Marmee & Louisa (26 page)

Abigail felt “selfish” keeping her seven-year-old daughter in Waterford, where she might be exposed to improper behavior, the exact nature of which Abigail did not define in writing.
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The spa had no provisions for children, and Abigail was too busy to care for her daughter. So she sent Abby May home to Massachusetts and requested that Louisa consider coming to join her at the spa.

But before Louisa could even pack her trunk, Abigail realized that the resort would not suit Louisa any more than it suited her. The establishment was improperly run, in her view, and her work was not adequately remunerated. Her salary was not sufficient for her labor. She was not a woman to abandon paid employment at a task she considered worthy, but she felt she had to leave the spa. The pain and guilt she felt at being so far from her children may have influenced her decision. “I wish I had staid with you,” Abby May had already written from Concord.
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“I wish you would come home soon; when will you come? . . . I wish you would come home.”

In late June, after sending word to Louisa to remain at home, Abigail resigned as matron of the spa. It is not clear if she received any of her salary. If so, she had already sent it home. To purchase coach and train fares for herself and her “helpless charge,” Eliza, she had to borrow five dollars from Ann Sargent Gage. On or around July 10 Abigail packed her belongings and led Eliza to the stagecoach that took them to the train for home.
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A happy reunion ensued in Concord, but a sad truth remained. The Alcotts’ situation was dire. Despite her sacrifice, Abigail had changed nothing. They could not afford to keep Hillside and had nowhere else to live. Over their eighteen years of marriage Bronson had proved that he could not support the family, and no one else had succeeded at providing for them in his stead.

On July 13 Abigail placed a five-dollar bank check drawn from the Concord Bank in an envelope with a letter to Ann Sargent Gage in Maine. “There has been no moment, my dear friend, since my arrival at the threshold of my Home that I could pass with you, even to acknowledge the obligation
I am under for your many favours during my sojourn in Waterford, and more especially to return your loan so promptly and kindly extended to me, in money for my passage.”
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Abigail felt “truly glad” to return to “love and comfort, two essential elements of my being wholly deficient at” the spa in Waterford, which “infringed too largely” on her physical well-being and “wasted” her energy. Her job had “made a greater sacrifice of home and happiness than I can ever be indemnified for, by any association with men and manners such as have presented themselves at Waterford. . . . [T]he calm peaceful loveful condition of my home will soon restore the balance of my mind and seered heart.”

Abigail described for her friend how she coped with the suffering that seemed endemic to women. “Despair is no paragraph in our chapter for the day,” she began, almost as if giving a sermon on the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

Our lesson is to do—and bear—toil and stress, and though [we are] doomed to tread the earth with the earthly, we aspire to carry our heads in the heavens with the heavenly. If we must deal with men, we will take sweet counsel of Angels. What a message is in the careless carol of the birds. They take no thought of the morrow. They garner no bread for their journey, yet all are fed. They know that the compassions of the Lord are enduring. And birds would not have them, if grains were not scattered by a gracious Providence for their busy bills to gather. I blush to think that it is man, only man that doubts, and trembles for his substance. Even the sparrow hath more confiding love in the Creator. If we do not already see our father in the vexations of our life, if we seek him in its distractions but find him not, let us trust and love, and he will find and bless us.

Descending from the pulpit, Abigail asked Gage when her adult daughter Rowena would arrive in Boston on her way to Maine from Washington, D.C., “that I and my daughters may see her.” This prompted a remark on daughters in general, a subject Abigail gave much thought. “These dear, precious jewels in which you and I, my dear friend, are so regally invested . . . bring a dower in their love, a purity in their gentle hearts, which no royal diadem can surpass in nature or brilliancy.” Mentioning that a Concord couple had asked if she could recommend
the Waterford spa to their invalid sons, Abigail asked Gage to “ascertain if they have a cook, or a presiding Genius of any sort in the domestic department to which I can look to secure to them the courtesies and comforts of life.” It may have been difficult for Gage to imagine a presiding Genius of any sort in the domestic department quite like Abigail.

