The Square Pegs (24 page)

How well she would move those bones, even she could not know. For by the time she was forced to leave England four years later, she had initiated a heresy in literature, a controversy in academic circles that would persist generation after generation, that persists even today after more than a century.

When she disembarked from her steamer at Liverpool on May 24, 1853, she had little realization of the din her visit would create in future years. She knew only the gnawing immediacy of her mission: to regain for honorable and brilliant men Bacon, Raleigh, Spenser, and their associates the acclaim that was rightfully theirs, but had been usurped, albeit unwittingly, by an unlettered actor who lay at rest beneath the floor of a village church, but who soon enough would rest no more.

Delia Salter Bacon’s monomania was cast in the first fifteen years of her life. Her father, the Reverend David Bacon, was a descendant of an early Puritan who had once held military rank in England. He himself was made of the same sturdy stuff. Raised on a Connecticut farm, he became a fanatical Congregationalist clergyman. Turning his eyes westward, he saw his life’s work. Accompanied by his adoring, delicate eighteen-year-old bride, Alice Parks Bacon, he headed into the wilderness and for five years preached to uninterested redskins in Detroit, Mackinac, and settlements in the back country.

His lack of success in converting savages to Christ brought on a crisis. Church funds were withheld, and he was left stranded. He found himself in the area of Ohio’s Western Reserve, and there, faced with need to make a decision, he was divinely inspired. He realized his real mission: to establish a holy community where Eastern immigrants might support themselves in an atmosphere both devout and pure.

The word from on high was enough. He promptly purchased 12,000 acres of the richest forest land in the vicinity. Having no cash, he bought on credit. As he busied himself in constructing his own log cabin and subdividing his acres into smaller farm tracts, he corresponded with Congregationalist families in the East who wanted to move to Ohio and dwell in piety with their Reverend.

He called his religious Utopia Tallmadge, and in this holy town, in the confines of the log cabin he had built, a girl whom he christened Delia Salter Bacon was born on February 2, 1811. There had been four children before her, and there would be one after her, but Delia alone would be infected by her father’s fanaticism.

The burden of his growing family weighed heavily on David Bacon as he awaited the settlers who would relieve him of his indebtedness and fulfill his dream of a heaven on earth. But in short months his dream was shattered by a Congressional embargo on foreign goods which finally culminated in the War of 1812. The Connecticut parishioners who had planned to leave for Ohio changed their minds. And in the Western Reserve David Bacon had his promised land to himself.

When he could not meet his obligations, his creditors quickly foreclosed and repossessed his 12,000 acres, his skeleton town of Tallmadge, and his very residence. Crushed in spirit and deprived of livelihood, David Bacon led his large family on the weary 600-mile trek back to New England. There he dragged out six more years of defeat selling Bibles, occasionally teaching, sometimes delivering sermons. He was forty-six when he died in August 1817, when the girl child upon whom he had left the deepest impression was only six.

Without inheritance, and with a half-dozen mouths to feed, the widow Bacon distributed as many of her brood as she could among relatives and friends and moved to New York City to work as a milliner. Of the entire family it was thought that six-year-old Delia fared the best. She was accepted in a Hartford home that offered her, at least materially, such comforts as she had never known before. Her guardian, Mrs. Delia Williams, was the wife of a prominent attorney.

Delia Bacon lived with the Williamses for nine years. In many respects she found them generous. For one thing, they provided her with the best education then available for an unemancipated American young lady. In 1824 the clever Catharine Beecher, seeking occupation after the death of her fiance, Professor Alexander M. Fisher, established a small school for women in Hartford. Though it never attained an enrollment of more than 150 students, it was to become nationally respected. One of its first pupils was the founder’s younger sister, Harriet, who would become world famous as Harriet Beecher Stowe. Another was Delia Bacon. Many years later, Catharine Beecher would remember that Delia possessed one “of the most gifted minds” she had ever encountered in male or female society, and that “she was preeminently one who would be pointed out as a genius… .”

