Louisa May Alcott Read online

  Outside her windows, apple blossoms came and went, but for Louisa it was a cold Christmas Eve a long time ago, a Christmas when their mother, Abba, was still vigorous enough to organize the sisters to visit a poor family, bringing their own Christmas breakfast. Still, she resisted. The sisters’ experiences together seemed so ordinary compared to the drama and passion, the howling winds and demonic men and desperate love affairs of the melodramas, written under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, with which she had helped support her family for many years. “I plod away though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” she wrote in her journal. “Never liked girls or knew many except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”4

  Books often seem to have a life of their own. Scratching away at her little desk, Louisa was taken over by the story she was writing and did not want to write. The scenes of family life seemed to her to be dull and ordinary, but they fell into place one after the other. Even Jo March had something to say about writing: “She did not think herself a genius by any means; but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.”5 Soon, Louisa was at her desk every morning, and the lives of her sisters, partly remembered, partly as she yearned for them to have been, became more vivid than the Concord summer with its abundant wildflowers and heady birdsong. Deftly transposing the events of the three years the Alcott family had spent in the house next door to the house where she now sat writing, Louisa May Alcott found the pages quickly piling up next to her. Within six weeks, she had sent off 400 pages to Niles. Like Alcott, Niles thought the material was dull, but he said he would publish it anyway. They would have to see about a sequel. At least she agreed that he had suggested a good title: Little Women.

  In Little Women, the story of four sisters growing up in a house like Orchard House, the father has barely a cameo. Mr. March is away during the bulk of the action, and the girls’ growing fits and starts are handled by their beloved mother, Marmee, and by each other. Because of the intimate voice of the writing—it’s written in close third person so that all the girls’ deepest thoughts and feelings are revealed—the book sounds like a memoir. In some ways, with its emphasis on domestic drama and personal search and salvation, Little Women is the mother of the modern memoir.

  At the same time, Little Women is definitely fiction. Most strikingly, Louisa May Alcott is not Jo March. Jo is a rebel who is nevertheless beloved. Louisa was a rebel who often seemed genuinely disappointing to her parents and who found scant love from them or their friends.

  Furthermore, Louisa May Alcott was so dominated by her father that it is hard to unravel their lives from each other. As an infant, Louisa was subject to her father’s experiments. All through her life, Louisa’s father was prodding and bullying, commanding and occasionally rescuing, letting Louisa know what was wrong with her and telling her what to do. In every big decision she made, from going to Washington to be a Civil War nurse, to the commitment to her family that kept her from marrying and starting a new family, to the writing of Little Women, her father hovers in the background. His hold on her was incalculable. She loved him and fought with him. He called her a “fiend.”

  Yet Louisa had a stubborn soul and sometimes a sympathetic mother and sisters. She was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, because her father had won the job of running a school there, but she came to consciousness when she was three years old, at the apex of her father’s success as a Boston celebrity. Our earliest memories and our experiences as babies, before we can remember, are arguably powerful factors in the formation of our personalities. This “dance of the giant figures,” as the psychiatrists call it, can have lifelong effects that are especially resistant to change because the memories can’t be retrieved and understood. In Louisa’s earliest memories, and in the years before she started remembering, her father was a hero. During the winter of 1835, as she approached her third birthday, Bronson Alcott was one of the most respected and sought-after men in Boston.

  That winter the temperature in the city hit record lows.6 Shouting schoolboys had epic snowball fights on the Boston Common; and icicles covered the pediment of the new courthouse. Boston Harbor froze over from Hingham to Nahant. In a schoolroom on Temple Place with a single inadequate stove, schoolmaster Bronson Alcott was undisturbed. “I will kindle a fire for the mind,”7 he told his students. Even in the record cold, his fire spread quickly.

  Bronson Alcott’s new Temple School, his fourth academic venture, was more than just the talk of the town. Visitors from as far away as London came to sit on the schoolroom’s green velvet couch and watch the charismatic schoolmaster hold forth in his sunlit kingdom at the top of the building that featured high arched windows and busts of Plato, Shakespeare, Jesus, and Sir Walter Scott. There, the sons and daughters of progressive, aristocratic Boston were educated and enchanted by this dramatic character with wild blue eyes and a broad-brimmed hat.

  Most nineteenth-century education was memorization and punishment, and most educators thought of children as evil savages in need of civilization. Not Bronson Alcott. Seated in cunning desks, each with its own private bookshelf, the little Tuckermans, Shaws, Jacksons, and Quincys—the grandson of former President John Quincy Adams was the school’s youngest student—were entranced by this mysterious Pied Piper of a schoolmaster. The schoolroom at the Temple School was filled with progressive delights that had previously been emphatically excluded from education. Dozens of books invited exploration, a pitcher of water was always filled for the thirsty, the room sparkled with wonders: alarm clocks, decks of cards, an hourglass, blocks, and paintings. The students, boys in stovepipe trousers and wide-collared shirts and girls in dresses and pantalettes, were encouraged to sing and clap during frequent breaks from lessons. Instead of raising hands, students were asked to stand up at their desks. Twice a day a twenty-minute recess allowed them to run and play.