A few weeks after her return from Maine, having failed there, Abigail sought more paying work. “I have an offer to go as Nurse and companion to a friend of mine in New York for a few weeks. I shall go if she can afford to meet my portions,” she wrote in September. “Anything is better than this.” Aware that the most practical place to find work was the city of her birth, she corresponded with her moneyed cousins and family friends asking for their help. She hated to beg but would not give up hope. “Despair is the paralysis of the soul,” she said to Louisa.
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“A mother must always find the way, because she has the will to do for her offspring.”

Louisa and Anna promised to help, too. Anna, now seventeen, began teaching at a school in Roxbury. Louisa moved to Melrose, north of Boston, to work as a temporary housemaid and laundress at the home of her mother’s cousin, Samuel E. Sewall, who had made a small fortune as a lawyer and agent for the Cunard steamship line. Sewall was famous in Boston for working always at a high standing desk, his partner recalled, “in the midst of antique furniture, old bookcases, and dusty books.”
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Elizabeth returned to Hannah Robie’s chamber on Beacon Hill so she could attend school in Boston, as Abby May would soon do. Abigail meanwhile traveled between Concord and Boston, seeking employment.

No longer the country town of Abigail’s youth, Boston was growing rapidly. The city had 100,000 residents in 1845 and more than 150,000 a decade later, due to an influx of immigrants from Ireland and Germany and refugees from the American South.
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The city’s first slums—in the North End and on Fort Hill around Broad Street above the wharves—provided plentiful labor for the factories, foundries, and shipyards of America’s fourth-largest manufacturing center.
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Overcrowded, dangerous, and filthy, these neighborhoods aroused great concern among settled Bostonians. “The dark lanes and alleys . . . are rarely cleaned,” a Harvard Medical School professor observed.
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“Their wretched, dark, ill-ventilated rooms are scarce ever washed. Their persons are foul. Their clothing dirty. Everything about them is most wretched, most unfit to
minister to self-respect, or to promote physical health, or moral progress. They become—are they not made—intemperate by such hard trial of virtue.”

These were the words of the obstetrician Walter Channing, a brother of the Reverend William Ellery Channing, in his 1844
Plea for Pure Water
. Until then Bostonians had relied for water on cisterns or wells, many private and some unlocked. Most of these wells were now contaminated by the privies dotting the peninsula. Rapid population growth overwhelmed the old system, which spread disease and was inadequate to quench house fires.
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In the fall of 1848, as the Alcotts prepared to return, Boston inaugurated a new municipal water system that pumped clean water from exterior lakes through pipes to the city. In October Abigail’s cousin the former mayor Josiah Quincy spoke before the grand parade to inaugurate the new system. Water was now a right rather than a privilege.

At the same time, prosperous relatives and friends of Abigail’s were collaborating to create a charity to employ her called “Dr. Huntington’s Society,” much as her bankrupt father had once been given a house and a job.
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But Abigail’s new work was more challenging than her father’s had been. As a “City Missionary to the Poor,” she became one of America’s first paid social workers, in one of its earliest welfare programs.
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She was expected to tend to the sick, find work for the unemployed, and circulate secondhand clothes among the poor, who were mostly Irish and other European immigrants and free blacks. She called herself a “sister of charity,” aware that she had long been gifted at such works. A decade earlier, while struggling to raise three little girls in Boston without an income or a stable home, she had been lauded by Elizabeth Peabody as “a visitor of the poor such as I know none other.”
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In 1838, as the Temple School floundered and Peabody attempted to establish Bronson as a minister to the urban poor, a scheme that came to nothing, she had written to the Rev. William Ellery Channing, “Mrs Alcott would be so invaluable a coadjutor [to Bronson in his urban ministry]! She could visit the families & hunt up the children. She goes into the Irish hovel & takes off her things, & with her own hand shows them by doing it herself, how to wash children, how to prepare food, how to nurse the sick. She thrives on such labor; her heart is in it; her sympathy for the poor is like Mr [Orestes] Brownson’s a devouring fire that can only be
quenched by doing the things she wants to have done.” Abigail’s salary, which ranged from thirty to eighty dollars a month, was sufficient in November 1848 to rent a house in the impoverished South End where she worked.
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Unable to find a buyer for her dilapidated Concord house, Abigail rented it to a tenant for a year for $150.

