Lydia Maria Child

THE portrait which confronts the reader who opens the volume of Mrs. Child’s Letters,¹ is of a vigorous, resolute old lady, with a large head, strong lines about the mouth, a kindly eye, and an expression not of placid content, but of animation, of activity, and of aggressive spirit. The letters which follow, and the slight illustration of the writer which two notable friends give, disclose with candor, and some fullness, the character and career of a woman who was both striking as a figure in New England literary and social history, and interesting as a representative of ideas and manners.

Lydia Maria Francis was born in 1802. She lived to be seventy-eight, and her life was spent wholly in New England, except for a brief stay in New York city, and almost wholly in small country villages. Her older brother, Convers Francis, who was afterward a professor in the Divinity School at Cambridge, teased and advised her in her younger days, but she had in the main the education of the best New England girls of her time. On the intellectual side she had for books the substantial literature of England, — Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Gibbon, and the current literature in Scott and Byron ; on the moral side she had the important and controlling influence of the Unitarian movement, which was at its height in her most impressionable years ; but, above all, her formative period was that curious and interesting one when there was a serene and not self-conscious provincialism in New England ; when foreign and ancient literature and life were quietly measured by standards kept in the neighborhood of Boston Common ; when there was a flower of culture which was entirely of native growth and production ; when even New York was a remote and interesting region to be reported upon by travelers, and when all questions of philosophy and religion were to be determined with a calm disregard of the rest of the world, for the use of the descendants of the Puritans and Pilgrims. This prevalent tone of intellectual and moral life was apparent in Mrs. Child to the end of her days. It gave her an innocent audacity in handling themes which required larger equipment than she could bring into service, and made her, even when professing an inquiry into history, and a large human experience, to be curiously oblivious of great historic movements. All this was common enough in the New England of her early days, but the book which she prepared just before her death, Aspirations of the World, was just as provincial as if it had been written forty years before, when New England had its own exclusive prophets and philosophers.

It is amusing to see how in the first letter which is given, written when she was but fifteen years old, something of her mental horoscope is cast when she asks : “ Don’t you think that Milton asserts the superiority of his own sex in rather too lordly a manner? ” She was encouraged by her brother to write, and published her novel of Hobomok when she was twenty years old. This was followed by The Rebels, The Mother’s Book, The Girl’s Book, The History of Women, The Frugal Housewife, and The Juvenile Miscellany, a serial for young people, of which she was editor and almost sole contributor. Her novels were not her most successful works. They had a reputation at the time when they were published, but it was due largely to the meagre supply of native fiction. Miss Sedgwick was a truer artist. Indeed, it was not on the artistic side that Mrs. Child’s contributions to literature were strongest. She was a moralist and reformer, and used literature for the purpose of accomplishing special objects ; her best stories were short narratives which she was impelled to give in the warmth of her interest for some unfortunate or victim, as the pathetic story which she tells of the Umbrella Girl in her Letters from New York.

In 1828, when she was in the full tide of her literary success, she married Mr. David Lee Child, a young lawyer, handsome, alert, and with all the promise of high achievements. A brief series of extracts are given from the journal of Miss Francis, when she first met Mr. Child, four years before they were married, in one of which she writes: “Saw Mr. Child at Mr. Curtis’s. He is the most gallant man that has lived since the sixteenth century, and needs nothing but helmet, shield, and chain armor to make him a complete knight of chivalry.” To that view of Mr. Child add a loyal and unconquerable affection, and one has Mrs. Child’s view of her husband. A glimpse of their early married life is given in a letter which she writes to him, when separated for a while, where she says: “ Here I am in a snug, little, old-fashioned parlor, at a round table, in a rocking-chair, writing to you, and the greatest comfort I have is the penknife you sharpened for me just before I came away. As you tell me, sometimes, it makes my heart leap to see anything you have touched. . . . How I do wish you were here! It is nonsense for me to go a ‘ pleasuring ’ without you. It does me no good, and every pleasant sight makes my heart yearn for you to be with me. I am very homesick for you ; and my private opinion is, that I shall not be able to stand it a whole week. As for the place itself, it is exactly what I wanted to find. Oh, how I do wish we had a snug little cottage here, and just income enough to meet very moderate wants. I have walked about a mile to-day, and got well muddied by plunging into a meadow after that brightest of all bright blossoms, the cardinal flower. My dear husband, I cannot stay away a week.”

