Marmee & Louisa (27 page)

Abigail and her daughters returned to the slums that fall.
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At this point they had to move so often that Louisa and her sisters never unpacked
their trunks. Over the winter Abigail began to doubt her ability to continue her arduous work. Even if she did continue, she knew, she, Anna, and Louisa together would not be able to support the family. Moreover, her efforts seemed to address only the symptoms of poverty, not its causes. Her benefactors “are sympathizing in the details of wretchedness,” Abigail felt, while “I am busy with the
Causes
of so much poverty and Crime.
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Why
is it so? is a better question [about poverty], than what shall we
do
? The former implies prevention, the latter signifies the need of a cure. And for myself I feel that I have much to do to prevent myself from yielding to a false sympathy with the Symptoms, rather than making a stringent effort to overcome the necessity for so much begging and almsgiving!”

Abigail’s situation in Boston left her “despondent, quite dejected, feeble,” and “disconsolate,” she told Bronson after he returned from Concord.
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She was “embarrassed on every side, with no possible means of relief.”

He could not argue with her. “We are [sometimes] spared house rent by the kindness of Mr.
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[Samuel] May,” he said, “but we have no income nor present facilities for earning a support. . . . As far as I am concerned, [support] is a small matter . . . [to a] visionary thinker.” But “to the thinker’s family . . . it is . . . serious.”

Abigail accused her husband of callousness. She had heard that people were gossiping about his “implied indifference” in “permitting her to delve for the family.”
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He refused to discuss further “this subject of family destitution,” which in his view reflected the “dislocated state of our social system.”
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Aware as he was of society’s injustice, Bronson remained doubtful of the righteousness of his wife’s causes. Most abolitionists were untrustworthy, he confided to Emerson in 1849 after a lecture by Garrison at the Boston Athenaeum. “I scarce never meet a person of this temperament with unmixed pleasure.
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 . . . The spirit and grain of this class is essentially discourteous, and there is fight and desperation in the blood, manners, and speech of the creature . . . as if he were doing Satan’s behest in the Lord’s name.” Bronson then attended a speech by Garrison at Faneuil Hall not long after Daniel Webster had spoken before the United States Senate in favor of slavery. “A little more time must pass to enable the nation to discern the scope and tendency of affairs and Webster’s true
place, his merits and demerits as a statesman,” Bronson noted privately.
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“While I accept and am proud of the declarations of my friend [Garrison] who pleads the cause of civility and justice . . . I yet must cry out for the awards of justice and civility to Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and the conservatives of slavery even.”

Abigail, meanwhile, shared her deepest thoughts with the women, rich and poor, with whom she sewed. “You have come together this evening, my friends, to sew for the poor,” she said one evening to a group of her benefactors.
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“This is praise-worthy,” she went on, “but it is not incompatible with the swiftest stitching to deliberate well the principle which moves you to this labor, or the object you would promote, the cause of Pauperism and the best means for its prevention. For while we are doing the one, the other need not necessarily be left undone. And while you seek light to thread your needles, and patterns to shape your garments, let me help to open the shutters and spread the fabric of our social arrangements. We are all part and parcel of this condition of things, and
I
for one am a restless fragment and can’t find my niche.”

In the spring of 1850, while the Alcotts occupied a cheap rental as they awaited their return that summer to her uncle’s mansion, Abigail contracted the “varioloid,” or smallpox.
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Soon the entire Alcott family was afflicted. The four daughters returned to health within a few weeks, but not the parents, and Bronson reported that he was unable to leave the house for months. Louisa, as her parents’ nurse, found it a “curious time of exile, danger, and trouble” in which she feared her mother and father were near death.
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Bronson and Abigail survived, but recovered slowly. Their faces were still pocked in the fall. Abigail said she did not know where she might have contracted smallpox, but Louisa suspected it came “from some poor immigrants whom mother took into our garden and fed one day.” Similarly, in New Hampshire in 1856 Louisa thought her sisters caught scarlet fever “from some poor children Mother nursed when they fell sick [while] living over a cellar where pigs had been kept.
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The landlord would not clean the place till Mother threatened to sue him for allowing a nuisance. Too late to save two of the poor babies or Lizzie and May from the fever.”

