Eden's Outcasts (6 page)

Samuel, too, fretted over the appearance of the thing. Fearing scandal, he cautioned Abba to be wary of “the remarks and opinions of the world,” which a man might perhaps flout with impunity but which a woman could ignore only at the price of “incurring the greatest danger.”
⁷¹
He fully expected “a censorious world to ascribe selfish views both to myself and you, if you were now to unite with him in his school.”
⁷²
Nevertheless, if Samuel May thought that a professional connection between his sister and the blue-eyed Connecticut dreamer would be impolitic, he felt quite differently about their social liaison. Though she needed no prompting, he encouraged Abba to look beyond the schoolmaster's social status:

In any event, Bronson did not hire Abba, and he continued to vacillate as to the more personal aspect of their relationship. He was afraid above all of making a premature advance. As he wrestled with the problem of making “a disclosure so important in the history of my happiness,” speech failed him.
⁷⁴
At last, he resorted to the only confidant and go-between whose ability to represent him he fully trusted: his journal. After some trepidation, he handed Abba the pages where he had written what he could not say.

He first gave her some relatively noncommittal extracts for her perusal, passages that expressed admiration for her character but steered clear of forthright declarations. At their next meeting, as the two went for a solitary walk, he tried again to verbalize his feelings, but he meandered off into high-flown abstractions. Bewildered, Abba complained, “The more he tried to explain, the more mysterious everything appeared to me.” Finally, Bronson showed her the frankest portions of his journal, and they told Abba all she wished to know. An offer of marriage immediately followed, and Abba immediately accepted. Later that same day, she wrote to Samuel that she was “engaged to Mr. Alcott not in a school, but in the solemn—the momentous capacity of friend and wife.”
⁷⁵
She told Samuel, “I feel already an increase of moral energy—I have something to love—to live for—I have felt a loneliness in this world that was making a misanthrope of me in spite of everything I could do to overcome it.” With the most ardent emotion, she swore that she would “live to promote the happiness of him with whom all my interests are blended.”
⁷⁶

In the happiest moments, however, doubts can be especially troubling, perhaps because they stand out so starkly against the brightness of the scene. Abba confessed her awareness of both the differences of character that separated her from her fiancé and the scantness of his worldly means:

Just how much a lack of money can press in on the most determined happiness, Abba was to discover. Just how accurate she was in listing humility and prudence among her new fiancé's virtues should be left for the wise to determine.

Bronson felt that their mutual disclosure of affection possessed “all the romance of poetry.” Love had always been for him a diffuse, idealized emotion—something one felt generally for humankind or, somewhat more specifically, for a classroom of children. On his becoming engaged to Abigail May, love at last obtained a personal, physical form. Alcott wrote, “I then commenced
living
, not only for society, but for an
individual.
I identified a human soul with my own.”
⁷⁸

The couple's delight in their engagement was marred three months later by the death of Abba's only surviving sister, Mrs. Samuel Greele, who left behind a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. Abba, who had loved this sister deeply, was later to honor her memory by naming one of her own daughters after her. The maiden name of the departed sister was Louisa May.

A
MOS BRONSON ALCOTT AND ABIGAIL MAY WERE MARRIED
after an unhurried engagement on Sunday, May 23, 1830, at King's Chapel on Tremont Street. Bronson noted the day in his journal with ornate formality, revealing more about his taste for elaborate diction than disclosing the details of the event. He wrote, in full:

It is hard to read these words without some disappointment. They give no hint of the music that was played, the adornments of the bride, the good wishes that were exchanged, or, most importantly, the sentiments of the couple themselves. Whatever deep significance Bronson may have attached to the word “friend,” one expects a warmer word for a new bride. Bronson, however, was not deeply skilled as a reporter. The best descriptive passages in his journals are products of long reflection, written years, not hours, after the events in question. In addition, the distant quality of Alcott's wedding-day journal entry confirms a general truth about the nature of his awareness. More often than not, Bronson Alcott tended to live more in his ideas than in his skin. At many of the moments when others are likely to feel most alive to the world of sense, Bronson seems to have been only contingently present, like an accidental, gossamer visitor to a ponderously material world.

The couple's financial prospects brightened two months after the wedding, when they received an anonymous gift of two thousand dollars, most likely from Abba's father, Colonel Joseph May. To his credit, Bronson immediately used more than a third of the money to settle, with interest, the debt that he had long owed his family at Spindle Hill. Indeed, he traveled there with Abba to have the pleasure of pressing the money into his mother's hand. Sadly, though, Alcott's father was not there to meet his daughter-in-law. The previous year, Joseph Alcox had died at the age of fifty-seven.

