Marmee & Louisa (13 page)

That September, for the first time in more than a year, she and Bronson lived under the same roof, at a boardinghouse on Bedford Street, a few blocks south of Abigail’s childhood home.
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Within two weeks she conceived another child. Each morning Bronson rose early to walk four short blocks from their boardinghouse to the Temple School, as he called it.
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He had a large, elegant schoolroom overlooking Boston Common, which funds donated by his new students’ families enabled him to furnish with carpets, movable desks and chairs, and busts or bas-reliefs of his heroes Socrates, Bacchus, and Milton.
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Above and behind his own desk was a sculpture of Christ. His new students were three to twelve years old and mostly boys, some of whom would later attend Harvard. Three-year-old Anna Alcott often joined the class, which included the sons or grandsons of friends and relatives, such as the Tuckermans, who were related by marriage to Abigail, and Abigail’s cousin the lawyer and politician Josiah Quincy, now Harvard’s president. Everyone in town, it seemed, had a good word for the new school and its master, who reveled in his newfound success.

Bronson continued to use the Socratic method with his young students, according to Elizabeth Peabody. He would ask them the meanings of ordinary words and ideas—“What is a nook? What is the object of coming to school?”—which aroused class discussion and encouraged the children to explore their own ideas and beliefs. Peabody, in her
Record of a School,
described his style of teaching: “I am not myself prepared to say that I entirely trust his associations.
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But he is so successful, in arousing the activity of the children’s own minds, and he gives such free scope to their associations, that his personal peculiarities are likely to have much less influence than those of most instructors. . . . Mr. Alcott relies a great deal upon Journal writing, which is autobiography, though it hardly seems so to the writer. To learn to use words, teaches us to appreciate their force. And, while Mr. Alcott presents this exercise as a means of self-inspection and self-knowledge . . . he knows he is also assisting them in the art of composition.” During their collaboration Peabody told
Bronson he possessed “more genius for education than I ever saw or expected to see.
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I am vain enough to say that you are the only one I ever saw who . . . surpassed myself in the general conception of this divinest of arts.” While she disliked “some of his methods of discipline”—such as punishing a disobedient student by “making the child strike him,” to induce shame—she had “no doubt at all, that as far as regards this particular school, the methods have been in every respect salutary.”
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Boston’s embrace of Abigail’s husband augured well. She settled herself and the girls into new rented rooms at 3 Somerset Court (now Ashburton Place), behind the Park Street Church and near the State House.
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Her husband slept by her side every night, as he noted early one October morning in his journal: “My companion and the little ones lie before me, for I am now in the chamber where they repose.”

Proximity brought the family new troubles. Louisa and Anna, who for more than a year had spent little time with their father, became objects of his attention. Their behavior, especially Louisa’s apparent disobedience, troubled Bronson. At nearly age two Louisa “manifests uncommon activity and force of mind,” he observed. She was “much in advance of her sister” at the same age. Although at school he disciplined students by ordering them to hit him, at home, according to the editor of his journals, Bronson sometimes struck Anna and “particularly” Louisa.
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The polarity he saw between his daughters—“ideal, sentimental” Anna and “more active and practical” Louisa—matched the polarity he associated with himself and Abigail. Placid, blond Anna was like him, he believed, while impetuous, dark-haired Louisa was like his wife. One of Louisa’s persistent childhood memories was of her father telling her she was the spirit and image of her mother. When she was only a toddler he wrote in his journal that Abigail “has more sympathy . . . with Louisa” than with Anna.
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Abigail “comprehends [Louisa’s] mind more fully.” Abigail and Louisa “are more alike: the elements of their beings are similar; the
will
is the predominating power.” A generation earlier, in the May mansion, Abigail’s father had also reproved her for being willful.

