Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 20 (2 page)

[9.] Ibid., April 1865.

[10.] Ibid., May 1865.

[11.] Ibid., August and December 1866.

[12.] "Benj. Ci. Smith for Frank Leslie
to Miss L.M. Alcott,
New York
, 13 June 1867"
(Louisa May Alcott Collection [#6255], Manuscripts Department,
University
of
Virginia Library
). Smith went on to discuss
an apparent misunderstanding about "the amount paid per page. ... I was
not aware that any agreement existed between you and Mr. Leslie binding him to
pay $100 per story. ... To avoid difficulty in future you might mark the price
on the first page of the MS."

 
          
All
those stories were published anonymously, and all appeared in the pages of
Frank Leslie periodicals.
^[13]
Louisa had had dealings with the House
of Leslie before the August 1863 journal entry that announced the dispatch of
“A Pair of Eyes.” Actually her first known sensation tale had been submitted to
a competition announced by
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
,
offering one hundred dollars for the best story. “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,”
a fast-paced narrative revolving about the manipulating heroine Pauline Valary,
had won the prize and in January 1863 appeared in the weekly, where it was
ascribed to “a lady of
Massachusetts
.” To most ladies and gentlemen of
Massachusetts
and other states of the
Union
in those Civil War years,
Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper
was a familiar journal. Indeed, Frank Leslie was a
household word
.
^[
14]

[13.] For the original discovery of Alcott's
anonymous and pseudonymous stories, see Leona Rostenberg, "Some Anonymous
and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa M. Alcott," Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America 37 (2d Quarter 1943)-

[14.] For details about Leslie and his
publishing empire, see Madeleine B. Stern, Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs.
Frank Leslie (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953, 1970).

 
          
Frank
Leslie was also a pseudonym — a fact probably unknown to the author of
“Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” In all likelihood she never met the short,
broad, black-bearded newspaperman who exuded dynamic magnetism, although she
may well have seen his published likeness. Born Henry Carter in
Ipswich
,
England
, a glove manufacturer’s son, he had turned
his back on the family business and early evinced the artistic propensities
that would dominate his career. As Frank Leslie he pursued the skills of
engraving and pictorial printing for the
Illustrated London News
until
1848, when he immigrated to
America
. By the mid-fifties he had begun to
establish a place for himself in the field of illustrated journalism. Within
ten years he had become a colossus on
New York
’s Publishers’ Row.

 
          
The
flagship of his fleet of weeklies and monthlies was
Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper.
That weekly catered aggressively to most
facets of popular taste. Murder and horror, executions and assassinations,
prizefights and revolutions — every cause eelebre, every sensation, every
exposure — were grist for its mill.
Leslies
emphasis
was pictorial. His approach, since he was basically an artist, was visual. And
so his weekly ran just enough text to float the pictures that reanimated
contemporary history (especially its gorier aspects) for the American
household. In single woodcuts or in huge double-page engravings, the
Illustrated
Newspaper
reproduced for its vast readership authentic Civil War
battle scenes, volcanoes and earthquakes, private scandals and public
revelations. In addition, it ran the illustrated serials that lured the old
from the fireside and the young from their play — serials that appeared anonymously
under such titles as “A Pair of Eyes,” “The Fate of the Forrests,” and “Taming
a Tartar.”

 
          
The
remaining two thrillers in
A Double Life
were dispatched to yet
another Leslie journal.
Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner
was
planned, started, and edited by the femme fatale Miriam Squier, apex of a
melodramatic triangle, soon to become the w ife of Frank Leslie. This
fascinating beauty was also an astute editor, and she planned her
Chimney
Corner
as an illustrated fireside friend that would provide American
mothers with domestic stories, their daughters with romances, their sons w ith
dramatic escapades, and youngsters with adventures and fairy tales. On
3 June
1865
, in the w ords
of the editor:

 
          
We
present herewith, just as the aurora of peace irradiates the horizon, the first
number of The Chimney Corner . . . which shall be a welcome messenger of
instruction and amusement to the young and old, in the family and by the
fireside — that altar around which cluster our holiest and most cherished
recollections. ... We give a story a day all the year around, some to touch by
their tragic power, some to thrill with love’s vicissitudes, some to hold in
suspense with dramatic interest. . . . Come then, and welcome, to our Chimney
Corner, sure of a feast of good things
.
^[
15]

 
          
Part
of that feast had been requisitioned from the Leslie prizewinner Louisa May
Alcott, who wrote in her journal: “Leslie asked me to be a regular contributor
to his new paper ‘The Chimney Corner,’ & I agreed if he’d pay before hand,
he said he would & bespoke two tales at once $50 each. Longer ones as often
as I
could,
& whatever else I liked to send. So
here’s another source of income & Alcott brains seem in demand, whereat I
sing ‘Hallyluyer,’ & fill up my inkstand.”
^[16]
And so “A Double
Tragedy” was given a place of honor on page 1 of the first issue of
America
’s “Great Family Paper,” while “Ariel. A
Legend of the Lighthouse,” the author’s “second”
Chimney Corner
tale,
followed in July.

