Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  Nahant as a permanent summer residence Linked to Lynn by a narrow causeway, Nahant combined cool summer weather with easy access to Boston by carriage or steamer. The small peninsula attracted so many prominent but plain-living summer residents that Tom Appleton labeled it “cold roast beef Boston.”

  the seaside drowsiness Journal for 1847–48, LP, July 16, 1847.

  her scattered goods Journal, LP, Aug. 14, 1847.

  right out of Wilhelm Meister Journal, LP, Aug. 20, 1847.

  a man of genius Journal, LP, Aug. 14, 1847.

  How lovely the view Journal, LP, Aug. 18, 1847.

  an unpublished passage Journal, LP, Aug. 18, 1847.

  a short little fellow Journal, LP, July 28, 1847. For more details of Longfellow’s hometown, see Joseph Conforti (ed.), Creating Portland (forthcoming, Northeastern University Press).

  that later critics would ridicule Most unkind of all is surely John Betjeman’s “Longfellow’s Visit to Venice. [To be read in a quiet New England accent].”

  He improvised the poem Note with poem, Complete Poetical Works (Cambridge Edition, 1894), 68.

  Evangeline

  Conolly told a story Journal for 1840–41, LP, April 5, 1840. Hawthorne and Dana, The Origin and Development of Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” 10–13. This essay—by grandsons of Longfellow and Hawthorne—is the fullest account of how the poem came to be written.

  Hawthorne soon had second thoughts Hawthorne and Dana, 13. A copy of Conolly’s not very reliable journal is at BC.

  the Evangeline legend has been rewritten Most notably by Felix Vorhees, whose Acadian Reminiscences (1907) has a happy ending, and by Antonine Maillet, whose Pelagie-la-Charette (1979; English trans., 1982) is probably the most famous novel in Acadian French, a work of magic realism telling how a young woman with a cart undoes the Acadian disapora, reuniting her people. It won the Prix Goncourt in 1979.

  Banvard’s heroic diorama For the artist’s career, see Collins, Banvard’s Folly, 1–24.

  a pamphlet describing the panorama “Description of Banvard’s Panorama of the Mississippi River . . .” (Boston, 1847). Copy at the Boston Athenaeum.

  foundational myth of Acadian ethnic identity See, for example, Griffiths, “Longfellow’s Evangeline: The Birth and Acceptance of a Legend,” and Brasseux, In Search of Evangeline: Birth and Evolution of the Evangeline Myth. For Acadians in the St. John Valley, see National Park Service, Acadian Culture in Maine.

  Hawthorne repeated his praise Hawthorne and Dana, 39. Neither the personal nor the literary relationship between the two writers has been much studied. Yet there are intriguing echoes of Evangeline in The Scarlet Letter (1850), where in “A Forest Walk” Hester experiences “the mystery of the primeval forest” (as David Hochheiser has pointed out to me). In The Blithedale Romance (1852), the poet Coverdale lives in circumstances remarkably similar to Longfellow’s at the Craigie House in the early 1840s: “My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bed-chamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and periodicals; my writing-desk, with a half-finished poem in a stanza of my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture-gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement . . . my dinner at the Albion [the Boston hotel in which, before his remarriage, Longfellow often took his meals].” Library of America edition, 666.

  Laura Bridgman The Bridgman-Longfellow letters and related news clippings are in the Gulotta Collection, Houghton Library. For a perceptive if less than flattering account of the poet’s close friend, Samuel Gridley Howe, see Gitter, The Imprisoned Guest. Howe married Julia Ward, Sam Ward’s sister, now remembered as author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” but in her day a formidable belle; many of his friends hoped Longfellow would marry her. Howe was also the object of Charles Sumner’s adoration.

  A day of agony Journal for 1847–48, LP, Sept. 10, 1848.

  first recorded use of ether in childbirth Pittinger, “The Anesthetization of Fanny Longfellow . . .,” 368–69.

