Marmee & Louisa (15 page)

In the fall of 1836, to his delight, Bronson found an extraordinary replacement for Elizabeth Peabody. Twenty-six-year-old Margaret Fuller was the eldest daughter of a Unitarian, Harvard-trained lawyer
and congressman named Timothy Fuller who had given her a rigorous classical, recitation-based education at home. She was thoroughly grounded in Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian—more languages than in the repertoire of most educated men. As a young woman who had avoided “the feminine subculture of sentimentality,” according to a biographer, Fuller was able to detect and deplore the exclusion of educated, intellectual women from public power.
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“We women,” she would write in 1845, “have no profession except marriage, mantua-making and school-keeping.”
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She had learned of the opening at the Temple School soon after her father died and she accepted the position in order to support her mother and siblings.
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But she, like Peabody, would discover that Bronson never paid his assistants their promised salaries.

During the months that Fuller worked with Bronson, she continued Peabody’s practice of recording classroom discussions. Bronson’s freewheeling dialogues with the children about common words and religious concepts surprised and troubled Fuller. “I wish I could define my distrust of Mr. Alcott’s mind,” she remarked.
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“I constantly think him one-sided, without being able to see where the fault lies. There is something in his . . . philosophy which revolts either my common-sense or my prejudices, I cannot be sure which.” Fuller was neither the first nor the last person to struggle to define the misgivings that Bronson aroused.

Trouble began at the Temple School in the winter, following the publication of Bronson’s
Conversations with Children on the Gospels,
transcribed by Fuller and Peabody and heavily redacted by Bronson. Peabody had succeeded in moderating the explicitness of her descriptions of his teaching, but Fuller’s narration, however oblique, of his conversations with children about sexual reproduction struck most Bostonians as obscene. The exchange that prompted the most outrage involved a six-year-old’s response to Bronson’s question about the nature of birth. The boy said, “The spirit comes from heaven, and takes up the naughtiness out of other people.” Newspapers attacked Bronson for blasphemy. Strangers jeered at him on the street. Once again parents began withdrawing students from his school. By February his class had shrunk to twenty-five children, and four months later he had only ten.
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This exodus may have been accelerated by the Panic of 1837, America’s first economic depression.

But it was all painfully familiar to Bronson. Even after he had auctioned
off his books and the elegant furnishings purchased for his classroom and moved his few remaining students downstairs to the Temple basement, he was still more than five thousand dollars in debt. Fuller, Emerson, and other influential friends wrote to newspapers in Bronson’s defense. But six months later Fuller too left his school, moving to Providence, Rhode Island, where she taught children in a more traditional manner and finally received a salary.

Bronson became depressed. “The age hath no work for me,” he told Abigail.
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A man “severely censured,” whose work “threatened a mob,” he identified with martyrs for antislavery like his brother-in-law and Garrison.
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Feeling “doomed” and “outcast,” he said, “I see not my way.”
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Abigail tried to encourage him, hoping both to boost his spirits and also to motivate him to find paying work. Bronson felt he needed time away from her and the children. He spent several weeks alone at the coast and then visited with Emerson and his second wife, Lidian, at their comfortable farmhouse in Concord.
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Emerson’s advice was simply “Write!” This filled Bronson, who lacked confidence in his prose, with dread.
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Writing was no more likely to support his family than teaching had been. He knew he should support his family, but he had no idea how. In a sense, Bronson was as restricted as his wife was by traditional gender roles. Just as she was hemmed in by the expectation that she work only at home, he was constitutionally unable to assume the role of provider that society expected a husband to fill. He felt he was paralyzed, “an idea without hands.”

In July, while his wife, children, and mother, who was now living with them, remained in the city, Bronson resorted to Abigail’s “good brother’s household” in South Scituate, on the South Shore, where Samuel Joseph had recently assumed the pastorate of the First Parish. Samuel Joseph, Lucretia, and their three children lived about a mile from the church in a large, handsome eighteenth-century house between the woods and a river. While Bronson was there his condition improved. “Since I began to breathe this sweet country air, drink this pure water, and taste of my hostess’s wheaten loaf,” he wrote to Abigail, “I entertain the pleasing hope of returning a somewhat comelier specific of the man Adam than when I left you last.” Naturally, he did not drink alcohol with Lucretia and Samuel Joseph. “No need of resorting to the comforting little bottle that you and [my] mother put into my trunk, so womanly.”
He described walking along the river, “sitting under the shade,” and conversing with Abigail’s cousin Samuel E. Sewall and her brother.

The following fall Bronson had only three students. His “school in the [basement of the] Temple was given up,” Abigail observed, “and continued in a large room in the house” at 6 Beach Street in Boston where the Alcott family had reconvened.
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She suffered another miscarriage in February 1838, and earned a little money by taking in “six boys to board.” That spring, at Abigail’s urging, Lucretia and her daughter Charlotte, Louisa’s playmate, spent two weeks with the Alcotts, traveling to and from Boston in Lucretia’s private stagecoach.
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Abigail and her daughters spent most of the summer in South Scituate with the Mays. On one of Bronson’s July visits to South Scituate Abigail became pregnant once again.