Her three years under Catharine Beecher and dutiful support until she reached maturity were the best Delia could hope for as a ward of the Williamses. She was lonely for love and companionship. These her guardians could not supply. They were well intentioned, but they were childless, and their regime was austere. “There can be no doubt of the calm and constant kindness of patronage which the fatherless child received here,” Delia’s nephew, Theodore Bacon, wrote later. “But its calmness may have been somewhat stern and grim.”

In 1826 Delia Bacon left the Williamses to make her own way. She was fifteen years old, without capital and without connections, and possessed only of the learning imparted by Catharine Beecher. She had no choice but to exploit her single asset. She would emulate Miss Beecher. She would found her own academy for women and teach others.

It took Delia four heartbreaking years to learn that she was no Catharine Beecher. Aided by an older sister, she opened girls’ schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, and everywhere she failed. In the end her eldest brother, Leonard Bacon, the successful pastor of New Haven’s First Congregationalist Church, rescued her from debt and urged her to concentrate on instruction to the exclusion of business.

For the next decade and more Delia Bacon devoted herself to teaching. She returned to Hartford to accept employment as a pedagogue, then restlessly moved on to two other similar positions in New York State. She taught with only half a mind for her work. Its better half was given over to authorship. “From her childhood,” noted brother Leonard, “she has had a passion for literature, and perhaps I should say a longing, more or less distinct, for literary celebrity.”

When she was twenty years old, Delia began her struggle for “literary celebrity,” responding to what Catharine Beecher had characterized in her as “the desire of human estimation, especially in the form of literary ambition.” Early in 1831 the firm of A. H. Maltby in New Haven published a collection of three melodramatic, historical novelettes entitled
Tales of the Puritans
. The title page credited no writer, as the author had insisted upon anonymity. But when the imaginative if incongruous stories met with no adverse criticism, Delia stepped forward to acknowledge authorship. Under her pen the Puritans unbent, and were made to indulge in protracted love scenes and dashing swordplay. The book had a brief vogue among lady readers, and Delia was more than satisfied, admitting that it had been “written without experience, without knowledge of the subjects of which it treated, with scarcely a book to refer to beyond the works made use of in school.”

Later the same year, with less trepidation and no anonymity, Delia submitted a short story, “Love’s Martyr,” in competition for a first prize of $100 being offered by the
Philadelphia Saturday Courier
. Perhaps it surprised her not at all that she was soon announced as the winner. But it may surprise many, reading of her victory more than a century later, to know the caliber of opposition she overcame. For among those Delia had defeated in the contest was an impoverished former West Point cadet, two years her senior, named Edgar Allan Poe. Though Delia’s fiction was awarded the $100, one of Poe’s several submissions, “Metzengerstein,” was given the secondary honor of publication during January 1832 at space rates. With this appearance in print, Poe, who had already brought out three volumes of verse, made his debut as a writer of short stories.

Next, Delia decided to become a playwright. Her first offering, long planned, would be based on a dramatic episode that had occurred during the Revolutionary War. Delia had once read of an American girl, Jane McCrea, who had fallen in love with a British officer under General Burgoyne’s command. Taken captive by a party of Indians, Jane McCrea offered them a sizable reward if they would release her to the British. The proffered reward provoked a violent disagreement among the redskins. Each Indian claimed to deserve the full ransom. In the heat of the argument one savage turned upon the source of the trouble, the captive girl, killed her, scalped her, and made off. When the murder became public it did much to arouse and inflame patriotic opinion against the British and their Indian allies.

Out of these tragic materials, Delia spun her romantic play. It was rejected everywhere for its verbosity, improbability, and amateurish pretentions. Undeterred, yet with some misgivings (for she warned in her foreword that her work was “not a Play … not intended for the stage” but was merely a “DIALOGUE”), she submitted the theatrical effort for publication.

The so-called dialogue, two hundred pages of wordy prose in blank verse, was served up to America’s readers in 1839 as
The Bride of Fort Edward: A Dramatic Story
, by Delia Bacon. “It was a failure, every way,” Delia’s nephew recorded. “It brought debt instead of money, and no renown; but it did the great service of ending, for a time, her attempts at literary work, and turning her back to study and instruction.”