It was not only Bronson’s daughters who received greater scrutiny. Living with his family opened Bronson’s eyes to Abigail’s apparent failings. Louisa and Anna conducted themselves poorly under his wife’s supervision, he felt. “Some habits, I regret to say, have been permitted to attain a strength and fixity that will require no small degree of skill,
delicacy, and yet force of discipline to remove . . . more than the mother will be able to put forth.”
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Abigail’s maternal gifts were compromised, he believed, by her vision problems and overall “poor health,” which denied the girls “that earnest . . . attention and sympathy . . . upon which the tranquility . . . of childhood depend. Morbid affections,” which he did not define, “have gathered around their hearts.” He was convinced that Louisa and Anna required “a deep and apprehending love” that only he could provide. To repair the damage done by Abigail, he determined on October 26, 1834, to “relieve” her “from the delicate and yet necessary work” of parenting, presumably by limiting her time with the children.
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“It is my duty to . . . act in the way of example.”

Abigail was distraught. She had accepted the limitations her husband imposed on her public activities, such as during their courtship when he refused to hire her as his assistant teacher. But she chafed at his attempt to control her behavior at home, which was, even in society’s eyes, her domain. Her own mother had had no role outside the home, but no one had ever tried to prevent Dorothy Sewall May from demonstrating maternal love, as Bronson seemed to be doing to Abigail.

That winter Abigail’s belly swelled as it never had before. The prospect of a third child pleased Bronson, who was convinced that this baby would be male. “I am more interested in the domestic and parental relations than I have been,” he confessed.
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“If the Divinity wills, I shall soon behold the little one, a semblance and reduplication of myself and an image of the Infinite and Unshadowed One.”
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On June 24, 1835, when Anna was four and Louisa two and a half, Abigail gave birth at home to a third healthy girl. She and Bronson named the child Elizabeth Peabody Alcott in honor of his assistant, and he began another “Record of this newcomer.”
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A month later, Bronson left for a week to visit “the scenes of my early life” in Connecticut, hoping to be “revived” by “the air of my native hills.” Back in Boston with his family on August 1, he accepted an invitation from Samuel Joseph to hear the English abolitionist George Thompson speak at Julien Hall. The small audience included “several slave-holders” making “signs of violence,” Bronson observed. At the conclusion of Thompson’s speech, vigilantes barricaded the door of the hall and shouted, “Hang him! At Vicksburg we would bring Lynch’s Law to bear upon him!” Samuel Joseph, in his clerical garb, briefly diverted
the vigilantes by walking back and forth in front of them, while other abolitionists quickly removed Thompson by a back door and drove him to safety.

A week or two later, Abigail informed her brother that the Alcotts faced homelessness once again. “Abba is in trouble,” Samuel Joseph wrote to Lucretia.
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“The house where they live is going to be torn down and they must move this week. Where to go to or what to do they know not. But as necessity will compel them to decide, I suppose that they will know in a day or two.”

Daily life was chaos for Abigail, who now had to cope with two toddlers and a newborn in addition to her housing and marital troubles. “I have been hanging on the most precarious contingencies—regarding houses—leases—auctions, help—money &c,” she wrote in early September to her friend Mary Tyler Peabody, Elizabeth’s sister.
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“Nothing is yet concluded upon, but that patience is to do her perfect work upon me and my soul. . . . I mean to get to housekeeping very soon when or where I know not—and I sincerely regret that that item is not settled. . . . We may yet manage it in the course of next week, you shall be apprized at the earliest moment of our movements. Something like domestic and social enjoyment is in store for us I am sure this winter—I feel it in my bones.”

Despite all her difficulties, her girls—two-month-old “Lizzie” at her breast and Louisa and Anna playing at her feet—were endlessly fascinating to her. Louisa was bright beyond her two and a half years. To illustrate this point, Abigail described “my Louisa’s definition of patience: Her father was eating a piece of Gingerbread. She wanted a piece of his (having finished her own). He told her she could not have any more until afternoon, and that she must wait patiently. Do you know what patience is? said he. Yes, said L[ouisa], it means wait for ginger bread.”

Abigail added, “I could not do better than that myself.”

