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Bronson Alcott

May Alcott, The Real Amy, Always in the Real Jo’s Shadow

May Alcott, the real Amy March in Louisa May Alcott’s semi-autobiographical novel Little Women, struggled all her life to win success as an artist.

She stood on the cusp of fulfilling her dream when she died before turning 40. She had published a travel guide for American women to study art in Europe. And she had beaten out Mary Cassatt for a spot in the Paris Salon.

May Alcott

But May Alcott would always be defined by her oldest sister: first as the least likable March sister, Amy, and second as the younger sister of Jo March, Louisa May Alcott in real lilfe.

May Alcott

Abigail May Alcott was born July 26, 1840 into the eccentric – today we might say ‘progressive’ — Alcott family. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a hopelessly improvident romantic, passionate about social justice and education. Her mother, Abigail, kept the family financially afloat while advocating women’s rights.

She was Louisa May Alcott’s youngest sister. Named after her mother, her family called her Abba and then Abby. In her 20s, she asked to be called May, and her big sister gave her Little Women character an anagram — Amy.

The vain and self-absorbed Amy “was never so happy as when copying flowers, designing fairies, or illustrating stories with queer specimens of art,” wrote Louisa.

Struggles

The family struggled to survive until Louisa had her blockbuster hit with Little Women. The four Alcott daughters worked as teachers, governesses and servants to support the family, May worked as a teacher at the first Kindergarten founded by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody for a month; later she taught art at the Concord school run by her father’s friend Franklin Sanborn.

Despite her sex and her family’s poverty, she managed to piece together an artistic education. She briefly studied art from three prominent Boston artists: William Rimmer, William Morris Hunt and David Claypoole Johnston.

By 1868, she offered five or six classes in art. Daniel Chester French, who designed the Lincoln Memorial, studied under her.

That year, she illustrated Little Women. But critics panned her work as amateurish and anatomically incorrect. They were right. As a woman, May couldn’t study the human figure. She realized she’d gotten all the art training available in Boston, and dreamed of Europe, with its museums, teachers and opportunities to exhibit in prestigious venue.

May Alcott’s illustrations for Little Women did not go over well with critics.

Europe

Then May and Louisa got the opportunity to go to Europe as travel companions to a wealthy family friend. May developed the confidence to venture out in foreign cities alone, though she carried a dagger with her.

Toward the end of their trip In London, May Alcott found a watercolor teacher under whom she wanted to study. Louisa, flush with cash from Little Women, paid for her to stay on.

May Alcott returned to Concord to take care of family responsibilities – and allow Louisa to write. But soon she was back in Europe, again, thanks to Louisa’s largesse.

She returned home a second time, and established a free art center in Concord, which won her praise from her mother. “Noble girl,” wrote Abigail Alcott.

May later encouraged women of modest means like herself to travel to Europe to pursue an art career.

Third Trip

She began to come into her own on her third trip to Europe. She wrote a travel guide, released by her sister’s publisher.

Studying Art Abroad, and How to Do It Cheaply, advocated equal opportunity in art training for women.

“Art is so over-talked and over-written at the present time,” May Alcott wrote in her first chapter, “but none of these writers report the actual cost of living, instruction, or rent of studio abroad; or how one in search of such can most easily and economically obtain them, in order to realize the desire of one’s heart.”

Her art had developed beyond the student exercises she produced under her teachers and she began to enjoy some success.

In 1877, the Paris Salon selected a still life she submitted – over the work of Mary Cassatt.

La Negresse by May Alcott Nieriker

May Alcott Nieriker

The next year, at the age of 38, her life took a turn. She married Ernest Nieriker, a 22-year-old Swiss tobacco merchant, and they moved to a Paris suburb. According to Louisa, she seemed so happy her family couldn’t object to her marrying someone 16 years younger.

The next year, the prestigious Paris Salon again accepted her work, the study, La Negresse.

Watercolor of Orchard House by May Alcott

But then she got pregnant, and she died in childbirth at the age of 39 on Dec. 29, 1879. Her husband gave their daughter, Louisa or Lulu, to Aunt Louisa to raise.

