A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent

by Rybczynski, Witold

  British and European parks were generally estates that had been donated to the city, or private aristocrats’ gardens to which the public was allowed access. Birkenhead Park, by contrast, was designed specifically as a public park. Olmsted pointed out that the park was built and financed entirely by the town. He explained that part of the cost had been recovered by selling lots for private villas around the edges of the park. That citizens might build a park for themselves struck him as admirable. So did the fact that the park was open to all.

  I was glad to observe that the privileges of the garden were enjoyed about equally by all classes. There were some who even were attended by servants, and sent at once for their carriages, but a large proportion were of the common ranks, and a few women with children, or suffering from ill health, were evidently the wives of very humble laborers.

  Olmsted pointed out the irony that in democratic America there was nothing comparable to what he called the “People’s Park.”

  Downing had his own reason for wanting to publish an article on Birkenhead Park. In an editorial postscript, which praised the young author’s “clear and pleasing account,” he regretted that New York had no such public park, “no breathing place, no grounds for the exercise and refreshment of her jaded citizens.” This was Downing’s hobbyhorse. A year earlier he had published an article in which he complained about the paltriness of New York’s squares compared to London’s vast parks. Three months after Olmsted’s article appeared, Downing wrote a lead essay, “The New-York Park,” which spelled out his proposal of a great park for the city. Curiously, he seems to have been unaware of Birkenhead Park before reading Olmsted’s article. Although he had visited England the same year, likewise passed through Liverpool, and even met Paxton himself, the eight “Letters from England” that he published in The Horticulturist did not mention Birkenhead.

  Olmsted had discovered Birkenhead Park by accident. Three days after arriving in Liverpool, he and his companions crossed the Mersey to Birkenhead to start their walking tour. They stopped in a bakery to buy buns and talked to the baker about the merits of American versus French flour. As he bid them farewell he mentioned a new park. They decided to visit it and left their knapsacks in the store, for the park was some distance away. When Olmsted saw Birkenhead Park, he immediately realized that “gardening had here reached a perfection that I had never before dreamed of.” He excitedly sought out the head gardener and recorded the details that he would later include in his article.

  • • • •

  Olmsted was not just writing magazine articles; he had decided to write a full-length book. While he had been in Europe, he had kept a diary, parts of which, in the form of letters, he had sent to friends and family. He now gathered these, together with his notes, into a travel book. He was probably emboldened in this attempt by reading the numerous travel letters that Brace was sending from Germany to newspapers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Olmsted was also encouraged by his neighbor George Putnam. Putnam had terminated his partnership with John Wiley two years before and now published chiefly literary titles under his own name. He wanted to include Olmsted’s book in a new series he was planning to launch called “Putnam’s Semi-Monthly Library for Travelers and the Fireside.” Olmsted’s enthusiasm, as well as the vivid letters he already had in hand, had convinced Putnam. In any case, he was not taking a large risk; there was no advance, and the 10 percent royalty was to be paid only after expenses.

  The article on Birkenhead Park would become a chapter of Olmsted’s book. Meanwhile, he wrote another article, this time for a prestigious monthly, the American Whig Review. “A Voice from the Sea” is neither an agricultural essay nor an excerpt of the book. It is a spirited account of the sad lot of the working seaman. He had begun the essay while sailing to Liverpool with Charley and John. Olmsted skillfully juxtaposes episodes from that voyage, when he was a passenger, with his earlier experiences as a seaman on the Ronaldson. He includes a vivid description of the brutal flogging of the young boy. The tone is both authoritative and outraged. His condemnation of shipboard working conditions is powerful. He also has ideas on how to improve the situation. He proposes new laws, and paying overtime for longer hours. He suggests establishing schools for mariners that would teach practical skills, which, in turn, would make greenhorns more valuable, hence likely to be better treated. Such schools would also provide continuing education for sailors ashore.

  Like Richard Henry Dana, Olmsted sympathized with the sailors. Unlike Dana, however, he was not an idealistic reformer. He admitted that sailors were seldom saints.