Louisa’s precocity was also a cause for worry. A clever daughter augured a clever woman, which the world spurned. “I pray,” Abigail wrote to Mary, “that I may have reason to rejoice that our offspring are girls—or incipient women—but I do so dread the contact, the contamination, the conflict with the world that I almost dread a farther development of their virtue lest the suffering be the more augmented from the very contrast of that which is so [evil] in the world—vice in all forms and attitudes—ready to attack, molest, and make afraid” our daughters. “Mr.
Alcott would call this a horrid & skeptical and naughty kind of
assertion,
& cannot dignify it with the name of
reasoning
.” But to her more receptive, female audience, Abigail elaborated on her desire that women’s “capabilities are developed and educated.” She wondered, “Are we too tired and crucified [for knowledge]? We
suffer
because we
feel
and
die
because we
know
. Woman was told in the beginning that her sorrow should be greatly multiplied unto her; for what? Because she desired knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil.” She added, “I am not a great hand at doubtful points of disputation, as some wise-acre has it, but I say that I do think, and know that I do feel.”

Louisa had a vivid memory from this period of playing with her father’s books on the floor of his study. As a toddler she built “towers and bridges of the big dictionary,” looked at its pictures, and pretended to read it in imitation of her parents.
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If she could find a pen she scribbled on blank pages in books. Ever since, she said later, “books have been my greatest comfort, castle-building a never-failing delight, and scribbling a very profitable amusement.”

In keeping with the infant-school philosophy of the need for early education, Abigail and Bronson began instructing their daughters at age two or three in math, reading, composition, history, and geography. “Our lessons went on at home,” Louisa recalled. “On Sundays we had a simple service of Bible stories, hymns, and conversations about the state of our little consciences.” Abigail found teaching engrossing but overwhelming. Unable to finish a letter to her brother, she explained, “My children are importunate, or I should fill this sheet, for my mind is brim full and stirring with some great thoughts, which I have not time to define or express” on paper.
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Like a professional teacher, Abigail read and discussed with others how best to teach children. She believed in “the importance of
moral
education to the young,” emphasizing the human “
hearts
out of which are the issues of life.
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 . . . The very bud and blossom of our country is actually withering under the cold cheerless philosophy of ‘
breaking
the will’ and ‘
subduing
the spirit.’ ” She critiqued common-school teachers she encountered. One schoolmistress she observed in 1834 appeared to do “an immense amount of mischief by her influence over those little beings; her voice and countenance and stamp of foot [are] enough to make them turbulent and unhappy . . . as bad as having teeth drawn.
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She has no self control, and of course can have little or none over the children. . . . She has no more warmth or refinement than a polar bear.”

In addition to teaching them at home, Abigail and Bronson allowed three-year-old Louisa and four-year-old Anna to wander freely in Boston, as only boys could do a generation before. “I would rather a child of mind should roam the street and take her chance, than be under” a poor teacher, Abigail had remarked when they were even younger. There were risks to roaming the city streets, Louisa discovered. At age three, before she could swim, Louisa wandered into the Common and fell into the pond. A black boy saw her struggling in the water, jumped in, and rescued her. “I became a friend to the colored race then and there,” she recalled.
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Her mother often said to her, “You were an abolitionist at the age of three.” One night after dark the little explorer, unable to find her way home, sobbed herself to sleep on a doorstep on Boston’s Bedford Street. The town crier found her there with her head “pillowed on the curly breast of a big Newfoundland, who was with difficulty persuaded to release” Louisa.
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An almost identical scene had occurred during Abigail’s childhood, Samuel Joseph recalled. Not long after he and his sister Eliza had persuaded their mother to allow them to bring four-year-old Abigail with them to dame school, “she had become so eager to accompany us that she became quite a regular attendant at school.
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At length, it was regarded as a matter of course that she was to go to school as we [elder children] did. . . . One afternoon, as we were returning home with a party of our fellows and playing by the way, Abby slipped off into a side street, and went to find something curious.” Samuel Joseph “commenced a search, but it was in a direction different from that which she had taken.” Alarmed, he ran home. “Of course the whole family were sent in requisition to find the wanderer,” leaving him and his sister Eliza “at home alone to bemoan our carelessness and indulge our fears for the fate of our little sister. First one, then another, returned from a fruitless search, only to aggravate an alarm, and make more glaring the sin of unfaithfulness to the charge committed to us. Not until late in the evening was our anxiety relieved, when a young man, a cousin, came leading her in, weary and frightened, from a distant part of the city where he found her.”