After this debacle Delia embarked upon the most successful undertaking of her brief career that of lady lecturer. It is more than likely she got the idea from observing the success of Margaret Fuller, feminist, critic, and gadfly. In this new endeavor Delia seemed to find herself at last. Her knowledge of literature and history, her eloquence and wit, supplemented by a small reputation gained with her first book and by contacts acquired through years of teaching and through her clergyman brother’s high station, helped to increase the attendance at her lectures. She might have had a long and prosperous career and “will Shakspere gent” might have rested undisturbed through all eternity had not scandal and shame entered her life in the malevolent shape of Reverend Alexander McWhorter, student of divinity and cad.

It is difficult, at best, to reconcile the stiff image left us by her subsequent literary reputation, of a studious, single-minded Delia Bacon, with the softer, shimmering vision, which existed before her retreat into monomania, of a warm, womanly Delia Bacon enraptured by love, sacred and profane. But as all existing evidence confirms, Delia was a woman. Beneath the prim aspect of teacher and speaker, behind the sterility of her scholarship, lay hidden the normal passions, the hungers, the longings for a man’s love.

She was not, by any means, unattractive. During her lecturing phase, as Mrs. Eliza Farrar recalled, she “was tall and commanding, her finely shaped head was well set on her shoulders, her face was handsome and full of expression, and she moved with grace and dignity.” A friend of Delia’s, Mrs. Sarah Henshaw, remembered her as “graceful, fair, and slight. Her habitual black dress set off to advantage the radiant face, whose fair complexion was that uncommon one which can only be described as pale yet brilliant.” A daguerreotype of Delia taken in May 1853, when she was forty-two years of age, still exists. She sits reposefully, staring into the camera. She wears a bonnet, and a shawl is thrown over her black-satin dress. Her hair is black and flattened by a severe part in the middle. Her brow is high, her deep-set eyes seem darker than the blue-gray described by her friends, her nose is long and classically Grecian, and her generous mouth is drawn in a tight, amused smile. If the face seems more forbidding, more worn, than the description of it left by her friends, it must be remembered that the portrait was taken six years after the sitter had suffered deeply at the hands of McWhorter.

With a nice sense of respect and a poor sense of history, Theodore Bacon does not mention McWhorter by name in his biography of his aunt. His only comment is provocatively enigmatic. “When she was mature in age, she underwent a most cruel ordeal, and suffered a grievous and humiliating disappointment.”

The ordeal began in 1846 when Delia was lecturing in New Haven, where her brother Leonard had replaced his friend and mentor, Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, as pastor of the First Church. At the hotel where Delia took her room and board she found herself often dining at the same table with another occupant of the hotel, a young man named Alexander McWhorter. She learned that McWhorter came from a wealthy New Jersey family and was a resident licentiate of Yale, studying under Dr. Nathaniel Taylor. Though there was a mutual attraction between Delia and McWhorter, she remained briefly aloof. Perhaps it was because they had not been formally introduced. More likely, it was because Delia was then thirty-five years old, and McWhorter twenty-three.

After a short time, Delia could no longer ignore McWhorter’s formal attentions. Nor, as it turned out, did she any longer wish to. Learning that her fellow boarder was a student under her brother’s respected friend Dr. Taylor, she felt free to respond to McWhorter’s overtures. It was her custom to give nightly receptions in her parlor. To these she invited friends and acquaintances, and to one such affair she invited McWhorter. He attended and made it clear that his interest in his hostess was romantic rather than intellectual.

“His first visit was not his last,” the
Philadelphia Times
reported rather sternly in 1886. “He was more than pleased with Delia Bacon’s intellectual attainments he was interested in her personal attractions. He called upon her frequently. He showed her marked attention. He acted as her escort in public. He professed for her a profound and lasting affection, and would not take ‘no’ for an answer. He even followed her to a watering-place, with no other excuse than to be near her. These two … were lovers… . Then, when he tired of the flirtation, as all men do who fall in love with women older than themselves, he turned viciously upon his uncomplaining victim and contemptuously characterized an affair, that had begun with baseness on his part, a literary intimacy.”