Part I: A New World
CHAPTER 1. “She Was Home to Me”
[>] “stick out one finger”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“Clover is inestimable”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“I don’t want to tend her”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“wit, her sense of the ridiculous” . . . “same as she did in company”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann.
A lithographic portrait: The portrait of Ellen Sturgis Hooper was given to the Sturgis Library in Barnstable, Massachusetts, by Mary Lothrop Bundy, a direct descendant of Clover’s first cousin, Anne M. Hooper Lothrop.
[>] “full of genius” . . . “refined”: Margaret Fuller to Arthur B. Fuller, January 20, 1849, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, vol. 5, 1848–1849, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 186.
“whose character seemed” . . . “to her character”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, privately printed by EWH, Swann.
“Cape-Cod boy” . . . “the sea”: William Sturgis, as quoted in Charles G. Loring, Memoir of the Hon. William Sturgis, as prepared by resolution of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1864), 6.
extraordinarily capable seaman: For a description of Sturgis’s successful command of his first trading ship, the Caroline, see Loring, Memoir, 8–10. For more on Sturgis, see also Edward Sturgis of Yarmouth Massachusetts, 1613–1695, and His Descendants, ed. Robert Faxton Sturgis (Boston: Stanhope Press, 1914), esp. 41–42; for more family background, see Francis B. Dedmond, “The Letters of Caroline Sturgis to Margaret Fuller,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 201–3.
boarding school run by two sisters: My thanks to Anna Cook at the MHS for finding information on the boarding school run by the Cushing sisters in Hingham. Francis H. Lincoln, in History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts (Hingham, MA: 1983), 143. Ellen’s access to education was not unusual for a young woman of her social standing. According to Mary Kelley, between 1790 and 1830 “182 academies and at least 14 seminaries were established exclusively for women in the North and the South.” Though education for a young woman was understood as equipping her for her future role as a helpmate to her husband, the curriculum had begun shifting from an entire emphasis on social refinements—music, dancing, reciting poetry—to subjects studied at schools for boys. See Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 67, 71. While at school in Hingham, Ellen wrote to her parents: “We are studying about the war between the Thebans and the Spartans at the time when Thebes was contending for the empire of Greece. I want the Thebans to beat.” As quoted in Otto Friedrich, Clover (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 43.
[>] Ellen was particularly close: ESH to William Swain, September 1, 1844, S-T Papers. Ellen wrote to Swain, a family friend, to thank him for sending a copy of writing by his son, Robert Swain, who had died some months before. On reading it, Ellen was reminded of her own brother, William: “[Robert’s] letters and journal remind me of my brother William in their simplicity and boyish fun as well as in the earnestness and feeling which weaves through them. I did not know how lovely and affectionate Robert was till I saw it here—his manliness and uprightness I had seen.” She also revealed something of how she understood the loss of her brother, saying that the brevity of Robert’s life “seems to me not so much a broken hope as a beautiful whole, a harmony of simple and select notes.”
“very much” . . . “450 lines of Virgil”: Ezra Goodwin to WS, September 21, 1810, WS Papers. On the back of this same letter, William’s uncle, the Reverend Goodwin, told Captain Sturgis that William’s teacher had been “astonished” by the young student’s “first recitation of Virgil.” He assured the father that he and his wife, Ellen, who was Mrs. Sturgis’s oldest sister, “shall be glad” for William to stay as long as necessary: “He is a child by whom we set great store, and find that the older he grows, the more valuable he becomes.”
Her behavior over time: In a letter following the death of a child of a family friend, Elizabeth Sturgis wrote to her husband, “I am shocked and grieved at the trying event which you communicate—a solemn event which again forcibly reminds us of the uncertain tenure of our present state of being ‘in the midst of life we are in death,’ and every day’s experience convinces us of this truth, darkness and shadows would rest on our condition here; so much of suffering and sorrow; so few gleams of sunshine mid renewing storms; and thro the dark vista the tomb only in prospect; but blessed be the God and father our Lord Jesus Christ, who thro him has revealed life and immortality—‘he is the way, the truth, & the life’; & ‘no man cometh unto the Father but by him’ ‘he is the resurrection and the life’ and believing as I do most entirely that there is ‘no other name given among men by which we may saved’ it is my earnest desire and constant prayer for me and mine that we may all be brought into the ‘fold of the good Shepard [sic]’ and ‘that believing we may have life.’—you know I seldom mention these subjects, I feel that I am not one privileged, or worthy to descant on Him, yet the peace & joy which I am permitted to in believing, has been an ‘answer sure and steadfast,’ thro a trial which would have prostrated my whole nature probably, and certainly my mind; if it had not rested on the ‘rock of ages.’ I realize that one of my treasures is in heaven, and it is my heart’s desire and prayer that we may be prepared to rejoin him; ‘oh thou with what an angel smile of gladness, he will welcome me.’ I feel these inflictions are salutary, and requisite, we are under a Father’s administration; he both gives, and takes away and ‘blessed be his holy name.’” Elizabeth Davis Sturgis to WS, July 27, 1828, WS Papers.
