and we shall have to discount the statement of any observer who
gathered a different impression. Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, at whose
home some of these interviews took place, was a boy of twelve, and may
have taken the play of wit between the parties too seriously. He says,
"At first Miss Francis did not like Mr. Child. Their intercourse was
mostly banter and mutual criticism. Observers said, 'Those two people
will end in marrying.' Miss Francis was not a beautiful girl in the
ordinary sense, but her complexion was good, her eyes were bright, her
mouth expressive and her teeth fine. She had a great deal of wit,
liked to use it, and did use it upon Mr. Child who was a frequent
visitor; but her deportment was always maidenly and lady-like."
The engagement happened in this wise. Mr. Child had been admitted to
the bar and had opened an office in Boston. One evening about nine
o'clock he rode out to Watertown on horseback and called at the
Curtises' where Miss Francis then was. "My mother, who believed the
denouement had come," says Mr. Curtis, "retired to her chamber. Mr.
Child pressed his suit earnestly. Ten o'clock came, then eleven, then
twelve. The horse grew impatient and Mr. Child went out once or twice
to pacify him, and returned. At last, just as the clock was striking
one, he went. Miss Francis rushed into my mother's room and told her
she was engaged to Mr. Child."
There are indications in this communication that Mr. Curtis did not
himself greatly admire Mr. Child and would not have married him, but
he concedes that, "Beyond all doubt, Mrs. Child was perfectly happy in
her relations with him, through their long life." After their
marriage, he says, they went to housekeeping in a "very small house in
Boston," where Mr. Curtis, then a youth of sixteen, visited them and
partook of a simple, frugal dinner which the lady cooked and served
with her own hands, and to which Mr. Child returned from his office,
"cheery and breezy," and we may hope the vivacity of the host may have
made up for the frugality of the entertainment.
In "Letters from New York," written to the Boston _Courier_, she
speaks tenderly of her Boston home which she calls "Cottage Place" and
declares it the dearest spot on earth. I assume it was this "very
small house" where she began her married life, where she dined the
fastidious Mr. Curtis, and where she seems to have spent eight or
nine happy years. Her marriage brought her great happiness. A friend
says, "The domestic happiness of Mr. and Mrs. Child seemed to me
perfect. Their sympathies, their admiration of all things good, and
their hearty hatred of all things mean and evil, were in entire
unison. Mr. Child shared his wife's enthusiasms and was very proud of
her. Their affection, never paraded, was always manifest." After Mr.
Child's death, Mrs. Child said, "I believe a future life would be of
small value to me, if I were not united to him."
Mr. Child was a man of fine intellect, with studious tastes and
habits, but there is too much reason to believe that his genius did
not lie in the management of practical life. Details of business were
apparently out of his sphere. "It was like cutting stones with a
razor," says one who knew him. "He was a visionary," says another,
"who always saw a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow." This was a
kind of defect which, though it cost her dear, Mrs. Child, of all
persons, could most easily forgive. One great success he achieved:
that was in winning and keeping the heart of Mrs. Child. Their married
life seems to have been one long honeymoon. "I always depended," she
says, "upon his richly stored mind, which was able and ready to
furnish needed information on any subject. He was my walking
dictionary of many languages, and my universal encyclopedia. In his
old age, he was as affectionate and devoted as when the lover of my
youth; nay, he manifested even more tenderness. He was often singing,
'There's nothing half so sweet in life
As love's _old_ dream.'
Very often, when he passed me, he would lay his hand softly on my head
and murmur 'Carum Caput.'... He never would see anything but the
bright side of my character. He always insisted upon thinking that
whatever I said was the wisest and whatever I did was the best."
In the anti-slavery conflict, Mr. Child's name was among the earliest,
and at the beginning of the controversy, few were more prominent. In
1832, he published in Boston a series of articles upon slavery and the
slave-trade; in 1836, another series upon the same subject, in
Philadelphia; in 1837, an elaborate memoir upon the subject for an
anti-slavery society in France, and an able article in a _London
Review_. It is said that the speeches of John Quincy Adams in Congress
were greatly indebted to the writings of Mr. Child, both for facts and
arguments.