  The basis of Alcott’s pedagogy was the Romantic and revolutionary idea that children were holy innocents, able to teach adults important moral lessons instead of the other way around. Alcott believed that children were born perfect, as the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth had written in his already famous Intimations of Immortality less than thirty years earlier in 1807. Children, Wordsworth wrote, in an image that would help to change the world, were born “trailing clouds of glory . . . from God, who is our home.”8

  From the first, Louisa seemed to trail clouds of mischief rather than clouds of glory. As an infant, Louisa had suffered plenty of hitting and scratching from her jealous and obedient older sister, Anna, who was very good at escaping punishment. By the time the family moved to Boston and into a boardinghouse at 1 Bedford Place, the tables had turned. Louisa had become the aggressor in fights with her older sister; she suffered from “a deep-seated obstinacy of temper,” her father wrote; “she seems practicing on the law of might—the stronger and colder has the mastery over the weaker and more timid. She is still the undisciplined subject of her instincts.”9 In another world, what might have been called the “terrible twos” was diagnosed as a severe character flaw by the attentive Alcott.

  What could be the source of this two-year-old’s inability to act like the civilized visitor from God her father knew her to be? Perhaps, Bronson speculated, it was that her mother persisted in feeding her meat. Perhaps it was her coloring—Bronson believed that dark eyes and dark hair, unlike his own vivid blue-eyed blondness, was a sign of inferior morality. Subscribing to a repulsive, popular pseudoscience of the day, Bronson theorized that blond, blue-eyed people like himself were angelic and godlike, while dark-haired, dark-eyed people like his wife and Louisa were less elevated and further from heaven. Their dark coloring and olive skin was, as Emerson paraphrased it, “a reminder of brutish nature.” Or perhaps Louisa’s bond with her overly in
dulgent mother was ruining Bronson’s attempts to bring out the angel in Louisa.

  That angel was often obscured by Louisa’s hot temper, a trait she seemed to have inherited from her mother. Even as an adorable toddler, Louisa had the power to drive her father a little crazy. In the nursery, Louisa was the villain. He believed, of course, that spanking was a “brutal” and “barbarous” method, an animalistic and even impious method of punishment. Yet he spanked Louisa often, sometimes repeatedly. Although this sometimes worked temporarily, she became more and more rebellious.10 She was always the freer of the two sisters and adored her father’s game of letting the two little girls run around naked before getting dressed for bed. “I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state, because it was such a joy to run. No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences and be a tomboy,”11 she wrote.

  Bronson Alcott was an aristocrat of nothing but the schoolroom. He was born Amos Alcox to a poor farming family in Spindle Hill, Connecticut. His fire for educational reform was stoked at the dreadful local school he went to with his brother William. Bronson always loved books, but at the schoolhouse he and William were shut up indoors for the best hours of the day, lined up with all the other pupils on backless benches in fetid air. An automaton of a teacher dragged his charges forward by rote and punishment toward the goal of a basic literacy that most of them would never use. The brothers both quit after elementary school and went to work as laborers.

  The Alcox family had few resources, but distinguished connections. Although the boys’ mother wrote haltingly, her brother Tillotson Bronson was a distinguished scholar who had gone to Yale and was the principal of Cheshire Academy. Her father, Amos Bronson, was a country patriarch who had turned against the prevailing Calvinism of that part of Connecticut and joined the Episcopal Church. Bronson’s father’s father was also a distinguished man who had fought in the American Revolution, had seen General Washington, and had received his commission from Jonathan Trumbull.

  All this distinction wasn’t of much use to a farm boy whose principal tasks were herding sheep, planting crops, mending stone walls, husking corn, milking cows, collecting eggs, fetching water, and picking beans or whatever was in season. William nevertheless ended up at Yale and later went to medical school; he suggested many of the physical changes that Bronson employed in his schoolrooms. “It is certain at any rate,” writes Alcott biographer Odell Shepard, “that as time went by, the two earnest youths became equally convinced that there was something deeply wrong with primary education, and that they must do their best to change it. In the planting of this conviction, the little gray schoolhouse at the crossroads must have played some part—as a horrible example.”12

  By the 1820s, Bronson had left the family farm and become an itinerant Yankee peddler of women’s notions, going door-to-door up and down the Atlantic seaboard, drinking too much and building up substantial debts. A reinvention was in order. He changed his name from Amos Alcox to A. Bronson Alcott and turned his energies to education. As a peddler, he had seen the way the wealthy live—their airy sunlit rooms, their books and beautiful objects, their choices when it came to food. Teaching was his way to achieve that kind of life for himself and for his students. He embraced Wordsworth’s ideas and rebelled against the predominant idea of children promulgated by the great preacher Jonathan Edwards, who had written that children “are young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers.”13

  By 1825, Bronson’s career as an educator was off to a promising start. Although he had only an elementary school education, he was widely read and brilliantly self-taught. He established himself as the head of a small school in Cheshire, Connecticut, where he began to put his ideas into practice. This was almost ten years before he opened the Temple School, but his pedagogical methods were already in place: a physically comfortable schoolroom, a respectful attitude toward the children, an absence of corporal punishment, and a rule by example and affection. He even had a jury of schoolmates to decide punishments for their peers when discipline was necessary.