“walking up and down”: CST to Margaret Fuller, December 1844, as quoted by Eleanor M. Tilton in her introduction to The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 31. Five years before, twenty-year-old Caroline worried about her mother, regretting her summer plans for an extended stay on the island of Naushon off Cape Cod. On arriving on the island, she urged Ellen, who had stayed in Boston, to “write me something about mother,” explaining that she was not “comfortable away from home, when I know she is staying there in such a dolorous manner.” CST to ESH, July 9, 1839, Swann.
Practicality and a personal toughness: The oldest of five siblings and the only boy, William Sturgis had had to support his mother after his father died at sea, which had left the family in dire financial straits. For more about Sturgis’s youth, see The Journal of William Sturgis, ed. S. W. Jackson (Victoria, BC: Sono Nis Press, 1978).
[>] His motto: In a letter to Caroline about her faulty furnace, William Sturgis wrote he would “leave you to take of yourselves. Young people must learn to take care of themselves.” WS to CST, June 17, 1848, S-T Papers. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody quotes Ellen making a comment at one of Margaret Fuller’s Conversations that may also reveal how much William Sturgis valued self-reliance: “Ellen Hooper asked if she did not think that it was the duty of a man in the first place to support himself—if he ought not to be impressed with the idea from the beginning that he must make for himself a place, so far at least as not to be dependent—If this independence on outward support with respect to his physical being was not essential to our idea of a man?” Nancy Craig Simmons, “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: 1839–1840 Series,” Studies in American Renaissance 1994 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 217.
he bought a large summer house: Caroline Sturgis describes the house at Horn Pond in a December 1844 letter to Margaret Fuller: “The front of the house is quite beautiful with the pond stretched out in front & no houses in sight. There is a lovely wooded walk between the canal & pond, an island in the center & pine woods all around.” In the same letter, Caroline tells of accompanyi
ng her father to Woburn to look at the property. They spent the day together “wandering over a mountain in the most babe-in-the-woods manner.” As quoted in Tilton, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, 31. Captain Sturgis, for all his austerity, could be good, even fun-loving company.
“Do take the trouble”: ESH to Elizabeth Davis Sturgis, n.d., Swann.
“I have not seen her”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“a mystery of sorrow”: ESH to CST, n.d., Swann.
“moment I have” . . . “one minute loving”: CST to Margaret Fuller, July 21, 1842, in Dedmond, “The Letters of Caroline Sturgis to Margaret Fuller,” 224. Caroline wrote in the same letter that “Ellen is moping and melancholy, Annie is conscientious and hesitating, Sue rude & frivolous & not very funny, & I feel like an icicle.” Though these characterizations of her sisters and herself reveal Caroline’s painful efforts to sort herself out in relation to her family, they also expose something of the emotional upheaval in the Sturgis family.
[>] “well-balanced character” . . . $300,000: Charles Henry Pope and Thomas Hooper, Hooper Genealogy (Boston: privately printed, 1908), 115.
A miniature portrait: Robert’s likeness was painted by Pierre D’Aubigny in the early 1830s. I want to thank Elle Shushan for providing the identification of this portrait, which is in private hands.
[>] “gifted by Nature”: The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 402; “so inferior to her”: Margaret Fuller to Arthur B. Fuller, January 20, 1849, in Hudspeth, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, vol. 5, 186; “dull man”: Margaret Fuller to Sarah Ann Clarke, January 18, 1849, in Hudspeth, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, vol. 5, 172.
Fuller liked to pronounce: I am indebted to Megan Marshall for her insight on Fuller. Charles Capper, in his two-volume biography of Margaret Fuller, implies that the Hooper marriage had been a failure in his more general discussion of Fuller’s reactions to her friends’ marriages. But this reflected Fuller’s—and no other—point of view. Conversation, Charles Capper, April 9, 2010. See also Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171.
“one of the happy marriages” . . . “to rest upon”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann.
“You cannot tell”: ESH to RWH, July 27, no year, Swann. Though the postmark does not indicate the year, it is most likely the summer of 1845, when Dr. Hooper was traveling in the South.
James Freeman Clarke, the liberal: American National Biography, ed. John A. Garrity and Mark C. Carnes, vol. 11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 140–41.
“a search for principles”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), xii.
[>] “the truth of religion” . . . “into the world”: George Ripley, as quoted in Gura, American Transcendentalism, 142. Perry Miller defines the Transcendentalists as “children of the Puritan past who, having been emancipated by Unitarianism from New England’s original Calvinism, found a new religious expression in forms derived from Romantic literature and from the philosophical idealism of Germany.” Perry Miller, The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), ix. Robert D. Richardson states: “For better or worse, American transcendentalism was uncohesive, preferring to unravel rather than compromise its belief in the sovereign worth of each separate strand of yarn.” Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 250.