The wistful words here give a little hint of another side of the picture. Mr. Child was a visionary, who always saw before him a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. Now it was one thing and now another, and while there was perfect accord between the husband and wife, Mrs. Child’s native good sense and sound judgment were sometimes sorely tried by the vagaries which her husband followed. At one time it was beet-sugar, and the two went to Northampton and led a most pinched life in pursuit of this dream. Here, as later, Mrs. Child did her own work, as the saying is, and struggled bravely against fortune, all the while discovering vents for her intellectual activity. “ A month elapsed after I came here,” she writes to Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring, “ before I stepped into the woods, which were all around me, blooming with wild flowers. I did not go to Mr. Dwight’s ordination, nor have I yet been to meeting. He has been to see me, however, and though I left my work in the midst, and sat down with a dirty gown and hands somewhat grimmed, we were high up in the blue in fifteen minutes. I promised to take a flight with him from the wash-tub or dish-kettle any time when he would come along with his balloon.” Her letters at this time are full of an indomitable spirit, and touched with pathetic little passages, like that in which she answers a friend who had apparently lost his head, like other staid Bostonians, under the marvelous twinkle of Fanny Elssler’s feet.

“ I too should like to see ' the poetry of motion' in Fanny Elssler. But the only thing (except seeing dear friends) that has attracted me to Boston was the exhibition of statuary. In particular I have an earnest desire to see the Infant guided to Heaven by Angels. I am ashamed to say how deeply I am charmed with sculpture ; ashamed, because it seems like affectation in one who has had such very limited opportunity to become acquainted with the arts. I have a little plaster figure of a caryatid which acts upon my spirit like a magician’s spell. Sarah (she reproves me when I call her Mrs. S.) did not seem to think much of it; but to me it has an expression of the highest kind. Repose after conflict — not the repose of innocence, but the repose of wisdom. Many a time this hard summer I have laid down dish-cloth or broom and gone to refresh my spirit by gazing on it a few minutes. It speaks to me. It says glorious things. In summer I place flowers before it; and now I have laid a garland of acorns and amaranths at its feet. I do dearly love every little bit of real sculpture.”

Better relief than the poor little plaster figure ever could afford came from nature, and her letters now, as well as later, disclose a fine sense of wildwood charms ; she knew the little denizens of the woods and fields, and made friends with squirrels and birds, while landscape and clouds were constantly drawing her gaze.

While Mrs. Child was living this lonely, repressed life an invitation came to Mr. Child to remove to New York and edit the Anti-Slavery Standard. The beet-sugar experiment was raging and he declined to go, but Mrs. Child, grown somewhat desperate, accepted the task and went alone to the city. The separation was necessary in her mind, and gave rise naturally, to ill-natured talk, but Mrs. Child’s own letters are better evidence than any gossip, and her womanly affection was sorely tried by the absence from her husband. “ My task here,” she writes to Mrs. Pierce, “is irksome to me. Your father will tell you that it was not zeal for the cause, but love for my husband, which brought me hither. But since it was necessary for me to leave home to be earning somewhat, I am thankful that my work is for the anti-slavery cause. I have agreed to stay one year. I hope I shall then be able to return to my husband and rural home, which is humble enough, yet very satisfactory to me. Should the Standard be continued, and my editing generally desired, perhaps I could make an arrangement to send articles from Northampton. At all events, I trust this weary separation from my husband is not to last more than a year. If I must be away from him, I could not be more happily situated than in Friend Hopper’s family. They treat me the same as a daughter and a sister.”

Yet the experience of life in New York was of the greatest value to her, and she enjoyed a revival of her nature which bore fruit in many ways. New York in 1842 was not a metropolis, but it had some of the airs of one, and to a New England girl, who had lived a little while in Boston, but chiefly in the country, the city afforded an excitement out of proportion to its size and dignity. Here, while engaged upon her special task, she wrote those letters from New York which, afterward collected into two volumes, enjoyed deserved popularity and show Mrs. Child at her best. The sights of the city, especially those which drew the mind away from commercial bustle, the incidents which fell under her notice, the conversations which she held, all furnished texts for amiable discourses upon a great variety of topics. She found in this exercise an agreeable relief from her professional work, and in her freedom from household care she engaged with great eagerness in literature.

