Eden's Outcasts (5 page)

Perhaps more than ill fortune had helped to keep Abba single. Throughout her life, she had a forthrightness and a sharp tongue that might have discouraged a fainthearted suitor. In addition, as an infant she had been severely burned on her face and right hand. The extent of the lasting scars and physical impairment that resulted cannot be known. However, biographer Madelon Bedell has suggested that Abba's hand was permanently disfigured in some way that harmed appearance more than function.
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In any event, it is not fanciful to suppose that the loss of her fiancé, coupled with self-consciousness about her appearance—or a dearth of suitors because of her scars—had a deflating effect on her romantic expectations.

By her midtwenties, Abba May was thinking more about books than about men. By this time, her best friend, Lydia Maria Child, was already on her way to becoming one of the most respected women writers in the country. For her part, Abba had never been much attracted to formal study, but she read voraciously on her own, devouring biographies, philosophical works, and contemporary novels. She possessed both intellect and will, but, having no inspiring object to give focus to her determination, she believed that her intellectual stamina was not sufficient for concentrated work. She had written this critical self-assessment to her brother Charles:

But she felt no despondency the day Bronson Alcott first came to her brother's door. The stranger was tall, blond, and imperially gracious. She invited him in.

It is hard to say which of the May siblings was more immediately enraptured by Alcott, who spoke with such sparkle and sincerity about his theories of education. Samuel May found that his expectations were more than answered. He wrote, “I have never, but in one other instance, been so taken possession of by any man I ever met. He seemed to me like a born sage and saint.” Bronson, May recognized, was a radical in the literal sense of the word, that is, his discernment went directly “to the root of all things, especially the subjects of education, mental, and moral culture.”
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As he laid out his ideas and visions for the betterment of children's minds and spirits, Bronson was unconsciously making a strong impression in another direction as well. Abba May shared her brother's fervor for social causes. Decades later, her daughter Louisa wrote that Abba had “the blood of all the Mays and Sewalls ‘a bilin' in her veins.”
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Without question, young Mr. Alcott's conversation caused that blood to rise a degree or two. However, not all of the heat came from political excitement. She was not so high-minded that she could ignore his more obvious charms: his upright carriage; his gracious, almost overly elaborate manners; the quick, playful uplift of his head; and his profound earnestness. Until Abba opened her brother's door that day, her life had lacked possibility and promise. Unexpectedly, she found herself sitting in the presence of an immeasurable fullness.

Bronson was a man of many internal rules and restraints who exerted great control over his displays of emotion. Abba was naturally more impulsive, but she knew more than enough of the manners of good society to make her immediate attraction to Bronson seem like polite interest. Her first acknowledgment of Bronson in her journal evinced cautious restraint. She wrote, “I found…an intelligent, philosophic modest man, whose reserved deportment authorized my showing many attentions.”
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It took Bronson almost a year to write down his initial impressions of Abba. By that time, he had seen her on many occasions, and his true first impressions had been reshaped by those subsequent interviews. Even so, as he recalled their first meeting, there was a stiff, fumbling quality to his prose that suggests a lingering discomfort with the feelings she had stirred in him. During this period, Alcott had affected the use of the royal “we” when writing about himself. Although he used this device in writing about all subjects, it is fun to suppose that, when he used it with respect to his courtship, he did so because he did not want to go it alone. He referred to her tentatively as:

At last, after all the circumlocutions and polysyllables, he permitted himself to come to the point: “How could we but be in love with [her]?”
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He wrote approvingly of Abba's lack of artifice and affectation. “All,” he wrote, “was openness, simplicity, nature herself.” He set down a series of her admirable qualities: “intelligence, sympathy, piety…tenderness of eye…beauty of moral countenance…joyousness of domestic performance.”
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He respected the fact that she thought for herself, and he was flattered to find that many of her conclusions were the same as his own. Moreover, she seemed genuinely interested in his driving passion: the instruction of the young. Bronson ended up staying with the Mays for about a week, during which time he became as attracted to the family as they were to him.

There was talk of Bronson's going to Boston to form a school under the aegis of a Scottish educator, William Russell, who was gaining recognition as the editor of the
American Journal of Education
. Abba, plucking up her courage, offered her services. Bronson, however, wanted to make one more attempt at establishing himself in his home state. Late in the autumn of 1827, he set up a school in Bristol, run on the same principles he had used in Cheshire. This time, however, the backlash against his progressivism was even swifter and more decisive. If he were to have any hope of continuing as an educator, he would have to pursue his dream in a city large-minded enough to have produced a family like the Mays. It was time to go to Boston.

On the way, he stopped at the Mays' house. This time, however, his interactions with Abba May were more strained. During the previous ten months they had been too much in each other's thoughts for them to repeat the naturalness of emotion with which they had first greeted each other, and both came away from this second encounter confused and troubled. Bronson reflexively took refuge in his formality and mannered correctness, leading Abba to curse the naïveté with which she had assumed warmer motives on his part. Expecting to greet a friend, she discovered “merely an acquaintance, whose reserve chilled me into silence.”
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It even occurred to her that he found her character disagreeable.

No image exists of Abba Alcott as a young woman. When she sat for this photograph, long years of social activism and challenging married life were behind her.