  Suspicious, distrustful, often dishonest and hard-hearted themselves, the captain is partly right in thinking they would not understand, could not trust, and might fail to reward a worthy, generous and manly command. Trained like brutes, they must be driven yet like brutes. The old wrong has produced the evil, and the evil excuses the present wrong; and thus here, as often elsewhere, both are perpetuated. Such are always the hardest cases for the philanthropist, where heedless, fanatical, impracticable reformers are for ever making mischief.

  This underlines the complex nature of Olmsted’s mind. Now twenty-nine, he had grown out of his early, easy enthusiasms. Suspicious of facile solutions to difficult problems, he was developing a rare ability to see both sides of a question, no matter how opposed or contradictory—the test, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would later point out, of a first-rate intelligence.

  * * *

  1. Paxton, a gardener and builder of conservatories, would become famous for the Crystal Palace, which he built for the 1851 International Exhibition in London.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Olmsted Falls in Love and Finishes His Book

  DURING THE YEAR after returning from Europe, while Olmsted was busy with his book and magazine articles, he resumed his correspondence with Emily Perkins. She was the “fine girl” from Hartford with whom he had read Macaulay. It was not immediately a romantic attachment, judging from a comment that Olmsted made in a letter to Brace. “I doubt if I shall ever ‘love’ till I marry (or am engaged) but I shall not marry a woman that I shall not be very likely to love very dearly when I safely can. I do not know such a one [emphasis added].” That was written in January 1851. Several months later, after spending some more time with Emily, he changed his mind. That summer they discussed marriage, and before the autumn, they were engaged. The engagement was, at first, known only to the families, but in due course it was made public. The prospective bride customarily set the marriage date. Emily wanted to marry in the early fall but agreed to a slightly later date to allow Frederick to attend to the harvest. It was a brief engagement at a time when engagements could last years.

  It appeared a promising match. They moved in the same circles. They had known each other for two years. Olmsted was acquainted with several of the immediate Perkins family, and Emily’s first cousin was his old flame Lizzie Baldwin. Like Frederick, Emily belonged to Hartford’s genteel class of merchants and professionals. Her family background was formidable. Her grandfather was Lyman Beecher, her uncle was another famous churchman, Henry Ward Beecher, her aunts were Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who would achieve international fame with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published the following year. Her father was a Hartford politician in whose law office Fred Kingsbury had studied. The attractive, dark-haired Emily Baldwin Perkins was twenty-two, seven years younger than her fiancé. She was intelligent, well-educated, urbane. She was a catch.

  And then she got away. The engagement was made public in August, and before the end of the month, Emily’s mother wrote to Olmsted that her daughter wished to be released. Mrs. Perkins gave no particulars, but she asked to meet Olmsted in New Haven. It must have been an awkward confrontation. We do not know what caused Emily to change her mind. Her parents did not object to the marriage. Olmsted, who did not smoke and drank in moderation, probably had no skeletons in his closet. In any case, the upright youth was well-known to the Perkins family a
nd held in high esteem by Emily’s cousin Elizabeth Baldwin.

  It is not necessary to imagine that scandal was involved. Nineteenth-century engagements were terminated for many reasons. One young woman called off her engagement—to a Harvard student—simply because she felt he was too reserved and did not “upon intimate acquaintance become the more open & frank.” Another asked her fiancé to release her because of her own “moments of indifference.” Such accounts are a reminder that young Americans of Frederick and Emily’s generation considered romantic love a prerequisite for marriage. An important function of courtship, especially for women, was to authenticate the depth of this emotional attachment. Men considered the engagement a necessary formality before they could marry; but women saw it as a period when they could test their own—and their fiancé’s—feelings and decide if they would marry. At times a broken engagement could be the ultimate test—the serious supplicant was expected to prove himself by persevering and patching things up. This is unlikely to have been the case with Emily. If she had been merely testing Frederick, she would not have involved her mother (parents normally did not play a role in mid-nineteenth-century courtship). More likely, Emily simply fell out of love. Perhaps Frederick, busy on the farm, did not pay enough attention to her. Or it may have dawned on her that she wanted more out of life than growing cabbages on Staten Island. Emily did get married—only fourteen months later—to Edward Everett Hale, an ambitious young clergyman from Worcester, Massachusetts. Possibly Hale was the reason for the breakup, although the only surviving documentary evidence indicates that he met Emily two months after the engagement was called off.