This was the underside of Abigail’s charity work: she gave too much of herself to the world. Decades later Louisa would describe Abigail as “the maternal pelican who could not supply all our wants on the small
income which was freely shared with every needy soul who asked for help.”
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During famine, according to legend, a mother pelican spills her blood to feed her children, much as Christ sacrificed his body and blood to atone for human sin. Louisa, who felt obliged to repay her mother for her many sacrifices, may have resented Abigail for sharing her small portion with “every needy soul who asked.”

In the wake of the smallpox, one of seventeen-year-old Louisa’s role models died. Margaret Fuller had gone to Europe in 1846 as a correspondent for the newspaperman Horace Greeley, “to behold the wonders of art, and the temples of old religion” and “to bring home some packages of seed for life in the new” world.
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Feeling immediately “at home” in Italy, Fuller sent regular dispatches to the
New York Daily Tribune,
lived through and supported the 1848 revolution, and fell in love with a revolutionary named Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. In the summer of 1850, after Italy’s new government fell, she and her family boarded a merchant ship to America. As the ship approached New York City, it ran aground in a hurricane and broke apart. Fuller, Ossoli, and their toddler son drowned.

“It is too tragic to think of,” Abigail observed. “Just in the prime of [her] intellectual power. A Book born of her Genius, a Child born of her Love, all Lost in the Deep—Husband, wife, offspring, Book, lost in the Briny Deep. The mysteries of Providence!! I dare not utter here all I feel about it. Surely she must have shrieked, ‘My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?’ ” Some saw in Fuller’s death an eerie confirmation of the suspicion that America could not tolerate a female intellectual with a family. “Perhaps it was the most beautiful finish to a woman of Genius,” Abigail continued.
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Had Fuller lived, “care, want, cold, [and] criticism might have invaded her domestic peace or literary aspirations, and she might have become the wretch of outraged genius, or disappointed affection. . . . It is well she rests from trials and labours!”

But Louisa could not rest. In July and August she taught young children at a school in Boston. “School is hard work,” she said, “and I feel as though I should like to run away from it.” Her students “seem happy, and learn fast, so I am encouraged.” But she “missed Anna so much” she was “very blue. I guess this is the teaching I need, for as a
school-marm
I must behave myself and guard my tongue and temper carefully, and set an example of sweet manners.”
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She wrote to a friend, “I . . . prefer pen & ink to birch & book, for my imaginary children are much easier to
manage than living responsibilities.”
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Louisa’s students “seem to love her exceedingly,” Abigail observed. On September 2, 1850, Bronson noted that he “passed the morning in Louisa’s school in Suffolk Street.” He read from
Pilgrim’s Progress
to her students and admitted to himself, “I never go into a school without some regrets that I may not be there at my post. Had I a hundred and more little ones to meet daily, then would my cup be filled to overflowing, for the pleasure it would give me.”

Meanwhile, Abigail, recognizing that she was no longer fit to continue the strenuous work of a “sister of Charity,” decided that fall to open in her house an intelligence office, or employment agency for domestic servants, which she called the Ladies’ Help Exchange. She advertised “the best American and Foreign Help . . . accomplished cooks, good parlor and chamber girls, nursery maids, seamstresses, toilette women, and dress-makers” for terms of six months.
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The Alcotts now occupied a rented house at 50 High Street, a tree-lined road above the mercantile offices along the wharves. Louisa called her mother’s office “a shelter for lost girls, abused wives, friendless children, and weak or wicked men.”
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Several of their cousins opined that this work was beneath a woman of Abigail’s background and stature. “I have outlived the flummery of that,” Abigail replied.
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“If I did not think that I was eminently qualified to extend to the one [the domestic servant] the protection they need in this exacting and cruel work, and to the other [the servant’s employer] the agency they require to place the best adapted to each family . . . I should turn in disgust from an occupation which absorbs time, quiet, and domestic privacy.”