Today, May Alcott is remembered as the model for Amy March, not for her art nor for her advocacy for women’s artists. Most of her art is exhibited at Orchard House, the girls’ childhood home, billed as the Little Women Museum.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Joseph Palmer, Fashion Criminal, Persecuted for Wearing a Beard

In 1830, Joseph Palmer wore a long, flowing beard, considered such a fashion crime then that men attacked him and local authorities threw him in jail.

For more than a century, men had considered facial hair a fashion “don’t.” Since 1720, only Jewish-American men wore beards and moustaches. And Joseph Palmer.

Joseph Palmer was born in 1789 in Notown, a village between Leominster and Fitchburg, Mass., and fought in the War of 1812.

He was described as “an honest, kindly man and good citizen, deeply religious but tolerant, a man of many intellectual interests.”

People considered him eccentric. He wouldn’t serve rum to his hired farmhands because of his belief in temperance. And at the age of 40, he decided to emulate Moses and Jesus by growing a beard.

Joseph Palmer.

Joseph Palmer, Beard Wearer

People harassed and mocked him for wearing a beard. A minister told him he looked like the devil, and he replied, “Mr. Trask, are you not mistaken in your comparison of personages? I have never seen a picture of the ruler of the sulfurous regions with much of a beard, but if I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard not unlike mine.”

One day in May 1830, Joseph Palmer went to a Fitchburg hotel to deliver meat and cucumbers. Four men approached him with scissors and razors and tried to cut off his beard. Palmer fought back, cutting two of the men’s legs with his jackknife. For defending himself, local authorities arrested him and charged him with unprovoked assault. Judge David Brigham ordered him to pay a $10 fine, $40 in court fees and a $700 bond. Palmer chose to go to the Worcester County Jail instead.

For the first few weeks in jail, he took sick. His jailers beat him, starved him and put him in solitary confinement for months. The other prisoners tried to cut off his beard.

But Joseph Palmer managed to make life difficult for his persecutors. He wrote letters to the Worcester County sheriff complaining of his ill treatment. Once he even sent him all the food he’d been given in a day to show how little he was fed. He also sent letters to the local newspapers, which picked them up.

His case began to embarrass the county, and several delegations came to the jail to ask him to pay his fine and leave. Judge David Brigham visited him with a letter from his mother, begging him to come home. Still he refused. Finally his jailers carried him out of the jail in a chair and set him on the sidewalk.

Fruitlands

The story doesn’t quite end there. Joseph Palmer began to advocate prison reform and an end to slavery. He attended a convention of philanthropists in Boston, where he met William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott.

Farmhouse at Fruitlands

He followed Alcott, his daughter Louisa May Alcott and 12 others in founding the utopian community Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass. No one else had any farming experience, and he kept Fruitlands going as long as it did.

When the commune broke up seven months later, Joseph Palmer bought the land and farmed it. He and his wife Nancy welcomed the hoboes, writers and reformers who came to visit over the next 20 years. Neighbors called it ‘Old Palmer’s Home for Tramps.’

Joseph Palmer died in 1873, when beards had once again become fashionable.

Gravestone of Joseph Palmer

A bas-relief of Palmer and his beard are carved into his tombstone in the Evergreen Cemetery in Leominster, Mass. The inscription reads,

Persecuted for wearing the beard.

This story was updated in 2022. Photo of Fruitlands farmhouse by By victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40800910. Photo of Palmer’s grave by romana klee via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0.

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Louisa May Alcott Shakes Off the Blues

One day in 1857, Louisa May Alcott walked to the Mill Dam in Boston’s Back Bay, stared into the Charles River and thought about throwing herself into it. She was 24, poor, discouraged and unable to find a job to help support her family.

Louisa May Alcott

Looking into the river, she talked herself out of suicide. In a letter to her family, she wrote that it

…seemed so mean to turn & run away before the battle was over that I went home, set my teeth & vowed I’d make things work in spite of the world, the flesh & the devil.

She resolved ‘to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.’

A decade later, Little Women brought her fame and fortune. But not before her beloved sister died, the Civil War broke out and she developed a debilitating chronic illness.