  Olmsted’s broken engagement puzzled his father. Several months later, John Olmsted wrote to Sophia Stevens: “Pray tell me what it is makes Fred so happy since his disappointment, as it is calld? He seems like a man who has thrown off a tremendous weight. Can it be that he brot [sic] it about purposely?” Olmsted left no written evidence of his feelings about Emily, but possibly he got cold feet and realized that he was not ready for marriage. His convenient absences on the farm would have given Emily ample reason for doubt. But I do not think that he was as unaffected by the episode as his father supposed. He may not have been miserable or openly brokenhearted, but Emily was the last of his long string of youthful infatuations. For the next eight years there would be no romantic attachments, no angels, no “plaguy fine girls.” Olmsted seemed destined to become an “old bach,” after all.

  He must have felt left out. Sophia Stevens, the Olmsted family friend, was marrying a schoolteacher in Burlington, Vermont. Frederick Kingsbury was married in April of that year to Alathea Scovill, the daughter of a wealthy Waterbury industrialist. Charles Brace was still abroad, and still single, but he was in love with Letitia Neill, a Belfast girl he had met during their tour. Lizzie Baldwin, too, was about to become engaged. Most important of all was the betrothal of his brother and Mary Perkins. The circumstances were bittersweet. The couple had announced their engagement just before the European trip. John’s health had not improved as a result of his travels, however, and by the summer of 1851 he was visibly worse. Finally, the bleeding from his lungs made it impossible to ignore what everyone feared: he had tuberculosis.1 Nevertheless, Mary bravely stood by him, and they decided to marry that fall.

  • • • •

  The first part of Olmsted’s book, titled Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, appeared in February 1852; the second part followed in October. He dedicated the first volume to his mentor and friend George Geddes. That was appropriate, for this is not an ordinary travel book, but one intended especially for farmers. He devotes entire chapters to British agricultural practices: the cultivation of beets, orchard diseases, farm implements. His wide range of interests leads him to many other subjects as well. He writes about education, politics, culture, and everyday life. He describes how people dressed, behaved, and talked. He had already shown in his correspondence from China that he had an ear for dialogue, and his “talks” with English men and women of all backgrounds enliven the book and provide agreeable and often humorous interludes to the discussions of crop-raising and animal husbandry. The author’s artistic side is also in evidence—the books include a dozen attractive woodcuts made by John William Orr (who had illustrated Downing’s The Architecture of Country Houses) after Olmsted’s own sketches.

  He was a perceptive observer. The descriptive passages are vivid and detailed. His descriptions of landscapes are particularly successful—I have already quoted his impressions of Eaton Hall in Cheshire. Here he is in Chester, standing on the town wall with his two companions, looking down into the marketplace.

