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Transcendentalists

The Real People Behind Little Women

A century and a half after Little Women first reached the bookstore shelves, the story of four sisters and their mother still has ardent fans.

Louisa May Alcott attributed the book’s success to its simplicity and truth. And it was true, for she based the characters on her own family. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy were in real life Anna, Louy, Lizzy and May. Alcott modeled Marmee on her mother, Abigail May Alcott, and the absent Father on her own father, Bronson Alcott.

The Alcott family had less stability than the Marches, though. They moved 20 times in 30 years. And unlike the March family, they moved in the leading intellectual circles of the day. Growing up, Louisa knew Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson, her mother’s fourth cousin, helped support them financially.

In many other ways, though, the book stayed true to the Alcott family story.

Father

Louisa May Alcott had a reason, if only subconscious, for writing her father out of the story. Bronson Alcott was a dreamer, a reformer, a philosopher and a hopelessly improvident father. Born on a small farm in Wolcott, Conn., he came from a less distinguished family than his wife. He taught school, but his controversial methods cost him students, and he didn’t do much better when he tried his hand as a Yankee peddler.

Bronson Alcott

Alcott believed in the ‘sweetness of self denial’ — a convenient philosophy for someone who couldn’t support his wife and four daughters.

When Louisa was 10, he moved the family to a utopian community called Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass. (where part of Little Women was filmed in 2019).

Fruitlands

The Fruitlands communards didn’t believe in eating meat, owning property or using animal labor. They dressed only in linen, wore canvas shoes, drank nothing but cold water and bathed in it as well. The women did most of the work while Bronson Alcott traveled, looking for recruits. Finally Louisa’s mother took the four girls to a rented farm and her husband joined them only later.

Until Louisa’s success with Little Women when she was 36 years old, the Alcott family lived in poverty. They depended on the generosity of family and friends, their mother’s inheritance and the wages of the women in the family. Their most permanent home was Orchard House, now a museum in Concord, Mass.

Louisa no doubt described her father when asked her definition of philosophy. “My definition is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends pulling the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.”

Bronson Alcott died March 4, 1888, two days before Louisa died.

Marmee

Abigail May Alcott, or Abba, came from a prominent New England family. Her great-great grandfather was Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewall. Dorothy Quincy, her great aunt, had married John Hancock. Her brother, Samuel May, was a well-known Unitarian minister active in promoting peace, temperance, education reform and an end to slavery.

Abigail May Alcott

Abba also had as ancestors three kings: France’s King Robert I, England’s Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. Her cousins, albeit distant, include 11 U.S. presidents: the Bushes, the Adams, the Roosevelts, Warren G. Harding, Gerald Ford, Franklin Pierce, Rutherford B. Hayes and George Washington. Abigail Adams was her third cousin once removed, but she was also distantly related to Edith Carow Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Nancy Reagan.

Like her daughters, she had to work to support the family. In 1848, when Louisa was 15, she took a job as a social worker in Boston, one of the first in Massachusetts. Abba believed in women’s suffrage and temperance and abolition. As a fervent abolitionist, she opened her home to fugitive slaves; the family knew Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

When she died in 1877. Louisa wrote, “She was so loyal, tender, and true, life was hard for her and no one knew all she had to bear but her children.”

Meg

Anna, the oldest Alcott sister, was closest to Louisa during their childhood. She was idealistic like her parents, and she had talent as an actress. She and Louisa often staged amateur theatricals. Though ambitious, Anna resigned herself to marriage and motherhood.

The fictional Meg, from an illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith

“I have a foolish wish to be something great and I shall probably spend my life in a kitchen and die in the poor-house,” she wrote in her diaries.

As a young woman she taught school for a while in Syracuse, N.Y., but returned to the family home in Concord, Mass., in her mid-20s. She and Louisa then formed a drama group, and Anna fell in love with her costar, John Bridge Pratt, during a play called The Loan of a Lover. Their wedding guests included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Franklin Sanborn. Louisa wrote John into Little Women as John Bridge.

Orchard House

Beth

Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, the third Alcott daughter, originally had “Peabody” as her middle name after Bronson Alcott’s friend and teaching assistant, Elizabeth Peabody. Three years later that changed to her grandmother’s maiden name after Bronson and Peabody had a falling out.

