Eden's Outcasts (29 page)

On a gloomy November day, the Alcotts held a family council that was, in its way, every bit as devastating as the one at Fruitlands at which Bronson had proposed that he might leave the family. It appeared that the family could hope to make ends meet only if Abba and the girls found jobs, and the employment prospects in Concord were not promising. Therefore they decided to move back to Boston. Abba's friends could find her a good salary as a missionary for the poor. Anna, seventeen, and Louisa, nearly sixteen, were now old enough to try their hands at teaching. Anna, indeed, had already had some slight experience in this line, having taught a handful of children during an extended visit to her cousin Lizzie Wells in Walpole, New Hampshire, the previous spring. As for Bronson, he felt that his three years of seclusion, introspection, and communion with nature had at last “restored him to hope and the service of mankind.” Heaven, he felt, had won him health from sickness and hope from defeat, and he believed himself “a richer, a stronger, [and] a wiser man” for the lessons he had learned. In his Micawber-like way, he felt confident that he could establish a school or “a reading room, a journal, a press, a club.”
⁹⁵
Once in Boston, he intended to deliver conversations for a modest fee, distilling some dollars from his years of contemplation.

After the similarly wrenching meeting at Fruitlands, when she was only eleven, Louisa had cried and prayed. This time, she reacted differently. She took a brisk run over the hill and settled down for “a good think” in her favorite retreat, an old, abandoned cartwheel, lying half-hidden in the grass. Louisa had found it a good place to sit when struggling to work out her mathematics lessons, though she usually ended up scribbling poems and fairy tales instead of sums. The sky was a leaden gray, the trees bare, and the dry grass had surrendered to the frosty air. And yet, for all its gloom, the scene was not so different from the bare common, strewn with snow puddles, where her mentor Emerson experienced the moment of transcendence he had described in
Nature
. In such a place, one really could feel glad to the brink of fear. If the cold air touched her, it was only to stiffen her resolve:

As the old wheel creaked under Louisa's shifting weight, it seemed to her as though it had begun to turn, “stirred by the intense desire of an ambitious girl to work for those she loved and to find some reward when the duty was done.”
⁹⁷
Louisa strode back to Hillside cold but resolute. Almost forty years later, it seemed to her that this was the day when she ceased to be a child. She was still young, sentimental, and impulsive. Her nerves and feelings were not yet fully ready for the hard, patient slog that might one day yield success. Yet she was equipped with the loving support of a strong, united family and a will that could not easily be broken. She had also learned a lesson familiar to all persons of courage: that the only direction in which life moves is forward.

T
HE ALCOTTS DID NOT SELL THE HILLSIDE HOUSE. THEY
could not find a buyer. Despite Bronson's substantial improvements to the house and grounds, the best offer came from a tenant who agreed to rent the property for one hundred fifty dollars a year. It was better than nothing. On November 17, 1848, the family moved back to Boston. Still not fully cognizant of their financial straits, the girls had dreamed of a fine home in the hub of New England. Instead, they found themselves in a basement apartment on Dedham Street. Even Bronson conceded that existence there was a “cramped and unvaried life.”
¹
Their new domain consisted of three rooms and a kitchen. There was a small backyard but not a tree in sight. The splendors of the city danced tantalizingly before Louisa's eyes, but she had no money with which to make any of them hers. Along with her sisters, she yearned for the country again. The bustle and dirt of Boston made it harder for Louisa to think. “Among my woods and hills I had fine free times alone,” she remembered, “and though my thoughts were silly, I daresay, they helped to keep me happy and good.”
²

The move to Dedham Street ushered in the bleakest era in the Alcotts' lives. For the next several years, they would have no home of long duration. During the summer, when cholera and other diseases hung threateningly over the city, they were sometimes able to stay with wealthier relatives, who feared for the family's health. Otherwise, they were to inhabit a succession of dreary, cramped abodes in struggling, graceless neighborhoods. The apartment on Dedham Street gave way to another on Groton Street, and Groton Street was followed by even worse quarters on High Street, which bordered on one of the most appalling slums in Boston.
³
Whatever their address of the moment, they were to be, in Louisa's description, “Poor as rats & apparently quite forgotten by every one but the Lord.”
⁴

Anna Bronson Alcott, Bronson's eldest daughter, whom he called a “peacemaker…beloved of all.” During the lean years in Boston, Anna's income as a teacher and governess helped keep the family fed.

