Marmee & Louisa (2 page)

Perhaps Abigail’s absence shouldn’t have surprised me. Invisibility is the lot of most women of the past. With few exceptions, women appear in historical records only when they were born, married, and died, if they are remembered at all. The eleven-page chronology of Louisa’s life compiled by the editors of her published papers mentions her father repeatedly but her mother just four times:

Abigail May is born

Bronson Alcott and Abigail May are married in Boston

Mrs. Alcott’s final illness begins

Mrs. Alcott dies

A woman who was pregnant at least eight times and bore five children was not credited in the chronology with even giving birth: “Louisa May Alcott is born.”
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One might infer that Abigail was barely present in the Alcott home and had not a thought in her head.

How is it that the woman behind Marmee, the cornerstone of Louisa’s most famous work, would have had nothing to say? One possible explanation is that Abigail is hiding in plain sight. As readers of
Little Women,
we feel we know Louisa’s mother because we know the mother in Louisa’s book. As a result, Louisa’s literary creation may obscure the flesh-and-blood Abigail.

There is another explanation for our lack of knowledge of Abigail, or so we’ve been led to believe. Abigail’s letters and journals were all destroyed, burned by her husband and daughter after she died. Louisa wrote in her journal in the spring of 1882, “[I] Read over & destroyed
Mother’s Diaries as she wished me to do.” Apparently, she and her parents wished to eradicate these papers in order to maintain the family’s privacy, to protect Bronson’s reputation, and, ironically, to preserve Abigail’s image as an avatar of docile, nineteenth-century womanhood. The biographer John Matteson concluded that “instead of weaving her mother’s writings into a published work, [Louisa] chose to commit the great majority of them to the flames.
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Her decision has cost historians priceless insights into the mind of an extraordinary woman”—an extraordinary woman who cannot be known. According to conventional wisdom, Abigail’s inner life was a mystery because she left no significant record of her thoughts.

The conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong. Louisa did weave her mother’s writings into published works. Throughout the 1860s, as she composed short stories, adult novels, and
Little Women,
she pored over her mother’s private journals, mining them for material. Her claims of burning the family papers are exaggerations.
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Louisa wrote to a friend in January 1883, “My journals were all burnt long ago in terror of gossip when I depart & on unwise use of my very frank records of people & events.”
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In fact, however, hundreds of pages of Louisa’s journals are in the archives at Harvard University, which holds the largest collection of Alcott papers in the world. These archives also contain hundreds of pages of Abigail’s diaries as well as thirty-six years of Abigail’s personal correspondence with her brother Samuel Joseph. These letters have “a remarkable vivacity,” in the words of Madelon Bedell. “In some ways, Abby was a better writer than her more famous daughter.”
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Cornell University’s collection of May Papers contains more unpublished family diaries and personal correspondence. Unknown papers of the Alcotts continue to be discovered. The historical society of a village in western Maine where Abigail worked in 1848 referred me to a local historian, who revealed to me that he had letters written by Abigail that year to his great-grandmother. In addition to visiting his farmhouse in the foothills of the Mahoosuc Mountains and reading those letters, I explored the sites of Abigail’s and Louisa’s lives in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, New York, and throughout New England.

My research exploded a number of myths about the Alcotts that have arisen as a consequence of
Little Women
. Unlike the fictional March
family, the Alcotts were homeless for decades. Abigail regularly begged for money from family and friends. Her marriage was deeply distressed.
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For years she functioned as a single parent, whose despair over her husband’s inattention, absences, and inability to earn a living caused her at least once to pack and move out with her four children. For Louisa, who was ten years old, seeing her parents’ marriage disintegrate motivated her to become her mother’s provider and support. For much of Louisa’s childhood her father, even when at home, often seemed absent. Her mother, in contrast, was always present, urging her on and serving as her intellectual mentor and literary forebear.

