Mrs. Child began her literary career in 1824 with "Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times," and she closed it with a volume of biography, ent.i.tled "Good Wives," in 1871. Between these two dates, covering forty-seven years, her publications extended to more than thirty t.i.tles, and include stories, poems, biographies, studies in history, in household economics, in politics, and in religion. "Her books," says Col.
Higginson, "never seemed to repeat each other and belonged to almost as many different departments as there are volumes"; and while writing so much, he adds, "she wrote better than most of her contemporaries."
If she had not done many things so well, she would still have the distinction of having done several things the first time they were ever done at all. It has been claimed that she edited the first American magazine for children, wrote the first novel of puritan times, published the first American Anti-Slavery book, and compiled the first treatise upon what is now known as "Comparative Religions,"
a science not then named, but now a department in every school of theology.
Mrs. Child"s maiden name was Francis, and under that name she won her first fame. She was born in Medford, Ma.s.s., Feb. 11, 1802. Her father, Convers Francis, is said to have been a worthy and substantial citizen, a baker by trade, and the author of the "Medford Crackers,"
in their day second only in popularity to "Medford Rum." He was a man of strong character, great industry, uncommon love of reading, zealous anti-slavery convictions, generous and hospitable. All these traits were repeated in his famous daughter. It was the custom of Mr.
Francis, on the evening before Thanksgiving to gather in his dependents and humble friends to the number of twenty or thirty, and feast them on chicken pie, doughnuts and other edibles, sending them home with provisions for a further festival, including "turnovers" for the children. Col. Higginson, who had the incident from Mrs. Child, intimates that in this experience she may have discovered how much more blessed it is to give than to receive. Certainly, in later life, she believed and practiced this doctrine like a devotee.
Mrs. Child began to climb the hill of knowledge under the instruction of a maiden lady known as "Ma"am Betty," who kept school in her bedroom which was never in order, drank from the nose of her tea-kettle, chewed tobacco and much of it, and was shy to a degree said to have been "supernatural," but she knew the way to the hearts of children, who were very fond of her and regularly carried her a Sunday dinner. After "Ma"am Betty," Mrs. Child attended the public schools in Medford and had a year at a Medford private seminary.
These opportunities for education were cut off at the age of twelve apparently by some change in the family fortunes which compelled the removal of Maria to Norridgewock, Maine, on the borders of the great northern wilderness, where a married sister was living. An influence to which she gave chief credit for her intellectual development and which was not wholly cut off by this removal was that of Convers Francis, her favorite brother, next older than herself, afterward minister in Watertown, and professor in the Divinity School of Harvard University. In later life, Dr. Francis was an encyclopedia of information and scholarship, very liberal in his views for the time.
Theodore Parker used to head pages in his journal with, "Questions to ask Dr. Francis."
Dr. Francis began to prepare for college when Mrs. Child was nine years old. Naturally the little girl wanted to read the books which her brother read, and sometimes he seems to have instructed her and sometimes he tantalized her, but always he stimulated her. Years afterward she wrote him gratefully, "To your early influence, by conversation, letters, and example I owe it that my busy energies took a literary direction at all."
Norridgewock, her home from her twelfth to her eighteenth year, was and is a very pretty country village, at that era the residence of some very cultivated families, but hardly an educational center. As we hear nothing of schools either there or elsewhere we are led to suppose that this twelve year old girl had finished her education. If she lacked opportunities for culture, she carried with her a desire for it, which is half the battle, and she had the intellectual stimulus of letters from her brother then in college, who seems to have presided over her reading. What we know of her life at this period is told in her letters to this brother.
The first of these letters which the editors let us see was written at the age of fifteen. "I have," she says, "been busily engaged reading Paradise Lost. Homer hurried me along with rapid impetuosity; every pa.s.sion that he portrayed I felt; I loved, hated, and resented just as he inspired me. But when I read Milton I felt elevated "above this visible, diurnal sphere." I could not but admire such astonishing grandeur of description, such heavenly sublimity of style. Much as I admire Milton, I must confess that Homer is a much greater favorite."
It is not strange that a studious brother in college would take interest in a sister who at the age of fifteen could write him with so much intelligence and enthusiasm of her reading. The next letter is two years later when she has been reading Scott. She likes Meg Merrilies, Diana Vernon, Annot Lyle, and Helen Mac Gregor. She hopes she may yet read Virgil in his own tongue, and adds, "I usually spend an hour after I retire for the night in reading Gibbon"s Roman Empire.
The pomp of his style at first displeased me, but I think him an able historian."
This is from a girl of seventeen living on the edge of the northern wilderness, and she is also reading Shakspere. "What a vigorous grasp of intellect," she says, "what a glow of imagination he must have possessed, but when his fancy drops a little, how apt he is to make low attempts at wit, and introduce a forced play upon words." She is also reading the Spectator, and does not think Addison so good a writer as Johnson, though a more polished one.
