Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her LIfe, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

“When Louisa Alcott Was a Girl” (1898)

“When Louisa Alcott Was a Girl” (1898) Edward W. Emerson The fourth and youngest child of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward was born in 1844. As a youth, he attended Sanborn’s Concord academy. Frail health kept him from joining the Union army during the Civil War. He graduated from Harvard College in 1866 and then Harvard Medical College in 1874. That same year, Edward, returning to Concord to practice medicine, married Annie Shepard Keyes, daughter of one of Concord’s leading citizens, John S. Keyes. After his father died in 1882, Edward began a career as a writer and speaker. A painter himself, he also served as an instructor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He died in Concord in 1930. He is best known for his writings about his father and others in the Transcendentalist circle, such as Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917) and Emerson in Concord (1889). He also edited the centenary edition of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (12 vols.) in 1903–4. Four years May Alcott’s junior, Edward, of all the people who published reminiscences of Louisa May and her family, probably knew them the best. They had returned, after the Fruitlands disaster, to Concord in the year of his birth, and by the time Edward was thirteen years old, the Alcotts were firmly planted at Orchard House. Coming late in his own life and after the deaths of the immediate Alcott family, Edward’s account, however, appears somewhat reserved , treating what he calls “this remarkable family” with the respect and dignity of a longtime friend. Despite this reverence, Edward’s depiction of the Alcotts’ family life illustrates why Little Women was and continues to be acclaimed . He pulls back the curtains of the March/Alcott home, allowing readers to experience the real “little women” growing up. The love, closeness, creativity , and fun depicted in these scenes would make anyone want to be a part of it. His recollections, along with those of Julian Hawthorne, provide a view of the Alcotts over a wide range of time that is unequaled by others who wrote about them. [89] * In the year 1840 a remarkable family moved to Concord; high-minded, cultivated , exceedingly poor, despised by most persons, welcomed by one or two; apparently so ill fitted to fight the world’s fight that failure was sure. Yet they won, in the end, respect, recognition, success, and their name is honorably associated with that of the town. The head of that family, Amos Bronson Alcott, began life as a peddler, but a call came so strongly to him, like that which Jesus gave to certain poor fishers to become teachers of a better life than they found, that he felt justified in obeying the Master’s command to them: “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” Mr. Alcott began to teach in a better sense than the schools of New England then recognized. He appealed to the intellect, the conscience, the imagination, discovering for himself methods that advanced teachers strive to introduce to-day, held to these at a loss, and finally had his Boston school wrecked and was himself almost mobbed for being in advance of his day. In his school and later, on a day of public shame, he bravely espoused, even at the risk of influence and of life, the cause of the poor slaves. It is of his family that I am to tell here, but their extraordinary nurture and home surroundings must be known to rightly value their interesting personalities and their life together. From that life the best of lessons may be read, which may be helpful alike to those who in their youth had trials and opportunities like theirs, and to those who have every advantage which they had not. In the glimpses that I shall give of this family this point is best worth heeding: that with beliefs, tastes and aims differing so widely as to make domestic harmony seem impossible, courage, respect for each other and love won the day, and kept father, mother and children a united family, and if with suffering, also with happiness. After the loss of his school Mr. Alcott brought his noble wife (a sister of Samuel May, justly called one of the Heralds of Freedom ) and his four little children to Concord. He gardened, let himself out for day’s work...