In addition to challenging the myths and misconceptions about the Alcotts and especially about Abigail,
Marmee & Louisa
offers answers to questions that readers continue to ask about Louisa. Why did she never leave home? Why did she not marry? Who was the real Mr. March? Where did Louisa May Alcott find the material to describe a happy childhood?

While writing this book, I came to see that many of the dilemmas that Abigail and Louisa faced in the nineteenth century were not unlike the dilemmas we face today: How to balance work and love? How to combine a public life with a private one? How to live out one’s ideals without doing harm? How to hold one’s children close while encouraging their independence? How to find a voice in a world that does not listen?

Marmee & Louisa
is the story of two visionary women, perhaps the most famous mother-daughter pair in American literary history. Louisa and Abigail were born into a world that constrained and restricted them, but they dreamed of freedom. The story of their struggle to forge a new world begins with Abigail. Indeed, we cannot understand Louisa without knowing her mother. You may find, as I have, that aspects of Abigail’s life are strangely familiar, as if we had encountered her before. In a way we have, through her daughter’s writing. The imaginative child of an inspirational mother, Louisa studied Abigail’s life and character, appropriated them, and embedded them in her fictional worlds.

Chapter One

A Good Child, but Willful

O
n Wednesday, October 8, 1800, in a large frame house on Milk Street overlooking Boston Harbor, Dorothy Sewall May delivered her fourth living daughter, whom she named Abigail, after her husband’s mother.
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“[I was] a sickly child, nursed by a sickly mother,” Abigail recalled, linked from the start to her own “Marmee.”

Dorothy Sewall May’s “most striking trait” was “her affectionate disposition,” according to Abigail.
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“She adored her husband and children.”
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This natural tendency was intensified because Dorothy had been orphaned at twelve when her father died of a stroke, a year after the death of her forty-year-old mother.
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Thereafter Dorothy had lived with her eldest sister, Elizabeth Sewall Salisbury. Elizabeth’s husband, Samuel, was a merchant whose apprentice, Joseph May, Dorothy married in 1784.

By the time of Abigail’s birth sixteen years later, the Mays had three boys—ages twelve, five, and three—and four girls: thirteen-year-old Catherine; Louisa, who was eleven; two-year-old Elizabeth, whom they called Eliza; and the new baby. Dorothy had no formal education and her husband had abandoned Boston Latin School in his early teens to work for Dorothy’s brother-in-law. Nevertheless, she determined to send their boys at age five to dame, or ma’am, schools run by women and then to “man schools” to prepare for Harvard College, from which her brother, father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had graduated. As for her daughters, Dorothy encouraged them to follow a year or two
of dame school with reading, singing, and sewing at home, where she provided tutors in dancing and music. The girls could read freely, for the Mays had house servants and a library stocked with the classic historians, philosophical works of Priestley and Paley, and the poetry of Pope, Addison, and Shakespeare.
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The year after Abigail’s birth, the family moved three blocks south to a “plain but comfortable” wood house with a large garden and orchards at No. 1 Federal Court, a “sunny and cheerful spot” off Federal Street that is less than a block from South Station in modern Boston.
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Around that time, Abigail’s frail, forty-three-year-old mother suffered a miscarriage that ended her thirteenth and final pregnancy.

At midday on Thursday, April 29, 1802, when Abigail was eighteen months old, her six-year-old brother Edward arrived home from ma’am school “full of glee” and eager to play, according to her four-year-old brother, Samuel Joseph, who was known in the family as Sam Jo. The brothers were close, Sam Jo said later: “We slept together, ate together, and he taught me all the sports. I every day awaited his return” from school.

Following the family’s midday meal, the two boys ran out to the garden, leaving their sisters inside with their mother. Edward climbed to the roof of a barn and pretended to be a chimney sweep. Minutes later, having concluded his sweeping, he prepared to descend from the barn by stepping onto the post of an old wooden chair.
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The chair post splintered beneath him, a broken spindle pierced his side, and he dropped to the ground. Screams from servants alerted Dorothy, who raced from the house, carried her six-year-old inside, and called for a bath. Servants rushed to the well and the stove. Not until Dorothy removed Edward’s shirt did anyone see the fatal wound.