Like the character Beth, Elizabeth or Lizzy Alcott caught scarlet fever while helping her mother care for a poor German family. She recovered from the illness, but not fully, and grew progressively weaker over the next two years. She died in her sleep at the age of 22. Of her death, Louisa wrote,

Last week she put her work away, saying the needle was too heavy … Saturday she slept, and at midnight became unconscious, quietly breathing her life away till three; then, with one last look of her beautiful eyes, she was gone.

The fictional Beth, from an illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith

Amy

The real Amy in Little Women was Louise May Alcott’s youngest sister, Abigail May. Her sisters called her Abba or Abby until she reached her 20s, when she asked them to call her May. Louisa used an anagram – Amy for May – to name her fictional character.

May, like Amy, was a talented artist. She gave lessons to Daniel Chester French, who later designed the Lincoln Memorial. May struggled all her life to win success as an artist and to come out from under the shadow of her famous older sister.

May Alcott self-portrait

She illustrated the first edition of Little Women, which critics panned for their anatomical inaccuracy. So she went to Europe because she could study the human body there – something prohibited for women in puritanical New England.

May stood on the cusp of fulfilling her dream as a successful artist 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 married a Swiss tobacco merchant, not Amy’s boy next door. Ernest Nieriker at 22 was 16 years her junior. They lived in a Paris suburb until she died seven weeks after giving birth. Louisa raised her daughter Louisa, nicknamed Lulu.

Jo

Alcott modeled Jo on herself, an energetic, nature-loving tomboy given to occasional wild moods. Henry David Thoreau taught her for a while, and she had a crush on him, as well as on another of her neighbors, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As a young woman she struggled to support her family while trying to carve out a writing career. 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 and as a teacher, which she hated. In her mid-twenties she got so discouraged she thought about throwing herself into the Charles River.

Louisa May Alcott in her 20s

As she approached 30, Louisa May Alcott went to Washington, D.C., as a Civil War nurse. She caught typhus after three, and her father brought her home. Doctors tried to cure her by giving her mercury, which probably caused her poor health for the last 25 years of her life. Her hair fell out, she had rashes, headaches, rheumatism and vertigo. But she wrote a book about her experience, which earned critical acclaim and allowed her to make a living writing. She wrote pulp fiction under the nom de plume A.M. Barnard.

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 10 weeks, unenthusiastic about it from the start. She only did it because her publisher, Thomas Niles, wanted a girls’ story, and he agreed to publish her father’s book on philosophy only if she did. “And I begin Little Women,” she wrote in her diary in May 1868. “So I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”

On Aug. 26, 1868. Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary:

“Proof of whole book came. It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it.”

Scene from the 1912 Broadway production of Little Women, adapted by Marian de Forest

The book, an instant hit, allowed the Alcott family to live in comfort. When a stroke killed Louisa at age 55, she left an estate of $200,000, about $5 million in today’s money.

Little Women has never been out of print, and an estimated thousand copies are sold every month. It’s been adapted for the theater as a play and a musical, turned into a Japanese anime series, an Indian television serial and a Canadian opera.

The first movie version of Little Women was produced in England in 1917 as a silent film, and a second, U.S. version followed the next year.

The third Little Women appeared on the silver screen in 1933, starring Katharine Hepburn. Then Hollywood remade it in 1949 starring Elizabeth Taylor, and in 1994 starring Winona Ryder. The most recent Little Women movie starring Saoirse Ronan was released in 2019.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Fruitlands By victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40800910. Orchard House By User:victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27754775. Scene from 1912 Broadway production By The Ridgway Company, New York; photograph by White Studio – Everybody's Magazine, page 112, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63332463.

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Mount Auburn Cemetery, a 19th Century Tourist Attraction

In 1846, 16-year-old Emily Dickinson made a rare foray outside of her Amherst, Mass., home to visit the biggest tourist attraction on the East Coast: Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Two years later, an estimated 60,000 people visited the famous pleasure (and burial) ground — a staggering figure for the day. During the 19^th century, Mount Auburn Cemetery ranked with Niagara Falls and Mount Vernon as a popular travel destination. And that was even before many of its famous dead were buried in it.

