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

[Reminiscences of “Laurie”] (1901 and 1902)

[Reminiscences of “Laurie”] (1901 and 1902) Alfred Whitman After the success of Little Women, readers soon learned that the work had been based upon Alcott’s family. Hundreds of children wrote Alcott, asking her to reveal the identity of the real “Laurie.” For a number of years afterward, Alcott said that she had conceived the character of Laurie from a young Polish man, Ladislas Wisniewski, whom she had met in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1865. Other Concord boys, most notably Julian Hawthorne, often claimed to be the basis of the character. But in a letter of 6 January 1869 to Alfred Whitman, called “Alf” by the Alcott sisters, Louisa confessed: “‘Laurie’ is you & my Polish boy ‘jintly.’ You are the sober half & my Ladislas . . . is the gay whirligig half” (Selected Letters, 120). But it would be almost forty years before Whitman revealed this fact in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Whitman, born in Cambridge in 1842, was motherless when he attended Sanborn’s academy in 1857. Staying at the home of Minot Pratt, a former member of the Transcendentalist utopian experiment, Brook Farm, Whitman, despite spending only a year in Concord, became a close friend to the Alcott girls, especially Louisa. By the fall of 1858, Whitman was on his way to Lawrence , Kansas, where his father had begun a farm four years earlier. He served in the Civil War and married Mary Brown in 1867. Interestingly, her father had also been a member of Brook Farm. After spending a few years in Louisville, Kentucky, Whitman returned to Kansas in 1883, working in real estate and insurance until his death in 1907. In the first volume of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag: My Boys (1871), Louisa described him as “proud and cold and shy to other people, . . . but so grateful for sympathy and a kind word” (15–16). In the story, she describes how she had touched the heart of this reserved youth when Whitman had played Dolphus Tetterby to her Sophy in a dramatization of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man. The two corresponded in a number of letters prior to the Civil War, where she often addressed him as “Dolphus” and signed herself “Sophy.” In the two articles here, Whitman, in such scenes as Louisa sewing Lizzie’s death shroud or performing in the antics of the Concord Dramatic Union, portrays a youthful Louisa May, unencumbered by the trappings of fame or the demands of publishers. [100] * “Miss Alcott’s Letters to Her ‘Laurie’” (1901) In the fall of 1857, I, a motherless boy of fifteen, landed in Concord, Massachusetts (a place I knew nothing of except its Revolutionary fame), and was enrolled as a student in the school taught by Mr. Frank B. Sanborn. I became a member of the family of Mr. Minot Pratt. With John, the second son, who had just returned from the West, and with Carrie, his only sister, I formed at once an intimate and lasting friendship, and together John and I paid our first visit to the Alcott family, that had come back to Concord after its various wanderings and experiences. The Alcotts occupied half of a house near the Town Hall, where they remained until after the death of Elizabeth, when they removed for a short time into the Hawthorne cottage, and from there into their new home, Orchard House, or “Apple Slump,” as it was christened by Louisa. In the little house near the Town Hall began the acquaintance which was to bring John Pratt a loving and devoted wife, and to the writer the joy of a lifelong friendship with the Alcotts and the Pratts. So close was this friendship , and so hearty and genuine the way in which I was taken into companionship by these gifted people, that it never occurred to me that all, with the exception of Abby, were at least ten years older than myself, and although I was born and had lived all my days in Massachusetts, the last year of my life in that State seems to have included almost all that has been permanent in my memory of it, and Concord the only place that I think of as home. It is hard for me now to realize that I lived in Concord not quite one year. It was but a few weeks after school opened when the question of having plays was talked of, and The Concord Dramatic Union was organized with Mr. Sanborn, the three Alcott girls, George B. Bartlett and his brothers...