Dorothy fainted, Sam Jo recalled, and all around the dying boy was “confusion and dismay.” Servants ran to summon the doctor and Joseph May, who raced home from his marine insurance office near Long Wharf. Amid the chaos Edward’s body was cleaned, dressed, and laid out in the best room.

“Some strange awful change had come over my beloved Edward,” Sam Jo said. “Eyes shut, body cold,” he gave “no replies to the tender things said to him” and took “no notice of all that was being done to him.” But Sam Jo would not abandon his brother’s body. He begged his parents to let him sleep with Edward one last time. That night in bed he
kissed his brother’s “cold cheek and lips, pulled open his eyelids, begged him to speak to me, and cried myself to sleep because he would not.”

The next morning the children watched their father place Edward into his coffin “in order that it might be laid away in the ground.” The parents and older sisters continually assured the younger children that “Edward is still living; he has become an angel and gone to heaven.”

Throngs of relatives and friends and Joseph May’s colleagues in shipping and insurance attended the funeral. James Freeman, America’s first Unitarian preacher and one of Joseph’s closest friends, performed the funeral service at home. Pallbearers carried the little coffin out to a carriage. Black-clad mourners followed the carriage on foot up the hill to the burial ground beside King’s Chapel, where Joseph was warden and coauthor of the new hymnal. Young men bore the coffin into the burying ground beside the stone church, while Sam Jo pleaded to see what they were doing to his brother.

His uncle Samuel May, his father’s younger brother, carried the boy into the graveyard and down the steps to the family burial vault. From the safety of his uncle’s arms Sam Jo surveyed the coffins of his brother Edward, his other deceased siblings, and his paternal grandfather, who had died in 1794. “Our kind uncle,” Sam Jo said later, “opened one of the coffins and let me see how decayed the body had become.” Uncle Sam allowed him to kiss his brother one last time. “Edward’s body is going to decay and become like the dust of the earth,” his uncle reassured him, while “his soul has gone to live in heaven with God and Christ and the angels.”

Over the years Sam Jo would recount this experience for Abigail, who was too young to recall the details. The night after the funeral, alone in bed for the first time without his brother, Sam Jo had a vivid dream. The ceiling of his room seemed to open, revealing a bright light. From “the midst of it came our lost brother, attended by a troop of little angels. He lay by me as he used to do, his head on my arm,” and said, “How happy I am in heaven.”

This dream recurred nightly until “by degrees” Sam Jo’s grief abated. “But I have never forgotten my almost twin brother” and the “heavenly vision” that provided “the deepest religious impression that my soul ever received.” That vision, he told Abigail, motivated him to devote his life to God.

Edward’s death caused other revolutions. Joseph and Dorothy May, who had lost five babies, were devastated. Dorothy drew even closer to her two surviving sons and four daughters. Meanwhile, their oldest son, Charles, an indifferent scholar, determined in his teens to go to sea. Charles’s departure when Abigail was small reduced the siblings at home to four girls and a single boy. This fundamental May quintet, as described decades later by Abigail to her daughters, would become a model for
Little Women
’s central characters, the four “March” sisters who share their remarkable Marmee with “Laurie,” the privileged boy next door.

Edward’s death forged an unexpected bond between little Abigail and her sole brother at home. A year after Edward’s death, when Sam Jo began attending school, two-and-a-half-year-old Abba, as she was known in the family, begged him to take her along. He and their sisters persuaded their parents to allow Abba to join them at school.
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By the time she was four she was learning to read and write under the tutelage of her seven-year-old brother, who delighted in walking his “darling little sister” up the cobbled road from home to Mrs.
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Walcutt’s Dame School on High Street.