Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America

5. Writing the Past

: 112 ; Chapter 5 Writing the Past • I n choosing to write about the history of domestic life, Alice Morse Earle was,in numerous ways,part of a broader literary tradition. Since the 1820s and 1830s, many writers had focused on the American domestic environment as an avenue to understanding the national character .1 Earle built on the work of Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Bushnell, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, and Sarah Orne Jewett, writers who concerned themselves with domestic life and the transformation of the Northeast. Her historical studies,however,incorporated a new sense of cultural urgency characteristic of the 1890s. She wrote for multiple audiences—popular and academic— publishing book-length works,magazine fiction and nonfiction,and articles for scholarly journals. Earle’s distinctive form, methodology, and modes of presentation were calculated to instill in her white middle-class readers a clear understanding of the past while pointing to a viable path for the future through the twin vehicles of history and domesticity.2 Over the course of her career,Earle came to see herself as an important voice in the reappraisal of the culture and society of colonial America, transmitting its lessons to ordinary readers in her many books and articles.At the same time,she confirmed her authority as a scholar through book reviews and articles in more highbrow and academic venues such as The Dial, the American Historical Review, the Journal of American Folklore, and The Chautauquan. : 113 Writing the Past Earle’s professional activities cannot be fully explained, however, simply in terms of a reformist impulse for social improvement.The extent and pace of her literary output suggest additional motivations. Her writing certainly must have supplemented her family’s household income. Her high production rate throughout the 1890s may have been linked to the generally poor economic climate of that decade. Henry Earle’s fortunes as a rubber broker on Wall Street were vulnerable to any economic downturn, as she well knew,and the depression of the 1890s may have created financial difficulties for him,adding to the pressure on his wife to contribute publishing income. Earle’s literary earnings can be discussed only speculatively,but typical publishing contracts in the 1890s normally netted the author a royalty of 10 percent—and occasionally as much as 20 percent—of retail sales.Magazine writing was a common strategy employed by many authors to increase their income, sometimes significantly. If one of Earle’s books, priced at $2.50 a copy (which was ten times the cost of a pound of butter in 1895), sold ten thousand copies,she had the potential to earn between $2,500 and $5,000 on that book alone,and income from magazine writing could have augmented that figure significantly. By comparison, the average annual wages in 1890 for men and women working as “Officers, Firm Members, and Clerks in Manufacturing Establishments” was $1,039 and $508, respectively.3 Following the publication of China Collecting in America in 1892, Earle continued writing at a feverish pace. Scribner’s published her third book, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, in 1893, as a companion volume to The Sabbath in Puritan New England, and timed to capture the surge of interest in history stimulated by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.4 The following year Earle wrote Costume of Colonial Times. Unlike her previous publications, these two new books employed an ethnographic scheme of organization. Earle surveyed clothing, education , household furnishings, tableware, food and drink, travel, festivals and celebrations, grooming, medicine, death, and mourning customs in early America. As with her book on the Puritan Sabbath, Earle relied on primary sources, both archival and artifactual. She commented in 1899 that her research methods paralleled those developed by the German historian Leopold von Ranke and introduced to the United States in 1872 by “President Adams”at the University of Wisconsin.Earle was a bit confused here. Her reference was to an American historian, Herbert Baxter Adams, who had studied under Ranke in Germany and subsequently brought his ideas 114 ; Chapter 5 about research and the seminar method of instruction to Johns Hopkins University. He was a founder of the American Historical Association in 1884. His most famous student, Frederick Jackson Turner, later taught at the University of Wisconsin, where Charles Kendall Adams was president from 1892 to 1901...