The Lowell Offering

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IN 1837, during the suspension offering. of specie payments by the New England banks, I, being pastor of a church in Portsmouth, N. H., was a member of a clerical club, which had, I suppose, some regular name that has escaped my memory, but which in later years was called by its members and others the Railroad Association. Its territorial limits were at first Portland and Boston ; but it afterward had members in Providence and New York. We met once in three months at one another’s houses, at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, and, obtaining the use and free entrance of guest-chambers in the houses of friendly neighbors, we prolonged our sessions till a very late hour.

There was then living at Amesbury Rev. Stephen Farley, who had faded out of the pulpit by reason of exceeding dullness, but who was a very learned theologian and Biblical scholar, and to us young men made himself interesting by a rich stock of professional anecdote and reminiscence. He had a keen scent for clerical gatherings of every kind, and, as ministerial etiquette then permitted, presented himself on all such occasions as an uninvited yet not unwelcome guest. As he was very poor, he probably had some little hankering for the luxury of a well-spread table, and he evidently had great enjoyment of the “feast of fat things ” served for our spiritual nourishment, to which he contributed his full share. He walked wherever he went, and when he was to be absent overnight he carried his belongings in a cotton bundle handkerchief ; for carpet bags were then in their infancy, and were possessed only by the few whose long-lived carpets had ceased to be serviceable except in fragments,— a bag made from new carpeting being an unheard-of extravagance, certainly among the clergy.

I think it was in January, perhaps in April, of 1837, that our club met at my house. Mr. Farley arrived in the middle of the forenoon, bore his usual part in our discussions, and attended the public service in the evening. When we returned from church, he asked me for an almanac, and as he looked into it read audibly, but hardly aloud, the time of the moon’s rising. We resumed our conference, and continued it till nearly midnight, when Mr. Farley, at my request, offered the closing prayer. He remained standing, and as he was to lodge in my house I offered to show him his room. “ No,” said he, “ I am going home. The moon is up, and I can walk as well by night as by day. I have important business that must be attended to in the morning.” I remonstrated earnestly, and so did we all, but in vain. We had dark suspicions that his mind had suddenly lost its balance, and that he might meditate something even more uncanny than a twenty miles’ tramp by moonlight. He put on his overcoat, took up his parcel which he had deposited in a corner of my library, and had almost reached the door, when Mr. (afterward Dr.) Lothrop placed himself between him and the door, and said, “ Mr. Farley, I am a stronger man than you, and I will not let you leave this house to-night.” Mr. Farley meekly and sadly yielded to superior force, laid down his parcel, took off his overcoat, and resumed his seat. Then said Mr. Lothrop : “ You certainly meant to stay ; for you brought your little bundle with you for that purpose. Have your feelings been wounded by any of us ? ” “No,” said he, “you have all treated me with the utmost kindness.” “ What then can have possessed you,” Mr. Lothrop rejoined, “ to alarm us all, and to slight our host’s hospitality, by starting off in this mad way in the dead of night ? ” Mr. Farley replied : “I heard you say at the dinner table that the Merrimack Mills are going to shut down on account of the hard times. My daughter Harriet intends to take the stage for Lowell that will pass my house early to-morrow morning, to seek employment in the Merrimack Mills ; and when I learned that they were to be closed, I determined that I would reach home early enough to prevent her going.” We told him to make himself easy about the expense of her journey, and I took him to his room. We then made up a comfortable purse, and Lothrop and I carried it to him and laid it on his pillow. Me slept, I doubt not, the sleep of the just, and his daughter went her way. Whether the Merrimack Mills were closed or not I do not know ; but she found employment, and my next knowledge of her was as the editor of The Lowell Offering.

During the several years of her editorship she was the most copious writer for the Offering, and her articles indicated not only superior culture, but literary talent, taste, and versatility that won more than approval— hearty admiration — from those best fitted to judge her work on its merits. The Offering had a subscription list of four thousand, which meant fully as much as twenty thousand would at the present time. It was in every respect on a level with the best magazines of the day. Its profits enabled Miss Farley to carry a brother through Harvard College, and to make generous provision for the comfort of the family at home. The work attracted no little attention on the other side of the Atlantic. A volume containing a selection from its articles was published in London in 1849, in one of the several series issued as popular libraries. At a much later period, my friend President Felton, in Paris, while attending part of a course of lectures on English literature, by Philarfète Chasles, heard one entire lecture on the history and the literary merits of The Lowell Offering.

During the palmy years of the Offering I used, every winter, to lecture for the Lowell Lyceum. Not amusement, but instruction, was then the lyceum lecturer’s sole aim, and however dry he or his subject might be, if he only conveyed knowledge which his hearers did not already possess, he was listened to with profound attention. The Lowell hall— immense we used to call it ; it was one of the largest of its time — was always crowded, and four fifths of the audience were factory girls. When the lecturer entered, almost every girl had a book in her hand, and was intent upon it. When he rose, the books were laid aside, and paper and pencil taken instead ; and there were very few who did not carry home full notes of what they heard. I have never seen anywhere so assiduous note-taking — no, not even in a college class, when the notes might be of avail in an impending examination — as in that assembly of young women, laboring for their subsistence, many of whom in after life filled honorable, useful, in some instances conspicuous positions in society.

Are the daughters of our farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen, who would scorn the thought of being factory operatives, doing as much for themselves, their families, the community, posterity, as was done by those hard-working young women of an earlier generation ?