Fields, James { Annie individual Note: yes Authors and Friends Indication that Annie by attended dinner at Dorrs Annie Fields in 1867 c Isaac I. Hayes. Check M.A. DeWalf Howe's llemories of a Hostess and James T. Fields, Alabas Yesterdays with Authors. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Universide Press, Cambridge 1897 CONTENTS PAGE ''ll The Company of the Leaf" wore laurel chaplets " whose lusty LONGFELLOW : 1807-1882 I green may not appaired be." They represent the brave and stead- GLIMPSES OF EMERSON 65 fast of all ages, the great knights and champions, the constant lovers OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: PERSONAL RECOLLEC- and pure women of past and present times.' TIONS AND UNPUBLISHED LETTERS 107 Keping beautie fresh and greene DAYS WITH MRS. STOWE 157 For there nis storme that ne may hem deface. CELIA THAXTER 227 GEOFFREY CHAUCER. WHITTIER : NOTES OF HIS LIFE AND OF HIS FRIEND- SHIPS 263 TENNYSON 335 LADY TENNYSON 349 FirstSearch: Libraries that Own Item Page 1 of 2 OC FirstSearch SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV Resource Staff View | My Account Options Databases Searching Results Sharing Comments Exit Hide tips List of Records Detailed Record Marked Records Saved Records Current database: WorldCat Total Libraries: 1 WorldCat E-mail Print Return Help Title: Papers Author: Fields, Annie Libraries with Item: "Papers," ( Record for Item I Get This Item ) Location Library Code MA MASSACHUSETTS HIST SOC MAH Record for Item: "Papers," ( Libraries with Item ) GET THIS ITEM Check the catalogs in your library. Libraries worldwide that own item: 1 Connect to Southern New Hampshire University Library FIND RELATED More Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options Papers (147); Fields Annie. (max: 54); Fields James Thomas (max: 72) Papers, 1847-1912. Author(s) Fields. Annie, 1834-1915 ; Fields James Thomas. 1817-1881. Year 1847-1912 Description: 13 cases containing 70 V. and 1 narrow box. English LCCN: ms 84-2007 Abstract Author and literary hostess, social welfare worker. Papers include a diary in 61 volumes and European travel journals for 1859 and 1869 containing accounts of her meetings with Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson and William M. Thackeray. Boston diaries contain descriptions of New England literary figures-A. Bronson Alcott, Ralph W. Emerson, Oliver W. Holmes, Henry James, Henry W. Longfellow, William H. Prescott and John G. Whittier. Also mentioned are Charlotte Cushman, Sarah Orne Jewett and Lucy Larcom. In addition there are 75 letters, mostly written by Mrs. Fields during her European trips, and an 1847 diary of James T. Fields (1817-1881). Descriptor: Authors Intellectual life http://80-firstsearch.oclc.org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=holdings:entit... 6/10/2006 MICROFILM EDITION OF THE Annie Adams Fields Papers 1852-1912 PS KU Libraries 1669 .F5 Z462 Microferms 1986 Collection CONTENTS ROLL I ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS DIARIES 1859-1870 ROLL 2 ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS DIARIES 1869-1877 DIARY OF A CARIBBEAN TRIP 1896 DIARY OF A TRIP TO FRANCE 1898 NOTES OF CONVERSATIONS AT THE HOME CLUB 1905 DIARY AND COMMONPLACE BOOK 1907-1912 ROLL 3 ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS "ROMAN ELEGIES IT 2 volumes LECTURE ON CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS LOOSE LETTERS 1852-1916 UNDATED MISCELLANY JAMES THOMAS FIELDS DIARY 1847 INTERVIEW WITH JESSE POMEROY SCRAPBOOK ON CHARLES DICKENS FirstSearch: List of Records Page 1 of 2 List of Records Terms & Conditions © 1992-2003 OCLC Click on a title to see the detailed record. WorldCat Click on a checkbox to mark a record to be e-mailed or printed in Marked Records. WorldCat Hot Topics: Select a topic to search: WorldCat results for: au: fields Sort Related Related Limit E-mail Print Export Help and au: annie. Subjects Authors Records found: 169 (English: 168) Rank by: Number of Libraries Books etc. Articles Journal Articles Previous Searches Find related: (WorldCat) (ArticleFirst) (ECO) 1 Prev Next All Books Archival Articles Sound Internet 169 138 24 5 1 1 Limit Any Audience Any Content Search ? results: Any Format 1. Memories of a hostess : a chronicle of eminent friendships, drawn chiefly from the diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields / Author: Howe, M. A. De Wolfe 1864-1960.; Fields, Annie, Publication: Boston : Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922 Document: English : Book Libraries Worldwide: 501 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item 2. Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett / Author: Jewett, Sarah Orne, 1849-1909.; Fields, Annie, Publication: Boston and New York : Cambridge : Houghton Mifflin Company ; The Riverside Press, 1911 Document: English : Book : Letter Libraries Worldwide: 406 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item 3. Life and letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Author: Fields, Annie, 1834-1915. Publication: Boston, Houghton, Mifflin 1897 Document: English : Book Libraries Worldwide: 273 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item 4. Authors and friends. Author: Fields, Annie, 1834-1915. Publication: Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1896 Document: English : Book Libraries Worldwide: 220 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSQUERY?format=BI:next=html/records...: searchtype=basi 5/23/2003 FirstSearch: List of Records Page 2 of 2 5. Accordion crimes Author: Proulx, Annie.; Fields, Anna. Publication: Newport Beach, CA :; Books on Tape, 1996 Document: English : Sound Recording : Non-music : Fiction : Cassette tape Libraries Worldwide: 182 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item 6. Letters of Celia Thaxter, Author: Thaxter, Celia, 1835-1894.; Fields, Annie,; Lamb, Rose, Publication: Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1895 Document: English : Book Libraries Worldwide: 162 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item 7. James T. Fields; biographical notes and personal sketches. Author: Fields, Annie, 1834-1915. ed. Publication: Port Washington, N.Y., Kennikat Press 1971, 1881 Document: English : Book Libraries Worldwide: 117 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item 8. Life and letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Author: Fields, Annie, 1834-1915. Publication: Detroit, Gale Research Co., 1970, 1897 Document: English : Book Libraries Worldwide: 140 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author I Advanced options See more details for locating this item 9. Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett Author: Jewett, Sarah Orne, 1849-1909.; Fields, Annie, Publication: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911 Document: English : Book : Microform Libraries Worldwide: 144 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item 10. Charles Dudley Warner, Author: Fields, Annie, 1834-1915. Publication: New York, McClure, Phillips & CO., 1904 Document: English : Book Libraries Worldwide: 126 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options See more details for locating this item Clear Marks Mark All WorldCat results for: au: fields Sort Related Related Limit E-mail Print Export Help and au: annie. Subjects Authors Records found: 169 (English: 168) Rank by: Number of Libraries http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSQUERY?format=BI:next=html/records...: searchtype=basi 5/23/2003 FirstSearch: Detailed Record Page 1 of 2 Detailed Record Terms & Conditions © 1992-2003 OCLC 08 Click on a checkbox to mark a record to be e-mailed or printed in Marked WorldCat Records. imi ? WorldCat results for: au: fields and au: annie Subjects Libraries E-mail Print Export Help and dt= "mix" Record 10 of 24. 10 Mark: Prev Next Correspondence, Annie Fields 1882-1911 English Archival Material 18 items. Annie Adams Fields, author and wife of James T. Fields, was born in Boston, MA in 1834. She traveled extensively with her husband and formed intimate friendships with some of America's most well-known 19th century writers and intellectuals. She died in 1915, having outlived many of her contemporaries. GET THIS ITEM Availability: Check the catalogs in your library. Libraries worldwide that own item: 1 FIND RELATED More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author I Advanced options Find Items About: Correspondence, (69,178); Fields, Annie, (max: 40) Title: Correspondence, 1882-1911. Author(s): Fields, Annie, 1834-1915. Year: 1882-1911 Description: 18 items. Language: English Abstract: Annie Adams Fields, author and wife of James T. Fields, was born in Boston, MA in 1834. She traveled extensively with her husband and formed intimate friendships with some of America's most well-known 19th century writers and intellectuals. She died in 1915, having outlived many of her contemporaries. SUBJECT(S) Descriptor: Women authors, American -- Massachusetts -- 19th century -- Correspondence. Women authors, American -- Massachusetts -- 20th century -- Correspondence. Named Person: Fields, Annie, 1834-1915 -- Correspondence. Jewett, Sarah Orne, 1849-1909. Beecher, Henry Ward, 1813-1887. Note(s): University of New Hampshire Special Collections e-mail address: ARCHIVES@UNH.EDU./Bio/History: Eighteen letters written by Annie Adams Fields between the years 1882 and 1911. Many of them describe http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=sp03... numrecs= 5/23/2003 8/26/03 BaRBara furth Ratundo drs Jones T.7ields, Hosters websit Contact Massachu Distorial freet u annie fields (ms Jan melds) Draries Unpublished forends 3 First America Literay salon. with x Ticknor & Fields Olwer Werdell Holmer invited to all Henry Wadeswerts forfellow Field's gatherings HOLLIS X Field, annue. Correspondince Happen Lby Harvard guests at 148 Charls Street (pg. 14 ) Do I pressure M search for Dair's parents? sntoo new England Quarting - Order ? year at SNHU Ift x Atlahollang "Mr. Nrs you T, Field Hug Jomes CXVI (Ful, 1915). Pp. ? "In the 19th the upper-midden had the $ many the lessen A the education which bed formery be the perpeturs of the eustacing its members caned lead austocrates leves Drispeats- but not GBD. HOLLIS FULL CATALOG - Full View of Record Page 1 of 2 e Your Account I Start Over Help Comments Full Catalog I Journals Reserves E-Resources HOLLIS CATALOG Previous Searches I Results List I Display Options Harvard University Search I Expanded Search I Command Search Harvard Libraries Full View of Record : FULL CATALOG Save/Mail Add to List I View List Last Browse Choose format: Full view Short view I MARC Record 48 out of 55 Previous Record Next Record Author : Howe, M. A. De Wolfe (Mark Antony De Wolfe), 1864-1960. Title : Papers, 1849-1959 (inclusive), 1878-1959 (bulk). Locations/Orders Availability Location Houghton i b MS Am 1524-1524.2 Holdings Availability Description : 35 boxes (9 linear ft.). History notes : Howe was a biographer, editor, historian, and poet. He held editorial positions on the Youth's Companion (1888-1893, 1899-1913), The Atlantic Monthly (1893-1895), Harvard Alumni Bulletin (1913-1919), and Harvard Graduates' Magazine (1917-1918). Howe was also vice-president of The Atlantic Monthly Company (1911-1929). Summary : Correspondence of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, together with two boxes of pamphlets and four boxes of notebooks, scrapbooks of Howe's publications in newspapers and magazines, diaries, 1928-1951, and other printed material. The correspondence consists chiefly of incoming letters with carbon copies of some of Howe's replies. There are also 278 letters, 1878-1904, from Howe to his mother which document his student years at Lehigh and Harvard and his early years in Boston. In general the correspondence relates to Howe's editorial and biographical work and includes letters from writers for the Youth's Companion and from authors of volumes published in the series of Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans, edited by Howe. In addition there are 17 letters, 1870-1891, from Bishop William Hobart Hare to Howe's father and a few scattered earlier letters and documents of James Buchanan, Josiah Quincy, and Daniel Webster. The Richard Malcolm Johnston material includes 5 letters from Johnston to Howe, 1888- 1893. Provenance Deposited by Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, 1958, 1959. Cite as : Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe Papers (bMS AM 1524-1524.2). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Finding aids : Unpublished finding aids available in repository. Accessions nos.: *57M-206, *58M-21, *59M-47. For access to related M. A. De Wolfe Howe material, consult manuscript card catalogue in the Houghton Library or Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, published by Chadwyck-Healey, 1986. Subject : Howe, M. A. De Wolfe (Mark Antony De Wolfe), 1864-1960. /61OTMKJPHJ4EC761F6JLAVCKMGRPMFBVMV18AS2IE2KJLCM4H9-00628?func=ful5/27/2003 HOLLIS FULL CATALOG - Full View of Record Page 1 of 2 P Your Account I Start Over Help Comments Full Catalog I Journals Reserves E-Resources HOLLIS CATALOG Previous Searches I Results List I Display Options Harvard University Search I Expanded Search I Command Search Harvard Libraries Full View of Record : FULL CATALOG Save/Mail Add to List I View List Last Browse Choose format: Full view I Short view I MARC Record 46 out of 55 Previous Record Next Record Author : Fields, Annie, 1834-1915. Title : Papers, 1847-1912 [microform]. Locations/Orders Availability Location : Microforms (Lamont) i Harvard Depository Film M 456 [Consult Documents/Microtexts desk for reel 1=HNBWTZ, reel 2=HNBWU1, reel 3=HNBWU2] Holdings Availability Location : Microforms (Lamont) 0 INDEX Film M 456 [= Guide] Holdings Availability Description : 71 V., 1 container. Summary : "The volumes represent, as she intended and so labeled them, a 'Journal of literary events and glimpses of interesting people"--Introd. Author and literary hostess, social welfare worker. Papers include a diary in 61 volumes and European travel journals for 1859 and 1869 containing accounts of her meetings with Dickens, Tennyson and Thackeray. Boston diaries contain descriptions of New England literary figures--A. Bronson Alcott, Emerson, Holmes, James, Longfellow, Prescott and Whittier. Also mentioned are Charlotte Cushman, Sarah Orne Jewett and Lucy Larcom. In addition there are 75 letters, mostly written by Mrs. Fields during her European trips, and an 1847 diary of James T. Fields (1817-1881.) (CONTINUED) Portions of the Annie Fields diaries have been published in Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess (Boston, 1922) and some of her letters in James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors (Boston, 1872.) Restrictions : Information on literary rights and restrictions available in library. Notes : Microfilm reproduction of original holographs preserved in the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Cairns Collection Finding aids : Guide ([5] p.). Subject : Fields, Annie, 1834-1915 -- Archives. Fields, Annie, 1834-1915 -- Diaries. Subject : Authors, American -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- Diaries. Subject : Boston (Mass.) -- Intellectual life -- 19th century -- Sources. .../61QTMKJPHJ4EC761F6JLAVCKMGRPMFBVMV18AS2IE2KJLCM4H9-00620?func=ful5/27/2003 Ticknor and Fields. Records: Guide. Page 1 of 6 bMS Am 2100. Ticknor and Fields. Records: Guide. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Descriptive Summary Repository: Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University Location: b Call No.: MS Am 2100 Creator: Ticknor and Fields. Title: Records, Date(s): 1839-1881. Quantity: 1 box (.5 linear tt.) Abstract: Primarily correspondence of James Thomas Fields and other editors at Ticknor and Fields, a nineteenth-century Boston, Massachusetts, publishing house. Administrative Information Processed by: Jackie Dean. Acquisition Information: *98M-2 *2001M-31 Purchased from John William Pye Rare Books with funds from the Parkman D. Howe Fund, the James Duncan Phillips Fund for Harvard College, the Harmand Teplow Fund, and funds from the sale of duplicates; received: 1998 June 24; 2001 Nov. 13. Historical Note Ticknor and Fields of Boston, Massachusetts was the premier "literary" publishing house in the United States during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Ticknor and Fields originated in the firm of Allen and Ticknor established in 1832. The partners in Ticknor and Fields were William D. Ticknor (one of the partners in Allen and Ticknor) and James T. Fields, who entered the firm as a junior partner in 1843. Fields edited the Atlantic monthly from 1861-1870. Fields was also a writer; his writings include: Poems (1849), Yesterdays with authors (1872), and Hawthorne (1876). In 1854, Fields married Annie http://oasis.harvard.edu/html/hou00106.html 5/27/2003 Ticknor and Fields. Records: Guide. Page 2 of 6 Adams, an author, literary hostess, and social welfare worker. Ticknor and Fields became Fields, Osgood and Co. in 1868 when James R. Osgood joined the firm. After a series of changes, Fields, Osgood and Co. evolved into Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Organization The records have been organized into three series: I. Correspondence A. Letters from James Thomas Fields B. Letters to James Thomas Fields C. Other Ticknor and Fields correspondence D. Other correspondence II. Compositions III. Other papers Scope and Content Primarily business and personal correspondence of James Thomas Fields along with the correspondence of James R. Osgood and other Ticknor and Fields' editors. Correspondents include Louis Agassiz, Lydia Maria Francis Child, George William Curtis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, among other nineteenth-century literary figures. Some letters include cartes-de-visite of the correspondent. There is a small amount of correspondence among Ticknor and Fields' authors as well as letters from Annie Fields. Compositions include autograph manuscript poems by Annie Fields, print and autograph manuscript poems by James Thomas Fields, and a partial autograph manuscript of George Stillman Hillard's Six months in Italy, among other items. Finally, there are royalty checks to various Ticknor and Fields' authors, visiting cards of James Thomas Fields, and a cabinet photograph of an unidentified man. Container List Series: I. Correspondence. A. Letters from James Thomas Fields. (1) Fields, James Thomas, 1817-1881. Letters A-B, various dates. 1 folder. Includes letters to: A. Williams & Co., 1877. Henry Mills Alden, 1875. Robert Balmanno, 1842. Mr. Bennett, 1854. Mr. Bond, 1881. Mrs. Bray, 1880. Charles Warren Brewster, 1837. Charles Timothy Brooks, 1864. Mr. Brown, 1878. (2) Fields, James Thomas, 1817-1881. Letters C-F, various dates. 1 folder. Mr. Carter, 1875. William Mellen Chamberlain, 1843. Lydia Maria Francis Child, 1867. http://oasis.harvard.edu/html/hou00106.html 5/27/2003 Ticknor and Fields Page 1 of 4 . Home Henry Links Activities Teachers Author Thoreau Ticknor and Fields Houghton Mifflin Publishing Connection Houghton Mifflin, publisher of Henry Hikes to Fitchburg by D.B. Johnson, has a connection with Ticknor and Fields, the publisher of Walden or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau and other prominent authors of the nineteenth century. Old Corner Bookstore 1850 Courtesy of Cornell University Library Nineteenth Century Periodicals Collection William Davis Ticknor William D. Ticknor established a publishing business in 1832 and occupied the Old Corner Bookstore located on Washington and School Streets in Boston, Massachusetts. His partners included John Reed and James T. Fields. In the spring of 1864, Ticknor died unexpectedly and his son Howard M. Ticknor joined the business to carry on his father's work as Ticknor and Fields. The name Ticknor and Fields was well known William Davis Ticknor 1810-1864 in the publishing industry for its http://www.cyberbee.com/henryhikes/ticknor.htm 5/27/2003 Ticknor and Fields Page 2 of 4 Courtesy of Cornell University Library publications and authors. Dickens, Nineteenth Century Periodicals Collection The House of Ticknor. [The Bay State monthly. Longfellow, Holmes, Stowe, /Volume 3, Issue 4, September 1885] Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau were a few of the individuals whose writings were published by Ticknor and Fields. In 1867 the business was moved from the Old Corner Bookstore to No. 124 Tremont Street in Boston. Magazines were also acquired and added to its publishing list. These included the Atlantic Monthly, Our Young Folks, and the North American Review. During its great publishing years the firm went by many names; Ticknor and Fields, Fields, Osgood & Co., and James R. Osgood & Co. In 1878 the houses of Hurd and Houghton and James R. Osgood & No. 124 Tremont Street Company merged together and Courtesy of Cornell University Library Nineteenth Century Periodicals Collection became Houghton, Osgood & The House of Ticknor. [The Bay State monthly. Company. James Osgood retired in /Volume 3, Issue 4, September 1885] 1880 and the company became known as Houghton Mifflin & Company. Henry Oscar Houghton Henry Oscar Houghton was born in Sutton, Vermont April 30, 1823. He became a printer's apprentice at the age of thirteen in the office of the Burlington Free Press. This served him well when he went off to college with no means of support except his printing skills. He was still in debt after college, but had the opportunity to purchase an established printing Henry Oscar Houghton 1823-1895 office in Cambridge, Courtesy of Cornell University Library Massachusetts if he could raise Nineteenth Century Periodicals Collection $1,500. That was a very large http://www.cyberbee.com/henryhikes/ticknor.html 5/27/2003 Ticknor and Fields Page 3 of 4 Henry Oscar Houghton, Publisher. [The New England magazine. / Volume 19, Issue 2, Oct sum of money in 1849. To his 1895] credit, he was able to find three individuals who gave $500 each. yes He began the Riverside Press on the banks of the Charles River in se IX. (State !kre's few cash Fr.r time Le and 3th TXW. Cambridge. The firm was called H. Officer Death Dr. Car thing incluse lessed chea 3663. Cryck O. Houghton & Company. I Just time Privis Name III FORM Net Beston: be 1 was & - 4 Your adidas In Priss Tirn. Yes New Silitals and William 1846 Up to this point American books $ Too then. Energy New K Temporar Thank New The will White 3843 had been printed on poor paper 6. Gas the my 55 MONTH 2.69 Tin: You 1% iti with poor ink. He was determined It: the Kut built in 13 Marian % K. 1. to improve the quality and laner New Yes. Houl and Max it. 1948 8. tifs Sind's Hospital and he: Day date Original lower adopted the saying, "Do it well or las Present You Yet Best >* Houghes. 1833 B. THIS in seil H: Fees. IFR.I. not at all." Her Sal. Morl and 13(c) 3. as Dive 393 Made is like Professional R Chicago Milka is 18% is ing Us Course DAWAID Tickers He joined with Melancthon M. and EB 18% : YS does less Billers states for mix Britaka Hurd to publish books under the Said the Widow and Fidia 116. the Firm Birth ity Morr Bise Besica Please name of Hurd & Houghton in 1305. :1. in " details it's in 1864. During this time period, he and Fire Liabilities Birten: Am in: Hope : *** had a desk in the Old Corner 16. the - sir Fr W. E. G. Kingere. Best set J.S. TErms & (id. 3:466, Bookstore where he transacted 1f. The December has. by #. 3. Date: J. R. Tikia I the INC business with publishers. IT. Drow. Date issue if the Represent 3. R. THE . a ENG 10. Part News Samp, Anne As They Jty Arces. Ja. Dates. 184 As noted above Hurd and It ansix Yey the the Active e the ILL 1 bosure Loting. 1/885. Houghton merged with James R. Click to view larger image Osgood & Company (Ticknor and Children's Books of the Year 1865 Fields) and soon became known as Courtesy of Cornell University Library Houghton & Mifflin Company. Nineteenth Century Periodicals Collection Children's Books of the Year. [The North George H. Mifflin was connected American review. / Volume 102, Issue 210, with the Riverside Press and Jan 1866] became a partner fater Osgood retired. Houghton died on August 25, 1895 leaving a publishing business that continues today. bit © 2000 Linda C. Joseph & Linda D. Resch All Rights Reserved http://www.cyberbee.com/henryhikes/ticknor.html 5/27/2003 274 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND PERSONAL SKETCHES. 275 Faith overleaps the confines of our reason, And if by faith, as in old times was said, Women received their dead Raised up to life, then only for a season Our partings are, nor shall we wait in vain AUF WIEDERSEHEN. Until we meet again ! HENRY W. LONGFELLOW IN MEMORY OF JAMES T. FIELDS. UNTIL we meet again ! That is the meaning Of the familiar words, that men repeat At parting in the street. Ah yes, till then ! but when death intervening Rends us asunder, with what ceaseless pain We wait for thee again ! The friends who leave us do not feel the sorrow Of parting, as we feel it, who must stay Lamenting day by day, And knowing, when we wake upon the morrow, We shall not find in its accustomed place The one beloved face. It were a double grief, if the departed, Source: Annie Adams fields. Being released from earth, should still retain A sense of earthly pain ; It were a double grief, if the true-hearted, James T. fields : Biographired Who loved us here, should on the farther shore totes ad Personal shetches Remember us no more. Believing, in the midst of our afflictions, 1881. That death is a beginning, not an end, We cry to them, and send Farewells, that better might be called predictions, Being foreshadowings of the future, thrown Into the vast Unknown. Howtington Library Quarterly 52, H 3 (1989): NOTES AND DOCUMENTS 409 409-414. "A World Without Dickens!" James T. to Annie Fields, 10 June 1870 by Jerome Meckier News of Dickens's death reached James T. Fields, his American publish- er, at the Boston offices of Ticknor and Fields on Friday 10 June 1870. The note he immediately sent his wife, probably Dickens's most ardent North American admirer, survives in Box 12 (envelope 7) of Addenda to the Huntington Library's Fields Collection. Undated, in purple ink, on a scrap of paper without letterhead, this sheet has never been commented on, possibly because it is not a letter to Fields and thus not officially part of the 5,438 items mostly of that nature in fifty-seven boxes; instead, it is mixed in with more than fifty other letters from James to Annie on incon- sequential domestic matters. Beginning "O my dear Annie," at once a salutation and a cry of woe, the one-paragraph note reveals the publisher's devastation in the face of unexpected catastrophe: A telegram has just come from England to the associated press, and they have sent word to us, saying that our dear, dear friend Dickens died this morning. God grant there may be some mistake in the dis- patch, but I have deep and dreadful fears. I am here and must remain here to watch for more intelligence over the wires. If any bet- ter tidings come you shall hear at once, but if you don't hear, you will know I have got nothing further. I am terribly shocked by this blow, and know not how to believe the report. God help us all if it be true. A world without Dickens! It is hard to think of such a calamity & I won't believe the report till it is further confirmed. Actually, Dickens died "at ten minutes past six" (ten after one in Boston) on the evening of 9 June, "just four months and two days past his fifty- eighth birthday."2 If correct, the handwritten date of 10 June-not in Fields's hand but penciled in at the bottom of the note-suggests a certain delay either in cabling across the Atlantic or in sending word to 124 Tremont Street.3 Equally disconcerting is the inscription on the reverse side, again in pencil and presumably by the same executory hand that added the date: "Letters from Mr. Fields to his wife to be destroyed." The Old Corner Bookstore: "Rialto of Current Good Things, Hub of the Hub" David Emblidge Heaven save that ancient building From the innovator's hand! As a landmark of our fathers Let the corner bookstore stand I. Epicenter: August 9, 1854, Concord, Massachusetts Henry David Thoreau rises, as always, with the dawn, checks the sky for the new day's weather (clear, dry), and begins his literary day by reading a few verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. By noon he must be on a train to Boston for a rendezvous with destiny, a destiny even Thoreau-in all his expansiveness--cannot imagine. In his writings, Thoreau lamented the advent of the railroad-the in- fernal machine in the garden, to borrow Leo Marx's phrase-but it was in fact the train, and bridges built across the Charles River, that had made Boston into a literary city accessible to the many writers who chose then, as they do today, to live in the more pastoral smaller towns on the city's periphery. Moreover, as noted by Peter Davison, the late poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly, without railroads, Boston's publishing firms would never have been able to ship their books out to the rest of the United States (Davison 58). In the city proper, in a robustly prosperous-looking red brick home near Beacon Hill, rising not quite as early as Thoreau in Concord, is William Davis Ticknor. Publisher, close friend of Hawthorne, civic leader, and CO- proprietor of The Old Corner Bookstore (with James T. Fields), Ticknor spends the first hour of his morning perusing American and European newspapers, keeping an eye out for indications of the general drift of the economy as the nation edges fitfully toward sectional conflict over slavery, a system of human exploitation that he, Ticknor, a pillar of the Baptist church, cannot abide. By eight o'clock Ticknor is moving toward the bookshop where from seven a.m. onwards his clerks have been dusting, The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, N.S. Vol. 16, 2008 Hentragler Laborary Quarterly 8, #1 (1944), lover James T. Fields and the Beginnings of Book Promotion, I 840-1855 Ride By WILLIAM CHARVAT I N RECENT years much has been written concerning the efflores- cence of American literature about the middle of the nineteenth century. Mr. Matthiessen has ably discussed the tone, the quality, and the aesthetic psychology of American romantic literature, and Mr. Brooks has revealed the New England writers as products of a regional culture and as points in the curve of a culture-cycle. But the genius or talent of a newly emergent group of writers is one thing; the transformation of genius into books which provide a living for the geniuses is quite another-and on this subject we have little information. No great art can flourish unless it has an audience and unless artists can live on it: in other words, to be born and to survive, it must have patronage Up to the eighteenth century that patronage was predominantly royal or aristocratic. From about 1700 on it has been increasingly public, or popular, or democratic-in a word, commercial. The transition from the one kind of patronage to the other was long and chaotic; but the fifteen years which are described in these pages represent the end, in America, of that transition. The last five years of it are those of the first full flowering of American literature. I propose to describe some of the means by which literary art was put on a basis of effective democratic patronage. If a slight odor of venality hovers over some of these proceedings, let us remember that flowers do not bloom luxuriantly without fertilizer. On the other hand, if these revelations seem a little appalling to the aesthete, it is because literary historians have failed, on the whole, to recognize the fact that literature is, from one point of view, a form of business enterprise. Writers must eat, and the improvement in their diet since 1800 (in America, at least) is to be accounted for, to an appreciable extent, by improvements in the manufacture and marketing of their books. Considered in his- 75 The Massachusetts Rareev 4 (1989). Judith Fryer What Goes on in the Ladies Room? Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Fields, and Their Community of Women "S OMETIMES ENTERING A NEW DOOR can make a great change in one's life," Willa Cather wrote of going for the first time to 148 Charles Street in 1908. She would recall waiting, when the door was opened, in a small reception room just off the hall, then going up a steep, thickly carpeted stairway and entering the "long drawing-room" where Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett sat at tea: That room ran the depth of the house, its front windows, heavily curtained, on Charles Street, its back windows, looking down on a deep garden. Directly above the garden wall lay the Charles River and beyond, the Cambridge shore. At five o'clock in the afternoon the river was silvery from a half-hidden sun; over the great open space of water the western sky was dove-coloured with little ripples of rose. The air was full of soft moisture and the hint of approach- ing spring. Against this screen of pale winter light were the two ladies: Mrs. Fields reclining on a green sofa, directly under the youthful portrait of Charles Dickens , Miss Jewett seated, the low tea-table between them. This is not the recollection of Cather, the McClure's Magazine journalist, but of the mature writer, who, in 1936, has all of her major works except Sapphira and the Slave Girl behind her. It is this later Willa Cather who remembers Annie Fields as fragile in her lavender and Venetian lace, reminding her of Isabella Stewart Gardner (both women were painted by John Singer Sargent), and Jewett looking "very like the youthful picture of herself in the game of 'Authors' I had played as a child, except that she was fuller in figure and a little grey." Invited to see some of the treasures of the 610 Orne (left), and Annie Fields (right) at 148 Charles Street, Boston ca. late 1880s. Sarah Photograph courtesy Jewett of The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. DAYS WITH MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS AND HER FRIENDS. DeWolfe Howe, M A The Bookman; a Review of Books and Life (1895-1933); Dec 1896; 4, 4; American Periodicals pg. 308 DAYS WITH MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS AND HER FRIENDS. That we may come without delay to after an ominous pause, I wonder if any young an understanding of the spirit which is lady can tell me what this poem means? There was no reply. behind a delightful new book, Authors Can you tell us?' was the next question and Friends, by Mrs. James T. Fields, a pointed at the poor little girl who had just passage at the beginning of is paper on dropped out of cloudland. I thought it ex- Tennyson which it contains may very plained itself, was the plaintive reply. With a well be quoted. Its least value does not slight air of depreciation. in another moment the next recitation was called for, and the dull lie in its being one of the few passages clouds of routine shut down over the sudden in which the reading of direct autobiog- glory. Shades of the prison house then and raphy, rather than reminiscence of there began to close over the growing child. others, seems to be permitted : One joy had for the present faded from her life, that of a sure sympathy and understanding. There is a keen remembrance, lingering Not even her teacher could see what she saw, ineradicably with the writer, of a little girl com- nor could feel what lay deep down in her own ing to school once upon recitation day with a glowing heart. Nevertheless, Tennyson was piece' of her own selection safely stored away henceforth a seer and a prophet to this child in her childish memory. It was a new poem to and to the growing world but for some, who the school, and when her turn came to recite could never learn his language, he was born her soul was full of the gleam and glory of too late." Camelot. She felt as if she were unlocking a treasure-house, and it was with unspeakable It is because Mrs. Fields herself was pleasure to herself that she gave, verse after born just early and just late enough, verse, the entire poem of The Lady of Shalott.' and through circumstance and native Doubtless the child's voice drifted away into endowment came into the closest inti- sing song, as her whole little self seemed to drift away into the land of fancy, and doubtless also macy and sympathy with the men and the busy teacher, who was more familiar with women whose names shine forth most Jane Taylor and Cowper, was sadly puzzled. clearly in our century's record of letters, When the child at length sat down, scarcely that her book has an uncommon charm knowing where she was in her sudden descent and value. from the land of marvel, she heard the teacher say, to her amazement and discouragement, Even if James T. Fields had not been Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. MRS. FIELDS'S SIUDY precisely what he was as a man. his posi- 4111 an equal share in this life of ser- tion as one of the large-minded firm of vice and co-operation Mrs. Fields came Ticknor and Fields, and as editor of by night. It is something to have known the Atlantic Monthly at a time when the the men and women who filled the hours giants in American literature nearly all of that life it is much more to have lived in and near Boston, would have been able to know them, to have had made his doors a familiar entering- the powers of understanding and pro- place for those elect ones whose thoughts voking the best things in their natures, and talk were best worth hearing But and to have held their friendship long Mr. Fields was something far more after the circumstances which gave it than publisher and editor. He had a birth had been left in the past gift for friendship, a generosity of mind It is twenty-live years since Mr. and heart, and a sympathy with the Fields, in his familiar Yesterdays with things of the intellect and spirit which Authors, opened the doors of his library, few men of any employment possess, and talked freely of the portraits on the and which peculiarly fitted him for the walls, the great friends who had come work he had to do in the world. To and gone across the threshold, and the remove the name of Fields from the intimacies with them and others with most important chapters of our literary whom he had met only on English soil. annals would be to give up the one These same doors Mrs. Fields opens name that appears on nearly every page. again in her Authors and Friends. Now Without the least assumption of the we are permitted to go in and out with dignity of a pope in the hierarchy of let- those other intimates of her husband ters, he was in the truest sense the servis and herself who have outlived him. serviritum of that divinity which rules the The reminiscences are drawn from the same sources as those to which Mr. brotherhood of the pen. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. wonder whether one's presence gives any such pleasure to oth- ets as to one's self. Yet inti- mate as the intercourse is, the reader feels again and again. without being told, that re- serves are kept, and he is glad of it. There are biographies enough and to spare in these days of ours which leave one with the feeling of having in- truded unwittingly upon scenes too private for an outside eye. When one finds one's self in such a room, it is best to say without hesitation, I beg your pardon, I think I must be going. With the exception of the shoit concluding paper on Lady Tennyson, all the por- tions of the present volume have appeared from time to time in magazines, though new material has frequently, and with great advantage, been added. In the paper on Mrs. Stowe, for example, there is enough that did not appear in the Atlantic last summer to James T. Feed make the article practically a new production. Separated, moreover, as the successive magazine papers were in time and place, it was impossible to Fields turned frequently-letters more note, as one now does, how they vary or less directly connected with books in atmosphere and treatment with the which concerned him as it publisher and subjects with which they deal. The memorials, written and unwritten, of daily lives of Longfellow and Holmes are the friendships with which the business more clearly reflected, perhaps, than of books came inevitably to occupy a those of any Authors who were Mrs. secondary relation. Fields's Friends, for with none of the per. In these reminiscences of Longfel- sons in the book was there a more con- low, Holmes, Emerson, and their con- stant personal intercourse. Whittier, in temporaries, Mrs. Fields gives evidence his habit as he lived, walks in and out of qualities of the first value, though with some frequency Emerson, clusive not of the widest distribution, in bio- and shy, with less, but the flashes of his graphical writing. For one quality let talk and letters brighten many pages. us give special thanks. She does not Mrs. Stowe, living more continuously at a tell the reader more than he is entitled distance from Boston, is seen mainly in to know. He is admitted to high ac- her visits to town, but most vividly in quaintanceships, and feels that double her frank and spirited letters to both of gratification which comes of being well her friends in Charles Street. The paper introduced-a sense that the new ac- on Mrs. Thaxter appears elsewhere as an quaintance is seen at his best, and that introduction to a volume of her letters, one is received without a suspicion of and, lacking letters therefore itself, is coldness. This last sensation may be a harmonious study of a life and char- termed fanciful in a mere reader but acter. So, too, the accounts of Tenny- the feeling of personal contact is real son and his wife, with whom of neces enough in the book to make one half sity the personal intercourse was more Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. broken than with the others, are studies happened to Dr. Holmes, this charac- of personality. teristic letter, reproduced in Mr. Morse's As the treatment of the different Life, from Mrs. Fields's article in the themes varies, so, to a striking degree, Century, was promptly written does the atmosphere of personality with which each separate paper is instinct. 216 BEACON STREET, The simple, loving benignity of Longfel- February 11, 1S72. low as a man has entered into Mrs. My DEAR MR. FIELDS: On Friday evening Fields's picture of him. From the ac- last I white-cravated myself, took a carriage, and found myself at your door nt eight of the count of Emerson one learns to appre- clock. I.M. ciate keenly the truth and significance A cautious female responded to my ring and of a single phrase-" a kind of squiriel- opened the chained portal about as far as it like shyness and swiftness"- - that is clam opens his shell to see what is going on in used in describing his reading of an Cambridge Street, where he is waiting for a customer. essay. Dr. Holmes, the droll, shrewd, Her first glance impressed her with the con. true-hearted little man, stands out ex- viction that 1 was a burglar. The mild address actly as the Autocrat should appear. with which I accosted her removed that impres- The Friend Whittier is the very per- sion, and 1 rose in the moral scale to the com- paratively elevated position of what the unfeel. son his poems reveal. He felt a cer- ing world calls n sneak thief." tain brotherhood with Burns," says By dint, however, of soft words and that look Mrs. Fields, 'and early loved his of ingenuous simplicity by which I am so well genius but where were two more un- known to you and all my friends, I coaxed her into the belief that I was nothing worse than a like?' Where indeed ? Yet where rejected contributor, an autograph collector, an could truer words for Whittier the Ab- author with a volume of poems to dispose of. or olitionist be found than these of a other disagreeable but not dangerous charac- younger poet, who sings of Burns ter. She unfastened the chain, and I stood before her. To him the powers that formed him brave I calmed her fears, and she was calm, And told" A mighty gift of Hatred gave- A gift above All other gifts benefic. save me how you and Mrs. F. had gone to New The gift of Love. York. and how she knew nothing of any literary debauch that was to come off under your roof, He saw 'tis meet that man possess but would go and call another unprotected fe- The will to curse as well as bless, male who knew the past, present, and future. To pity-and be pitiless and could tell me why this was thus, that I had To make and mar, been lured from my fireside by the ignis fatuus The fierceness that from tenderness of a deceptive invitation. Is never far." It was my turn to be afraid. alone in the house with two of the stronger sex, and I re- tired. The eager strenuousness of Mrs. Stowe, On reaching home I read my note, and found the abundant life of Mrs. Thaxter, the it was Friday the 16th. not the 9th, I was invit- serenity, dark and fair, of Lord and ed for. Dear Mr. Fields, 1 shall be very happy to Lady Tennyson are drawn each with a come to your home on Friday evening. the 16th faithfulness no less convincing than that of February, at eight o'clock. to meet yourself of the cursory remark that has been and Mrs. Fields. and hear Mr. James read his quoted concerning Whittier. paper on Emerson, etc. One could cite many words from the Always truly yours. O. W. HOLMES. book to show the means by which these various ends of living portraiture are at- tained but the book itself is the place It was an older Whittier who came to to look for them. Two widely separat- the door, during one of his last visits to ed passages well serve as an illustration Boston, and found it closed. As clear- of the manner in which two such differ- ly as the joyous Autocrat spoke from his letter, the aged poet was himself in ent persons as Holmes and Whittier re- veal their habits of mind under almcst the following lines similar conditions. At different times I stood within the vestibule each of them had gone to the house on Whose granite steps I knew so well, Charles Street, and had found the oc- While through the empty rooms the bell cupants away from home. When it Responded to my eager pull. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. MOTLEY. EMERSON. HAWTHORNE. HOLMES. LOWELL. WHITTIER. LUNGFELLOW. GROUP FROM THE SATURDAY CLUB CONTEMPORARY WITH MR. JAMES T. FIELDS. o friend, whose generous love has made I listened while the bell once more Rang through the void, deserted hall : My last days best, my good intent I heard no voice nor light footfall, Accept, and let the call I meant And turned me sadly from the door. Be with your coming doubly paid." 14 Though fair was Autumn's dreamy day, Largely typical as these verses are of And fair the wood paths carpeted one phase of Whittier's spirit, they rep- With fallen leaves of gold and red, resent a feeling toward the dwellers in I missed a dearer sight than they. Mrs. Fields's house which could not help I missed the love-transfigured face, expressing itself in each separate ac- The glad, sweet smile so dear to me, count of her friendships. It is inevi- The clasp of greeting warm and free. What had the round world in their place? table that the letters which Mrs. Fields Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. has printed should show something of word conversation as we are apt to use it. We the other side of the personal relation, recall the quiet guest-chamber, apart from the noise of the street, and lifted tar above the something of the impression she had river ; that room, opulent and subtle with the made upon her intimates. Therefore astral shapes of past occupants-Longfellow one finds in these pages the constant Whittier, Dickens, Thackeray. Mrs. Stowe, revelation of kindnesses little and large; Kingsley, and the rest of their high order-and of a gracious hospitality - whether in always resounding softly to the fine ear with the departed tread of Hawthorne, who used to Boston or in the cottage at Manches- pace the floor on sleepless nights. We remem- ter-by-the-Sea-which Emerson called ber the separation from paltriness and from plus-Arabian; of the comprehending superficial adjustments which that scholarly and sympathy which a womanhood deficient gentle atmosphere commanded. in either heart or head is incapable of ex- A book which extends this atmosphere pressing. Mrs. Fields tells freely of the beyond the limits of the walls that first pleasures the friendships of her fireside enclosed it does something more than have given her. In Mrs. Phelps-Ward's to gratify a curiosity, however worthy, Chapters from 11 Life, appearing almost about the lives we call great. It takes simultaneously with Mrs. Fields's book, us for a time into a company of higher it is good to read a few words in which spirits, and gives to all, in the measure one guest at her house may be supposed of their capability for receiving, the re- to speak the thoughts of many : freshment which comes of breathing a Those of us who received its hospitality re- clear, pure air : call its inspiration among the treasures of our lives. We think of the peaceful library into 'Tis human fortune's happiest height to be which the sunset over the Charles looked deli- A spirit melodious, lucid, poised and whole; cately. while the best things of thought were Second in order of felicity given and taken by the finest and strongest I hold it, to have walked with such a soul." minds of the day in a kind of electric interplay, which makes by contrast a pale affair of the M. A. DeWolfe Howe. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Atlontic Monthly 58 (Aug 1881)- 1881.] Recollections of James T. Fields. 253-259. There rolls A dangerous sea, unseen, on which are borne By fiercer tidal waves brave women's souls To barren inlands, where, too strong to die, Even of thirst and loneliness and scorn, Like ghastly stranded wrecks, long years they lie H. H. RECOLLECTIONS OF JAMES T. FIELDS. Edwin P. Whipple IT would be ridiculous for me to say whole thing has gone out of my memory that in giving my recollections of James as thoroughly as it has gone out of the T. Fields I should preserve the tone of memory of the public. But what I do impartial criticism. That tone would remember is this, that Fields was anx- make me in sympathy with the French ious that I should succeed. Being un- physiologist, who said, " I had a friend; der the age when a free American can I loved him; he died; and I dissected vote, I naturally thought my couplets him." Certainly that is not the feeling were quite bright. Fields did all he with which I write of a friend of more could to confirm me in my amiable illu- than forty years, who was at once the sion. He suggested new "points most helpful of friends and the most worked with me as though he desired fascinating of companions. that my performance should eclipse his Gould was a few days before our acquaintance be- a clerk in a dry-goods jobbing house, gan as the first anniversary poet of the Fields in a book-store, I in a broker's association. Before a large audience he office. Fields's collection much exceeded had read an original poem which com- Gould's and mine, for he had in his room manded general applause. two or three hundred volumes, - the It was my fortune, or misfortune, to nucleus of a library which eventually follow Fields in his brilliantly success- became one of the choicest private col- ful anniversary poem. Of what I wrote lections of books, manuscripts, and au- I can hardly remember a line. The tographs in the city> The puzzle of the 7/20/20 Legacy 4.11 (spring 1987). 27-36 LEGACY Profile Annie Adams Fields (1834-1915) RITA K. GOLLIN State University of New York College at Geneseo who until her death at the age of 81 had re- tained the "personal beauty," "signal sweetness of temper," and benignity of her youth Fields would have been as gratified by James's subordinating her to that golden age as by the implications of his title: "Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields." The husband who had died 34 years earlier, the enter- prising Boston publisher who "shone with the reflected light" of such writers as Emer- son, Hawthorne, Lowell, and Longfellow, had remained part of her self-definition. And their Charles Street house had been a center of culture throughout their long marriage: it was Dickens's "safest harbour- age" during his hectic reading tour of 1867-68; luminaries like the Swedish singer Christine Nilsson performed in the drawing-room; and James said with more truth than he knew that the Ticknor and Fields journal Atlantic Monthly "seemed very much edited from there." Such regu- lar contributors as Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Stowe were regular Portrait of Annie Fields by John Singer Sargent guests, James noted, adding with only a Courtesy of The Boston Athenaeum. tinge of irony that the childless Fieldses were "addicted to every hospitality and every benevolence, addicted to the cultiva- A nnie Fields emerges from Henry tion of talk and wit and to the ingenious James's memoir in the Atlantic multiplication of such ties as could link the Monthly in July 1915 as a "charming" and upper half of the title-page with the lower "consecrated" link with Boston's "golden In summarizing Annie Fields's long widow- age," virtually its embodiment-a woman hood, James was at once witty and tender: 27 Atlantic Monthly CXVI (July, 20 LAW, POLICE, AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS and day, in front of the house, who ing conditions, but it never ran suffi- 1915) simply took and recorded the real ciently in advance of what the people names of all who visited the place. In- believed or felt to set up a counter cur- MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS Pp.21-31. variably the house closed in a few rent; and so, when the time came to days, and the keepers of the remaining close the district entirely, it was done houses redoubled their efforts to con- as the natural and expected conclusion BY HENRY JAMES trol their inmates and keep them with- to a long and accepted development. in the bounds set by orders from head- quarters. By this system of gradual IF at such a time as this a man of my surance. They all come back, one now V police repression the contributory al- generation finds himself on occasion recognizes, to a single supporting pro- lurements were withdrawn, one by one, From all this we learn a larger sym- revert to our ancient peace in some position, to the question when in the and the advertising of the district was pathy for the difficulties of those to soreness of confusion between envy world peace had SO prodigiously flour- suppressed. whom falls the duty of enforcing police and pity, I know well how best to clear ished. It had been broken, and was Meanwhile two other factors were at regulations in our city communities. up the matter for myself at least and to again briefly broken, within our view, work to change the conditions of the It will not be quite SO possible to take recover a workable relation with the but only as if to show with what force problem. With better education and at full value the condemnation which blessing in eclipse. I recover it in some and authority it could freshly assert it- improving economic conditions women is sometimes heaped upon the police, degree with pity, as say, by reason of self; whereby it grew to look too in- were becoming less and less willing to who after all are a fairly faithful mirror the deep illusions and fallacies in which creasingly big, positively too massive accept the open degradation implied of the ethical definiteness of the com- the great glare of the present seems to even in its blandness, for interruptions from residence in the district, and the munity they serve. But the more sig- show us as then steeped; there being not to be afraid of it. Mann Act made it discouragingly dan- nificant and useful lessons are that our always, we can scarce not feel, some- It is in the light of this memory, I gerous to attempt to recruit the district own conception of the function of the thing pathetic in the recoil from fond confess, that I bend fondly over the from the outside. There was, possibly, police arm itself must change, and ac- fatuities. When these are general age - so prolonged, I have noted, as to some increase in clandestine prostitu- cordingly our method of selecting and enough, however, they make their own yield ample space for the exercise in tion, but it would be difficult to attrib- training the men who are to comprise law and impose their own scheme; they which any challenge to our faith fell be- ute it to the increasing rigor of regu- the force; and, finally, we get a helpful go on, with their fine earnestness, to low the sweet serenity of it. I see that lation within the segregated district. view of the direction in which to look their utmost limit, and the best of by any measure I might personally Moreover, there was, during all this and work for better things. We can course are those that go on longest. have applied, the American, or at least period, a very general increase of know- grow only as we substitute knowledge When I think that the innocent confi- the Northern, state of mind and of life ledge as to the danger from a hygienic for force. The policing of society is dence cultivated over a considerable that began to develop just after the point of view, - a danger obviously best done when most done by the peo- part of the earth, over all the parts Civil War formed the headspring of greater under conditions of segregation. ple themselves. Every extension of most offered to my own view, was to our assumption. Odd enough might it The results are at once astonishing our efforts for the dissemination of in- last well-nigh my whole lifetime, I can- have indeed appeared that this con- and instructive. We had at the outset formation as to the foundations of not deny myself a large respect for it, ception should need four years of free an obstinate problem with which the effective cooperation and social welfare cannot but see that if our illusion was carnage to launch it; yet what did that police had struggled hopelessly for brings its own enforcement at the complete we were at least insidiously mean, after all, in New York and Bos- years: raids, arrests, fines, imprison- hands of people who understand and and artfully beguiled. What we had ton, into which places remembrance ments, and spasmodic social and reli- appreciate. Practical agitation, it thus taken so actively to believing in was to reads the complacency soon to be the gious uprisings had all failed to make appears, is neither an appeal to emo- bring us out at the brink of the abyss, most established - what did that any impression upon the sordid busi- tional excitability nor a setting of ar- yet as I look back I see nothing but mean unless that we had exactly shed ness. Then we had a police adminis- bitrary restraints upon the wicked by our excuses; I cherish at any rate the the bad possibilities, were publicly tration fran accept the community's the good, but a spreading of the sound image of their bright plausibility. We purged of the dreadful disease which view of the situation, recognize what news of the social advance, and culti- really, we nobly, we insanely (as it can had come within an inch of being fatal it recognized, and repress the nuisance vating, in neighborliness and sym- only now strike us) held ourselves com- to us, and were by that token warrant- manifestations of the traffic as rapidly pathy, a public opinion which will re- fortably clear of the worst horror that ed sound forever, superlatively safe? as public sentiment could be shown flect its soundness in the laws it enacts in the past had attended the life of na- as we could see that during the the practical possibility of each step. and in the approval it gives to their tions, and to the grounds of this con- previous existence of the country we This police course was aided by chang- enforcement. viction we could point with lively as- had been but comparatively so. The 21 MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS 23 22 breathless campaign of Sadowa, which sically charming(a link with the past has it own annals, and luckless any to what would seem a precocious inter- occurred but a year after our own and abounded SO in the pleasure of ref- to which this cultivation of the sense est in title-pages, and above all into sublime conclusion had been sealed erence and the