THE BIRTH OF CLARA BARTON
Clara Barton was a Christmas gift to the world. She was born December
25, 1821. Her parents named her Clarissa Harlowe. It was a name with
interesting literary associations.
Novels now grow overnight and are forgotten in a day. The paper mills
are glutted with the waste of yesterday’s popular works of fiction; and
the perishability of paper is all that prevents the stopping of all the
wheels of progress with the accumulation of obsolete “best-sellers.”
But it was not so in 1821. The novels of Samuel Richardson, issued
in the middle of the previous century, were still popular. He wrote
“Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded,” a novel named for its heroine, a pure
and simple-minded country girl, who repelled the dishonorable proposals
of her employer until he came to respect her, and married her, and
they lived happily ever after. The plot of this story lives again in
a thousand moving-picture dramas, in which the heroine is a shop girl
or an art student; but Richardson required two volumes to tell the
story, and it ran through five editions in a year. He also wrote “Sir
Charles Grandison,” and it required six volumes to portray that hero’s
smug priggishness; but the Reverend Dr. Finney, president of Oberlin
College, who was also the foremost evangelist of his time, and whose
system of theology wrought in its day a revolution, was not the only
distinguished man who bore the name of Charles Grandison.
But Richardson’s greatest literary triumph was “Clarissa Harlowe.”
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was not far wrong when she declared that
the chambermaids of all nations wept over Pamela, and that all the
ladies of quality were on their knees to Richardson imploring him to
spare Clarissa. Clarissa was not a servant like Pamela: she was a lady
of quality, and she had a lover socially her equal, but morally on a
par with a considerable number of the gentry of his day. His name,
Lovelace, became the popular designation of the gentleman profligate.
Clarissa’s sorrows at his hands ran through eight volumes, and, as the
lachrymose sentiment ran out to volume after volume, the gentlewomen
of the English-reading world wept tears that might have made another
flood. Samuel Richardson wrote the story of “Clarissa Harlowe” in 1748,
but the story still was read, and the name of the heroine was loved, in
1821.
But Clarissa Harlowe Barton did not permanently bear the incubus of so
long a name. Among her friends she was always Clara, and though for
years she signed her name “Clara H. Barton,” the convenience and rhythm
of the shorter name won over the time-honored sentiment attached to the
title of the novel, and the world knows her simply as Clara Barton.
He who rides on the electric cars from Worcester to Webster will pass
Bartlett’s Upper Mills, where a weather-beaten sign at the crossroads
points the way “TO CLARA BARTON’S BIRTHPLACE.” About a mile
from the main street, on the summit of a rounded hill, the visitor
will find the house where she was born. It stands with its side to the
road, a hall dividing it through the middle. It is an unpretentious
home, but comfortable, one story high at the eaves, but rising with
the rafters to afford elevation for chambers upstairs. In the rear
room, on the left side, on the ground floor, the children of the Barton
family were born. Clara was the fifth and youngest child, ten years
younger than her sister next older. The eldest child, Dorothy, was born
October 2, 1804, and died April 19, 1846. The next two children were
sons, Stephen, the third to bear the name, born March 29, 1806, and
David, born August 15, 1808. Then came another daughter, Sarah, born
March 20, 1811. These four children followed each other at intervals of
a little more than two years; but Clara had between her and the other
children the wide gap of more than a decade. Her brothers were fifteen
and thirteen, respectively, and her sister was “going on eleven” when
she arrived. She came into a world that was already well grown up and
fully occupied with concerns of its own. Had there been between her and
the other children an ascending series of four or five graduated steps
of heads, the first a little taller than her own, and the others rising
in orderly sequence, the rest of the universe would not have been
quite so formidable; but she was the sole representative of babyhood
in the home at the time of her arrival. So she began her somewhat
solitary pilgrimage, from a cradle fringed about with interested and
affectionate observers, all of whom had been babies a good while
before, but had forgotten about it, into that vast and vague domain
inhabited by the adult portion of the human race; and while she was not
unattended, her journey had its elements of solitude.