Such, briefly, is the man with whom Mrs. Child is to spend forty-five
years of her useful and happy life. In 1829, the year after her
marriage, she put her twelve months of experience and reflection into
a book entitled, "The Frugal Housewife." "No false pride," she says,
"or foolish ambition to appear as well as others, should induce a
person to live a cent beyond the income of which he is assured." "We
shall never be free from embarrassment until we cease to be ashamed of
industry and economy." "The earlier children are taught to turn their
faculties to some account the better for them and for their parents."
"A child of six years is old enough to be made useful and should be
taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not
been done to assist others." We are told that a child can be taught to
braid straw for his hats or to make feather fans; the objection to
which would be that a modern mother would not let a child wear that
kind of hat nor carry the fan.
The following will be interesting if not valuable: "Cheap as stockings
are, it is good economy to knit them; knit hose wear twice as long as
woven; and they can be done at odd moments of time which would not be
otherwise employed." What an age that must have been when one had time
enough and to spare! Other suggestions are quite as curious. The book
is "dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy." "The writer,"
she says, "has no apology to offer for this little book of economical
hints, except her deep conviction that such a book is needed. In this
case, renown is out of the question; and ridicule is a matter of
indifference."
Goethe made poems of his chagrins; Mrs. Child in this instance
utilized her privations and forced economies to make a book; and a
wonderfully successful book it was. She was not wrong in supposing it
would meet a want. During the next seven years, it went through twenty
editions, or three editions a year; in 1855, it had reached its
thirty-third edition, averaging little short of one edition a year for
thirty-six years. Surely this was a result which made a year of
economical living in a "very small house" worth while.
"The Frugal Housewife" was a true "mother's book," although another
and later volume was so named. "The Mother's Book" was nearly as
successful as "The Frugal Housewife," and went through eight American
editions, twelve English, and one German. The success of these books
gave Mrs. Child a good income, and she hardly needed to be the "frugal
housewife" she had been before.
A check soon came to her prosperity. In 1831, she met Garrison and,
being inflammable, caught fire from his anti-slavery zeal, and became
one of his earliest and staunchest disciples. The free use of the
Athenaeum library which had been graciously extended to her ten years
before, now enabled her to study the subject of slavery in all its
aspects, historical, legal, theoretical, and practical and, in 1833,
she embodied the results of her investigations in a book entitled, "An
Appeal in behalf of the class of Americans called Africans." The
material is chiefly drawn from Southern sources, the statute books of
Southern states, the columns of Southern newspapers, and the
statements and opinions of Southern public men. It is an effective
book to read even now when one is in a mood to rose-color the old-time
plantation life and doubtful whether anything could be worse than the
present condition of the negro in the South.
The book had two kinds of effect. It brought upon Mrs. Child the
incontinent wrath of all persons who, for any reason, thought that the
only thing to do with slavery was to let it alone. "A lawyer,
afterward attorney-general," a description that fits Caleb Cushing, is
said to have used tongs to throw the obnoxious book out of the window;
the Athenaeum withdrew from Mrs. Child the privileges of its library;
former friends dropped her acquaintance; Boston society shut its doors
upon her; the sale of her books fell off; subscriptions to her
_Juvenile Miscellany_ were discontinued; and the magazine died after a
successful life of eight years; and Mrs. Child found that she had
ventured upon a costly experiment. This consequence she had
anticipated and it had for her no terrors. "I am fully aware," she
says in her preface, "of the unpopularity of the task I have
undertaken; but though I expect ridicule, I do not fear it.... Should
it be the means of advancing even one single hour the inevitable
progress of truth and justice, I would not exchange the consciousness
for all Rothschild's wealth or Sir Walter's fame."
Of course a book of such evident significance and power would have
had another effect; by his own acknowledgement, it brought Dr.
Channing into the anti-slavery crusade, and he published a book upon
slavery in 1835; it led Dr. John G. Palfry, who had inherited a
plantation in Louisiana, to emancipate his slaves; and, as he has more
than once said, it changed the course of Col. T. W. Higginson's life
and made him an abolitionist. "As it was the first anti-slavery work
ever printed in America in book form, so," says Col. Higginson, "I
have always thought it the ablest." Whittier says, "It is no
exaggeration to say that no man or woman at that period rendered more
substantial service to the cause of freedom, or made such a 'great
renunciation' in doing it."