After the wedding, Alcott barely had time to resume his teaching in Boston before events started to lead him down a different road. During the same month that saw him married, he entered a contest. The
United States Gazette
of Philadelphia advertised a one-hundred-dollar prize for the best essay on education. Alcott responded with a twenty-seven-page opus,
Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction
.
Observations
represents the most comprehensive statement on the subject of teaching that he ever committed to writing. Moreover, it reveals Alcott's state of mind near the time when his thinking about education was to be put to its most formidable test; only a month or so after their wedding, Abba became pregnant with the couple's first child. After this child was born, Alcott's roles as father and educator were never distinct. Thus, his
Observations
is as much a treatise on parenting as a theory of the classroom.

Alcott began by positing that a child possessed a collection of faculties that developed at different rates over time. He identified them, in ascending order of complexity, as “the animal nature, the affections, the conscience [and] the intellect.” To accomplish its tasks, he argued, an education must address all these aspects of personality. “The whole being of the child,” he insisted, “asks for expansion and guidance.” Rather than being prematurely forced to concentrate only on the emergence of his intellect, the child should be encouraged to “associate pleasure with the action of all his faculties.” Children naturally seek enjoyment. However, lacking judgment and experience, they either fail to find enjoyment or discover it in the wrong activities. Therefore, a teacher must seek and supply the means to guide the pupil to true and lasting sources of enjoyment.
²

Since the first aspect of a child's character to emerge was its animal nature, his physical needs should initially be treated as paramount. It was essential to allow him unrestrained movement and ample opportunity for play, an activity that Alcott called “the appointed dispensation of childhood.” Only when the exuberance of the body had been satisfied could the intellect be successfully addressed. The playroom, then, was the most effective preparation for the schoolroom. Always, Alcott declared, instruction should be invested “with an interest, a certainty, and a love, which future experience shall not diminish, nor maturer reason disapprove.”
³

Games and playtime were, of course, only the first steps. The instructor must also address the intellectual and moral constitution of the child, though never in a condescending or autocratic fashion. Rather, the chief avenue to the mind and soul of the child was through conversation, that is, through a system of Socratic dialogue that, while adjusted to the lesser intellect of the child, nevertheless treated the child as the moral peer of the instructor. “To train and elevate [the conscience] by frequent appeals to the unerring laws of reason, rectitude, and benevolence” was, for Alcott, “an all-important work.” Socrates, however, was not the sole model, for Alcott also revered the teaching practices of Christ, especially his parables. Abstract reasoning should give way to “interesting incidents, familiar descriptions, approaching as nearly as possible to the circumstances and relations of life.”
⁴

Indeed, Alcott believed that the ideal teacher should be a modern Christ, entering the classroom not only with a solemn sense of moral duty but a surpassing love for his young charges. Perfecting of a growing spirit required the near perfection of the instructor:

Not surprisingly, given his own haphazard, unfinished education, Alcott insisted that the teacher's formal training and store of academic knowledge were of relatively minor import. Alcott argued that the word “education” must be taken literally. It was a drawing out of what the child already possessed within, not a cramming in of facts and theories. As the child traveled the path to knowledge and spiritual unfoldment, the role of the teacher was neither to drive nor to lead the child; it was to accompany him.

Bronson did not win the contest. However, as with his cousin William's report on the Cheshire school, this document also opened a door. Alcott's
Observations
was printed by a Boston publishing house and caught the eye of a Pennsylvanian Quaker named Reuben Haines, a railroad entrepreneur and financier with a fancy for educational topics. In October 1830, on a visit to Boston, Haines sought Alcott out and made him an offer. Alcott and his wife were to move from Boston to Germantown, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where Haines would provide them with a house free of rent and arrange for Bronson and his friend William Russell to open a school based on the principles of Bronson's
Observations
. Bronson responded to the proposal with enthusiasm. Abba could hardly have welcomed the news that she was to become a mother hundreds of miles away from the rest of the May family. Nevertheless, on December 14, 1830, now six months pregnant, Abba joined Bronson and the Russells on their difficult four-day journey over rutted roads and storm-tossed waters to Philadelphia.

When Alcott and Russell arrived in Germantown, they found the quiet farming community far below their expectations. Neither believed that the community was sufficiently forward-looking to appreciate their progressive approach to education. Therefore, instead of settling in Germantown, the Alcotts took rooms at a boardinghouse in Philadelphia. The two men kept Haines at bay for several weeks while they tried to locate patrons who might support them in establishing a school in Philadelphia. Finding no takers, they again agreed to Haines's original offer, which the philanthropist had kindly held open for them. Alcott instructed children from the ages of three to nine, while Russell worked with the older pupils.