What she was doing with her ever busy hands during this period we are not told, but her intellectual life ran on in these channels until she reaches the age of eighteen, when she is engaged to teach a school in Gardiner, Maine, an event which makes her very happy. "I cannot talk about books," she writes, "nor anything else until I tell you the good news, that I leave Norridgewock as soon as the travelling is tolerable and take a school in Gardiner." It is the terrible month of March, for country roads in the far north, "the saddest of the year."
She wishes her brother were as happy as she is, though, "All I expect is that, if I am industrious and prudent, I shall be independent."
At the conclusion of her school, she took up her residence with her brother in Watertown, Ma.s.s., where one year before, he had been settled as minister of the first parish. Here a new career opened before her. Whittier says that in her Norridgewock period, when she first read Waverly at the house of her physician, she laid down the book in great excitement, exclaiming, "Why cannot I write a novel?"
Apparently, she did not undertake the enterprise for two years or more. In 1824, one Sunday after morning service, in her brother"s study, she read an article in the _North American Review_, in which it was pointed out that there were great possibilities of romance in early American history. Before the afternoon service, she had written the first chapter of a novel which was published anonymously the same year, under the t.i.tle of "Hobomok: a Tale of Early Times."
A search through half a dozen Antique Book stores in Boston for a copy of this timid literary venture I have found to be fruitless, except for the information that there is sometimes a stray copy in stock, and that its present value is about three dollars. It is sufficient distinction that it was the first attempt to extract a romantic element from early New England history. Its reception by the public was flattering to a young author. The Boston Athenaeum sent her a ticket granting the privileges of its library. So great and perhaps unexpected had been its success that for several years, Mrs. Child"s books bore the signature, "By the author of Hobomok." Even "The Frugal Housewife" was "By the author of Hobomok."
In 1825, the author of Hobomok published her second novel, ent.i.tled, "The Rebels: a Tale of the Revolution." It is a volume of about 300 pages, and is still very readable. It ran rapidly through several editions, and very much increased the reputation of the author of Hobomok. The work contains an imaginary speech of James Otis, in which it is said, "England might as well dam up the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland." This supposed speech of Otis soon found its way into the School Readers of the day, as a genuine utterance of the Revolutionary patriot, and as such Col. Higginson says he memorized and declaimed it, in his youth.
This literary success was achieved at the age of twenty-three, and the same year Miss Francis opened a private school in Watertown, which she continued three years, until her marriage gave her other occupations.
In 1826, she started _The Juvenile Miscellany_, as already mentioned, said to be the first magazine expressly for children, in this country.
In it, first appeared many of her charming stories afterward gathered up in little volumes ent.i.tled, "Flowers for Children."
In 1828, she was married to Mr. David Lee Child, then 34 years of age, eight years older than herself. Whittier describes him, as a young and able lawyer, a member of the Ma.s.sachusetts legislature, and editor of the _Ma.s.sachusetts Journal_. Mr. Child graduated at Harvard in 1817 in the cla.s.s with George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, George B. Emerson, and Samuel J. May. Between 1818 and 1824, he was in our diplomatic service abroad under Hon. Alexander Everett, at that time, Charge d"Affaires in the Netherlands. On his return to America, Mr. Child studied law in Watertown where, at the house of a mutual friend, he met Miss Lydia Maria Francis. She herself reports this interesting event under date of Dec. 2, 1824. "Mr. Child dined with us in Watertown. He possesses the rich fund of an intelligent traveller, without the slightest tinge of a traveller"s vanity. Spoke of the tardy improvement of the useful arts in Spain and Italy." Nearly two months pa.s.s, when we have this record: "Jan. 26, 1825. Saw Mr. Child at Mr. Curtis"s. He is the most gallant man that has lived since the sixteenth century and needs nothing but helmet, shield, and chain-armor to make him a complete knight of chivalry." Not all the meetings are recorded, for, some weeks later, "March 3," we have this entry, "One among the many delightful evenings spent with Mr. Child. I do not know which to admire most, the vigor of his understanding or the ready sparkle of his wit."
There can be no doubt that she thoroughly enjoyed these interviews, 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sed 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 ent.i.tled, "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 a.s.sured." "We shall never be free from embarra.s.sment 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 a.s.sist 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 ent.i.tled, "An Appeal in behalf of the cla.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 emanc.i.p.ate 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 pa.s.sage 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 dest.i.tute 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, Ma.s.s.
He received a silver medal for raw and refined sugar at the Exhibition of the Ma.s.sachusetts Charitable Mechanics a.s.sociation in 1839, and a premium of $100 from the Ma.s.sachusetts 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 a.s.sisting 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 pa.s.sion 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."