(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

Once in Boston, Alcott wasted no time seeking out influences that he could incorporate into his understanding of the mind and its proper education. It was very nearly the last time in American history when society's intellectual leaders could be found primarily in the pulpit, and Alcott busily pursued enlightenment by hearing the leading ministers of the Unitarian church. Easily the greatest spokesperson of Unitarian belief was William Ellery Channing, a man whose merits Alcott was quick to recognize. He observed, “Among the list of divines here of the liberal character, Dr. Channing ranks pre-eminent, both in originality of thought and felicity of expression.”
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A Rhode Island native, Dr. Channing had been the pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston since 1803. He remained there until his death in 1842. Channing and his fellow Unitarians firmly rejected the doctrine, rooted in the minds of New Englanders since the seventeenth century, that humankind was born depraved and alienated by Adam's sins from the love and majesty of God. Channing and his followers refused to believe that a good God would produce a wicked creation and then punish it with everlasting misery for evils that He had allowed to exist in the first place. God, for the Unitarians, was infinitely good and kind, seeking always to encourage in his creation the highest development of virtue.

Channing routinely emphasized the paternal nature of God and implied that the world was a school for the spirit in which human beings were the pupils. In 1819, Channing had ascribed to God “a father's concerns for His creatures, a father's desire for their improvement,…a father's joy in their progress.” Unitarians, he said, “look upon this world as a place of education, in which He is training men by prosperity and adversity, by aids and obstructions, by conflicts of reason and passion.”
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Channing saw God as both father and teacher, a view that dovetailed precisely with Alcott's ideas of education. The ideal teacher was to Alcott a type of spiritual father, who tried to bring, with both his words and his example, an image of divine goodness into the mind of the child. After arriving in Boston, Bronson strove whenever possible to employ a female assistant in his schools. With both a female and a male teacher in the room, he must have reasoned, the school would more closely approach the model of the family proposed by Pestalozzi. Eager to observe the results of Alcott's theories of spiritual education, Channing became a benefactor of the school that Alcott established on Common Street in the fall of 1828.
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On September 28, 1828, Alcott's diaries mention a first encounter with a man who, for the time being, was nothing more to him than an unusually gifted preacher. On that day, twenty-five-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson read a sermon on the universality of the Deity to his congregation at the Second Church in Boston's North End. Alcott listened as Emerson decried the life of the average person, so intent on satisfying the monotonous wants of an unexceptional life that the omnipresent miracles of the universe are invisible to him.

Of this sort of rodentlike existence, Bronson was already a dedicated foe. It must have warmed him to hear these words that answered the intuitions of his own heart. In Emerson's words, too, he heard a cordial invitation to friendship and a sharing of spirit. In the knowledge of God, the young minister declared, “our hearts beat as one heart…we are touched with the same emotion; are struck with the same truth; and pray with one prayer.”
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Alcott and Emerson did not meet that Sunday. Still, there was a gravity of soul to this young minister that was well worth a closer look. Alcott wrote in his journal of Emerson and others like him, “To be favored with the acquaintance of such men as these is a privilege of which I am desirous to obtain and secure…. The same objects are before our view.”
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Alcott was forming a useful connection with the educator William Russell, who had quickly come to respect him both as a teacher and as an expounder of educational theories. The lean-faced Russell visited Alcott's new school and left, as he put it, “With a clearer conception than I ever had before of the innate excellence of the human soul.”
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Russell's journal published a paper on Alcott's Cheshire school, as well as a paper by Alcott on Pestalozzian education. Before long, Russell was assisting with the instruction at Alcott's school. At the age of twenty-eight, Bronson was beginning to move among the intellectual circles of Boston.

At the same time, events of a more intimate nature were slowly and haltingly gathering momentum. The stiffness Alcott had exhibited during his last visit to Brooklyn had put Abba off only momentarily. No doubt realizing that an extra effort would be required to conquer his aloofness, she had embarked on a bold stratagem. She moved from Samuel's house to her father's home in Boston. From this nearer vantage point, she wrote to Alcott, offering herself not as a lover but as an assistant at the school he was soon to open.

In part, she was engaged in a romantic pursuit. In part, though, she was simply trying to recapture her self-esteem. She resolved, if not to capture his affections, then at least “that he should know me better and find I had some redeeming virtue.”
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Bronson, too, had obstacles to overcome. As much as the gentility of the Mays had delighted him, their attention also made him conscious of his countrified origins. Yes, his experiences in the South had taken the rough edges off his manners, but navigating an occasional drawing room or dance floor was not the same as forging a possibly permanent connection with an established family. He felt that he still evinced “so much of the rustic awkwardness and simplicity of natural life that I am often offending the more cultivated tastes” of more polite people.
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Moreover, he was not in the habit of regarding himself as a romantic person. A devotee of principles, how could he succeed in something so unprincipled as a love affair? Also, as a practical matter, it seemed imprudent to accept Abba's offer of professional assistance. After all, Samuel May was to be his patron. It would hardly serve anyone's reputation if it were thought that May had extended his kindness on the basis of his sister's romantic affinities, nor was it wise to create the impression that Alcott had given Abba a job as a quid pro quo.