Hamlin Garland: A Life

4. Boston Mentors, 1884-85

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'..*·.+ On a cold and rainy day in October 1884, Hamlin Garland debarked from a train in Boston’s Hoosac Station. In his pockets was $130, all that remained of the $200 he had earned from the sale of his Dakota claim. He had stopped in Chicago to buy a Prince Albert frock coat—his first made-to-order suit, a mid-thigh, doublebreasted coat of heavy cloth—figuring the $20 investment in his future worth the extravagance. Travel expenses had consumed $50. He arrived with vague ambitions and large dreams: he considered returning to teaching and wanted more education to fit himself for a position, but he also was interested in exploring Boston, for his father had told him stories of his own youthful days as a teamster . Moreover, Boston was the home of the authors he had read in his McGuffey Readers and the occasional book that had come his way—James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Dean Howells—and nearby were the homes of Longfellow, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whittier. But first he needed to find an inexpensive place to stay, for his earlier eastern tramp had shown him that money doesn’t last long in the city. He found a lodging house at No. 12 Boylston Place, on the Boston Common near the public library. By strict economizing, he figured he could stretch his meager funds until May, allocating five dollars per week for room and board, which consisted mostly of coffee, bread, and doughnuts at the cheaper restaurants nearby. His immediate project was to gain admission to one of the universities . He sat in on a few courses at Boston University but found them dull, for the professors seemed “to teach what they had learned in books, and not what they had felt for themselves,” Garland told boston mentors 63 an early interviewer.1 He presented his letter of introduction from the Reverend Bashford to a literature professor, hoping to enroll as a non-degree-seeking student, but was so offended by the man’s patronizing attitude that he stormed out. Next he tried Harvard, but regular tuition was beyond his reach, and Harvard was unwilling to make room for him on a course-by-course basis. It appeared his dream of furthering his education at Boston’s leading universities was at an end, so he decided to enter upon an intense program of independent reading at the public library, striving to cram in as much reading as he could before his money ran out. His reading at the Cedar Valley Seminary had largely been con- fined to classical texts in rhetoric and the standard British and American authors, and Hamlin had noted the contrast between life as he had experienced it and life as portrayed in fiction. That disparity confirmed his basic rationalist habit of mind, and his reading of Hippolyte Taine and Henry George in his Dakota shanty had awakened him to the writings of evolutionary thinkers. When he entered the Boston Public Library he eagerly sought out the work of those writers whom he had read in snippets in magazines and newspapers . “I read both day and night,” he later recalled, “grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske, Helmholtz, Haeckel,—all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I had not hitherto been able to open.”2 He read widely but haphazardly, for he lacked a mentor to help him distinguish the good from the mediocre, but at some point he stumbled upon Herbert Spencer. At the time, Spencer was all the rage among enlightened thinkers, for his application of Darwin’s theory of evolution to all realms of human effort promised, as Donald Pizer has observed, to unlock “all the mysteries of the world, revealing their basic harmony and movement toward perfection for an age that was searching for a new faith either to replace or buttress the old.”3 In First Principles Spencer had articulated the thesis that was to organize his subsequent books: that simple and unified structures tend to evolve into complex, diverse, specialized, and interdependent units. Just as life evolves from simple cells to more specialized and complex forms, so too do social systems tend toward division of labor and increased complexity of commerce. As political systems 64 boston mentors develop, they produce more individual freedom, and even established art forms tend to grow into new ones. Spencer...