Mount Auburn Cemetery later inspired one of the most famous parks in the world.

19^th Century Tourist Attraction

Mount Auburn Cemetery was originally known (appropriately enough) as Stone’s Farm, 170 rolling acres between Watertown and Cambridge, Mass.

Built in 1831, it was designed by Henry Alexander Scammell Dearborn, son of Secretary of War Henry Dearborn and named for Dearborn’s friend Alexander Scammell. He had help from Jacob Bigelow, a physician who thought it unhealthy to bury people under churches. Alexander Wadsworth, cousin of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also helped design it. Later he would be buried there.

Dearborn, a lawyer and horticulturist, designed Mount Auburn as an artful wilderness. It had winding avenues and paths and a tower on top of Mount Auburn for a panoramic view of Boston. The first rural cemetery in America, it had an arboretum and an experimental garden.

Back then, public parks didn’t belong in the American landscape. Mount Auburn Cemetery quickly became a 19^th century tourist attraction. Dearborn intended it that way. The cemetery and garden, he wrote, ‘will present one of the most instructive, magnificent and pleasant promenades in our country.’

Model Park

The rich came by carriage. The working classes came by streetcar. A slew of guidebooks, literature and personal travelers’ accounts then spread Mount Auburn’s fame as a pleasure ground. Today it has a mobile app.

Miscellaneous view of Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing observed the hordes of visitors at Mount Auburn. He also noticed people came to Boston solely to see the cemetery. And he sensed the pent-up demand for public places where people could relax and socialize outdoors.

”The idea took the public mind by storm,” he wrote. Downing recommended Mount Auburn as a model for more public parks. He thought a nation that called itself a republic should encourage people of all social classes to mingle in public places.

“The true policy of republics is to foster the taste of great public libraries, sculpture and picture galleries, parks and gardens,” he wrote.

Downing then died in 1852 in a steamboat accident on his 37^th birthday. But he had paved the way for his partner, Calvin Vaux, and a young Frederick Law Olmsted. They designed New York’s Central Park, Hartford’s Bushnell Park and Springfield’s Elm Park.

Today, tourists still visit Mount Auburn Cemetery to walk winding paths in a picturesque landscape and to seek out the graves of the dead. The famous people buried there include people you’d expect: Nathaniel Bowditch, Robert Gould Shaw and Julia Ward Howe. Some of its inhabitants you wouldn’t expect: Bernard Malamud, Curt Gowdy and Joyce Chen.

Other notables also include Margaret Fuller, Harriet Jacobs, Winslow Homer and both Henry Cabot Lodges.

This story was updated in 2022. Miscellaneous view of Mount Auburn Cemetery By Daderot at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18516143. Featured image also By Daderot CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003519.

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Henry David Thoreau Grows the First Giant Pumpkin in America

New England’s autumn fairs an festivals feature the oddest of contests: Who can grow the biggest giant pumpkin?

The tradition of the giant pumpkin can trace its roots back to 1857 and Henry David Thoreau.

The Marvelous Giant Pumpkin

The eccentric naturalist, author, abolitionist and tax protester who famously made his home at Walden Woods for several years also was one of the first Americans to plant seeds to grow a giant pumpkin. The seeds had come from France and were probably given to Thoreau by his friend and former natural sciences instructor, Thaddeus W. Harris.

Henry David Thoreau, the first American to plant a giant pumpkin.

As always, Thoreau marveled at nature’s ability to produce such miracles as the giant pumpkin. He also scoffed at society’s inability to appreciate them while distracting itself with superficial trivialities.

In his book Wild Fruits he described how, in the spring of 1857, he planted six seeds from the Patent Office labeled (he thought) ‘Potiron Jaune Grosse,’ or Large Yellow Pumpkin. Then he noted that two of the seeds came up. One produced a giant pumpkin weighing 123 ½ pounds. The other bore four weighing together 186 ¼ pounds.

“Who could have believed that there were 310 pounds of Potiron Jaune Grosse in that corner of my garden!,” wrote Thoreau.

