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 circ.u.mstances; 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 h.e.l.l 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 pa.s.sions was music, which happily she now has opportunities to gratify. "As for amus.e.m.e.nts," 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 G.o.d 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, Ma.s.s. 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, Ma.s.s., 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 h.o.a.rd 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.
Under date of July 14, 1848, she writes to Dr. Francis: "My book gets slowly on.... I am going to tell the plain, unvarnished truth, as clearly as I can understand it, and let Christians and Infidels, Orthodox and Unitarians, Catholics, Protestants, and Swedenborgians growl as they like. They will growl if they notice it at all: for each will want his own theory favored, and the only thing I have conscientiously aimed at is not to favor any theory at all." She may have failed in scientific method; but here is a scientific spirit. "In her religious speculations," says Whittier, "Mrs. Child moved in the very van." In Wayland, she considered herself a parishioner of Dr.
Edmund H. Sears, whom she calls, "our minister," but she was somewhat in advance of Dr. Sears. Her opinions were much nearer akin to those of Theodore Parker. Only a Unitarian of that type could perhaps at this early period have conceived the history of religion as an evolution of one and the same spiritual element "through successive ages."
She had not much time to dream over her chest of artistic treasures when the a.s.sault of Preston S. Brooks upon Senator Sumner called her to battle of such force and point that Dr. William H. Furness said, it was worth having Sumner"s head broken.
When death released her from the care of her father, she took "Bleeding Kansas" under her charge. She writes letters to the newspapers; she sits up till eleven o"clock, "st.i.tching as fast as my fingers could go," making garments for the Kansas immigrants; she "stirs up the Wayland women to make garments for Kansas"; she sends off Mr. Child to make speeches for Kansas; and then she writes him in this manner: "How melancholy I felt when you went off in the morning darkness. It seemed as if everything about me was tumbling down; as if I were never to have a nest and a mate any more." Surely the rest of this letter was not written for us to read: "Good, kind, magnanimous soul, how I love you. How I long to say over the old prayer again every night. It almost made me cry to see how carefully you had arranged everything for my comfort before you went; so much kindling stuff split up and the bricks piled up to protect my flowers." Here is love in a cottage. This life is not all prosaic.
Old anti-slavery friends came to see her and among them Charles Sumner, in 1857, spent a couple of hours with her, and left his photograph; she met Henry Wilson at the anti-slavery fair and talked with him an "hour or so." Whittier says, "Men like Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrew availed themselves of her foresight and sound judgment of men and measures."
When John Brown was wounded and taken prisoner at Harper"s Ferry, nothing was more in character for Mrs. Child than to offer her services as his nurse. She wrote him under cover of a letter to Gov.
Wise, of Virginia. The arrival of Mrs. Brown, made Mrs. Child"s attendance unnecessary, but the incident led to a lively correspondence between Mrs. Child and Gov. Wise, in which Mrs.
Senator Mason, of Virginia, joined. Neither of her distinguished correspondents possessed the literary skill of Mrs. Child. The entire correspondence was collected in a pamphlet of which 300,000 copies were sold. On a visit to Whittier at Amesbury, a delegation from a Republican political meeting called upon her, saying they wanted to see the woman who "poured hot shot into Gov. Wise."
In 1863, after saying that she is "childish enough to talk to the picture of a baby that is being washed," she writes her friend, Mrs.
Shaw, "But you must not suppose that I live for amus.e.m.e.nt. On the contrary I work like a beaver the whole time. Just now I am making a hood for a poor neighbor; last week I was making flannels for the hospital; odd minutes are filled up ravelling lint; every string that I can get sight of I pull for poor Sambo. I write to the _Tribune_ about him; I write to the _Transcript_ about him; I write to private individuals about him; and I write to the President and members of Congress about him; I write to Western Virginia and Missouri about him; and I get the articles published too. This shows what progress the cause of freedom is making." Not everything went to her mind however. If we think there has been a falling from grace in the public life of our generation, it may do us good to read what she says in 1863: "This war has furnished many instances of individual n.o.bility, but our national record is mean."