grace of fidelity. She of a golden age that has left a pre- the mysterious or behind-the-scenes by Lee's surrender, enlarged the pros- helped the present, that of her own ac- cious deposit happens to be closed. world suggested by publishers' names pect much rather than ruffled it; and tuality, to think well of her producing A local present of proper pretensions which, in their various collocations, though we had to confess that the siege conditions, to think better of them has in fact to invent a set of antece- had a color and a character beyond of Paris, four years later, was a false than of many of those that open for dents, something in the nature of an even those of authors, even those of note, it was drowned in the solidifica- our wonderment to-day: what a note of epoch either of giants or of fairies, books themselves; an anomaly that I tion of Germany, so true, so resound- distinction they were able to contribute, when literal history may in this respect seek not now to fathom.but which the ingand, for all we then suspected to the she moved us to remark, what a qual- have failed it, in order to look other brilliant Mr. Fields, as I aspiringly saw contrary, SO portentously pacific a one. ity of refinement they appeared to have temporal claims of a like complexion in him, had the full benefit of, not less How could peace not flourish, more- encouraged, what a minor form of the the face. Boston, all letterless and un- when I first came to know him than over, when wars either took only seven monstrous modern noise they seemed ashamed as she verily seems to-day, before. Mr. Reed, Mr. Ticknor, were weeks or lasted but a summer and to have been consistent with! needs luckily, for recovery of self-re- never at all to materialize for me; the scarce morethanalong-drawnautumn? The truth was of course very decided- spect, no resort to such make-believes former was soon to forfeit any perti- the siege of Paris dragging out, to ly that the seed I speak of, the seed - to legend, that is, before the fact; all nence, and the latter, SO far as I was our pitying sense, at the time, but that has flowered into legend, and with her legend is well after it, absolutely concerned, never SO much as peeped raised before all the rest of us, prepar- the thick growth of which her domestic upon it, the large, firm fact, and to the round the titular screen. Mr. Fields, ing food-succor, could well turn round, scene was quite embowered, had been point of covering, and covering yet on the other hand, planted himself well and with the splendid recovery of sown in soil peculiarly grateful fa- again, every discernible inch of it. I before that expanse; not only had he France to follow SO close on her ampu- vored by pleasing accidents. 'The per- felt myself during the half-dozen years shone betimes with the reflected light tation that violence fairly struck us as sonal beauty of her younger years, long of my younger time spent thereabouts of Longfellow and Lowell, of Emerson moving away confounded. So it was retained and not even at the end of such just a little late for history perhaps, and Hawthorne and Whittier, but to that our faith was confirmed vio- a stretch of life quite lost. the exquisite though well before, or at least well meet him was, for an ingenuous young lence sitting down again with avert- native tone and mode of appeal, which abreast of, poetry; whereas now it all mind, to find that he was understood ed face, and the conquests we felt the anciently we perhaps thought a little densely foreshortens, it positively all to return with interest any borrowed truly golden ones spreading and spread- 'precious,' but from which the distinc- melts beautifully together, and Isquare glory and to keep the social, or I should ing behind its back. tive and the preservative were in time myself in the state of mind of an au- perhaps rather say the sentimental, ac to be snatched, a greater extravagance thority not to be questioned. In other count straight with each of his stars It was not perhaps in the purest gold supervening; the signal sweetness of words, my impression of the golden What he truly shed back, of course, of the matter that we pretended to deal temper and lightness of tact, in fine, age was a first-hand one, not a second was a prompt sympathy and conver- in the New York and the Boston to were things that prepared together the or a third; and since those with whom sability; it was in this social and per- which I have referred; but if I wish to easy and infallible exercise of what I I shared it have dropped off one by sonal color that he emerged from the catch again the silver tinkle at least, have called her references. It adds one, - I can think of but two or three mere imprint, and was alone, I gather, straining my ear for it through the greatly to one's own measure of the ac- of the distinguished, the intelligent and among the American publishers of the sounds of to-day, I have but to recall cumulated years to have seen her reach participant, that is, as left, - I fear time in emerging/He had a conception the dawn of those associations that the age at which she could appear to there is no arrogance of authority that of possibilities of relation with his au- seemed then to promise everything, the younger world about her to `go am not capable of taking on. thors and contributors that I judge no and the last declining ray of which back' wonderfully far, to be almost the James T. Fields must have had other member of his body in all the rests, just long enough to be caught, only person extant who did, and to owe about him when I first knew him much land to have had; and one easily makes the benign figure of Mrs. Fields, of the much of her value to this delicatearoma of the freshness of the season, but re- out for that matter that his firm was all latter city, recently deceased and leav- of antiquity. member thinking him invested with but alone in improving, to this effect of ing behind her much of the material My title for thus speaking of her is a stately past; this as an effect of the amenity, on the crude relation-crude, out of which legend obligingly grows that of being myself still extant enough spell cast from an early, or at least from I mean, on the part of the author. Few She herself had the good fortune to to have known by ocular and other ob- my early, time by the 'Ticknor, Reed were our native authors, and the friend- assist, during all her later years, at an servational evidence what it was she and Fields' at the bottom of every ti- ly Boston house had gathered them in excellent case of such growth, for which went back to and why the connection tle-page of the period that conveyed, almost all the other, the New York nature not less than circumstance had should consecrate her. Every society however shyly, one of the finer pre- and Philadelphia houses (practically perfectly fitted her she was SO intrin- that amounts, as we say, to anything sumptions look back with wonder all we had) were friendly, I make out MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS 25 24 at this distance of time, to the public hour to a past that has become distant even if already, at the season I recall, tween such amenities and hospitalities in particular, whose appetite they met is always to have to look through over- to a more ghostly effect and as a pre- and the due degree of inspiration. It to abundance with cheap reprints of growths and reckon with perversions; sence definitely immortalized. The would take me too far to say how I dis- the products of the London press, but but even so the domestic, the water- register of his two American visits was pose of J. R. Lowell in this reconstruc- were doomed to represent in a lower, side museum of the Fieldses hangs piously, though without the least so- tion, the very first editor as he was, if sometimes indeed in the very lowest, there clear to me; their salon positively, lemnity, kept in Charles Street; which I mistake not, of the supremely sym- degree the element of consideration for SO far as salons were in the old Puritan assisted, however, at Dickens's second pathetic light miscellany that I figure, the British original. The British orig- city dreamed of - by which I mean al- visit to the States and a comparative- but though I have here to pick woeful- inal had during that age been reduced lowing for a couple of exceptions not ly profane contemporaneity. I was ly among my reminiscences I must to the solatium of publicity pure and here to be lingered on. We knew in not to see him there; I was, save for spare a word or two for another pres- simple; knowing, or at least presuming, those days little of collectors; the name a brief moment elsewhere, but to hear ence too intimately associated with the that he was read in America by the of the class, however, already much im- him and to wonder at his strange histri- scene, and too constantly predominant fact of his being appropriated, he could pressed us, and in that long and narrow onic force in public; nevertheless the there, to be overlooked. himself appropriate but the compla- drawing-room of odd dimensions waterside museum never ceased to re- The Atlantic was for years practical- cency of this consciousness. unfortunately somewhat sacrificed, I tain, for my earnest recognition, certain ly the sole organ of that admirable writ- To the Boston constellation then al- frankly confess, as American drawing- fine vibrations and dying echoes of all er and wit, that master of almost every most exclusively belonged the higher rooms are apt to be, to its main aper- that episode. liked to think of the form of observational, of meditational, complacency, as one may surely call it, ture or command of outward resonance house, I could n't do without thinking and of humorous ingenuity, the author of being able to measure with some - one learned for the first time how of it, as the great man's safest harborage of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table closeness the good purpose to which vivid a collection might be. Nothing through the tremendous gale of those and of Elsie Venner. Dr. Oliver Wen- they glittered. The Fieldses could im- would reconcile me at this hour to any even more leave-taking appearances, dell Holmes had been from the first agine so much happier a scene that the attempt to resolve back into its ele- as fate was to appoint, than we then the great 'card' of the new recueil, and fond fancy they brought to it seems to ments the brave effect of the exhibition, understood; and this was a fact about this with due deference to the fact that flush it all, as I look back, with the in which the inclusive range of 'old' it, to my taste, which made all sorts of Emerson and Longfellow and Whittier, richest tints. SO describe the sweet portrait and letter, of old pictorial and other, much more prolonged and reit- that Lowell himself and Hawthorne influence because by the time I found literal autograph and other material erated, facts comparatively subordin- and Francis Parkman, were prone to myself taking more direct notice the gage or illustration, of old original ate and flat, The single drawback was figure in no other periodical (speaking singularly graceful young wife had be- edition or still more authentically con- that the intimacies and privileges it wit- thus of course but of the worthies ori- come, so to speak, a highly noticeable secrated current copy, disposed itself nessed for in that most precious connec- ginally drawn upon), Mr. Longfellow feature; her beautiful head and hair and over against the cool sea-presence of tion seemed scarce credible; the inimit- was frequent and remarkably even, smile and voice (we wonder if a social the innermost great basin of Boston's able presence was anecdotically enough neither rising above nor falling below circle worth naming was ever ruled port. Most does it come to me, I think, attested, but I somehow rather missed a level ruled as straight as a line for a by a voice without charm of quality) that the enviable pair went abroad the evidential sample, 'a feather, an copybook; Emerson, on the other hand, were so many happy items in a gen- with freedom and frequency, and that eagle's feather,' as Browning says, was rare, but, to make up for it, some- eral array. Childless, what is vulgarly the inscribed and figured walls were which I should, ideally speaking, have times surprising; and when I ask my- called unencumbered, addicted toevery a record of delightful adventure, a dis- picked up on the stairs. self what best distinction the magazine doubtless meanwhile found it the owed pour remaining hands I of course hospitality and every benevolence, ad- play as of votive objects attached by dicted to the cultivation of talk and restored and grateful mariners to the most salient of all the circumstances remember that it put forth the whole wit and to the ingenious multiplication nearest shrine. To go abroad, to be that the Atlantic Monthly had at no later array of The Biglow Papers, and of such ties as could link the upper half abroad (for the return thence was to ancient date virtually come into being that the impressions and reminiscences of the title-page with the lower, their the advantage, after all, only of those under the fostering roof, and that a of England gathered up by Hawthorne vivacity, their curiosity, their mobility, who could not SO proceed) represented charm, or at least a felt soft weight, into Our Old Home had enjoyed their the felicity of their instinct for any success in life, and our couple were im- attached to one's thinking of its full- first bloom of publicity from month to manner of gathered relic, remnant or mensely successful. flushed earlier form as very much edited month under Fields's protection. These tribute, conspired to their helping the Dickens that timewent a great way from there. There its contributors, or things drew themselves out in delight- 'literary world' roundabout to a self- with us, the best of him falling after many of them, dined and supped and ful progression, to say nothing of other consciousness more fluttered, no doubt, this fashion well within the compass of went to tea, and there above all, in cognate felicities-everything that ei- yet also more romantically resolute.) our life; and Thackeray, for my own cir- many a case, was almost gloriously re- ther Lowell or Hawthorne published in To turn attention from any present cle, went, I think, a greater way still, vealed to them the possible relation be- those days making its first appearance, 26 MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS 27 inveterately, in the Atlantic pages. being that I absolutely like to remem- I find myself couple together the isk point as sharply as ever its beveled Lowell's serious as well as his hilarious, ber, pressing out elated irony in it, that two Charles Street houses, though even capstone against the sky. that is his broadly satiric, verse was the magazine seemed pleased to profit with most weight of consideration for The charm I thus rake out of the pe- pressed into their service; though of by Howells, whether as wise editor or that where The Autocrat, The Professor, riod, and the aspect of the Fieldses as his literary criticism, I