Waxing Rhapsodic

Thoreau got a little carried away describing his pumpkins. But he made some money on the bigger pumpkin at the county fair, so perhaps he can be forgiven. Here he goes into rapture about his pumpkin seeds, his ‘ferrets,’ his ‘terriers,’ his ‘hounds’:

These seeds were the bait I used to catch it, my ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which unearthed it. A little mysterious hoeing and manuring was all the Abracadabra-presto-change that I used, and lo! True to the label, they found for me 310 pounds of Potiron Jaune Grosse there, where it never was known to be nor was before. These talisman had perchance sprung from America at first and returned to it with unabated force… and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure chest. Here you can dig not gold, but the value which gold merely represents.

The big squash took a premium at the Middlesex Show that fall, and I understood that the man who bought it intended to sell the seeds for ten cents apiece – and were they not cheap at that? But I have more hounds of the same breed. I learn that one which I dispatched to a distant town, true to its instinct, points the large yellow pumpkin there, where no hound ever found it before, as its ancestors did here in France. Yet farmer’s sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception, while in this case there is no deception – no Signor Blitz. Surely men love darkness rather than light.

Thoreau’s giant pumpkin was hardly the largest ever grown. Growers in France and elsewhere in Europe were already crowning 200-plus pound pumpkins with the title “King Pumpkin.”

Prefers Pumpkins

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/giant-pumpkin-festival.jpg

A giant pumpkin festival

Still, Thoreau was likely one of the first to plant the French variety that produced the mammoth pumpkins in this country, according to Amy Goldman, author of The Compleat Squash. And it is no surprise given his attachment to the land.

“I have great faith in a seed,” wrote Thoreau. “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

And of the pumpkin in particular he noted in Walden that he preferred its humble simplicity to all the sophistication and wearying noise the modern world could offer:

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.”

Pumpkin image: By Infrogmation of New Orleans – Photo by Infrogmation, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4990747. Giant pumpkin festival: By Yourcsd – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17020198. This story about Thoreau and the giant pumpkin was updated in 2020.

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An LOL Story: OK Is Born in Boston in 1839

The word OK was born on March 23, 1839, a child of New England’s most popular newspaper and a fun-loving group that campaigned against bell ringing in Boston.

Boston Post front page

OK had siblings – the long-forgotten KG and OW and GT and SP. We might have forgotten OK too. But the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society, a presidential campaign and the Boston Post immortalized the expression.

The abbreviations amounted to the LOL and the OMG of the 1830s, a linguistic fad among educated young Brahmins

They shortened popular slang expressions, like GT for ‘gone to Texas’ and SP for ‘small potatoes.’ They took the joke further by first spelling the words wrong. KG, for example, stood for ‘no go.’

OK, which stood for ‘oll korrect’ (all correct), might have been OW, which stood for ‘oll wright.’

Such elaborate comic abbreviations began to appear in newspapers, notes Michael West. In Transcendental Wordplay: America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature, he wrote,

Newspaper columns were suddenly sprinkled with mysterious acronyms that other editors and the public had to demonstrate their cleverness by figuring out.

On the Trail to OK

Allan Walker Read, an etymologist and lexicographer, tried to trace the origin of OK in the 1960s.

He found that a group of funsters who called themselves the Anti-Bell Ringing Society made ample use of ‘oll korrect.’ The Anti-Bell Ringing Society belonged to another 19^th century fad – clubs devoted to inside jokes. Jokesters, for example, formed the Association of Bankrupt Insurance Companies, the Mammoth Cod Association and the Flouring Committee.

Wags founded the Anti-Bell Ringing Society on Oct. 26, 1838. They did it ostensibly to fight a municipal ordinance banning the ringing of dinner bells in Boston.

When the Boston Post reported on their antics, the writer included one of their favorite slang expressions: OK for ‘oll korrect.’ The Boston Post, BTW, was the most popular daily newspaper for a century in New England. The Post also gave out the Boston Post cane — until it folded in 1956.

By the end of 1839, OK appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript, the New York Evening Tattler and the Philadelphia Gazette.

Henry David Thoreau even used OK. Once, a Concord tailor told him the pants he wanted were out of fashion. He wondered where she got the idea. Oblivious to clothing fashion but susceptible to linguistic fads, Thoreau wrote about the incident. “It is some Oak Hall O Call–OK all correct establishment which she knows but I do not,“ he wrote.