In 1864, she published "Looking Toward Sunset," a book designed to "present old people with something wholly cheerful." The entire edition was exhausted during the holiday season; 4,000 copies were sold and more called for. All her profits on the book, she devoted to the freedmen, sending $400 as a first instalment. Not only that, but she prepared a volume called "The Freedman"s Book," which she printed at an expense of $600, and distributed among the freedmen 1200 copies at her own cost. She once sent Wendell Phillips a check of $100 for the freedmen, and when he protested that it was more than she could afford, she consented to "think it over." The next day, she made her contribution $200. She contributed $20 a year to the American Missionary a.s.sociation toward the support of a teacher for the freedmen, and $50 a year to the Anti-Slavery Society. A lady wished, through Mr. Phillips, to give Mrs. Child several thousand dollars for her comfort. Mrs. Child declined the favor, but was persuaded to accept it, and then scrupulously gave away the entire income in charity. It is evident she might have made herself very comfortable, if it had not given her so much more pleasure to make someone else comfortable.
Her dress, as neat and clean as that of a Quakeress, was quite as plain and far from the latest style. A stranger meeting her in a stage coach mistook her for a servant until she began to talk. "Who is that woman who dresses like a peasant, and speaks like a scholar?" he asked on leaving the coach. Naturally, it was thought Mrs. Child did not know how to dress, or, more likely, did not care for pretty things.
"You accuse me," she writes to Miss Lucy Osgood, "you accuse me of being indifferent to externals, whereas the common charge is that I think too much of beauty, and say too much about it. I myself think it one of my greatest weaknesses. A handsome man, woman or child can always make a pack-horse of me. My next neighbor"s little boy has me completely under his thumb, merely by virtue of his beautiful eyes and sweet voice." There was one before her of whom it was said, "He denied himself, and took up his cross." It was also said of him, "Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor." He never had a truer disciple than Mrs. Child.
Not that she ever talked of "crosses." "But why use the word sacrifice?" she asks. "I never was conscious of any sacrifice." What she gained in moral discipline or a new life, she says, was always worth more than the cost. She used an envelope twice, Wendell Phillips says; she never used a whole sheet of paper when half of one would do; she outdid poverty in her economies, and then gave money as if she had thousands. "I seldom have a pa.s.sing wish for enlarging my income except for the sake of doing more for others. My wants are very few and simple."
In 1867, Mrs. Child published "A Romance of the Republic," a pathetic story, but fascinating, and admirably written; in 1878, appeared a book of choice selections, ent.i.tled, "Aspirations of the World"; and in 1871, a volume of short biographies, ent.i.tled "Good Wives," and dedicated, to Mr. Child: "To my husband, this book is affectionately inscribed, by one who, through every vicissitude, has found in his kindness and worth, her purest happiness and most constant incentive to duty."
Mr. Child died in 1874 at the age of eighty, and Mrs. Child followed him in 1880, at the age of seventy-eight. After her death, a small volume of her letters was published, of which the reader will wish there were more. Less than a month before her death, she wrote to a friend a list of benevolent enterprises she has in mind and says, "Oh, it is such a luxury to be able to give without being afraid. I try not to be Quixotic, but I want to rain down blessings on all the world, in token of thankfulness for the blessings that have been rained down upon me."
It is too late to make amends for omissions in this paper, but it would be unjust to Mrs. Child to forget her life-long devotion to the interests of her own s.e.x. In 1832, a year before her "Appeal in behalf of that cla.s.s of Americans called Africans,"--eleven years before the appearance of Margaret Fuller"s "Woman in the Nineteenth Century,"
Mrs. Child published "A History of the Condition of Women in all ages and nations," showing her disposition to begin every inquiry with a survey of the facts, and also that the "woman question" was the first to awaken her interest. Her greatest contribution to the advancement of women was herself; that is, her own achievements. To the same purpose were her biographies of famous women: "Memoirs of Mme. de Stael and Mme. Roland" in 1847, and sketches of "Good Wives" in 1871.
Whittier says, she always believed in woman"s right to the ballot, as certainly he did, calling it "the greatest social reform of the age."
In one letter to Senator Sumner, she directly argues the question: "I reduce the argument," she says, "to very simple elements. I pay taxes for property of my own earning, and I do not believe in "taxation without representation."" Again: "I am a human being and every human being has a right to a voice in the laws which claim authority to tax him, to imprison him, or to _hang_ him."
A light humor illuminates this argument. Humor was one of her saving qualities which, as Whittier says, "kept her philanthropy free from any taint of fanaticism." It contributed greatly to her cheerfulness.