Turning from the real world, which was becoming too hard for her, Mrs.
Child took refuge in dreamland and wrote "Philothea: a story of
Ancient Greece," published in 1835. Critics have objected that this
delightful romance is not an exact reproduction of Greek life, but is
Hamlet a reproduction of anything that ever happened in Denmark, or
Browning's Saul of anything that could have happened in Judea, a
thousand years before Christ? To Lowell, Mrs. Child was and remained
"Philothea." Higginson says that the lines in which Lowell describes
her in the "Fable for Critics," are the one passage of pure poetry it
contains, and at the same time the most charming sketch ever made of
Mrs. Child.
"There comes Philothea, her face all aglow;
She has just been dividing some poor creature's woe,
And can't tell which pleases her most--to relieve
His want, or his story to hear and believe.
No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails,
For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales;
She knows well that silence is sorrow's best food,
And that talking draws off from the heart its bad blood."
In 1836, Mr. Child went abroad to study the Beet Sugar industry in
France, Holland, and Germany and, after an absence of a year and a
half, returned to engage in Beet Sugar Farming at Northampton, Mass.
He received a silver medal for raw and refined sugar at the Exhibition
of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association in 1839, and a
premium of $100 from the Massachusetts Agricultural society the same
year. He published a well written and edifying book upon "Beet Sugar,"
giving the results of his investigations and experiments. It was an
enterprise of great promise, but has taken half a century, in this
country, to become a profitable industry.
Mrs. Child's letters from 1838 to 1841 are dated from Northampton,
where she is assisting to work out the "Beet Sugar" experiment. It
would have been a rather grinding experience to any one with less
cheerfulness than Mrs. Child. She writes, June 9, 1838, "A month
elapsed before I stepped into the woods which were all around me
blooming with flowers. I did not go to Mr. Dwight's ordination, nor
have I yet been to meeting. He has been to see me however, and though
I left my work in the midst and sat down with a dirty gown and hands
somewhat grimmed, we were high in the blue in fifteen minutes." Mr.
Dwight was Rev. John S. Dwight, Brook Farmer, and editor of _Dwight's
Journal of Music_.
Half of her published letters are addressed to Mr. or Mrs. Francis G.
Shaw, parents of Col. Robert G. Shaw. Here is one in 1840, to Mr.
Shaw, after she had made a trip to Boston. It will be interesting as
presenting a new aspect of Mrs. Child's nature: "The only thing,
except meeting dear friends, that attracted me to Boston was the
exhibition of statuary.... I am ashamed to say how deeply I am charmed
with sculpture: ashamed because it seems like affectation in one who
has had such limited opportunity to become acquainted with the arts. I
have a little figure of a caryatid which acts upon my spirit like a
magician's spell.... Many a time this hard summer, I have laid down my
dish-cloth or broom and gone to refresh my spirit by gazing on it a
few minutes. It speaks to me. It says glorious things. In summer I
place flowers before it; and I have laid a garland of acorns and
amaranths at its feet. I do love every little bit of real sculpture."
Her other artistic passion was music, quite out of her reach at this
period; but happily, she loved birds and flowers, both of which a Beet
Sugar Farm in the Connecticut Valley made possible. A family of
swallows made their nest in her woodshed, husband and wife dividing
the labors of construction, nursing, and even of incubation, though
the male bird did not have the same skill and grace as the lady, in
placing his feet and wings. Mrs. Child gives a pretty account of this
incident in a letter to one of her little friends, and says, "It seems
as if I could watch them forever." Later, in one of her letters to
the Boston _Courier_, she gives a more complete account of the
episode. Her observations convinced her that birds have to be taught
to fly, as a child is taught to walk.
When birds and flowers went, she had the autumn foliage, and she
managed to say a new thing about it: it is "color taking its fond and
bright farewell of form--like the imagination giving a deeper, richer,
and warmer glow to old familiar truths before the winter of
rationalism comes and places trunk and branches in naked outline
against the cold, clear sky."