(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

Everyone in the family, except for Louisa, soon had a place to go. Having buried the hatchet with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bronson leased an additional room downtown, next door to the bookstore that his old colleague had established. In his rented space, Bronson offered daily conversations and lessons, bringing in a trickle of cash.
⁵
Peabody also provided lessons to Lizzie and May, now thirteen and eight, respectively. Abba was offered a job as a missionary to the poor at a salary of thirty dollars a month. The position had been created for her through the agency of Hannah Robie, whose kindness during the Fruitlands episode was but one instance of her continuing interest in her niece Abba. Robie organized a cadre of philanthropic sponsors to guarantee Abba's salary, thus assuring that a wealth of good would be done both for the indigent of Boston and the nearly indigent Alcotts. Abba later opened an “intelligence office,” the nineteenth-century equivalent of an employment agency, devoted principally to finding positions for the indigent. Economically speaking, there was little to separate her from her clients.

Anna, now old enough to work, took a situation as a governess. It fell to Louisa to keep the house in order. She felt “like a caged sea-gull as I washed dishes and cooked in the basement kitchen where my prospect was limited to succession of muddy boots.”
⁶
Her work and surroundings supplied a metaphor for her inner life. She imagined that her mind was a room in confusion that she must put in order. No matter how she tried to sweep out the useless thoughts and foolish fancies, the mental cobwebs still got in. She judged herself to be a poor housekeeper of the soul, and she feared she would never get her room set right.
⁷

For the first time in a few years, Louisa started keeping a journal. Bronson criticized her entries, observing that Anna's diary was principally about others, whereas Louisa wrote mostly about herself. It was an ironic critique, coming as it did from a man whose own journals were often indefatigably solipsistic.
⁸
While acknowledging that her father was right, Louisa defended her inward focus. Since she never
spoke
about herself, her journal was the one place where she could get a hold of the willful, moody girl she was forever trying to manage and see how she was progressing. Her journal was also a ready receptacle for the frustrations that heaped upon her when she considered “how poor we are, how much worry it is to live, and how many things I long to do and never can.” With a flourish of drama but also with more than a hint of truth, she added, “Every day is a battle, and I'm so tired I don't want to live; only it's cowardly to die until you have done something.”
⁹

Her great solace came in the evenings, when her parents and sisters returned from their various labors with their vivid and varied tales of the city. Seen through the eyes of each, Boston presented a highly different aspect. Bronson, with the aid of Emerson, had succeeded in forming an intellectual society known as the Town and Country Club. The club graciously elected Alcott its corresponding secretary and librarian and, still more graciously, discussed paying the rent for his West Street rooms.
¹⁰
The club, whose membership was more or less handpicked by Alcott, included Thoreau, Samuel Gridley Howe, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the poet James Russell Lowell, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was later both a key supporter of John Brown and a mentor of Emily Dickinson. The club, which hosted lectures by such luminaries as Emerson, Henry James Sr., and Theodore Parker, kept Bronson in steady contact with the best minds of liberal Massachusetts. The stories he brought home to Dedham Street spoke to Louisa of “the upper world, and the wise, good people who adorned it.”
¹¹
The sights and sounds that Abba related were of a darker, more somber tone. She had much to say about the poor who came to her for help each day. Sometimes she came home particularly disheveled, for there were days when her sympathy with the poor and helpless prompted her literally to give them the clothes off her back. Anna brought word from a middle realm, giving modest accounts of her success in the classroom, where her patience and gentle nature were proving to be valuable assets. To all this news, Lizzie and May added their joys and woes of the passing moment, and Louisa contributed her own tragicomic musings. One of the strongest adhesives holding the family together was narrative; the tales they shared of their daily lives formed a bridge of sympathy and shared effort. They were Louisa's only consolation amid the dirty pots and unmade beds.

Language offered another solace to Louisa during this period, for it was in the Dedham Street apartment and its successors that the girls' family theatricals enjoyed their greatest flowering. The sisters made every kind of prop imaginable, from a harp to a fairy's spangled wings, and they learned to recite pages of dialogue without error. Most often, the speeches came from Louisa's pen; she authored melodramas like “Norna, or the Witch's Curse,” and “The Captive of Castile, or the Moorish Maiden's Vow.” Later, Louisa's scripts gave way to scenes from Shakespeare, and she acted Hamlet with “a gloomy glare and a tragic stalk” that she thought superior to any professional performance she had ever seen.
¹²
It seemed for a time that acting might be the swiftest way out of poverty. Since the time of Fruitlands, Louisa had dreamed of becoming as famous as the soprano Jenny Lind, and now she thought her powers as a tragedian might make her another Sarah Siddon. Anna, too, had a full-blown case of stage fever, and the two would talk excitedly about the money they could make and the glittering lives they would lead. But Abba prudently cautioned the girls that they were too young for such adventures. “Wait,” she told them, but “Wait” seemed to be the standing order regarding all ambitions and hopes for the future. “Waiting,” Louisa wrote in her journal, “is so
hard
!”
¹³

