service and at the age of twenty-five. The following spring and summer
she spent as a governess in the family of Dr. Channing at his summer
home in Rhode Island. Her duties were light and she lived much in the
open air, devoting her leisure to botany in which she was already "no
mean proficient," and to "the marine life of the beautiful region."
Very pretty letters were exchanged between her and Dr. Channing at the
termination of the engagement. "We will hear no more of thanks," he
wrote her, "but your affection for us and our little ones we will
treasure among our most precious blessings." He invites her to renew
the relations another year, and so she did.
To avoid the rigors of a New England climate, Miss Dix, for some
years, spent her winters, now in Philadelphia, now in Alexandria, Va.,
keeping herself busy with reading "of a very multifarious
kind,--poetry, science, biography, and travels,--besides eking out the
scanty means she had laid by from her teaching by writing stories and
compiling floral albums and books of devotion." In 1827, she published
a volume of "Ten Short Stories for Children" which went to a second
edition in 1832; in 1828, "Meditations for Private Hours," which went
through several editions; in 1829, two little books, "The Garland of
Flora," and "The Pearl, a Christmas Gift." Occasional brief
engagements in teaching are also recorded in this period.
The winter of 1830, she spent with the Channings on the Island of St.
Croix, in the West Indies, in her old capacity as governess. A
daughter of Dr. Channing gives an interesting account of the
preceptress of whom, first and last, she had seen so much. She
describes Miss Dix as tall and dignified, very shy in manner, strict
and inflexible in discipline. "From her iron will, it was hopeless to
appeal. I think she was a very accomplished teacher, active and
diligent herself, very fond of natural history and botany. She enjoyed
long rambles, always calling our attention to what was interesting in
the world around us. I hear that some of her pupils speak of her as
irascible. I have no such remembrance. Fixed as fate we considered
her."
Miss Dix returned from the West Indies in the spring, very much
improved in health, and in the autumn, she reopened her school in the
Dix Mansion, with the same high ideals as before and with such
improved methods as experience had suggested. Pupils came to her again
as of old and she soon had as many attendants as her space permitted.
A feature of the school was a letter-box through which passed a daily
mail between teacher and pupils and "large bundles of child-letters of
this period" are still extant, preserved by Miss Dix with scrupulous
care to the end of life. It was a bright child who wrote as follows:
"I thought I was doing well until I read your letter, but when you
said that you were rousing to greater energy, all my satisfaction
vanished. For if you are not satisfied in some measure with yourself
and are going to do more than you have done, I don't know what I shall
do. You do not go to rest until midnight and then you rise very
early." The physician had administered too strong a tonic for the
little patient's health.
A lady who, at the age of sixteen, attended this school in 1833,
writes of her eminent teacher as follows: "She fascinated me from the
first, as she had done many of my class before me. Next to my mother,
I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was in the
prime of her years, tall and of dignified carriage, head finely shaped
and set, with an abundance of soft, wavy, brown hair." The school
continued in the full tide of success for five years, during which
time, by hard labor and close economies, Miss Dix had saved enough to
secure her "the independence of a modest competence." This seems a
great achievement, but if one spends nothing for superfluities and
does most of his labor himself, he can lay by his income, much or
little. The appointments of the school are said to have been very
simple, a long table serving as a desk for study, when it was not in
use for dinner. Only one assistant is mentioned, who gave instruction
in French and, perhaps, elementary Latin. Surely Miss Dix could handle
the rest herself. The merit of the school was not in its elaborate
appointments, but in the personal supervision of its accomplished
mistress. So the miracle was wrought and at the age of thirty-three,
Miss Dix had achieved a modest competence.
The undertaking had cost her her health once before, and now it cost
her her health again. The old symptoms, a troublesome cough, pain in
the side, and slight hemorrhages, returned and, having dragged her
frail body through the winter of 1836, Miss Dix reluctantly closed her
school in the spring and, in obedience to her physician, went to
Europe for rest, with the intention of spending the summer in England,
the autumn in France, and the winter in Italy. Prostrated by the
voyage, she was carried to a hotel in Liverpool where she was put to
bed with the forlorn prospect of being confined to her solitary room
for an indefinite period of convalescence. But again Dr. Channing
befriended her. From him she had received letters of introduction, one
of which brought to her side Mr. William Rathbone, a wealthy merchant
of Liverpool and a prominent English Unitarian. Mr. and Mrs. Rathbone
insisted upon taking her to their home, a charming residence a few
miles out of the city. Thither she consented to go for a visit of a
few weeks, and there she remained, as an honored guest tenderly cared
for, for eighteen months. "To the end of her days," says her
biographer, "this period of eighteen months stood out in her memory as
the jubilee of her life, the sunniest, the most restful, and the
tenderest to her affections of her whole earthly experience." She
wrote a Boston friend, "You must imagine me surrounded by every
comfort, sustained by every tenderness that can cheer, blest in the
continual kindness of the family in which Providence has placed me,--I
with no claim but those of a common nature." And again, "So completely
am I adopted into the circle of loving spirits that I sometimes
forget I really am not to consider the bonds transient in their
binding."