Whether she had been living hitherto in a "rent" we are not told, but
in a letter of February 8, 1841, she informs us that she is about to
move to a farm on which "is a sort of a shanty with two rooms and a
garret. We expect to whitewash it, build a new woodshed, and live
there next year. I shall keep no help, and there will be room for
David and me. I intend to half bury it in flowers."
There is nothing fascinating in sordid details, but Mrs. Child in the
midst of sordid details, is glorious. A month before this last letter,
her brother, Prof. Francis, had written her apparently wishing her
more congenial circumstances; we have only her reply, from which it
appears her father is under her care. She declines her brother's
sympathy, and wonders that he can suppose "the deadening drudgery of
the world" can imprison a soul in its caverns. "It is not merely an
eloquent phrase," she says, "but a distinct truth that the outward has
no power over us but that which we voluntarily give it. It is not I
who drudge; it is merely the case that contains me. I defy all the
powers of earth and hell to make me scour floors and feed pigs, if I
choose meanwhile to be off conversing with angels.... If I can in
quietude and cheerfulness forego my own pleasures and relinquish my
tastes, to administer to my father's daily comfort, I seem to those
who live in shadows to be cooking food and mixing medicines, but I am
in fact making divine works of art which will reveal to me their fair
proportions in the far eternity." Besides this consolation, she says,
"Another means of keeping my soul fresh is my intense love of nature.
Another help, perhaps stronger than either of the two, is domestic
love."
Her Northampton life was nearer an end than she supposed when she
wrote these letters; she did not spend the next year in the little
farm house with "two rooms and a garret"; on May 27th, she dates a
letter from New York city, where she has gone reluctantly to edit the
_Anti-Slavery Standard_. She had been translated from the sphere of
"cooking food and mixing medicines" to congenial literary occupations;
she had, let us hope, a salary sufficient for her urgent necessities;
her home was in the family of the eminent Quaker philanthropist, Isaac
T. Hopper, who received her as a daughter, and whose kindness she
repaid by writing his biography. However the venture might come out,
we would think her life could not well be harder or less attractive
than it had been, drudging in a dilapidated farm house, and we are
glad she is well out of it. Strange to say, she did not take our view
of the situation. We have already seen how independent she was of
external circumstances. In a letter referred to, dated May 27, she
chides a friend for writing accounts of her outward life: "What do I
care whether you live in one room or six? I want to know what your
spirit is doing. What are you thinking, feeling, and reading?... My
task here is irksome enough. Your father will tell you that it was not
zeal for the cause, but love for my husband, which brought me hither.
But since it was necessary for me to leave home to be earning
somewhat, I am thankful that my work is for the anti-slavery cause. I
have agreed to stay one year. I hope I shall then be able to return to
my husband and rural home, which is humble enough, yet very
satisfactory to me. Should the _Standard_ be continued, and my editing
generally desired, perhaps I could make an arrangement to send
articles from Northampton. At all events, I trust the weary separation
from my husband is not to last more than a year. If I am to be away
from him, I could not be more happily situated than in Friend Hopper's
family. They treat me the same as a daughter and a sister."
The _Anti-Slavery Standard_ was a new enterprise; its editorship was
offered to Mr. and Mrs. Childs jointly; Col. Higginson says that Mr.
Child declined because of ill health; another authority, that he was
still infatuated with his Beet Sugar, of which Mrs. Child had had more
than enough; it appears from her letter that neither of them dreamed
of abandoning the Sugar industry; if the enterprise was folly, they
were happily united in the folly.
However, of the two, the _Anti-Slavery Standard_ was the more
successful enterprise, and at the end of the two years, Mr. Child
closed out his Beet Sugar business and joined Mrs. Child in editing
the paper. Mrs. Child edited the _Standard_ eight years, six of which
were in conjunction with Mr. Child. They were successful editors; they
gave the _Standard_ a high literary character, and made it acceptable
to people of taste and culture who, whatever their sympathy with
anti-slavery, were often repelled by the unpolished manners of Mr.
