the requirement to support herself and her family.
Sometimes her frustration showed in impatience with her students, whose “barbarous ignorance” at times seemed to Margaret almost a personal affront: teaching sixty “miserably prepared” young girls was not the professional life she had imagined for herself. The girls’ journals registered fear of the sometimes “satirical” or “very severe” Miss Fuller—who “is very critical and sometimes cuts us up into bits”—along with admiration for “the infinite capacity of her mind” and a craving for her attention. When one older student burst into tears after being singled out for failing to prepare for class, Margaret later extended a written apology—“I often regret that you have not a teacher who has more heart, more health, more energy to spend upon you than I have.” Although she admitted she may have been “too rough” with the girl, Margaret still hoped to “teach her more confidence and self-possession.” She would rather her students learn to stand up to pressure than be indulged for shortcomings well within their power to correct: “I dare not be generous lest I should thus be unable to be just.” In the end, all her students learned that “we must think as well as study, and talk as well as recite.”
Margaret Fuller Page 13