recall, the mag- delightful writer, only up to the verge Elsie Venner, and the long and bright bathed in that soft medium - so soft azine was less avid - little indeed, at of his broadening out into mastership. succession of the unsurpassed Boston after the long internecine harshness the same time, as it could emulate in He broadened gradually, and far-away pièces de circonstance in verse, to say gloss over to my present view every advance its American-born fellows of back numbers exhibit the tentative nothing of all the eagerest and easiest troubled face of my young relation to-day in apparent dread of that insid- light footprints that were to become and funniest, all the most winged and with the Atlantic; the poor pathetic ious appeal to attention. Which re- suchfirm and confident steps; but affec- kept-up, most illustrational and sug- faces, as they now pass before me, be- marks, as I make them, but throw into tionate appreciation quite consciously gestional, table-talk that ever was, ing troubled for more reasons than I relief for me the admirable vivacity assisted at a process in which it could sprang smiling to life. Ineffaceably can recall, but above all, I think, be- and liberality of Dr. Holmes's Atlantic mark and measure each stage - up to present to me is all that atmosphere, cause from the first I found 'writing for career, quite warranting, as they again the time, that is, when the process though I enjoyed it of course at the the magazines' an art still more dif- flicker and glow, no matter what easy quite outgrew, as who should say, the time but as the most wonderstruck ficult than delightful. Yet I doubt talk about a golden age. The Autocrat walls of the drill-ground itself. and most indulged of extreme juniors; whether I wince at this hour any more of the Breakfast Table, the American By this time many things, as was and in the mere ghostly breath of it old than I winced on the spot at hearing it contribution to literature, that I can inevitable, - things not of the earlier unspeakable vibrations revive. I find quoted from this proprietor of the first recall, most nearly meeting the condi- tradition, - had come to pass; not the innumerable such for instance between of those with which I effected an under- tions and enjoying the fortune of a least of these being that J. T. Fields, the faded leaves of Soundings from the standing that such a strain of pessim- classic, quite sufficiently accounts, I faithfully fathering man, had fallen for Atlantic, and in one of the papers there ism in the would-be picture of life had think, for our sense not only at the always out of the circle. What was to reprinted, 'My Hunt for the Captain,' an odd, had even a ridiculous, air on time, but during a long stretch of the follow his death made for itself other in especial, the recital of the author's the part of an author with his mother's subsequent, that we had there the most connections, many of which indeed had search among the Virginia battlefields milk scarce yet dry on his lips. It was precious of the metals in the very finest already begun; but what I think of in for his gallant wounded son; which, to my amused W. D. H. that I owed fusion. Such perhaps was not entirely particular, as his beguiled loose chron- with its companions, evokes for me al- this communication, as I was to owe the air in which we saw Elsie Venner icler straightening out a so at this end of time, and mere fond him ever such numberless invitations bathed - since if this too was a case of I would not for the world overmuch - memory aiding, a greater group of sa- to partake of his amusement; and I the shining substance of the author's the confusion of old and doubtless, in cred images than I may begin to name, trace back to that with interest the first mind, so extraordinarily agile within some cases, rather shrunken import- as well as the charm and community of note of the warning against not 'ending its own circle of content, the applica- ances what I especially run to earth is that overlooking of the wide inlet which happily' that was for the rest of my lit- tion of the admirable engine was yet that there were forms of increase which so corrected the towniness. The Auto- erary life to be sounded in my ear with not perhaps so happy; in spite of all of the 'original' organ might have seemed crat's insuperable instinct for the dou- a good faith of which the very terms which nothing would induce me now to to grow rather weak in the knees for ble sense of words, when the drollery of failed to reach me intelligibly enough lower our then claim for this fiction as carrying. I pin my remembrance, how- the collocation was pointed enough, to correct my apparent perversity. I the charmingest of the 'old' American ever, only to the Fieldses - that is, has its note in the title of the volume I labored always under the conviction group, the romances of Hawthorne of above all, to his active relation to the have just mentioned (where innumer- that to terminate a fond aesthetic effort course always excepted. affair, and to the image left with me of able other neglected notes would re- in felicity had to be as much one's The new American novel for that guiding and nursing pleasure shown spond again, I imagine, to the ear a bit obeyed law as to begin it and carry it was preparing - had at the season I always as the intensity of personal earnestly applied); but the clue that on in the same; whereby how could one refer to scarce glimmered into view; pleasure. No confident proprietor can has lengthened out SO far is primarily be anything less than bewildered at the but its first seeds were to be sown very ever have drawn more happiness from a attached, no doubt, to the eloquence of non-recognition of one's inveterately exactly in Atlantic soil, where my super- cherished and computed value than he the final passage of the paper, in which plotted climax of expression and inten- excellent friend and confrère W. D. drew from Dr. Holmes's success, which the rejoicing father, back from his anx- sity? One went so far as literally to Howells soon began editorially to culti- likewise provided so blest a medium ious quest, sees Boston bristle again on claim that in a decent production vate them. I should find myself cross- for the Autocrat's own expansive spir- his lifelong horizon, the immemorial such as one at least hoped any particu- ing in this reference the edge of a later it that I see the whole commerce and signs multiply, the great dome of the lar specimen of one's art to show for period, were I moved here at all to stiff inspiration in the cheerful waterside State House rise not a whit less high the terminal virtue, driven by the discriminations; which I am so far from light. than before, and the Bunker Hill obel- whole momentum gathered on the way, MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS 29 28 MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS play over our classic, our livid ring- conversed, to the last credibility, every had to be most expressional of one's most actual recruit, and accepted the letted image a sort of Scandinavian time they went to London, and, thanks subject, and thereby more fortunately homage of extremely presented and smoky torch, out of the lurid flicker of to whose intimate confidence in them, pointed than whatever should have fluttered persons, not one of whom which it never fully emerged. does n't it seem to me that I enjoyed gone before. remember clinging to could fail to be dazzled by her extraor- These are trivial and perhaps a bit the fragrant foretaste of Middlemarch? that measure of the point really made dinary combination of different kinds tawdry illustrations; but there were roundabout which I patch together even in the tender dawn of the bewil- of lustre. Then there was the period of plenty of finer accidents: projected as- certain confused reminiscences of a derment I glance at and which I asso- Charles Fechter, who had come over surances and encountered figures and weekly periodical, a younger and plain- ciate with the general precarious ele- from London, whither he had original- snatched impressions, such as natural- er sister of the Atlantic, its title now ment in those first Atlantic efforts. It ly come from Paris, to establish a the- ly make at present but a faded show, lost to me and the activity of which was really won me to an anxious kindness atre in Boston, where he was to estab- and yet not one of which has lost its all derivative, consisting as it did of for Mr. Fields that though finding me lish it to no great purpose, alas! and distinctness for my own infatuated bang-on-the-hour English first-fruits, precociously dismal he yet indulgently who during the early brightness of his piety. I see now what an overcharged advance felicities of the London press. suffered me - and this not the less for legend seemed to create for us on the glory could attach to the fact that An- This must all have meant an elated sea- my always feeling that Howells, during same spot an absolute community of thony Trollope, in his habit as he lived, son during which, in the still prolonged a season his sub-editor, must more or interests with the tremendously know- was at a given moment literally dining absence of an international copyright less have intervened with a good result. ing dilettanti to whom he referred. He in Charles Street. I can do justice to law, the favor of early copy, the alert- The great, the reconciling thing, referred most of course to Dickens, who the rich notability of my partaking of ness of postal transmission, in consid- however, was the easy medium, the had directed him straight upon Charles Sunday supper there in company with eration of the benefit of the quickened generally teeming Fields atmosphere, Street under a benediction that was at Mrs. Beecher Stowe, and making out fee, was to make international harmony out of which possibilities that ravished first to do much for him, launch him to my satisfaction that if she had, of in- prevail. I retain but an inferential me increasingly sprang, though doubt- violently and to admiration, even if he tensely local New England type as she sense of it all, yet gilded again to mem- less these may speak in the modern light was before long, no doubt, to presume struck me as being, not a little of the ory by perusals of Trollope, of Wilkie quite preponderantly of the young ob- overmuch on its virtue. nonchalance of real renown, she 'took Collins, of Charles Reade, of others of server's and devourer's irrepressible Highly effective too, in this connec- in' circumjacent objects and more agi- the then distinguished, quite beneath need to appreciate - as compared, 1 tion, while the first portents lasted, tated presences with the true economy their immediate rejoicing eye and with mean, with his need to be appreciated, was the bustling virtue of the Fieldses of genius. I even invest with the color double the amount of quality we had and a due admixture of that recognized. - on that ground and on various oth- of romance, or I did at the time, the up to that time extracted oozing grate- preserve doubtless imperfectly the ers indeed directly communicated from bestowal on me, for temporary use, of fully through their pores. old order of these successions, the thrill Dickens's own, and infinitely promot- the precursory pages of Matthew Ar- Mrs. Fields was to survive her hus- sometimes but blandly transmitted, ing the delightful roused state under nold's Essays in Criticism, honorably band for many years and was to flour- sometimes directly snatched, the pre- which we grasped at the aesthetic fresh- smirched by the American compositor's ish as a copious second volume - the sented occasion and the rather ruefully ness of Fechter's Hamlet in particular: fingers, from which the Boston edition connection licenses the free figure of missed, the apprehension that in such Did n't we react with the finest collec- of that volume, with the classicism of the work anciently issued. She had a a centre and circumfer- tive and perceptive intensity against its future awaiting it, had just been set further and further, a very long life, all ence, in Charles Street, coming well to- the manner of our great and up to that up can still recover the rapture with of infinite goodness and grace, and, gether despite the crowded, the verily time unquestioned exponent of the which, then suffering under the effects while ever insidiously referring to the crammed, space between them the part, Edwin Booth?- however he of a bad accident, I lay all day on a past, could not help meeting the future brush of aesthetic, of social, of cultural might come into his own again after sofa in Ashburton Place and was some- at least half-way. And all her implica- suggestion worked, when most lively, the Fechter flurry, never recovered real how transported, as in a shining silvery tions were gay, since no one SO finely at the end of a long handle that had credit, it was interesting to note, for dream, to London, to Oxford, to the sentimental could benoted as so humor- stretched all the way over from Europe. the tradition of his 'head,' his facial French Academy, to Languedoc, to ous; just as no feminine humor was per- How it struck me as working, I remem- and physiognomic make-up, of a sud- Brittany, to ancient Greece; all under haps ever so unmistakingly directed, ber well, on a certain afternoon when den quite luridly revealed as provin- the fingered spell of the little loose and no state of amusement, amid quan- the great Swedish singer Christine Niel- cial, as formed even to suggest the pow- smutty London sheets., And I some- tities of reminiscence, perhaps ever SO sen, then young and beautiful and glor- erful support rendered the Ophelia of how even felt in my face the soft side merciful. It was not that she could ious, was received among us - that is, Pendennis's Miss Fotheringay. I re- wind of that 'arranging' for punctual- think no ill, but that she could n't see when she stood between a pair of the member, in fine, thinking that the emis- ities of production of the great George others thinking it, much less doing it; windows of (the Fields museum) to sary of Dickens and the fondling of the Eliot, with whom our friends literally which was quite compatible too with which she was for the moment the Fieldses, to express it freely, seemed to 30 MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS MR. AND MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS 31 her being as little trapped by any pre- Jewett, mistress of an art of fiction all ready apprehension of the greatness of dignity as antiquity counts there- sumptuous form of it as if she had had her own, even though of a minor com- big 'composed' Sussex, which we ex- abouts - of a clear colonial house, in its measure to the last fineness. It be- pass, and surpassed only by Hawthorne plored together almost to extravagance Maine, just over the New Hampshire came a case of great felicity; she was as producer of the most finished and the lesson to my own sense all re- border, and a day spent amid the all the gentle referee and servant, the penetrating of the numerous 'short maining that of how far the pure, the very richest local