  Evangeline was published The event cemented Longfellow’s long relationship with the firm that by 1855 was internationally known as Ticknor and Fields and his close friendship with the publisher James T. Fields. The firm’s authors included Tennyson, Whittier, Child, Holmes, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson. For details of every aspect of its operation, see Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields.

  more pleasure than it would be decorous to express Hawthorne and Dana, 39. The hexameter bothered some critics; the best account of Longfellow’s use of it is in Allen, American Prosody, 180–85, along with analysis of Longfellow’s other verse forms and meters.

  a family so blessed On the exemplary nature of the Longfellow family in the mid-nineteenth-century American imagination, see Gartner, “Longfellow’s Place: The Poet and Poetry of Craigie House,” especially for his explanation of how the poet lowered the barrier between public and private by “inviting” the public, as it were, into his home.

  condemned as sentimentality There is now a vast literature on sentimentalism as a literary movement in the sense that romanticism and realism are considered movements, much of it in reaction to Anne Douglas’s dismissal of nineteenth-century sentimental writing as evidence of female intellectual enfeeblement. Very little of this new scholarship concerns sentimental male writers, despite the success of Dickens and Longfellow in this vein. Two important contributions are Haralson, “Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental Masculinity” and the essays in Chapman and Hendler, Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, especially Bertolini, “The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850s.”

  “Sail On, O Union”

  its true weight and emphasis Journal for 1849–50, LP, Feb. 12, 1850.

  Lincoln, too, was moved to tears McClatchy, 39.

  conflation of the national romance and the personal For an analysis of the poem, see Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America, where she compares Longfellow and Lydia Sigourney as “sentimental nationalists.”

  the Appleton family fortunes Starting life as a New Hampshire farm boy, Nathan Appleton had become one of the richest men in New England as a result of his investment in the Lowell, Mass., textile mills (whose famously literate “mill girls” were among Longfellow’s most enthusiastic readers). The mills depended on an uninterrupted supply of Southern cotton; among their products were cheap clothing sold to plantation owners for their slaves. For Appleton’s career, see Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made.

  the outspokenly antislavery Sumner Boston’s Whig political elite, including Robert Winthrop and Nathan Appleton, found Sumner an irritant; Sumner, for his part, seemed genuinely surprised when people he had harshly criticized turned against him. In the 1840s he combined antislavery with a belief in the peace movement; he had accompanied the Longfellows on their 1843 wedding trip to Springfield, where they visited the U.S. Arsenal (which still exists as a museum). Fanny suggested an antiwar poem using the image of the gun barrels as organ pipes, playing the death-angel’s tune; her husband obliged. Without the slightest trace of irony, the museum displays a copy of the poem next to an organ-pipe-like construction of rifles.

  the first lesbian relationship in American fiction Faderman, “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James,” 315–18.

  life in the early Plymouth Colony See John Seelye, “Feminizing the Rock,” Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock, 361–95.

  Holmes once told a friend The Saturday Club was organized in 1855 to bring together for monthly dinners men of literary interests in the greater Boston area; it soon became the most famous of such clubs in the country, a symbol of the prestige of the New England literati. Meetings were long and convivial; Longfellow and Hawthorne sat quietly while such champion talkers as Emerson, Holmes, Felton, and Tom
Appleton held forth; it was also a place to show off Boston to distinguished visitors, especially Englishmen. For the membership, see Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club, passim.

  his literary earnings Allibone, A Critical Dictionary, II, 1128–29. See also Charvat, “Longfellow’s Income from His Writings, 1840–1852.”

  severe eyestrain Throughout his middle years, Longfellow suffered terribly from his eyes, at some points becoming unable to read or write (Fanny served as his amanuensis). The condition eventually cleared up, suggesting a temporary disorder of the macula, such as central serous chorioretinopathy. I am grateful to Dr. Frederick S. Miller III for this suggestion.

  The Jewish Cemetery at Newport For a less admiring account of the poem, see Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature, 91–93.

  John Brown’s bold though bloody raid Howe was one of John Brown’s financial supporters and had to flee temporarily to Canada in 1859. Longfellow sympathized: When Brown was hanged, he exclaimed, “This will be a great day in History! The date of a New Revolution; quite as much needed as the old one!” Journal for 1858–59, LP, Dec. 2, 1859.

  the redemption of the country Journal for 1860–62, LP, Nov. 7, 1860. His journal over the next months is filled with enthusiasm for the North and complaints about South Carolina and other secessionist states.