Although Robert Hooper sympathized: Robert Hooper was a long-time trustee of the Worcester Lunatic Asylum, the first hospital of its kind in Massachusetts. Wanting to provide more humane forms of treatment, Hooper urged the board to convert space in the hospital into workrooms so that patients could do something productive with their time. He may have gotten some of his ideas for improved treatments for the insane from his training in Paris. RWH to Edward Jarvis, September 24, 1862, BMS c11.2, Boston Medical Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University.
The Sturgis sisters: The sisters joined a group of women that included Lydia Maria Child, already a well-known author; Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, an abolitionist and the new wife of the historian George Bancroft; and Sophia Willard Dana, who would later found the utopian Brook Farm with her husband, George Ripley. Simmons, “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: 1839–1840 Series,” esp. 195–202. According to Phyllis Cole, Fuller’s Conversations occupied the “intersection of liberal religion and feminist reform,” incorporating an ethos of individualism that marbled Transcendental thought. Social, political, and personal transformation would occur through the education and development of every individual woman’s potential. Cole, “Stanton, Fuller, and the Grammar of Romanticism,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 4 (2000): 546. At Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s bookshop, which was located in the downstairs parlor of a two-story brick townhouse, patrons could buy or borrow books published overseas that were not easily found in American bookstores. Peabody’s shelves were lined with books by the German idealists Kant and Hegel, the novels of Victor Hugo and George Sand in French, the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a set of Goethe’s writings in German that ran to fifty volumes. Her shop became a central meeting place to discuss ideas, “a gathering place for . . . intellectual companions, a locus of conversations both organized and informal.” Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, 391–98; for more information on Peabody’s bookshop, see Gura, American Transcendentalism, 123–27.
“character and mind” . . . “induction”: ESH, quoted in Joel Myerson, Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Writers in Their Own Time series. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 43. This is what Ellen said, according to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who took careful notes of comments at Fuller’s Conversations. See also Kathleen Lawrence, “The ‘Dry-Lighted Soul’ Ignites: Emerson and His Soul-Mate Caroline Sturgis as Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts,” Harvard Library Bulletin, vol. 16, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 37–68. Lawrence’s article is the single best source on Caroline Sturgis, her complicated relationship with Emerson, and her involvement in the Transcendental movement.
“light, free, somewhat”: Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 213.
[>] “sympathized with”: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9, 1843–1847, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 111.
“some writing” . . . “different channel”: ESH to Maria Weston Chapman, October 14, no year, Ms. A.9.2, vol. 24, no. 38, Boston Public Library.
Ellen turned, instead, to poetry: All subsequent quotes from Ellen Sturgis Hooper’s poetry are taken from a folio collection of her poetry, privately printed in 1871 by EWH, given to the author by a descendant of the family. A copy of the Hooper folio can be found at the Houghton Library.
[>] “a more interior revolution”: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, as quoted in Marshall, The Peabody Sisters, 183.
“very happy together”: ESH to RWH, n.d., Swann.
“sit at the parlor window”: RWH to unknown addressee, n.d., Swann.
“a certain bravado” . . . “simpleton as usual”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“nearly wild with delight”: ESH to CST, n.d., Caroline Sturgis Tappan Papers, MS Am 1221 (180), Houghton.
[>] Give kisses on her eyes”: ESH to RWH, n.d., Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“I long since abandoned”: ESH to CST, May 19, 1843, Swann. The letter was sent to Caroline in care of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord.
Doctors prescribed everything: Sheila Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Expe
rience of Illness in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 13–25; William H. Burt, Therapeutics of Tuberculosis: Or, Pulmonary Consumption (New York: Boericke and Tafel, 1876), esp. 9–14; Richardson, Emerson, 91–92.
[>] “for your attentions”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann. Ellen also sent along a small charcoal drawing she made of a young slave girl in South Carolina. Lousia Hooper Thoron, Clover’s niece, later identified the place correctly on the back of the drawing, but not its date, listing it as 1849. Robert and Ellen were in the South a year earlier, in the spring of 1848.
“I shall be very sorry”: ESH to WS, March 15, 1848, Swann; “delighted to hear so good”: ESH to WS, April 19, 1848, Swann.
“my precious silver grey”: RWH and ESH to WS, April 6, 1868, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“frequent excursions” . . . “to have come”: RWH and ESH to WS, April 6, 1848, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“is about the same as when”: WS to CST, June 17, 1848, S-T Papers.
“have interest” . . . “burn them unread”: Half-sheet titled “Directions,” 1847, Swann. Ellen’s letters were preserved by the family, and though there is no direct evidence her children read through her papers, it is also hard to imagine that they did not.
[>] “Patience! Patience!”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann.
A small marble headstone: William W. Sturgis Jr. was reburied in Mount Auburn Cemetery on October 25, 1834, after Captain Sturgis bought one of the first of one hundred lots in the new cemetery. Sturgis paid sixty dollars for a three-hundred-square-foot lot, number 310, on Catalpa Path. Circular, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Historical Collections, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA.
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