Seeing that his latest school had failed, Bronson began to muse about moving to the country, perhaps to Concord, which reminded him of his “native hills.”
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There he could receive more “children into my household as boarders and pupils,” he told Abigail, although she felt boarders added to her housework and diverted her attention from her own girls.
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“I miss the influences of Nature,” he said.
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“The city does not whet my appetites and faculties. Life is got at too great an expenditure of labor.” City dwellers, he said, worshipped the “Mammon-King; [their] Gospel is of Profit and Loss.”
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It is not clear when Abigail realized that her husband would not or could not reconcile himself to earning “filthy lucre.” He loved what money could buy, but he hated the earning of it. During their four recent years in Boston, for instance, he had taken in $5,387 and spent twice that. Abigail, who had been raised to believe that a wife should respect and obey her husband and provider, could not forever avoid acknowledging her husband’s inability to provide for their family. Having admitted this, she would of necessity wonder, Can I myself support the family?

Hope arrived that fall, or so it seemed, in a letter from England. James Pierrepont Greaves, a mystic “socialist” who had worked with the Swiss educational theorist Johann Pestalozzi, informed Bronson that he and other English reformers were so impressed by Bronson’s work, as described in
Record of a School
(1835) and
Conversations on the Gospels
(1836, 1837), that they had formed an institute in his name. Alcott House, in Surrey, southwest of London, was dedicated to simple
living, vegetarianism, communal celibacy, and early education.
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In addition, a London publisher wished to reprint
Record of a School
. Greaves invited Bronson to England to visit Alcott House. Overjoyed, Bronson said to Abigail, “Friends in England . . . appear to take that interest in my labors which my countrymen have not yet shown.”
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She offered hopefully, “You shall cross the water to find the sympathy and appreciation denied you at home.”
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Still, the prospect of being pregnant and alone with three children to feed and clothe frightened her. One evening in February 1839, as her husband read aloud from his journal, Abigail erupted in anger. His descriptions of her were ugly “caricatures,” she said. If Emerson or anyone else heard such unfair characterizations, she would be embarrassed. She promised, “Those must come under the ban of my scissors some day.”
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They must have, because they do not survive in his journals.

In late March, exhausted from his teaching and the evening lectures for adults that he often gave, he closed the school’s winter term.
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“I need a short respite,” he said, so “I purpose spending a few days with Emerson at Concord.”
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Abigail, nine months pregnant, remained in Boston with the children from his school and her daughters, ages nine, six, and three. In a letter to his mother, Bronson wrote, “I am full of hope, as usual. . . . As to money, I take no second thoughts about it. . . . It only needs for me to be faithful to my principles, to reap not bread nor shelter nor raiment alone but, what is better, a useful name and peace of mind.”

The need for bread, shelter, and raiment did give Abigail second thoughts, however. Indeed she could think of little else. She was sick of begging for food and rent money from relatives and friends. When the girls needed dresses, Abigail sewed them herself. As soon as Anna and Louisa could safely hold a needle, she taught them to sew. The three of them spent countless hours together before the fire, minding little Lizzie and repairing their ragged clothes. “Needlework,” Louisa remembered, “began early,” often accompanied by literature. “Every day we sewed while mother read to us, [Sir Walter] Scott, [Maria] Edgeworth, Harriet [Martineau], [Frederika] Bremer, or any good story she found, also books on health, history, & biography.”
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This training “made us independent, not ashamed of work & accomplished in the domestic arts without which women are very helpless. The books so read are remembered with peculiar interest.”

Privately, Abigail’s worries seemed to intensify along with her expanding belly. Another child, however delightful, was another responsibility. Lacking household help, she arranged for her two younger daughters to stay with relatives during her labor and confinement. Three-year-old Elizabeth went to Grandfather May’s house, where servants could watch her.
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Louisa, now six, was sent to Cambridge to spend a few days with cousins. Anna, nine, could mind herself at home.

Bronson, unlike his wife, could not contain his eagerness for the next baby. His ability to reproduce himself filled him with awe. “My Body,” he wrote in his journal, “is an engine of marvelous analytic powers. . . . The Soul climbs out of itself, weaving its net of cellular tissue and incarnating members. . . . Fluids form solids. Mettle [sperm] is the Godhead proceeding into the matrix of Nature to organize Man. Behold the creative jet! And hear the morning stars sing for joy at the sacred generation of the Gods!” The spiritual aspects of reproduction, which he had discussed several years earlier with his pupils at the Temple School, continued to amaze him.
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“Life is ever throbbing in the soul of Man, and investing him with the immortality which is its essential being,” he went on in his journal. “In his fleshly heart the Universal Spirit throbbeth; and his life is summed up and numbered by the pulsations that stir within this central member. And here, in this corporeal vesture, doth the spirit first incarnate itself and display its subtle plying. From this, as from a fount, doth the Infinite gush forth into the light of Life. Behold the first shaping in the maternal womb, where the humanity of the soul is assumed!”

In a letter to his mother, to whom he described himself as a “Hoper,” Bronson exulted, “A young Hoper is on his way into the midst of us, and before I write again, will be a cradled Babe with a name.
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His sisters will jump for joy.” Thinking perhaps of God’s promise to King David to send a redeemer to save Israel, he wrote. “I say
He,
because I am to have a Boy according to the Promise.”

Chapter Five

This Sharp Sorrow

O
n April 7, 1839, Abigail delivered a “fine boy, full grown, perfectly formed” but dead.
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“Why,” she cried, “after nine months of toil, a severe and tedious labor, a yearning panting hope of a living son, [are we] pierced with this sharp sorrow?” To her Puritan forebears, a dead baby was considered a message from God that the parents had sinned.
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Abigail pondered the meaning of the “mysterious little being” that made her “drink from death’s bitterest beaker.
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 . . . Oh, for that quickening power to breathe into its nostrils the breath of life.” She could only “wait, pray, hope, live, watch!” For the rest of her life the anniversary of the stillbirth would give “a gray tinge to the world and my Soul.”