Garrison's paper, _The Liberator_.
Something of her life outside the _Standard_ office, something of the
things she saw and heard and enjoyed, during these eight years, can be
gathered from her occasional letters to the Boston _Courier_. They are
interesting still; they will always be of interest to one who cares to
know old New York, as it was sixty years ago, or from 1840 onward.
That they were appreciated then is evident from the fact that,
collected and published in two volumes in 1844, eleven editions were
called for during the next eight years. Col. Higginson considers these
eight years in New York the most interesting and satisfactory of Mrs.
Child's life.
Though we have room for few incidents of this period, there is one
too charming to be omitted. A friend went to a flower merchant on
Broadway to buy a bunch of violets for Mrs. Child's birthday.
Incidentally, the lady mentioned Mrs. Child; she may have ordered the
flowers sent to her house. When the lady came to pay for them, the
florist said, "I cannot take pay for flowers intended for her. She is
a stranger to me, but she has given my wife and children so many
flowers in her writings, that I will never take money of her." Another
pretty incident is this: an unknown friend or admirer always sent Mrs.
Child the earliest wild flowers of spring and the latest in autumn.
I have said that one of her passions was music, which happily she now
has opportunities to gratify. "As for amusements," she says, "music is
the only thing that excites me.... I have a chronic insanity with
regard to music. It is the only Pegasus which now carries me far up
into the blue. Thank God for this blessing of mine." I should be glad
if I had room for her account of an evening under the weird spell of
Ole Bull. Her moral sense was keener than her aesthetic, but her
aesthetic sense was for keener than that of the average mortal.
Sometimes she felt, as Paul would have said, "in a strait betwixt
two"; in 1847 she writes Mr. Francis G. Shaw: "I am now wholly in the
dispensation of art, and therefore theologians and reformers jar upon
me." Reformer as she was and will be remembered, she was easily drawn
into the dispensation of art; and nature was always with her, so much
so that Col. Higginson says, "She always seemed to be talking
radicalism in a greenhouse."
Mr. and Mrs. Child retired from the _Standard_ in 1849. Her next
letters are dated from Newton, Mass. Her father was living upon a
small place--a house and garden--in the neighboring town of Wayland,
beautifully situated, facing Sudbury Hill, with the broad expanse of
the river meadows between. Thither Mrs. Child went to take care of him
from 1852 to 1856, when he died, leaving the charming little home to
her. There are many traditions of her mode of life in Wayland, but her
own account is the best: "In 1852, we made our humble home in Wayland,
Mass., where we spent twenty-two pleasant years, entirely alone,
without any domestic, mutually serving each other and depending upon
each other for intellectual companionship." If the memory of Wayland
people is correct, Mr. Child was not with her much during the four
years that her father lived. Her father was old and feeble and Mr.
Child had not the serene patience of his wife. Life ran more easily
when Mr. Child was away. Whatever other period in the life of Mrs.
Child may have been the most satisfactory, this must have been the
most trying.
Under date of March 23, 1856, happily the last year of this sort of
widowhood, she writes: "This winter has been the loneliest of my life.
If you knew my situation you would pronounce it unendurable. I should
have thought so myself if I had had a foreshadowing of it a few years
ago. But the human mind can get acclimated to anything. What with
constant occupation and a happy consciousness of sustaining and
cheering my poor old father in his descent to the grave, I am almost
always in a state of serene contentment. In summer, my once
extravagant love of beauty satisfies itself in watching the birds, the
insects, and the flowers in my little patch of a garden." She has no
room for her vases, engravings, and other pretty things; she keeps
them in a chest, and she says, "when birds and flowers are gone, I
sometimes take them out as a child does its playthings, and sit down
in the sunshine with them, dreaming over them."
We need not think of her spending much time dreaming over her little
hoard of artistic treasures. Her real business in this world is
writing the history of all religions, or "The Progress of Religious
Ideas in Successive Ages." It was a work begun in New York, as early
as 1848, finished in Wayland in 1855, published in three large octavo
volumes and, whatever its merits or success, was the greatest literary
labor of her life.