She very much needed these friends and their tender care. Nine months
after her arrival, we hear of occasional hemorrhages from which she
has been exempt for ten days, the pain in her side less acute, and her
physician has given her permission to walk about her room. One would
think that her career was practically ended, but, strange to say, the
career which was to make her famous had not yet begun. From this date,
her convalescence proceeded steadily, and she was able to enjoy much
in the delightful home and refined social circle in which she found
herself. "Your remark," she writes a friend, "that I probably enjoy
more now in social intercourse than I have ever before done is quite
true. Certainly if I do not improve, it will be through wilful
self-neglect." Apparently, she was having a glimpse of a less prosaic
existence than the grinding routine of a boarding school. Madam Dix
died at the age of ninety-one, leaving her granddaughter, still in
Europe, a substantial legacy, which sensibly increased her limited
resources and, when the time came for action, left her free to carry
out her great schemes of benevolence without hampering personal
anxieties. It ought to preserve the memory of Madam Dix that she
endowed a great philanthropist.
In the autumn of 1837, Miss Dix returned to America, and avoiding the
New England climate, spent the winter in Washington, D. C., and its
neighborhood. Apparently, it was not a wholly happy winter, chiefly
because of her vain and tender longings for the paradise she had left
across the sea. The Washington of 1837 seemed raw to her after the
cultivated English home she had discovered. "I was not conscious," she
writes a friend, "that so great a trial was to meet my return from
England till the whole force of the contrast was laid before me.... I
may be too craving of that rich gift, the power of sharing with other
minds. I have drunk deeply, long, and Oh, how blissfully, at this
fountain in a foreign clime. Hearts met hearts, minds joined with
minds, and what were the secondary trials of pain to the enfeebled
body when daily was administered the soul's medicine and food."
Surely, that English experience was one upon which not every invalid
from these shores could count, but when, a few years later, Miss Dix
returned to England as a kind of angel of mercy, giving back much
more than she had ever received, the Rathbone family must have been
glad that they had befriended her in her obscurity and her need.
It was in 1841 at the age of thirty-nine that the second chapter in
the life of Miss Dix began. Note that she had as little thought that
she was beginning a great career as any one of us that he will date
all his future from something he has done or experienced to-day. It
happened that Dr. J. T. G. Nichols, so long the beloved pastor of the
Unitarian parish in Saco, Maine, was then a student of Divinity at
Cambridge. He had engaged to assist in a Sunday School in the East
Cambridge jail, and all the women, twenty in number, had been assigned
to him. The experience of one session with his class was enough to
convince him that a young man was very much out of place in that
position and that a woman, sensible if possible, but a woman
certainly, was necessary. His mother advised him to consult Miss Dix.
Not that her health would permit her to take the class, but she could
advise. On hearing Mr. Nichols' statement, Miss Dix deliberated a
moment and then said, "I will take the class myself." Mr. Nichols
protested that this was not to be thought of, in the condition of her
health, but we have heard of her iron will: "Fixed as fate we
considered her," said one of her pupils; and she answered Mr. Nichols,
"I shall be there next Sunday."
This was the beginning. "After the school was over," says Dr. Nichols,
"Miss Dix went into the jail and found among the prisoners a few
insane persons with whom she talked. She noticed that there was no
stove in their rooms and no means of proper warmth." The date was the
twenty-eighth of March and the climate was New England, from which
Miss Dix had so often had to flee. "The jailer said that a fire for
them was not needed, and would be unsafe. Her repeated solicitations
were without success." The jailer must have thought he was dealing
with a woman, not with destiny. "At that time the court was in session
at East Cambridge, and she caused the case to be brought before it.
Her request was granted. The cold rooms were warmed. Thus was her
great work commenced."
Such is Dr. Nichols' brief statement, but the course of events did not
run so smoothly as we are led to suppose. The case had to be fought
through the newspapers as well as the court, and here Miss Dix showed
the generalship which she exhibited on many another hard fought
field. She never went into battle single-handed. She always managed to
have at her side the best gunners when the real battle began. In the
East Cambridge skirmish, she had Rev. Robert C. Waterston, Dr. Samuel
G. Howe, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Howe visited the jail and wrote an
account for the Boston _Advertiser_. When this statement was disputed,
as it was, Mr. Sumner, who had accompanied Dr. Howe, confirmed his
account and added details of his own. He said that the inmates "were
cramped together in rooms poorly ventilated and noisome with filth;"
that "in two cages or pens constructed of plank, within the four stone
walls of the same room" were confined, and had been for months, a
raving maniac and an interesting young woman whose mind was so
slightly obscured that it seemed any moment as if the cloud would pass
away; that "the whole prison echoed with the blasphemies of the poor
old woman, while her young and gentle fellow in suffering seemed to
shrink from her words as from blows;" that the situation was hardly
less horrid than that of "tying the living to the dead."