This change jarred Louisa and her sisters. Hillside had been their home for three years, longer than any other home they had known.
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Twelve years old when she had arrived, Louisa was now almost sixteen. Years later, though, she minimized the pain of the move. “My father went away to hold his classes and conversations, and we women folk began to feel that we also might do something.
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So one gloomy November day we decided to move to Boston to try our fate again after some years in the wilderness.” Before leaving Concord, the teenager ran alone up the hill behind the house to take a last look at the meadows and woods. Scanning the horizon, Louisa felt “the intense desire of an ambitious girl to work for those she loved.” She vowed to herself, “I will do something by-and-by. . . . Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!”

City life was “very hard” for Louisa, she admitted. “The bustle and dirt and change send all lovely images and restful feelings away.”
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She could not think clearly. She disliked their “small” rented house “with not a tree in sight [and] only a back yard to play in. . . . We all rebelled and longed for the country again.” She missed her “fine free times alone, and though my thoughts were silly, I daresay, they helped to keep me happy and good.
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I see now what Nature did for me, and my love of solitude and out-of-door life.”

Everyone in the family but her seemed to have a function. Anna taught. Elizabeth and Abby May went to school. Father went “to his classes at his [rented] room down town” at 12 West Street beside Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop, where he gave his conversations, freewheeling lectures on moral topics, to adults. Abigail “went to her all-absorbing poor.”
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That left Louisa “to keep house” at 29 Dedham Street amid the squalor of Ward 11, her mother’s district. “I felt like a caged sea-gull as I washed dishes and cooked in the basement kitchen, where my prospect was limited to a procession of muddy boots.”

At the same time, she worried about her mother’s health. Social work
was even more physically and emotionally demanding than running a spa. Hundreds of people came daily to the Alcott house for help. Abigail, who was open to reforms of all kinds, supported fledgling trade unions, attempted to reorganize city charities to increase their efficiency, and encouraged her donors to provide jobs as well as alms for the poor. “We do a good work when we clothe the poor,” she said, “but a better one when we make the way easy for them to clothe themselves. We shall do the best when we so arrange society as to have no poor.” She believed the world could—and should—be made better. Each evening after work, according to Louisa, “Mother, usually much dilapidated because she
would
give away clothes, [told] sad tales of suffering and sin from the darker side of life.” Louisa understood why her mother identified with the poor: she was one of them. Abigail’s “intense labor” to help them was “drudgery,” she admitted in a letter to her brother.
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“My life is one of daily protest against the oppression and abuses of Society.
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 . . . I find selfishness, meanness, among people who fill high places in church and state.”

The following summer, in 1849, Abigail was saved once again by well-to-do relatives. While continuing to work among the needy, she moved her family to live rent-free in a downtown mansion at number 88 Atkinson (now Congress) Street, on the corner of Purchase Street.
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The house belonged to her father’s brother Samuel May and his wife, Mary Goddard May, who were temporarily abroad.

Louisa and her sisters delighted in the comforts of their great-uncle’s “commodious” house. Their father appreciated the mansion, too, though he hated “feculent,” plague-infested Boston. Sometime that summer he became depressed again, according to his journal. He had a vision of his body, buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. To recuperate, apparently, Bronson left Boston for several months to stay in Concord with the Hosmers, who owned the cottage he had rented a decade before. The Hosmers cared for him and served him “peaches and Apples and Cakes,” which would return him to “wholeness,” he hoped, “restoration from the dead.” He enjoyed walks with Thoreau and long talks with Emerson. Now and then he dreamed of returning to Fruitlands where
“a man once lived,”
he wrote to Abigail, perhaps astonishing her.
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