revelations. These literary and social executor, SO to speak, stories' that have the domestic life of peculiarly pure, old Boston spirit, old things were not so much of like as of a hundred ghosts, but the scroll of her New England for their general and even in these women of whom one was of equally flushed complexion with vivid commission had never been rolled their doubtless somewhat lean subject, miraculously and the other familiarly two or three occasions of view, at the up, SO that it hung there open to what- is to do myself, I feel, the violence of young, could travel without a scrap of same memorable time, of Mrs. Fields's ever more names and pleas might soft- suppressing a chapter of appreciation loss of its ancient immunity to set happy alternative home on the shining ly inscribe themselves. She kept her that I should long since somewhere against its gain of vivacity. Massachusetts shore, where I seem to whole connection insistently modern, have found space for. Her admirable There was vivacity of a new sort catch in latest afternoon light the quite in the sense that all new recruits to it gift, that artistic sensibility in her somehow in the fact that the elder of final form of all the pleasant evidence. found themselves in concert with the which rivaled the rare personal, that my visitors, the elder in mere calcul- To say which, however, is still consider- charming old tone, and, only wanting sense for the finest kind of truthful ren- able years, had come fairly to cultivate, ably to foreshorten; since there super- to benefit by its authority, were much dering, the sober and tender note, the as it struck me, a personal resemblance venes for me with force as the very last more affected by it than it was perhaps temperately touched, whether in the to the great George Eliot - and this word, or theon conclusive myself at fortunately in certain cases affected by ironic or the pathetic, would have de- but through the quite lawful art of least, a haunted little feast as of ghosts, them. Beautiful the instance of an ex- served some more pointed comme- causing a black lace mantilla to des- if not of skeletons, at the banquet, with quisite person for whom the mere grace moration than I judge her beautiful cend from her head and happily con- the image of that immemorial and in- of unimpaired duration, drawing out little quantum of achievement, her free sort with a droop of abundant hair, a extinguishable lady Mrs. Julia Ward and out the grace implanted, estab- and high, yet all SO generously subdued formation of brow and a general fine Howe, the most evidential and most lished an importance that she never character, a sort of elegance of humil- benignity: things that at once marked- eminent presence of them all, as she lifted SO much as a finger to claim, and ity or fine flame of modesty, with ly recalled the countenance of Sir Fred- rises in her place, under the extremity the manner of which was that, while her remarkably distinguished outward erick Burton's admirable portrait of of appeal, to declaim a little quavering- people surrounded her, admiringly and stamp, to have called forth before the the author of Romola and made it a ly, but ever SO gallantly, that 'Battle- tenderly, only to do in their own in- premature and overdarkened close of charming anomaly that such remains hymn of the Republic, which she had terest all the reminding, she was her- her young course of production. She of beauty should match at all a plain- caused to be chanted half a century be- self ever as little as possible caught in had come to Mrs. Fields as an adop- ness not to be blinked even under the fore and still could accompany with a the more or less invidious act. It was tive daughter, both a sharer and a sus- play of Sir Frederick's harmonizing real breadth of gesture, her great clap they who preferred her possibilities of tainer, and nothing could more have crayon. Other amplified aspects of the of hands and indication of the comple- allusion to any aspect of the current warmed the ancient faith of their con- whole legend, as I have called it, I was mentary step, on the triumphant line, jostle, and her sweetness under their fessingly a bit disoriented countryman afterwards to see presented on its na- Be swift my hands to welcome him, be jubi- pressure made her consentingly modern than the association of the elder and tive scene - whereby it comes back lant my feet!' even while the very sound of the con- the younger lady in such an empha- to me that Sarah Jewett's brave ghost The geniality of this performance sent was as the voice of a time SO much sized susceptibility. Their reach to- would resent my too roughly Boston- swept into our collective breast again less strident. gether was of the firmest and easiest, izing her: there hangs before me such a the whole matter of my record, which I My sense of all this later phase was and I verily remember being struck picture of her right setting, the antique thuscommend to safe spiritual keeping. able on occasion to renew itself, but with the stretch of wing that the spirit perhaps never did SO in happier fash- of Charles Street could bring off on ion thanwwhen Mrs. Fields, revisiting finding them all fragrant of a recent England, as she continued to embrace immersion in the country life of France, every opportunity of doing, kindly where admiring friends had opened to traveled down to see me in the country, them iridescent vistas that made it by bringing with her a young friend of comparison a charity they should show great talent whose prevailing presence the least dazzle from my so much ruder in her life had come little by little to display. I preserve at any rate the give it something like a new centre. To memory of a dazzle corresponding, or speak in a mere parenthesis of Miss in other words of my gratitude for their Nineteenth Century 3, (1977) The Old Corner Bookstore Wendell Holmes, James Rus- occupies a special place in the sell Lowell, and Henry Wads- history of American culture, worth Longfellow, all from and the original building still Cambridge, along with a legion stands, a symbol of the great of lesser names from as far off enterprise that flourished in it as New York and even the amidst the hurly-burly of nine- western frontier, were drawn teenth-century Boston. It was to the quaint old building and in this building, beginning about to the desk of Fields, hidden 1845, that the publishing house behind a famous "green baize of Ticknor & Fields was to play curtain" in one corner of the a major part in shaping and shop, for the exchange of en- developing the first great age ergy that seems to stimulate of American letters. What Van authors to their best efforts. Wyck Brooks called the "flow- Moreover, Ticknor and Fields ering of New England' had its were leaders in bringing the roots in the building at the cor- best literature of Old England ner of School and Washington to the new world-Tennyson Streets. and Browning, the poets, Dick- A commercial structure built ens and Thackeray, the novel- in 1711-12,¹ the edifice housed ists) After 1859 America's most booksellers and publishers as distinguished and influential early as 1828, being located in literary periodical, The Atlan- the heart of Boston's "pub- tic Monthly, was published lishers' row," and would per- from the Old Corner Book- Gordon Lewis sist as a booksellers' location store and edited for a number until 1903. Long after Ticknor of years after 1861 by Fields & Fields moved to more sump- himself. The Old Corner Bookstore tuous quarters on Tremont The Old Corner Bookstore Street it remained a ly-station remains to us then as one of on any literary excursion of the few tangible links with the Ticknor & Fields's men, institutions, and culture years, 1845-65, are the ones of one of the brightest literary THE which gave the Old Corner moments in our nation's his- Bookstore its worldwide repu- tory. ("Parnassus Corner' it tation, was called then, and perhaps OLD CORNER Ticknor & Fields printed, the ambiance of that time and published, and sold the books place can be recaptured if we of America's newly-fledged review the way Ticknor & BOOKSTORE: authors; but it did something Fields cooperated with its more. Particularly through the authors to make an essentially agency and energy of James private activity, writing, into a T. Fields: it offered in one rela- "public" event. It is well to look A BOSTON tively small building a cultural first at the personalities of the center and one focal point for a publishers themselves, before rapidly expanding and still un- turning to their illustrious FOCAL POINT defined American nation.2 authors. Great literary cultures seem to William D. Ticknor (1810- require great urban centers, 64) was born in New Hamp- FOR which at once attract and repel shire, in the farm community them. Such cultures flourish of Lebanon.³ He went to Bos- best when there is a self-sup- ton to seek his fortune and after porting subculture of authors a time in a brokerage house PUBLISHERS and publishers. Nineteenth- turned to bookselling and pub- century Boston was just that lishing. He was a solid, careful sort of an urban center and the businessman who never over- AND Old Corner Bookstore became extended himself and knew the meeting place for its literary when to cut his losses in the subculture-analogous to the roller-coaster economic envi- AUTHORS coffeehouse society of Augus- ronment of the nineteenth cen- tan England or the cultural tury. He seems to have acted community in Greenwich Vil- as leavening for the yeast of lage in the 1920s. Fields, although he had a repu- Ralph Waldo Emerson and tation for literary judgment in PAUL M. WRIGHT Henry David Thoreau from his own right. He and Fields Concord, Nathaniel Hawthorne were of one mind in their de- from Salem, John Greenleaf sire to pay their authors well Whittier from Amesbury, Oliver and fairly for their work, on a 94 regular professional basis. the residential showplaces of Ticknor was closest to the the city, 37 Charles Street quiet genius of Hawthorne. He There, in what Henry James died tragically while with Haw- called their "Charles Street thome on a trip, made for the waterside museum"- because purpose of restoring Haw- of the wealth of literary memo- thorne's health. rabilia Annie Fields main- James T. Fields (1817-81) tained one of the foremost was the epitome of the nine- literary salons in America.7 An teenth-century American self- invitation to this salon, or to made man. He also was born the Parker House where Fields in New Hampshire, in the small gave lavish dinners, or to his city of Portsmouth, and always office and study in the com- considered himself one of her pany's new quarters on Tre- leading sons.4 He received a mont Street facing the Boston basic education at Portsmouth Common was certification of Academy, but in common with "arrival" in literary America so many other gifted young Henry David Thoreau (1817- people of his time, could not 62) never attended on Annie afford to go to college and emi- Fields nor sat to table at the grated to Boston. Almost by Parker House. He was in prin- accident he fell into a position ciple opposed to such high liv- as clerk in the bookshop of ing, yet he appears in retrospect Carter & Hendee in the Corner as one of the brightest oma- Bookstore-th very building ments on the Ticknor & Fields he was to help make world- list. Rejecting the compulsive famous. gregariousness of so many of Young Fields made up for his contemporaries, Thoreau his lack of college training by chose to experiment with the taking part in the vigorous self- solitary life on the shores of culture movement sweeping Walden Pond from the Fourth the nation in the 1830s. He was of July, 1845, to September a member of the Mercantile 1847. Library Association, a group of The outcome of that stay, ambitious young businessmen the apparently artless narra- like himself, and achieved such tive we have today, is in fact prominence in the Association the result of several years and that he delivered its anniver- several stages of composition.8 James T. Fields Gordon Lewis sary poem in 1838,5 at the age In common with, and indeed of twenty-one.\ upon the advice of his fellow- Fields's confidence in- townsman, Ralph Waldo Emer- earlier work. He had to pay for Walden's critical reception creased, and his circle of liter- son, Thoreau kept a journal in the publication himself (a not was generally confused. Few ary acquaintances widened. which he recorded the signifi- uncommon arrangement at the reviewers perceived the true Soon Ticknor recognized the cant experiences of his daily time) and then it was so poor- nature of the book-on even younger man's ability and en- round. Stage one of the birth of ly promoted that he wound up read it as a satire on simple ergy and brought him in as a Walden (1854) was these jour- with some three-quarters of the country life. The great English partner when the bookshop nal entries. From these records initial print run unsold and novelist, George Eliot, wrote expanded into a full-fledged of over two years in the woods, stored in his attic. With Wal- perhaps the most perceptive publishing house in the mid- through seven successive drafts den, however, he was much review. She sensed the strength 1840s. Significantly, Fields taking a period of six years, more fortunate. James T. Fields of character behind the work brought no cash to the partner- was sculpted the book we now was much taken with Thoreau, and saw it for the characteris- ship; simply, as the agreement read, which has its events take finding that he brought "a tically American masterpiece it states, "his knowledge of the place all in one symbolic year's rural fragrance into the was. The public reception, while business." time. The evidence of the streets and lanes of Boston."9 not overwhelming, was suffi- His knowledge of the trade manuscripts shows a consum- Fields was enthusiastic about cient nearly to exhaust the first brought prosperity to the firm mate literary artist at work con- the manuscript and persuaded printing of 2,000 in one year and to Fields himself. As the structing an organic union of his more skeptical partner, and earn Thoreau a first royal- list grew and the company life and learning. His earlier Ticknor, to publish the volume. ty check of $51.60. Since his prospered, he made several and similar book, A Week on Thoreau received royalties as death the book has never been trips abroad and gathered the the Concord and Merrimack one of the house's "fine au- out of print and now is available big-sellers of England into the Rivers (1849), although inter- thors," that is one whose royalty translated into virtually every Ticknor & Fields fold. He had esting, is clumsy in compari- schedule exceeded 10% of the modern language. achieved such status by 1854 1-upon the narrative of a list price. The publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson that he could WOO and wed the canoe trip is superimposed a the book, originally scheduled (1803-82) was not only Thor- brilliant and beautiful Annie series of relatively unrelated for May but delayed while eau's friend but also James Adams, of impeccable New ruminations on eternal themes. Fields sought an English co- Fields's fellow member in the England background. Together Thoreau had been unlucky publisher, finally occurred in Saturday Club. He effectively they planned and built one of with the publishers of that August, 1854. links the two, and this suggests 95 Fields, before he secured Emer- for the Caribbean and Far- son's name for the list, called Eastern trade which made New him, half humorously and half England wealthy. Hawthome, seriously, a man "swinging on a lifelong Democrat, had lost an inverted rainbow." Later he his patronage position when boasted of him as the "honey" the Whigs came to power. His which fed the "understanding satirical portraits of certain few functionaries in the introduc- Although Emerson himself tion to the book, perhaps said that his publisher's "bril- drawn with malice, made it liant advertising and arrange- something of a success, be- ments have made me so popu- cause of his possible political lar,"14 it is clear that his own intentions.17 extensive lecturing tours made As James T. Fields would the considerable sales of his tell it later, Hawthorne hid the books possible. Beginning in manuscript of The Scarlet Let- the mid-1830s he described an ter in a bureau drawer and only annual circuit, for some twenty reluctantly handed it over mo- years, which took him as far ments before Fields had to west as the Mississippi River. leave to catch the last train to His carefully cultivated public Boston.1 Fields read it on the persona as the "Sage of Con- train, sensed the importance of cord" probably sold many of the story, and immediately of- his books to purchasers who fered the author a contract at never read a word of them.1 15% royalty rather than the Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804- usual 10%. 