In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America

6. A Blue and Gold Mystique

Chapter Six A Blue and Gold Mystique These are the days when skies resume The old – old sophistries of June – A blue and gold mistake. —Emily Dickinson (c. 1859) In her last book, a collection of stories titled A Garland for Girls (1888); (see figure 9), Louisa May Alcott repeatedly emphasizes the importance of reading in the lives of her characters.1 In “May Flowers,” six blue-blooded Boston girls meet regularly to discuss books read in common ; the thoughtful protagonist of “Poppies and Wheat” reads for selfimprovement during her grand tour of Europe; “Mountain-Laurel and Maidenhair” contrasts a jaded rich girl who has no true appreciation for poetry with an unsophisticated farmer’s daughter who reads it avidly. In “Pansies” a refined and learned elderly woman advises three young ladies which books to read and which to avoid (figure 10). Alice, the most serious of the girls and an admirer of George Eliot, is cautioned to “choose carefully” lest she become “greedy, and read too much,” since “cramming and smattering is as bad as promiscuous novel-reading, or no reading at all” (78–79). Eva, the youngest of the three, is gently steered away from the girlhood favorites Charlotte Yonge and Susan Warner to “fine biographies of real men and women”(81).Carrie,however,poses the greatest challenge to the sage Mrs. Warburton, for she delights in “thrilling” novels and frivolous romances.2 Nevertheless, Mrs. Warburton succeeds so well in reforming the girl’s taste in literature that Carrie forsakes the “crumpled leaves of the Seaside Library copy” of Wanda, an “interminable and impossible tale” (71) by the popular novelist Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée).3 She resolves instead “to take her blue and gold volume of Tennyson on her next trip to Nahant” (94).4 161 chapter six figure 9. The cover of Alcott’s A Garland for Girls. The distinctive letterforms and ornamental design suggest the influence of Sarah Whitman. Author’s collection. a blue and gold mystique figure 10. Frontispiece in A Garland for Girls, by Jessie McDermott, illustrating “Pansies.” Author’s collection. chapter six 164 Alcott’s allusion to the “blue and gold Tennyson” is not idiosyncratic; references to blue and gold volumes abound in the mid-nineteenth-century culture of books. In A Mid-Century Child and Her Books (1926), for example ,Caroline M.Hewins recalls,“My grown-up library began with the first edition of Hawthorne’s ‘Marble Faun’ and was soon increased by Longfellow ’s ‘Golden Legend,’ a blue and gold Tennyson and Jean Paul’s ‘Titan’ in two thick volumes” (36).5 Soon after Ticknor and Fields introduced the format in 1856, other publishers rushed to copy the design, and before long,“blue and gold”became a generic descriptor in book announcements and criticism. Roberts Brothers advertised its new edition of Jean Ingelow ’s Poems as “the prettiest Blue and Gold volume ever issued” (qtd. in Kilgour 35). And when Edmund Clarence Stedman received a new “blue and gold” edition of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poems, published by Rudd & Carleton in New York, he complained, “I don’t like Blue and Gold in so large a type; it looks too much like cheap gilt children’s books” (Stedman and Gould 1: 308).6 Still, Ticknor and Fields retained the strongest association with the style it had successfully popularized, so that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , upon receiving a barrel of cider from William D. Ticknor in January 1863, could quip, “If instead of this iron-bound cask you had sent me a copy of ‘Cider,a Poem in two Books’by J.Philips,bound in Blue and Gold, I should not have been half so grateful”(4: 311).7 Indeed,so closely was the design identified with Ticknor and Fields that the colors suggested their imprint even when they appeared beyond the covers of a book. Thus, in a parodic vignette published in the magazine Vanity Fair in 1860, a fictionalized Prince of Wales pays his respects to a “magnificent (i.e. for Boston) creature gotten up gorgeously in blue and gold, a la Ticknor & Fields” (“Stupendous Enterprise” 180).8 A remarkable feature of allusions such as these is that the phrase “blue and gold” appears without explanation. Whatever these colors signified was a given; it was cultural knowledge that evidently needed no contextualization for contemporary readers.9 In the context of Alcott’s story, the “blue and...