  Hiawatha

  inhabited the coast of Maine Maine’s Indians had not been eliminated but had retreated, in small numbers, to the live in the margins of white settlement; see Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, for a detailed account. By Longfellow’s youth they were regarded as a curiosity; in the first volume of the Maine Historical Society’s Collections (1831), William Willis anticipated the race’s extinction but urged study of their character, manners, and history (Introductory Remarks, 8). Longfellow himself took a sympathetic stance in his 1823 collegiate “dialogue” between an “emigrant” and a “savage.” See his letter to Zilpah, Hilen 31 (Nov. 9, 1823).

  As a Bowdoin professor North American Review (January 1832), 75.

  cyclical history of mankind Robert Stafford Ward, “The Influence of Vico upon Longfellow,” ESQ 58:1 (1970), 57–62.

  The case for the prosecution Carr, Inventing the American Primitive, 127, 141. On the other hand, the American Indian Film Institute gave a prize in 1996 to The Song of Hiawatha, starring Russell Means, a film “based on the epic poem.”

  a literary poem pretending to belong to the oral tradition Schmidt, Lives of the Poets, 439.

  his own civilized magic Trachtenberg, “Singing Hiawatha: Longfellow’s Hybrid Myth of America,” 12. The best introduction to the poem itself is Fiske, “Mercerized Folklore.”

  Emerson wrote to Longfellow Quoted in Trachtenberg, 17. Emerson and Longfellow are two people who enjoyed each other’s company but neither ever understood the other.

  I have at length hit upon a plan Journal for 1853–55, LP, June 22, 1854.

  The folklorist Elias Lonnrot For his career and modus operandi, see Magoun, The Kalevala.

  the study of Indian languages Schoolcraft, “General Considerations,” Algic Researches, 10.

  There are Indians here . . . Hilen 394 (Oct. 29, 1837), to his late wife’s sister, Margaret Potter. In 1849, in Boston, he met the Ojibwa preacher and poet Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway).

  his long-delayed resignation Longfellow cited his eye troubles and “the wearinesss of doing the same things over and over again for so many, many years.” Johnson, Professor Longfellow of Harvard, 82.

  My Lost Youth Robert Frost entitled his first collection of poems A Boy’s Will (1913). Longfellow’s evocation of the Portland of his childhood ranges from the topographic (“The shadows of Deering’s Woods”) to the sociological (“Spanish sailors with bearded lips”) to the imaginary (he could not possibly have heard the battle off distant Monhegan Island between the H.M.S. Boxer and the U.S.S. Enterprise in the War of 1812).

  A PROMISED LITERARY TREAT Journal, LP, July 24, 1854.

  hard work to write poetry in a closet Journal, LP, July 31, 1854.

  Very rich and dreamy Journal, LP, Aug. 1, 2, 5, 1854.

  Bogue offers one hundred pounds Journal, LP, Sept. 14, 1854.

  the violence of the Indian legends The deleted canto is “The Wrestling of Kwasind,” Hiawatha MS, Printer’s Copy, Vol. 2, 123–49, MsAm 1340 (97), Houghton Library.

  Some of the newspapers are fast and furious Journal, LP, Nov. 18, 1854.

  a martyr to neuralgia Longfellow’s Cambridge journals combine ecstatic descriptions of good weather, terse notes on the quality of the preaching he hears, tantalizingly brief descriptions of his social and literary encounters, lists of his voluminous reading, occasional paens to female beauty and political outbursts, and a litany of physical complaints, mostly regarding his teeth and head. It is not a journal intime, in other words, but he kept it more or less faithfully for most of his adult life and felt guilty when he skipped days.

  Hiawatha’s Photographing The parody is printed in Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll, Photographer, 113–17. The animal first appears in Canto II (“The Four Winds”), 7: “From the Land of the White Rabbit” and reappears in the deleted canto.

  an implicit treatise on the nature of language Fletcher, “Whitman and Longfellow: Two Types of the American Poet,” 141.

  who rhymed Androscoggin with “noggin” The difficulty of poeticizing Native American place names had bedeviled American poets until Longfellow—and Whitman. Try finding a word to rhyme with “Massachusetts.”

  its author’s hopes for peace The years preceding Hiawatha had been difficult for Longfellow in several respects: in a public sense in Daniel Webster’s support for the Fugitive Slave Law, more personally because of the death of his father in 1849 and his mother in 1851 (both after many years of being invalids). Within his circle there was great shock over the drowning of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, her new husband, and infant in 1850 on their return from Italy, and even greater anguish over the arrest in 1849 and eventual hanging of Harvard medical professor John Webster for the murder of George Parkman.

