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1 Away from Home
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter one Away from Home In 1820, eighteen-year-old John Locke, the son of a congressman by the same name, left his home in Ashby, a rural community in northwestern Massachusetts , for Boston. Accompanied by his father, Locke made the journey so many young men and women would make—from countryside to city, from “home” to boardinghouse. The senior Locke probably secured him his first job—as a shop boy in a dry goods store—and settled him into his first boardinghouse , run by a “Mr. Thomas Stearns in Brattle St.” Over the next few years, young Locke changed jobs and boardinghouses often, working his way up from shop boy to bookkeeper to “Head of the Clerks,” moving in order to be closer to successive workplaces. The reminiscences Locke penned a decade later were brief and unremarkable. If he found boardinghouse life disreputable or barely tolerable, if he longed for home, he did not say so. He did, however “recollect” the names of many of his fellow boarders: George S. Galvin Mr. Bernard an Englishman—Mr. Caleb Stimpson, Hall Kelly, Mr. Hogans—William Page Esq. C H. Locke Mrs Dunnage & her daughters Anna & Hannah & Miss Baker Stephen Hooper Esq a Lawyer at Mr. Stearns— in Brattle Street. George S. Galvin Benjamin Poor James A. G. Otis—James Vila at Mrs. Stannifords. Abraham N. Hewes Hall—Blake Callender—Two Miss Nuttings Miss Sarah Swain—Ladd—at Mr. Wescotts . . . Mr. Bains an Englishman —at Mr. Grays Perhaps because he wrote before the canon of domesticity—always fragile —had fully crystallized, Locke referenced none of the themes that moralists , humorists, novelists, advice writers, and boarders themselves (categories that were far from mutually exclusive) would eventually fashion into folklore . And in 1850, Locke, forty-eight years old and a clerk in the Boston Customs House, was still a boarder, living with his wife, four children, and elderly father in a fashionable boardinghouse on Federal Street.1 Locke’s residential history raises intriguing questions, for it unfolded amid increasingly insistent cultural dichotomies—house versus home, home versus market, virtue versus vice, public versus private. How did boarders understand their experiences? Did they see themselves as bohemian rebels against middle-class propriety? Social outcasts condemned to dens of iniquity? Lonely hearts who pined for “real” homes? Locke’s terse prose provides few answers— although, as we shall see, that he remembered the names of his fellow boarders is worth noting.2 Fortunately, other boarders had more to say. This chapter tells the stories of four: a youngish single woman, an elderly widow, a middle-aged husband, and a young man in his early twenties. Two were securely anchored in the respectable middle classes (one clearly a member of the local elite); two inhabited the murky margins between the working classes and the middling sorts. As befits this relatively diverse group, the experiences they recorded shared much but also diverged. Each endured—albeit to differing degrees—the discomforts that accompanied boarding life: the absence of privacy that supposedly characterized homes and dependence on landladies and servants to provide what one satirist derisively termed the “comforts of home.”3 Each encountered moral danger in varying—if mostly harmless—guises. Each, in short, confronted at least implicitly what it meant to be a boarder in an era that celebrated “homes.” The daily lives of people like Susan Brown Forbes, Catherine Thorn, Richard Barker, and Timothy O’Donovan furnished the raw material from which humorists, journalists, novelists, and short story writers produced their often-scathing critiques; conversely, popular social commentary provided a lens through which lodgers might view their circumstances. Yet, in the end, these four boarders—even the most stereotypical among them— navigated the nebulous territory between home and market, public and private , and house and home with more subtlety and grace than most boardinghouse critics were willing to admit. “Our Family at 34”: Susan Parsons Brown (1856–1861) Susan Parsons Brown left her hometown of Epsom, New Hampshire, for Boston at the tail end of March 1856. Snow still lay on the ground, so her father took her by horse sled to the house of a family friend. From there another friend of the family drove her by wagon to Concord. At Concord, Brown boarded a train that took her to Boston.4 This was not the first time that Brown had been away from home or even the first time she had visited Boston. At thirty-two, the former Lowell mill girl The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America...