Alcott's delay in committing himself to Haines meant that the house he had been promised was not immediately ready for occupancy. Thus, it was in a Germantown boardinghouse operated by a Mrs. Stuckart that Bronson prepared to open his school and Abba made ready for motherhood. The ensuing winter was a time of great excitement for Bronson but a season of loneliness for Abba. As her pregnancy neared its end, she became anxious and depressed. On March 15, 1831, she began thirty-six hours of labor.

The following evening, an hour before midnight, Abba delivered a daughter, whom the couple named Anna Bronson in honor of Bronson's mother. The baby was strong and healthy. Abba felt as if the child had opened “all the fountains of [her] better nature.” The baby had “given love to life—and life to love.” Abba doubted whether anyone else could comprehend “the sacred, pure emotions” that had “filled and at times overwhelmed” her.
⁶
Bronson was equally ecstatic. In his journal, he implicitly likened Anna's birth to the coming of the Christ child. One can almost hear the jubilant notes of Handel's
Messiah
in Alcott's words:

Bronson saw in Anna both a God-given duty and an experimental opportunity. In his current thinking, environment was all-important in the moral formation of a child. Even in the carefully constructed atmospheres of his primary schools, however, the children had always walked through the door as products of potentially contaminating influences. Never had Alcott had the chance to try out his educational theories on a pure subject, untainted by the petty prejudices of someone else's parenting.

In Anna, Bronson at last had the chance to supervise and observe the development of a child from its earliest moments, in an environment over which he could exert a high level of control. Alcott seized this opportunity with extraordinary zeal and ambition. Bronson was utterly confident of his innate genius. However, even though most of his childhood memories were fond, he bitterly regretted having been raised in an environment that had neither recognized nor fed his native brilliance. He resolved to give his child the spiritually indulgent upbringing he wished he had had. In this pursuit, Alcott accepted no half measures. He hoped to create an environment for his daughter that was not only better than what he had known but which, he believed, would come as close as possible to producing a perfect child.

Seeking from the first not to reprise the remoteness of his own father, Alcott could hardly be persuaded to leave the room where Abba and the infant lay. He was making good his determination to be a man, in Abba's words, “for domestic and parental excellence inferior to none.” His presence “shed tranquility on the scene.”
⁸
However, he did not stop there. From the day after Anna's birth, Alcott kept a separate journal regarding his daughter, titled “Observations on the Life of my First Child,” in which he aspired to record literally every event in her mental and spiritual growth. He proposed to continue this journal religiously until Anna was old enough to continue it herself, not merely through the end of childhood but as near as possible to her death. He desired nothing less than “the history of one human mind, commenced in infancy and faithfully narrated…through all the vicissitudes of life to its close.”
⁹
He hoped to create a document that would outstrip in value all that the world's philosophers had ever written about the human mind. The Alcott family nursery was to be more than a supreme locus of love and learning. It was also to be a laboratory for his children's minds and souls. Alcott undertook such journals not only for Anna but also for his next two daughters, Louisa and Elizabeth. He exposed them to stimuli and wrote down their reactions. He made minute observations of their movements, their facial expressions, their squeals of pleasure and fits of anger. Altogether, his writings on the early childhoods of his three eldest daughters eventually reached an astounding twenty-five hundred pages.

It is easy and, to some extent, justifiable to respond somewhat squeamishly to a man who would use his own children as the subjects of such an experiment. However, to read Alcott's painstakingly compiled notebooks is to realize that his motives, as well as his methods, were scrupulously kind. He was seeking to determine the nature of happiness and how to produce it, and harshness had no place in this search. In one of his experiments with Anna, Bronson affected a series of faces in order to note the baby's reactions. Curiosity prompted him to assume a deliberately frightening face. When Anna responded with panic, her father at once regretted his transgression. He wrote:

Moreover, Alcott was indulgent in his responses to Anna's inevitable assertions of frustration and anger. Indeed, he aspired to be a less controlling parent than the nature of his investigation would seem to suggest. When, at three months, Alcott noticed that Anna “indicated her opposition to whatever she thinks will diminish her happiness…uttering cries of uneasiness, dissatisfaction, etc.,” he emphatically rejected the idea, which he knew many of his contemporaries would urge, that such displays of passion should be immediately checked and overcome. He wanted to train his child for independence, not servile obedience. “Liberty,” Alcott maintained, “is a primary right of all created natures…. The child has his rights, as well as the adult…. The right of self-government, and the liberty to govern himself…are inherent principles of his nature.”
¹¹
Alcott's philosophy of the nursery reflected his philosophy of the state; he wanted not only to aid in the formation of a happy, intelligent child but to produce a republican citizen.