Where was Miss Dix during this controversy? Why, she was preparing to
investigate every jail and almshouse in the State of Massachusetts.
If this was the way the insane were treated in the city of Cambridge,
in a community distinguished for enlightenment and humanity, what
might not be going on in more backward and less favored localities?
Note-book in hand, going from city to city and from town to town, Miss
Dix devoted the two following years to answering this question
exhaustively.
Having gathered her facts, she presented them to the Legislature in a
Memorial of thirty-two octavo pages, the first of a series of
seventeen statements and appeals presented to the legislatures of
different states, as far west as Illinois and as far south as
Louisiana. "I shall be obliged," she said, "to speak with great
plainness and to reveal many things revolting to the taste, and from
which my woman's nature shrinks with peculiar sensitiveness.... I
proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present
state of insane persons within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets,
cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed
into obedience.... I give a few illustrations but description fades
before reality." If we could dismiss the subject by saying she reports
instance after instance where men and women were confined in the
almshouses in Massachusetts in such conditions of inhumanity and
neglect as no intelligent farmer would tolerate for his swine, we
could avoid some unpleasant details; but the statement would be
ineffective because it would seem incredible. At the almshouse in
Danvers, confined in a remote, low, outbuilding, she found a young
woman, once respectable, industrious and worthy, whose mind had been
deranged by disappointments and trials. "There she stood," says Miss
Dix, "clinging to or beating upon the bars of her caged apartment, the
contracted size of which afforded space only for increasing
accumulations of filth,--a foul spectacle; there she stood, with naked
arms, dishevelled hair, the unwashed frame invested with fragments of
unclean garments, the air so extremely offensive, though ventilation
was afforded on all sides but one, that it was not possible to remain
beyond a few moments without retreating for recovery to the outward
air. Irritation of body, produced by utter filth and exposure, incited
her to the horrid process of tearing off her skin by inches; her neck
and person were thus disfigured to hideousness.... And who protects
her," Miss Dix suggestively asks, "who protects her,--that worse than
Pariah outcast,--from other wrongs and blacker outrages!" This
question had more meaning for Miss Dix than we might suppose, for at
the almshouse in Worcester she had found an insane Madonna and her
babe: father unknown.
Fair and beautiful Newton finds a place in this chapter of dishonor,
with a woman chained, nearly nude, and filthy beyond measure: "Sick,
horror-struck, and almost incapable of retreating, I gained the
outward air." A case in Groton attained infamous celebrity, not
because the shame was without parallel but because the overseers of
the poor tried to discredit the statements of Miss Dix. The fact was
that she had understated the case. Dr. Bell of the McLean Asylum,
confirmed her report and added details. In an outbuilding at the
almshouse, a young man, slightly deranged but entirely inoffensive,
was confined by a heavy iron collar to which was attached a chain six
feet in length, the limit of his possible movements. His hands were
fastened together by heavy clavises secured by iron bolts. There was
no window in his dungeon, but for ventilation there was an opening,
half the size of a sash, closed in cold weather by a board shutter.
From this cell, he had been taken to the McLean Asylum, where his
irons had been knocked off, his swollen limbs chafed gently, and
finding himself comfortable, he exclaimed, "My good man, I must kiss
you." He showed no violence, ate at the common table, slept in the
common bedroom, and seemed in a fair way to recovery when, to save the
expense of three dollars a week for his board and care, the thrifty
Groton officials took him away. He could be boarded at the almshouse
for nothing, and, chained in an outbuilding, he would not require any
care.
We can follow Miss Dix in her career through a dozen states of this
Union, into the British Provinces, to Scotland and England, thence
across to the Continent, without repeating these details, if we bear
in mind that such as we have seen was the condition of the pauper
insane at that period. Her memorial was presented by Dr. S. G. Howe,
then happily a member of the Legislature, and a bill was passed, not
without opposition, but finally passed, enlarging the asylum at
Worcester to accommodate two hundred additional patients. The
provision was inadequate, but a reform of old abuses had begun. It was
her first victory.
Grateful for what had been accomplished in Massachusetts, Miss Dix
turned to Rhode Island, whose borders she had often approached and
sometimes crossed in her investigations in the adjoining state. Rhode
Island was perhaps not less civilized than her neighbor, but Rhode
Island furnished the prize case of horrors in the mistreatment of
insanity, a case which in a letter introducing the discoverer, Mr.