Her work on the Anti-Slavery Standard lay nearest her heart. In the early movement of the anti-slavery agitation she published an Appeal in Behalf of that Class of Americans called Africans. Mr. Whittier, in speaking of it, declares that “it is quite impossible for any one of the present generation to imagine the popular surprise and indignation which the book called forth, or how entirely its author cut herself off from the favor and sympathy of a large number of those who had previously delighted to do her honor. Social and literary circles, which had been proud of her presence, closed their doors against her. The sale of her books, the subscriptions to her magazine, fell off to a ruinous extent. She knew all she was hazarding, and made the great sacrifice, prepared for all the consequences which followed.” The letters now printed are but a small portion of the mass which she wrote under the impulse given to her nature by the great wrong against which she was employing a woman’s arsenal of conscience and wit, but they occupy the larger part of the volume, and furnish some of the most impressive commentaries on the social life of the time. Besides private letters, there have been included a few which saw the light at the time in newspapers ; especially noteworthy are those which passed between Mrs. Child, Governor Wise, John Brown, and Mrs. Senator Mason. Mrs. Child, in the excitement attending the Harper’s Ferry affair, applied to Governor Wise for permission to nurse John Brown, and inclosed her letter to the prisoner for the governor to read and forward. Governor Wise replied in a somewhat lofty tone, and assumed the air of a virtuous defender of the Constitution, whereupon Mrs. Child replied in a letter of extraordinary power, turning his own guns upon him, and pouring in hot shot, as people were fond of saying in those days, before they knew just what hot shot was. Mrs. Senator Mason rushed forward with a shrieking letter, beginning, “ Do you read your Bible, Mrs. Child ? If you do, read there, ' Woe unto you, hypocrites !’ and take to yourself with twofold damnation that terrible sentence,” and proceeding to claim for the Southern women an exclusive and tender interest in the poor and suffering. Mrs. Child’s reply is even more effective than her letter to Governor Wise. She begins in a cool, half - laughing tone, which must have infuriated her correspondent, and proves that she has read her Bible by showering down a number of those very uncompromising verses which were the missiles of the prophets among the abolitionists. Mrs. Mason had taunted her, in common with other Northern women, with neglect of the suffering, in comparison with the sympathy shown by the Southern slaveholder. “ Do you,” she writes, " soften the pangs of maternity in those around you by all the care and comfort you can give ? ” And Mrs. Child quietly replies: " I have never known an instance where the ' pangs of maternity ’ did not meet with requisite assistance ; and here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies.” Mrs. Child was more than a match for her correspondents, for she had not only a moral right on her side, but she had the security of a society unendangered by the portentous evil which was rumbling about Mrs. Mason’s ears.

The terrors of slavery are laid bare in many effective passages in these letters, and the book is thus in many ways a harrowing and distressing one, but there are reliefs in incidents which are sometimes exciting and stirring, and sometimes humorous. The picture of the escape of George Thompson is very graphic, and one is not disposed to look too closely into the supposed conspiracy against his life. Then there are glimpses of prominent actors in the scenes, which help to vivify the times. There is an amusing conversation at Mr. Whittier’s house, which we venture to quote, since the compilers have included it in the volume. Mrs. Child was visiting Mr. Whittier in his home, and wrote an account of her visit to Mrs. Shaw, in which she says : —

“ Whittier made piteous complaints of time wasted and strength exhausted by the numerous loafers who came to see him out of mere idle curiosity, or to put up with him to save a penny. I was amused to hear his sister describe some of these irruptions in her slow, Quakerly fashion. ‘ Thee has no idea,’ said she, ‘ how much time Greenleaf spends in trying to lose these people in the streets. Sometimes he comes home and says, “ Well, sister, I had hard work to lose him, but I have lost him.” ’ ‘ But I can never lose a her,’ said Whittier.

#8216; The women are more pertinacious than the men ; don’t thee find ’em, so Maria ? ’ I told him I did. ‘ How does thee manage to get time to do anything?’ said he. I told him I took care to live away from the railroad, and kept a bulldog and a pitch-fork, and advised him to do the same.”

After Mrs. Child left New York her home was for the most part in Wayland, Massachusetts, where she had inherited a little farm. Here Mr. and Mrs. Child settled, living a quiet, retired life, with no servant, but without the worry of any wild schemes. The letters from this time forward, though busy with public affairs, show a more restful life, and let one into some of the secret places of Mrs. Child’s kindly nature. How admirable was the charity, for instance, which took thought for the poor wretch who had served his time in the House of Correction, to which he had been sent for setting fire to a barn when in a drunken rage. Mrs. Child was his faithful friend. Every Sunday, month after month, she had the man come to her house, where she gave him a cup of tea, and entertained him, as few women could entertain, all the afternoon. “ I have never in my life,” she writes, “ experienced any happiness to be compared to the consciousness of lifting a human soul out of the mire ; ” and in her will she provided for monthly payments to be made to the man so long as he should abstain from intoxicating drinks.

Mrs. Child’s christianity may be summed up in the words that she bore other people’s burdens. She had a warm religious nature, but it was untrained and was disposed to run off into eccentricities. Like skeptical people generally, she had her own favorite credulities and superstitions, and found it easier to believe in planchette than in a spirit revealed through a historic church. An instructive comparison might be drawn between her and Miss Martineau. She had a less destructive mind than her contemporary worker, and it may be said that the depth of Mrs. Child’s emotional nature and her ardent love of beauty were always correcting a too intellectual judgment. In her old days she grew mellow, and after her husband’s death she seemed to centre her thoughts largely upon another world, where she should rejoin her companion. The liveliness of her sympathy was the bond which bound her to things present and things to come, and it is this pervading sentiment which gives an exceeding charm to Mrs. Child’s character as it is disclosed in these letters. Beyond this, the book has a genuine value as a transcript in glowing language of a period of our national life when a woman’s sympathy was a powerful lever in the great upheaval which followed.