Growing Up

Louisa May Alcott was born in what is now Philadelphia on Nov. 29, 1832, her father’s 33^rd birthday. Like Jo March, the main character in Little Women, she was the second of four sisters. Like Jo, she was a tomboy. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters,” she once wrote. Her mother, Abigail May, was the model for Marmee.

Louisa May Alcott wrote her father out of Little Women, sending the Father March character off to the Civil War. She probably knew Bronson Alcott, a 19^th century hippie, wasn’t quite ready for prime time.

Bronson Alcott abandoned his first career as a traveling salesman because he thought it would ruin his soul. He became a vegan and turned to teaching. He once lost all of his students after admitting a young African-American girl 25 years before slavery was abolished. Alcott also started a Transcendentalist utopia called Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass., but that, like so many of his ventures, failed.

Growing Up

When Louisa May Alcott was two, the family moved to Boston. Much of her life was spent in Concord, Mass., where she knew many of the household names of the 19^th century. William Lloyd Garrison was a close family friend after he, her parents and a few others formed the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. She knew Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Elizabeth Peabody boarded with the Alcotts, and John Brown’s daughter lived with them after Brown was hanged. Nathanael Hawthorne was a neighbor who didn’t get along with her father, Henry David Thoreau was her schoolteacher and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived next door. Bronson Alcott’s teaching assistants included Margaret Fuller and Dorothea Dix.

For all that proximity to fame, the Alcotts struggled to survive. Alcott believed in the ‘sweetness of self denial’ — a convenient philosophy for someone who couldn’t support his wife and four daughters. Their poverty combined with Bronson Alcott’s ideas about nutrition meant their diet consisted of unleavened bread, porridge, potatoes, squash, rice, graham meal and water. Sometimes Louisa May and her sisters went hungry. One year, they ate apple pudding for their Thanksgiving dinner.

Art Imitates Life

Louisa May Alcott 1940 commemorative stamp

At an early age, Louisa May Alcott went to work to help support her family. There weren’t many jobs available to women then, and none of her jobs paid well. She worked as a companion to invalids, as a maid, as a seamstress, as a teacher, which she disliked. She later wrote a semi-autobiographical book about those jobs called Work, A Story of Experience.

In Work, Christie Devon, her main character, can’t find work and thinks about killing herself. Christie stands on a bridge, looking down at swirling black water, and says to herself, “I must go.” An old friend happens to pass by and saves her from herself.

In real life, Louisa May Alcott walked away from the Mill Dam and started going to Sunday meeting. She followed the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who preached a message of social activism. One Sunday, Parker preached a sermon called ‘Laborious Young Women’ in which he advised, Don’t be too proud to ask, and accept the humblest work till you can find the task you want.

Louisa May Alcott presented herself at his door. Parker wasn’t home, but his wife was. She put her in touch with a woman named Hannah Stevenson, who helped her find a job working four hours a day as a governess.

No More Sisterhood

The next year, her younger sister Elizabeth died and her older sister Anna got married. Louisa May felt her sisterhood was broken up, but she soldiered on. In 1860, she began writing for the Atlantic Monthly.

By 1862 she was officially a spinster. Approaching 30, she went to Washington, D.C., to work as a Civil War nurse. There she became ill with typhoid fever. She would never fully recover from what she thought was the doctor’s ministrations of mercury.

There was an upside: Her letters home about the Civil War hospital were published as Hospital Sketches and earned her critical recognition. She was then able to make a living writing novels under the nom de plume A.M. Barnard.

Little Women

Back home at the age of 36 she angrily began writing Little Women at her publisher’s request. She didn’t want to write a girls’ book, but she persevered. The book was hugely successful, enabling the Alcott family to live in comfort and Louisa to write best-selling novels for the next 20 years. Of the surprising success of ‘Little Women,’ she wrote, “It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational but simple and true, for we really lived most of it.”

Over the course of her lifetime, Louisa May Alcott produced 200 literary works, including children’s books, serious novels, pulp fiction and suspense novels. One, A Long Fatal Love Chase, was first published in 1995 and became a best seller.

Louisa May Alcott may have remembered her low moment by the Charles River when she wrote

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

With thanks to American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever and Eden’s Outcasts: Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson.

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