Thomas G. Hazard said went beyond anything he supposed to exist in the
civilized world. The case was this: Abraham Simmons, a man whose name
ought to go on the roll of martyrdom, was confined in the town of
Little Compton, in a cell seven feet square, stone-built,
stone-roofed, and stone-floored, the entrance double-walled,
double-doored and double-locked, "excluding both light and fresh air,
and without accommodation of any description for warming and
ventilation." When this dungeon was discovered, the walls were covered
by frost a half inch in thickness; the bed was provided with two
comfortables, both wet and the outer one stiffly frozen, or, as Miss
Dix puts it, "only wet straw to lie upon and a sheet of ice for his
covering." Lest two locks should not be enough to hold this dangerous
man, his leg was tethered to the stone floor by an ox-chain. "My
husband," said the mistress, "in winter, sometimes of a morning rakes
out half a bushel of frost, _and yet he never freezes_; sometimes he
screams dreadfully and that is the reason we had the double wall and
two doors in place of one; his cries disturb us in the house." "How
long has he been here?" "Oh, above three years." Nothing in the
traditions of the Bastile could exceed these horrors, and yet they
were not the product of intentional cruelty, but of unfathomable
stupidity.
Disregarding the well-meant warnings of her attendant that he would
kill her, Miss Dix took his hands, tried to warm them in her own,
spoke to him of liberty, care and kindness, and for answer "a tear
stole over his hollow cheeks, but no words answered my importunities."
Her next step was to publish the terrible story in the Providence
Journal, not with a shriek, as might have been expected and justified,
but with the affected coolness of a naturalist. With grim humor, she
headed her article, "Astonishing Tenacity of Life," as if it had only
a scientific interest for anybody. If you doubted the statements, you
might go and see for yourself: "Should any persons in this
philanthropic age be disposed from motives of curiosity to visit the
place, they may rest assured that travelling is considered quite safe
in that part of the country, however improbable it may seem. The
people of that region profess the Christian religion, and it is even
said that they have adopted some forms and ceremonies which they call
worship. It is not probable, however, that they address themselves to
poor Simmons' God." Their prayers and his shrieks would make a strange
discord, she thinks, if they entered the ear of the same deity.
Having reported her discoveries to the men of science, she next
appealed to the men of wealth. Providence had at that date a
multi-millionaire, by the name of Butler; he left four millions to his
heirs. He had never been known as a philanthropist; he did not himself
suppose that his heart was susceptible. It is said that knowing
persons smiled when they heard that Miss Dix intended to appeal to
him. Further, it is said that Mr. Butler, at the interview,
ingeniously diverted the conversation from topics that threatened to
be serious. He apparently had no thought of giving Miss Dix a penny.
At length she rose with the impressive dignity so often noted by her
pupils and said: "Mr. Butler, I wish you to hear what I have to say. I
want to bring before you certain facts involving terrible suffering
to your fellow creatures all around you,--suffering you can relieve.
My duty will end when I have done this, and with you will rest all
further responsibility." Mr. Butler heard her respectfully to the end,
and then asked, "What do you want me to do?" "Sir," she said, "I want
you to give $50,000 toward the enlargement of the insane hospital in
this city." "Madam, I'll do it," he said, and much more of his estate
afterward went the same way.
Three years of devoted study of the problems of insanity, with
limitless opportunities for personal observation, had given Miss Dix
an expert knowledge of the subject. She had conceived what an insane
asylum should be. Hitherto, she had been content to enlarge upon
foundations already laid; now she would build an asylum herself. She
saw, we are told, that such an institution as she conceived could not
be built by private benevolence, but must have behind it a legislative
appropriation. She chose New Jersey as the field of her experiment.
Quietly, she entered the state and canvassed its jails and almshouses,
as she had those of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Next she digested
her facts in a Memorial to the Legislature. Then, with a political
shrewdness for which she became celebrated, she selected the member,
uniting a good heart with a clear head and persistent will, into whose
hands it should be placed. Much of her success is said to have been
due to her political sagacity. The superintendent of one of her
asylums said, "She had an insight into character that was truly
marvellous; and I have never known anyone, man or woman, who bore more
distinctly the mark of intellectuality." Having placed her Memorial in
the hands of a skilful tactician, she retired to a room appropriated
to her use by the courtesy of the House, where she spent her time
writing editorials for newspapers, answering the questions of members,
and holding receptions. "You cannot imagine," she writes a friend,
"the labor of conversing and convincing. Some evenings I had at once
twenty gentlemen for three hours' steady conversation." After a
campaign of two months the bill establishing the New Jersey State
Lunatic Asylum was passed, and the necessary money appropriated for
its erection. She was always partial to this first creation of her
energy and genius. She called it 'her first child,' and there,
forty-five years later, she returned to pass the last seven years of
her life, as in a home, a room having been gratefully appropriated to
her use by the trustees of the asylum.