  Odd-looking vehicles and oddly-dressed people are passing in the street below us: a woman with a jacket, driving two stout horses in one of those heavy farm-carts; an omnibus, with the sign of “The Green Dragon,” very broad, and carrying many passengers on the top; the driver, smartly-dressed, tips his whip with a knowing nod to a pretty Welsh girl, who is carrying a tub upon her head. There are scores of such damsels, neat as possible, with dark eyes, and glossy hair half covered by white caps, and fine, plump forms, in short striped petticoats and hob-nailed shoes. There goes one, straight as a gun-barrel, with a great jar of milk upon her head. And here is a little donkey, with cans of milk slung on each side of him, and behind them, so you cannot see why he does not slip off over his tail, is a great brute, with two legs in knee-breeches and blue stockings, bent up so as to be clear of the ground, striking him with a stout stick across his long, expressive ears. A sooty-faced boy, with a Kilmarnock bonnet on his head, carrying pewter pots, coming towards us, jumps suddenly to one side, and, ha! out from under us, at a rattling pace, come a beautiful sorrel mare, with a handsome, tall, slightly-made young man in undress military uniform; close behind, and not badly mounted either, follow two others—one also in uniform, with a scarlet cap and a bright bugle swinging at his side; the other a groom in livery, neat as a pin; odd again, to American eyes, those leather breeches and bright top boots. Lord Grosvenor, going to review the Yeomanry, says the printer. His grandfather built this gate and presented it to the corporation; you can see his arms on the key-stone.

  Walks and Talks is more than the account of a reporter. The author has opinions on a variety of subjects. When he is not discussing orchard blight, he is debating prison reform with British jailers, or explaining the etymological difference between English as spoken in Britain and America. He is interested in social conditions. He scathingly points out that the circumstances of English laborers are more degraded than anything he has seen elsewhere, even among Chinese coolies. He does not neglect the tourist sights. At Tintern Abbey he finds the guide so irritating he does not enjoy the experience; he much prefers Winchester Cathedral. On the whole, he favors ordinary places, farmhouses, and country inns. He never hesitates to recount what he thinks are useful lessons to his countrymen. In Hereford, for example, a visit to a public park is an opportunity to remind his readers that “not a town have we seen in England but has had a better garden-republic than any town I know of in the United States.”

  The first part of Walks and Talks was also published in England. When the second part appeared, Putnam made available a single-volume version of the work, “a splurgy, thick book,” according to its proud author. There was sufficient interest that a second edition appeared in 1859. In the preface that he wrote especially for that edition, Olmsted drolly describes himself as walking on “one farmer’s leg and one sailor’s leg, with the help of a short, crooked, half-grown academic sapling for a walking stick.” Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England is hardly a literary masterpiece. But for its author’s later fame it would not have survived, and even so, it is little more than a curiosity. Although it contains lively sketches of both places and people, it is too idiosyncratic in its attempt at encyclopedic breadth and in its obsessive details. Moreover, its origin in letter-writing is often transparent: the narrative does not flow smoothly. But despite its draw
backs, it is a respectable first book. And Olmsted accomplished something that is rare for a novice writer. He began to develop his own voice. It is a reasoned voice, inquisitive and good-natured. The voice is often heard in his letters, and it is surprisingly authoritative, although without the irritating touch of pedantry that so often marks the autodidact. Despite—or, rather, because of—his unconventional education and youthful experiences, he converses comfortably on a wide variety of topics. No wonder that one of the reviewers of Walks and Talks referred to Olmsted as “one of our original young Yankee farmers.”

  The first prominent review of Walks and Talks appeared in The Horticulturist. A publicist would have no trouble finding quotes, for it is a rave. “Here is a book of travels with a smack of novelty about it,” it began, and went on to praise the author: “A very pleasant bit of travel he has made of it, with no dust in his eyes—for Mr. OLMSTED is one of the new school of American farmers, without a single old prejudice, wide awake on all questions of the times, and a believer in the largest interpretation of the future of the people.” The unidentified reviewer recognized the breadth of Olmsted’s interests and quoted at length numerous passages, both descriptive and technical. Downing accorded the exceptionally long review a lead position in the magazine. Such tacit endorsement was important. When Olmsted’s essay on Birkenhead Park had appeared in The Horticulturist, the forthcoming book was not mentioned and the author was identified merely as “Wayfarer”; his “A Voice from the Sea” was unsigned; an essay in the Hartford Daily Courant was signed only “F.” But when a second excerpt of Walks and Talks appeared in the December 1852 issue of The Horticulturist, both the book and its author were clearly identified. “Fred. Law Olmsted” had become somebody whom readers might recognize.