Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

7. James and Annie Fields: The Business of Hospitality

James and Annie Fields the business of hospitality james t. fields (1817–1881) brought to his editorship of the Atlantic Monthly (1861–1871) both a more elastic notion of culture than that of James Russell Lowell and, perhaps most important , the resources of his young wife, Annie West Adams (1834–1915). Fields had an infectious exuberance that made people feel better and brighter in his presence. His Byronic collars and wildly swirling hair dated from the time he hoped to be a poet. Other duties compelled this son of a poor widow from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to apprentice himself in his early teens to Carter and Hendee, Boston booksellers located on the corner of Washington and School Streets. He remained with the successive owners of the firm, until he became, at twenty-six (1843), a junior partner in the newly christened publishing house of Ticknor, Reed and Fields. The year he married Annie (1854), the firm bore just two names, Ticknor and Fields. Five years later, Fields owned a stake in the Atlantic Monthly. In years to come, the name of the firm changed again as it lost and acquired partners: Ticknor and Fields became Fields, Osgood and Company in 1868. It then next merged with Hurd and Houghton (1878), which after buying the Atlantic for twenty thousand dollars in 1873, became Houghton, Osgood & Company. In 1880, it combined with the Riverside Press to form a new partnership, Houghton Mifflin & Company. Despite the many changes of fortune, 7 She was so intrinsically a charming link with the past and abounded so in the pleasure of reference and the grace of fidelity. . . . He had a conception of possibilities of relation with his authors and contributors that I judge no other member of his body in all the land to have had. henry james, “Mr. and Mrs. Fields,” 1915 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 52 ] one thing remained constant: the firm’s support of its flagship publication , the Atlantic Monthly. As editor, Fields had three related goals. He intended to broaden the magazine’s appeal, increase its circulation, and bring to maturity a new crop of authors, many of them women, who studied ordinary people and also the regions which gave rise to their particular, if not peculiar points of view. As the novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps testified: “He advocated the political advancement of our sex, coeducation, and kindred movements without any of the apologetic murmur so common among the half-hearted or the timid. His fastidious and cultivated literary taste was sensitive to the position of women in letters. He was incapable of that literary snobbishness, which undervalues a woman’s work because it is a woman’s.”1 With the possible exception of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Gothic romance , Sir Rohan’s Ghost (1860), the Atlantic’s collection of women writers concentrated on explicit, largely New England locales; they spotlighted the lonely realities of daily life and introduced a range of unlikely female protagonists, from hired girls to elderly spinsters, whose lives they infused with a quiet heroism. In “Miss Lucinda” (August 1861), Rose Terry Cooke wrote: “I have a reverence for poor old maids as great as for the nine muses. Commonplace people are only commonplace from character . . . . So forgive me once more, patient reader, if I offer you no tragedy in high life, no sentimental history of fashion and wealth, but only a little story about a woman who could not be a heroine.”2 Stories like Cooke’s which played with stereotypes of gender and region provided a bridge from more sentimental fiction to realism. Not only did they announce the magazine’s New England roots while broadening its appeal; they also portrayed the human consequences of social and economic inequities. Regional writers set the course for greater realism in American fiction and social criticism. Phelps broke into the Atlantic with “The Tenth of January” (1868), a fictional account of the fire that killed scores of mostly immigrant women workers at the Pemberton Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. A feminist, Phelps lectured on dress reform in a bathing dress and supported temperance and antivivisectionist efforts with such Atlantic works as A Singular Life (serialized 1895) and “Loveliness” (August 1899). An equally strong partisan for women’s rights, Mary Abigail Dodge wrote under the name Gail Hamilton. She debunked myths James & Annie Fields [ 53 ] about motherhood (“A Spasm...