Of her fame, she says playfully: "In a literary point of view I know I have only a local reputation, done in water colors."
Could anything have been better said than this of the New England April or even May: "What a misnomer in our climate to call this season Spring, very much like calling Calvinism religion." Nothing could have been keener than certain points scored in her reply to Mrs.
Senator Mason. Mrs. Mason, remembering with approving conscience her own ministries in the slave cabins caring for poor mothers with young babies, asks Mrs. Child, in triumph, if she goes among the poor to render such services. Mrs. Child replies that she has never known mothers under such circ.u.mstances to be neglected, "and here at the North," said she, "after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies." After Gen. Grant"s election to the Presidency, a procession with a band from Boston, marched to her house and gave her a serenade. She says that she joined in the hurrahs "like the strong-minded woman that I am. The fact is, I forgot half the time whether I belonged to the stronger or weaker s.e.x." Whether she belonged to the stronger or weaker s.e.x, is still something of a problem. Sensible men would be willing to receive her, should women ever refuse to acknowledge her.
Wendell Phillips paid her an appreciative tribute, at her funeral.
"There were," he said, "all the charms and graceful elements which we call feminine, united with a masculine grasp and vigor; sound judgment and great breadth; large common sense and capacity for everyday usefulness, endurance, foresight, strength, and skill." The address is given in full in the volume of "Letters." There is also a fine poem by Whittier for the same occasion:
"Than thine was never turned a fonder heart To nature and to art;
Yet loving beauty, thou couldst pa.s.s it by, And for the poor deny Thyself...."
The volume contains a poetical tribute of an earlier date, by Eliza Scudder, of which Mrs. Child said, "I never was so touched and pleased by any tribute in my life. I cried over the verses and I smiled over them." I will close this paper with Miss Scudder"s last stanza:
"So apt to know, so wise to guide, So tender to redress,-- O, friend with whom such charms abide, How can I love thee less?"
IV
DOROTHEA LYNDE DIX
[Ill.u.s.tration: DOROTHEA LYNDE DIX]
The career of Dorothy Dix is a romance of philanthropy which the world can ill afford to forget. It has been said of her, and it is still said, that she was "the most useful and distinguished woman America has yet produced." It is the opinion of Mr. Tiffany, her biographer, that as the founder of inst.i.tutions of mercy, she "has simply no peer in the annals of Protestantism." To find her parallel one must go to the calendar of the Catholic saints,--St. Theresa, of Spain, or Santa Chiara, of a.s.sisi. "Why then," he asks, do the "majority of the present generation know little or nothing of so remarkable a story!"
Till his biography appeared, it might have been answered that the story had never been told; now, we should have to say that, with a thousand demands upon our time, it has not been read.
Dorothea Lynde Dix--born February 11, 1802--was the daughter of Joseph Dix and granddaughter of the more eminent Dr. Elijah Dix, of Worcester, later of Boston, Ma.s.s. Dr. Dix was born in Watertown, Ma.s.s., in 1747. At the age of seventeen, he became the office boy of Dr. John Green, an eminent physician in Worcester, Ma.s.s., and later, a student of medicine. After five years, in 1770, he began to practice as physician and surgeon in Worcester where he formed a partnership with Dr. Sylvester Gardner. It must have been a favorable time for young doctors since in 1771, a year after he began to practice, he married Dorothy Lynde, of Charlestown, Ma.s.s., for whom her little granddaughter was named. Mrs. Dix seems to have been a woman of great decision of character, and no less precision of thought and action, two traits which reappeared conspicuously in our great philanthropist.
Certain qualities of Dr. Dix are also said to have reappeared in his granddaughter. He was self-reliant, aggressive, uncompromising, public-spirited, and st.u.r.dily honest. To his enterprise, Worcester owed its first shade trees, planted by him, when shade trees were considered great folly, and also the Boston and Worcester turnpike, when mud roads were thought to be divinely appointed thoroughfares.
His integrity is shown by an incident which also throws light upon the conditions of a troubled period. His partner, Dr. Gardner, made the grave mistake of taking the royal side in the controversies that preceded the Revolution, and Worcester became as hot for him as Richmond or Charleston was for a Union man in 1861. Dr. Gardner disappeared, leaving his effects behind him. After the war, Dr. Dix made a voyage to England and honorably settled accounts with his former partner.