Martin Van Buren

Going National

OK then went national in the presidential campaign of 1840. Martin Van Buren was running for re-election against William Henry Harrison. Van Buren, born and reared in the New York town of Kinderhook, had the nickname “Old Kinderhook.” Van Buren’s supporters began forming “OK Clubs” around the country. It spread to everyday speech, and by 1864 it showed up in the Slang Dictionary of Vulgar Words.

Other theories about the origin of OK. Some scholars (and Pete Seeger) claim it was a Choctaw Indian word spelled ‘okeh.’ That means “It is so.” Others argue it came from Africa and means “Yes, indeed.” We choose to believe Alan Walker Read’s analysis — oll korrect.

This story was updated in 2021.

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The Musketaquid Comes Out of the Cellar

Henry David Thoreau took his little boat Musketaquid out of the cellar in early March 1855 because the Concord River had iced out and he didn’t want to miss a day on it.

Egg Rock, where the Sudbury and Assabet rivers form the Concord, or Musketaquid, River

We know this because he wrote about it in his journal on March 8, 1855:

This morning I got my boat out of the cellar and turned it up in the yard to let the seams open before I calk it. The blue river, now almost completely open (i.e., excepting a little ice in the recesses of the shores and a good deal over the meadows), admonishes me to be swift.

Thoreau and his brother John had built the Musketaquid together, and then taken it on a week-long river voyage in 1839. They rowed and drifted from Concord, Mass., to Concord, N.H., in 1839.

We seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from the past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts. We glided noiselessly down the stream, he wrote.

Three years later, John died in Henry’s arms. He had developed tetanus after cutting himself shaving.

Henry David Thoreau, 1854

From 1845-47, Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, where he wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers as a tribute to his brother. In it, he described the Concord River and the grassy meadows through which it flowed:

The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. …Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of Concord … it appears to have been properly named Musketaquid, or Meadow River, by the Indians. For the most part, it creeps through broad meadows…

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How July 4th Partying Cost the Life of Thoreau’s Maine Guide

Joe Attien was a Maine guide, logger and Penobscot chief who died in a logging accident. It probably wouldn’t have happened if his skilled crew hadn’t been off partying on the Fourth of July.

Joe Attien

Logging season usually ended around Independence Day, and loggers on the Penobscot River usually spent their wages raising hell in the Devil’s Half Acre in Bangor, Maine.

But in 1870, the logging season ran long, and Attien got stuck with an inexperienced skeleton crew to drive the last of the logs down the Penobscot.

Maine Guide, Logger, Chief

Henry David Thoreau made several trips to Maine. On his second trip in 1853, he hired Joe Attien as his Maine guide. They met at Moosehead Lake, and Thoreau described him:

He was a good looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his under clothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian..

Joe Attien was more than a stereotypical Indian, though. He was the last hereditary chief, or governor, of the Penobscot Nation and the first to be elected. Born on Christmas Day, 1829, he grew up when the tribe had illegally ceded most of its land to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of Maine. Like many of the Penobscot men, he earned seasonal wages working as a Maine guide and a logger.

Log drive on the Kennebec River, 1922. Courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

On July 4, 1870, Joe Attien was leading a team of log drivers down the Penobscot River in a bateau. Some of the experienced loggers were in Bangor, celebrating Independence Day. Attien and his crew had to drive the last of the logs down the river.

Attien’s bowman was inexperienced and unskilled. They shoved off on the West Branch of the Penobscot, and the bowman ccouldn’t get the bateau in position to run the rapids. They struck a rock sideways and the boat began to break apart. Some swam for the shore while others clung to the boat. Attien stayed behind to rescue the men who clung to it. He was desperately trying to save their lives when the bateau plunged over Grand Pitch Falls.

Folklorist Fanny Hardy Eckstorm had known Joe Attien since she was an infant, and she wrote about his death in a collection of stories called Penobscot Man.

He was not only brave but good, an open-hearted, patient, forbearing sort of a man, renowned for his courage and skill in handling a boat, but loved for his mild justness.

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