 
          
All
five stories in this collection reveal Louisa May Alcott as a writer sensitive
to the cultural and social currents of her time. She employs as themes art and
the theater — two lifelong passions — as well as the contemporary interest in
what might now be termed the occult. Always present, too, are examples of the
struggle between the sexes, reflecting the rise of feminism.

 
          
Alcott’s
preoccupation with the art theme is thoroughly understandable. Her sister May
was an eager art student, who illustrated her sister’s effusions, studied at
the School of Design in Boston, served as drawing teacher in Syracuse, and took
anatomical drawing lessons under the distinguished Dr. William Rimmer.
^[17]
Eventually she would go abroad to study art, and after her tragie death her box
of paintings would be sent home to
Concord
. Now, in the early 1860s, the two young
women shared their excitement over literature and art just as they shared
lodgings in
Boston
. Between May’s enthusiastic reports and her
own exposure to art exhibitions, Louisa May Alcott was enabled to inject the art
motif into at least two of these tales, “A Pair of Eyes” and “Ariel.”

[15.] Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner i
:i
(
3 June 1865
); Stern, Purple Passage,
pp. 45-46.

[16.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished
journals (by permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard
University
), March 1865, printed with
deletions in Ednah Dow Cheney, -Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters,
andJournals {
Boston
: Roberts Brothers, 1889),
'p. 165.

[17.] It is interesting to note that Rimmer
was drawn to Shakespearean subjects. His paintings include scenes from The
'Lempest, Macbeth, and Romeo andJuliet. See Jeffrey Weidman et al., William
Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,
1985).

 
          
In
the former, published in
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
in October
1863
,
^[
18]
the black-bearded
artist Max Erdmann (who, curiously, bears a close resemblance to Erank Leslie)
finds a model for his portrait of Lady Macbeth in Agatha Eure, whom he later
marries. Agatha, however, jealous of Max’s better-loved mistress Art, practices
mesmeric
pow
ers upon him and so subdues him in one of
Alcott’s more remarkable versions of the pow er struggle between man and woman.

 
          
In
“Ariel,” Philip Southesk, a poet-artist, sketches the nymph Ariel, making “the
likeness perfect with a happy stroke or two,
”
^[
19]
a tribute to economy in brushwork. In “A Pair of Eves,” Max Erdmann creates a
far more arresting painting. Erdmann is the artist incarnate, going far beyond
Erank Leslie or May Alcott in his devotion to a muse that was to him “wife,
child, friend, food and fire.” And the portrait of Lady Macbeth for which a
mesmerist acts as model sets the w'eird and sinister tone of this tale. Alcott
describes the portrait in detail: “the dimly lighted chamber, the listening
attendants, the ghostly figure with wan face framed in hair, that streamed
shadowy and long against white draperies, and whiter arms, w'hose gesture told
that the parted lips were uttering that mournful cry — ‘Here’s the smell of
blood still! / All the perfumes of
Arabia
wdll
not / Sweeten this little hand — ’”

[18.] "A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern
Magic," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (24 and
31 October 1863
), 69-71,
85
-87.

[19.]
All quotations are from the stories that follow, unless otherwise indicated.

 
          
Was
the portrait a copy, or a Louisa Alcott original? The great eighteenth-century
Sw iss artist John Henry Fuseli produced a pen and gray wash of Lady Macbeth
sleepwalking that has much in common with Max Erdmann’s portrait, including the
listening attendants, the gesture of Lady Maebeth’s arms, her long streaming
hair. But Fuseli’s work was in the
British
Museum
, which Louisa had not yet visited, and
unless she had seen a reproduction of it somewhere, she probably had transposed
her own vision of the sleepwalking queen into a net of words
.
^[
20]

 
          
The
vision was of course an outcome of Louisa Alcott’s lifelong fascination with
the theater; the theme of theatricality in
general,
and of Shakespeare in particular, run markedly through nearly all these tales.

 
          
The
plays the young Louisa had co-authored and coproduced with her sister Anna for
performance in the barn before the Concord neighbors were published after her
death as
Comic Tragedies
.
^[
21]
She
dramatized one of her early stories, “The Rival Prima Donnas,” and wrote a
farce, “Nat Bachelor’s Pleasure Trip” that actually saw a single performance at
the Howard Athenaeum in i860. In addition, Louisa Alcott’s addiction to the
footlights was reflected in her amateur acting in
Walpole
,
New Hampshire
, in
Concord
, and in
Boston
, and though her major role was that of the
Dickensian Mrs. Jarlev of the waxworks, she elocuted her way through a variety
of popular parlor comedies.

 
          
She
was, in short, stagestruck. In 1855, on her twenty-third birthday, she wrote to
her father from
Boston
: “I go to the theatre once or twice a week.”
^[22]
Three years
later she mentioned in her journal: “Saw Charlotte Cushman, and had a
stagestruck fit. . . . Worked off mv stage fever in writing a story, and felt
better.” And when that renowned American actress descended upon
Concord
, Louisa was lost in admiration
.
^[
23]