  A Lock of Hair

  the three girls of “The Children’s Hour” “Grave Alice, and laughing [Anne] Allegra, / And Edith with golden hair.” The three were painted in a widely reproduced group portrait by Thomas Buchanan Reed; the pose gave rise to a popular story that Anne Allegra had only one arm. One of the most striking artifacts among the Longfellow memorabilia at the Maine Historical Society is a locket belonging to an unknown soldier, bearing a photographic copy of the painting, “found on the battlefield at Gettysburg.”

  She bore the agony like a martyr Quoted in Stanley C. Patterson, “The Second Act of Life’s Drama,” unpublished MS, 474. Copy at Longfellow National Historic Site Archives. The image of the burning woman has proved powerful: see, for example, James Schuyler’s 1988 poem “Light from Canada.” (My thanks to Carl Little for this reference.)

  a different version of the story “Circumstances of Mrs. Longfellow’s Death, 1861.” Dana Family Papers, Box 44: R. H. Dana III, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  How am I alive Hilen 1889 (Aug. 18, 1869).

  Charley Goes to War

  The Longfellow of the 1850s The poet’s appearance is noted in a Record of Family Faculties (Francis Galton, Macmillan: London, 1884), filled out by his children, which reports that he was five foot eight inches tall, with brown hair and blue eyes; “Erect, alert, graceful & gracious & gentle.” Fanny is described as five foot six or seven, hair dark brown, eyes dark; “Tall, dignified, beautiful, very reserved.” Her temperment: “Calm & dignified & self controlled. Great magnetism, but romantic & deeply enthusiastic.” Private collection. Longfellow’s physiognomy also attracted the attention of phrenologists: L. N. Fowler’s Illustrated Phrenological Almanac for 1859 used him, with two images of his head, as an example of the “literary faculties.” BC, Miscellaneous Pamphlets: Psychology.

  We were then introduced Charles Appleton Longfellow Letters, LP, bMS Am 1340.2 (3503), April
4, 1862.

  she enlisted as a private Charles Appleton Longfellow Letters, LP, [April 10, 1862].

  a letter postmarked in Portland Printed in Hilen, “Charley Longfellow Goes to War,” No. 1, 59. Hilen’s two-part essay is the most thorough account of Charley’s military service; this chapter is much indebted to it.

  Longfellow wrote to Rand Hilen 1993 (March 14, 1863).

  one of the great comic moments Hilen, “Charley Longfellow Goes to War,” No. 1, 80–81.

  Little Merrythought MS Am 1340 (165), Houghton Library. The Peter Quince drawings are deftly handled in Irmscher, “Longfellow Redux.”

  Its Revolutionary War details are fictionalized See Fischer, “The Union in Crisis: Longfellow’s Myth of the Lone Rider,” Paul Revere’s Ride, 331–35.

  As Matthew Gartner points out “Longfellow and Paul Revere’s Ride: A Study in American Literary Reputation,” lecture, Old South Meeting House, Boston, Sept. 20, 2000.

  the children’s book market A particularly striking example is Christopher Bing’s three-dimensional The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (New York: Handprint Books, 2001).

  a solid ground in biographical fact For the models, see Van Schaick, Characters in Tales of a Wayside Inn.

  Luigi Monti His unpublished, very lively memoir detailing his escape is in the Gulotta Collection, Houghton Library.

  an environmentalist before his time Longfellow and his children, for example, bought the Brighton Meadows in 1869, when the land was threatened with industrial development, to preserve the view from the Craigie House. The family later gave the land to Harvard.

  a tragic poem on the Puritans The complicated publishing history of The New England Tragedies is told, in part, in Tucker, The Shaping of Longfellow’s John Endicott.

  unstageable as drama Yet a recent staged reading of Giles Corey, which took about ninety minutes, proved successful. The play is much terser than Arthur Miller’s widely taught The Crucible but incorporates much of the same historical material.