  Abigail May, called Abby or Abba, Louisa’s mother, came from an entirely different sort of background. She was the youngest daughter of the distinguished Colonel Joseph May, who had won his rank in the War of Independence, and Dorothy Sewall May, a cousin of the Quincys and the Hancocks. At twenty-six, she was officially an old maid when she met Bronson Alcott. Abigail had been brought up in a distinguished Boston house named Federal Court. Although her father’s once-great fortune was diminished, he was still a respected citizen, a Revolutionary War veteran who wore the “small clothes” of the eighteenth century—breeches and buckled boots—and went by the title of Colonel because of his rank in the revered Revolutionary militia.

  All this changed when Abigail’s mother died, and her father quickly remarried and turned Federal Court over to a new wife. In what seemed like a moment, Abigail May was transformed from the beloved daughter of a respected household to an unwelcome, aging spinster. Abigail, distraught, moved out of her family home in Boston to Brooklyn, Connecticut, to keep house for her brother Samuel May. In the meantime, the aristocratic, educated, and generous Sam May, interested in reforms of all kinds, had heard about a local educational progressive named Bronson Alcott. May had written Alcott inviting him to Brooklyn for what would turn out to be a fateful visit.

  Looking back, it seems as if Louisa May Alcott’s parents, Abigail May and Bronson Alcott, were made for each other. Their marriage and their passionate regard for each other were as sturdy and handsome as a Connecticut oak. At first this was far from evident. They met while Abba was at her brother’s house, escaping from the fraught atmosphere created by the new marriage at Federal Court. She was in flight from the strictures and customs of aristocracy; he was flying toward the same strictures and customs. She was a Brahmin princess; he was a self-made man acting his way into a role he had dreamed for himself. He was brittle; she was easily offended. She would inherit family money; he was an unemployed idealist. Still, both were odd, eccentric, and devoted to the idea of service. Both were committed to progressive education. It took two years from their first meeting for them to get up the nerve for a kiss.

  Bronson and Abba had many serious discussions about the state of education during that first visit at the May house in Brooklyn. Bronson, with Sam May’s help, landed another position as a schoolmaster in a Bristol, Connecticut, school. Again, he instituted the changes that had become his educational trademark. In what would become a pattern for Bronson Alcott’s teaching career, the parents and the community of the school were at first thrilled to have him as a schoolmaster, then nervous about his methods, and finally condemnatory. He was always asked to leave.

  During the ten months between their first two meetings, Abigail and Bronson exchanged increasingly intimate letters. In person, however, their social and emotional awkwardness took over. When they met at Sam May’s house, they managed to offend each other. “I went into Mr. May’s study to see a friend,” Abigail wrote in her diary. “He proved merely an acquaintance, whose reserve chilled me into silence.”14

  By 1828, Abigail had returned to Federal Court. Bronson was also in Boston. Once again Sam May helped him land on his feet, and he was offered the job of headmaster of Boston’s first infant school, on Salem Street. School for children younger than five was a revolutionary idea that Bronson Alcott embraced. Again he immersed himself in theories of education and traveled to New York and Philadelphia to visit other progressive infant schools, which he found disappointing. “The source was pure, but one tasted the lead pipe,”15 writes Odell Shepard of Bronson’s reaction to the new schools’ lack of originality. The schools he visited incorporated the principles of the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi and other educational progressives, but he felt this was done in a spirit of repression and regimentation. Bronson believed that teaching must be an act of love; teaching was a higher form of preaching. Oh how Abigail
May agreed! She applied for the job of his assistant at the Salem Street School. He asked her to withdraw her application because, he said, he wanted to work with her at a larger, better school he was already planning.

  By September, when Bronson visited Abigail in Brooklyn, where she had gone for the summer, these two dedicated idealists finally managed to connect with each other. On or around the first of September, Bronson proposed to Abigail May and was accepted. “I do love this good woman, and I love her because she is good. I love her because she loves me,”16 he wrote in his journal. In October he opened yet another school in Boston, an elementary school for boys.

  Although Abba and Bronson were now officially engaged, Bronson was no more in a hurry to get married than he had been in a hurry to propose. For one thing, his new school was attracting a lot of attention. On some days, there were so many interested visitors to the classroom that Bronson felt it interfered with his teaching. One of his favorite visitors was Frances Wright, a Scottish-born reformer who believed in free love and who was a follower of another education reformer, Robert Owen. Fanny Wright was impressed with Bronson and thought his teaching talents deserved a wider audience. She was instrumental in offering Bronson a better job at the head of a school teaching according to Owen’s principles. Bronson turned it down in spite of his friendship with Wright and in spite of the offered salary that was double what he was making. When he was asked to choose between financial advantage and his personal principles, Bronson Alcott always chose principles. He could not teach another man’s philosophy.