The irony of the Alcotts’ situation in Boston was not lost on Louisa. A few blocks from Abigail’s cozy girlhood home, surrounded by their cousins’ mansions, the Alcotts were destitute and ignored by most of their wealthy relatives. Louisa sewed, taught, and did housework. She stole moments to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s new novel,
The Scarlet Letter
—“my favorite [as] I like ‘lurid’ things, if true and strong also”—and her mother’s more “wholesome” favorite, the novels of Fredrika Bremer. Louisa continued to write, in order, she told Abigail, to have “something to show that the time has not been wasted. Seventeen years have I lived, and yet so little do I know, and so much remains to be done before I begin to be what I desire—a truly good and useful woman”—like Abigail. Louisa confided in her journal, “I can’t talk to any one but
mother about my troubles, and she has so many now to bear I try not to add any more. I know God is always ready to hear, but heaven’s so far away in the city, and I so heavy I can’t fly up to find Him.”

In this moment of doubt Louisa composed a poem on “FAITH” that may seem ironic now:

Oh, when the heart is full of fears

And the way seems dim to heaven . . .

Let not temptation vanquish thee,

And the father will provide.

It was likely the High Street rental in which Louisa, just eighteen years old, completed her first novel,
The Inheritance
.
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The novel concerns the complicated legacy of a rich, noble family. Its heroine is an orphaned young woman, Edith Adelon, whom the rich family adopts but mistreats. When Edith is revealed to be the true inheritor of the family’s estate, she refuses to accept her inheritance, considering herself unworthy. She even throws into a fire the document proving her right to the estate, much as Louisa would later destroy family papers she deemed embarrassing. All that Edith desires, she explains to an older woman of the family, is to “call you mother and be a faithful, loving child, for you can never know how sad it is to be so young and yet so utterly alone.” One’s noblest inheritance, Edith realizes, is one’s family. This was a message to which Louisa would return again and again, and in essence it was the story of her life. As a gifted writer Louisa was herself the inheritor of an intellectual estate, some combination of her father’s charisma and her mother’s eloquence. But she, like Edith Adelon, her first literary alter ego, chooses or feels obliged to deny herself the fruits of this inheritance and instead to give it up for the good of her family.

For years Louisa had felt duty-bound to make her mother happy by providing for her. Two years earlier, as she began to conceive
The Inheritance,
at Hillside, she had described her life’s goal as making enough money “to pay all the debts, fix the house . . . and keep the old folks cosy.” She intended to accomplish this by emulating her mother, who spent most of her days working with her hands. “All the philosophy in
our house is not in the study,” Louisa once said, thinking of her father’s room. “A good deal is in the kitchen, where a fine old lady thinks high thoughts and does kind deeds while she cooks and scrubs.”

Her father was still distant and critical of her. In 1850, after reading through her and Anna’s journals, he made a stinging comparison between his eldest daughters. Anna’s journal concerned “other people,” whereas Louisa’s journal was “about herself.” Louisa was hurt but conceded the truth of her father’s remark. Writing did help her to understand and control her emotions, which was one reason she loved to write. “I don’t
talk
about myself; yet [I] must always think of the willful, moody girl I try to manage, and in my journal I write of her to see how she gets on.”
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Writing served, in her mother’s words, as a “safety valve” for her passionate feelings.
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If journal writing was therapeutic, story writing was even more so, for it allowed her to let her imagination go wherever it liked. Stories and poems allowed her to explore her self, as her mother had said, her sins as well as her gifts. “[I try to] keep down vanity about my long hair, my well-shaped head, and my good nose,” the teenager admitted. “In the street I try not to covet fine things.
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My quick tongue is always getting me into trouble, and my moodiness makes it hard to be cheerful when I think how poor we are, how much worry it is to live, and how many things I long to do I never can.” Louisa’s life was so difficult that “every day is a battle, and I’m so tired I don’t want to live; only it’s cowardly to die till you have done something.”