Abba was still her closest ally. However, looking back on it all later, Louisa acknowledged both parents when she wrote that she and her sisters “had the truest of guides and guards, and so learned the sweet uses of adversity, the value of honest work,…and the real significance of life.”
¹⁴
The counsel and protection of both her parents mattered intensely during this period, though Abba and Bronson ministered to admittedly different needs. In this sense, Bronson served as the inspiration for Mr. March in
Little Women
:

Bronson Alcott's effectiveness as an anchor in matters other than ethical ones was more subject to question. Although fully capable of managing the affairs of the Town and Country Club, writing his journal, and giving conversations on a wide array of topics, he was in some ways still recovering from his post-Fruitlands breakdown. There was now a hidden emotional infirmity in the man that had not manifested itself in his younger days. Following the family's move to Boston, he again fell prey to strange, almost hallucinatory thoughts. In the summer of 1849, he worked feverishly on a manuscript that he called “Tablets,” the most peculiar piece of writing he had yet attempted. Not to be confused with the rather successful book that Alcott was to publish in 1868, this “Tablets” was an attempt to synthesize an odd amalgam of readings that had captured his imagination. In addition to delving into the mystical philosophical work of Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Boehme and the writings of German naturalist Lorenz Oken, Alcott was also becoming fascinated with the theories of the renowned scientist Michael Faraday regarding the relation between magnetism and electricity. As he followed Faraday's work, it seemed to him that the Englishman was laying foundations not only for a new kind of scientific inquiry but also for a new understanding of spiritual life. Alcott began searching for a bridge between the worlds of physical matter and mental and emotional experience. As biographer Frederick Dahlstrand has put it, “His reading of Faraday led him to speculate that electricity, magnetism, and light were but three states of one substance; this substance was the mysterious nexus of spirit and matter, the immediate breath of life.”
¹⁶
For a man of Alcott's utter lack of formal scientific training, some of the conclusions he drew from Faraday were remarkably astute. Whereas Faraday himself had worked out the essential identity between magnetism and electricity, many years were to elapse before science was to establish that light, too, consists of the same substance.

Not knowing what to do with his newfound insight, however, Alcott at once veered off in an occult direction. Influenced by another current interest, astrology, he began to construct a series of arcane tables—the “Tablets” from which his manuscript took its title—that purported to explain the various aspects of the human psyche. He began to illustrate his journals with charts and diagrams, all striving to work out a theory that would unify the brain, the body, magnetism, and the stars. He was, he wrote, in a “blaze of being.”
¹⁷
The next year, he remembered the giddy, obsessed zeal with which he pursued his idea:

If Alcott's inspirations had come to a mystic of stronger literary gifts, for instance a William Blake or a Samuel Taylor Coleridge, they might have led to an outpouring of visionary poetry. In the less capable hands of Bronson Alcott, they dissolved into a blur of disconnected thoughts and over-wrought imagery. As Alcott wrote “Tablets,” his handwriting degenerated into a furious, almost illegible scrawl. He was writing at white heat, but for an incomprehensible purpose.

As he had done five years earlier during his stay in Still River, Bronson began to think of himself as a conduit for otherworldly energies. In “Tablets,” he declared himself “a conductor of heavenly forces, and a wondrous instrument, a cerebral magnet, and electric battery, telegraph, glass, crucible, molten fluids traversing his frame—rising and bathing in his vessels.” If the excerpts offered here create the impression of an author set somewhat off his hinges, there is good reason. At the same time that he was working on “Tablets,” Bronson was experiencing mental states and visions that suggest a frighteningly disturbed mind. He found it impossible to “sleep without seeing goblins, or stumbling over the places of the dead.” One day he turned up unannounced at the home of lapsed transcendentalist Orestes Brownson and informed his astonished host that he, Bronson, was not merely God but, indeed, “greater than God.” He experienced a vision of the universe as an immense spinal cord, symbolic of the means by which God's creatures progressed from lower to higher forms.
¹⁹
Immersed in his fantastic manuscript, he rose in search of starry wisdom and electric truths, magnetically drawn by a genius that looked more and more like madness.