64) was much too shy to work The first printing of 2,500 the lecture circuit. He spent copies was exhausted in ten twelve years in an attic room days in March, 1850, and it was in his mother's house in Salem immediately reprinted in an simply preparing to assume the edition of 2,500 more. The role of writer. His first novel book not only had a connection was published anonymously. with deeply-felt American party His Twice-Told Tales (1837) politics, but was also riding the and Mosses from an Old Manse crest of a wave of nostalgia for Paul Wright (1846) were well received criti- the remote New England Annie (Adams) Fields cally. The Scarlet Letter, (1850) past.¹ Although couched in his famous romance about Pu- the oblique language of the ritan Boston, has its roots in nineteenth century, the book the author's family history. dealt with adultery and illicit why we see him as the guiding aphorisms and perceptions re- The Hathornes, as the name sex. And in Hawthome's skill- spirit of New England's renais- corded in his journals. 12 The was spelled then, came early ful hands Hester Prynne's un- sance. He was descended on characteristic Emersonian style to New England, and one an- fastening of her hair is more his father's side from a long is to string a series of ringing cestor, John Hathorne, was a titillating than many a more line of Puritan clergymen, and sentences - "thunderbolts" judge at the infamous Salem explicit twentieth-centur tale. on his mother's from a series they were called on the strand witchcraft trials of 1692. Haw- The reviews of the book were of Yankee businessmen. New of the most tenuous associative thorne was aware of his family's mixed. Readers of discern- England can be defined in logic. Often the finish of an background, felt it to be a bur- ment like Herman Melville terms of the pulpit and the essay will seem to contradict den, and made himself an avid would eventually hail Haw- countinghouse, and Emerson the beginning, but he himself student of New England his- thome as the long-awaited combined in his life the roles said, "a foolish consistency is tory. He came to understand American Shakespeare be- of the visionary preacher and the hobgoblin of little minds." the values and customs of the cause of his understanding of the man of affairs. His extensive What one sees in Emerson at Puritans and their overwhelm- the reality of sin and evil. Oth- journals combine well-known his best is the internal drama ing sense of sin; he knew of ers would condemn the book passages of speculation with of man thinking, to use another Anne Hutchinson who had as "a dirty story with a running pages of the most minute ac- of his characteristic phrases. been banished from Boston for undercurrent of filth which be- counting of income and ex- Emerson seems to have had preaching heresy in 1636, and longs in a Brothel Library."2 penses from his various speak- fairly happy publishing rela- he showed in his books how Whatever the merits of the ing tours-o of his major tions with Boston houses other deviance, particularly in the novel, Ticknor & Fields was sources of revenue. than Ticknor & Fields-par- case of a woman, was harshly quick to capitalize on the free Emerson's gifts, in fact, were ticularly Munroe & Co. and punished. advertising and promoted the primarily oratorical.¹ Nearly all Philips Sampson, Co. He came During the period immedi- book vigorously. The publish- his famous essays began as fairly late in his career to the ately preceding the publication ers showed their confidence in platform performances which Old Comer's list, with the Con- of The Scarlet Letter, Haw- its staying power by having it were later transmuted into writ- duct of Life published in 1860, thorne had been employed as cast into stereotype platés. ten form. These performances but his had been a familiar face a surveyor of revenues at the Throughout the remainder of themselves were constructed for years at the convivial gath- Salem Custom House, for little Hawthorne's life it stayed in in mosaic fashion out of the erings in the store. James T. Salem had been a major port print and earned him con- 96 siderable royalties. was born and died in the same Four lesser luminaries be- ancestral house in Cambridge, long in the Ticknor & Fields "Elmwood." Lowell was elected constellation along with the the Harvard class poet for major figures of Thoreau, 1838, but for disobeying col- Emerson, and Hawthorne. The lege authorities he was rusti- first, Henry Wadsworth Long- cated to Concord until after fellow (1807-82), was an enor- commencement and never got mously popular poet in his own to read the class poem in pub- day, and a vestige of this re- lic.24 mains in our day in the legions He became involved in the of schoolchildren who have to antislavery cause through his (or had to) memorize such old wife, Maria White, and one of standards as "Paul Revere's his most important publica- Ride." tions, The Biglow Papers He was born in Portland, (1848), appeared in opposition Maine, and educated at little to the Mexican War and the Bowdoin College, where his suspicion that slaveholding classmate (1825) was Nathaniel territory would be augmented Hawthorne.22 He had a gift by such expansionism. for languages and eventually (Lowell's gifts were for the assumed the chair of modern witty rather than the somber or languages at Harvard in 1835. serious. His remembered works This gift for languages led him are The Biglow Papers, which to experiment with foreign depends on the humorous use meters, as in his attempt at an of the Yankee dialect of one American "epic" in The Song Hosea Biglow, and A Fable for of Hiawatha (1855), which imi- Critics, which satirizes, some- tated the meter of the Finnish times with outrageous rhymes, folk-epic, the Kalevala. This gift the literary egos of the 1840s. also made him one of our first He was also a magazine editor great literary translators. He of some taste and discemment, made important translations in 1857 becoming the first from the German poets and editor of the newly-founded late in his life published a fa- Atlantic Monthly. He suc- Paul Wright mous version of Dante's Divine ceeded his friend Longfellow James T. Fields, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Comedy which still bears read- as professor of modern lan- William D. Ticknor ing. guages at Harvard in 1855 and Longfellow had become later served as American am- friendly with James T. Fields bassador to the Court of St. when they were both young James's tion the first time it was con- James T. Fields had the fore- men and aspiring poets. Long- He brought all of his pub- demned. sight to publish two volumes fellow achieved fame as a lyric lications to Ticknor & Fields Holmes made a number of of his verse at the same time. poet, but his choice of pub- after 1849 including the rights real contributions to the sci- Most of the remainder of his lishers had been unfortunate, to his best work, all of which ence of medicine, including very successful books came out as one after another they failed. was published before that date. a monography, Homeopathy under the imprint of Ticknor Finally in 1847 Fields captured He found in that house not and Its Kindred Delusions & Fields. Holmes enjoyed the him for Ticknor & Fields, and only the friendship of James (1842), published by Ticknor fellowship and editorial skill a twenty-year association be- T. Fields, but also a regular & Fields, and he taught anat- at the Old Corner more than gan, of great profit to both au- business relationship, some- omy at Harvard Medical School most and said to Fields in a thor and publisher. Evangeline, thing his other publishers had for years. But he is primarily moment of Holmesian ex- a romanticized tale of the dis- not offered. remembered for the brilliance travagance: "I was nothing but placement of the French Aca- Oliver Wendell Holmes of his wit and conversation. a roaring kangaroo when you dians by the British in Canada, (1809-94), an important figure These are nowhere better cap- took me in hand combed was their first joint venture and for several reasons, is still re- tured than in the famous me down and put me in proper became a sensational best- membered because of one monologues collected under shape. seller. Longfellow continued to poem, "Old Ironsides," which the title The Autocrat of the Another Ticknor & Fields sell well throughout his life. he dashed off in a moment of Breakfast Table and published poet, John Greenleaf Whittier Twenty-five thousand copies emotion and printed in the in 1858. He named Boston (1807-92), was born to a poor of The Courtship of Miles Boston Advertiser in 1830: "the Hub of the Solar Sys- Quaker farm family in Haver- Standish (1858), for example, Ay, tear her tattered ensign tem," and isolated the class of hill, Massachusetts. Although were sold in one week2 down! which he was so conspicuous he is often linked with Long- James Russell Lowell (1819- Long has it waved on high, a member as the "Brahmin fellow, Lowell, and Holmes as 91) was never as popular a And many an eye has caste of New England" in his one of the "Fireside" or poet as Longfellow, but as an danced to see novel Elsie Venner, published "Schoolroom" poets, he shared editor and prose writer he car- That banner in the sky; by Ticknor & Fields in 1861. none of their educational or ried considerable weight in His verses were instrumental When Holmes's book on class advantages. Moreover, nineteenth-century Boston. He in saving the U.S.S. Constitu- homeopathy came out in 1842, he gave the better part of his life and energies over to the stage plays in the history of title perhaps gave her older 8J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making service of abolitionism and did American theatre. Mrs. Stowe's and somewhat more strait- of Walden, With the Text of the not particularly share the hale- heart-rending depiction of the laced husband some uncom- First Version (Chicago, 1957). fellow-well-met attitude of his breakup of black families and fortable moments-but she 9Noted in Walter Harding, The contemporaries. the gratuitous cruelty of the was never to achieve any recog- Days of Henry Thoreau (New Whittier's most important slave system touched the na- nition as a lyric poet. York, 1970), 331. Superscript(1)Harding, Days, 340. tract in the antislavery cause, tion as no closely argued tract After the Civil War she gave . O. Matthiessen, American Re- Justice and Expediency, was ever could. Her observation of herself to many causes includ- naissance: Art and Expression published in 1833. In 1850 he the slave system while she lived ing the New England's Wom- in the Age of Emerson and Whit- took the great Daniel Webster in Ohio, the moral immediacy en's Suffrage Association, the York, 1941), 3-166. to task for compromising with of her religious training, and the Woman's International Peace Superscript(12)Stephen Whicher, ed., Selections slaveholders in à ruthless poetic death of her own son at an ear- Association, and prison reform from Ralph Waldo Emerson indictment entitled "Ichabod." ly age all contributed to the movements. Her Reminis- (Boston, 1957), "Introduction," Whittier's association with emotional power surging cences, 1819-1899 is a color- xv-xxi. Ticknor & Fields began early through the book. ful document of nineteenth- 13Cited in Tryon, Parnassus Cor- ner, 185-86. in his career with publication Mrs. Stowe met Annie and century Boston life. 14Ibid., 204. of Lays of My Home, and Oth- James Fields in Europe in 1859 These were some of the per- 15See Robert Alan McGill, "Emer- er Poems in 1843. This volume and determined to make them sonalities and publications son and His Audience," unpub- was significant for the poet per- her friends and Ticknor & which made Boston see her- lished PhD dissertation, Univer- sonally but important for the Fields her publisher. Her later self in the nineteenth century, sity of Pennsylvania, 1959. future of American poetry as fiction, although lacking the with justification, as the "Athens 16Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of well. It convinced Ticknor and fervor of Uncle Tom's Cabin, of America." In characteristic the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psy- Fields that American (as op- bears rereading. The Pearl of New England fashion, the ap- chological Themes (New York, posed to English) poetry could Orr's Island (1862) and Old- 1966). proach to Mount Parnassus Sue The Scarlet Letter, Cente- sell well and make money. town Folks (1869) paint a real- was up the steps of a modest nary Edition (Athens, Ohio, 1962), They risked their own capital istic picture of early nineteenth- corner bookstore. "Preface to the Second Edition," on this volume, turned a tidy century smalltown life in New and "The Custom-House: Intro- profit, and were willing to spon- England. She also published ductory to 'The Scarlet Letter." sor other American poets in important domestic manners James T. Fields, Yesterdays With the future. books with her sister Catherine Authors(Boston, 1900), 49-51. Whittier is preeminently the Beecher. Superscript(1)-Michael Davitt Bell, Hawthorne poet of the rural New England Like Stowe, Julia Ward and the Historical Romance of life. His best work and most Howe (1819-1910) is generally NOTES New England(Princeton, 1971). famous piece, "Snow-bound" remembered for one stirring 20Herman Melville, "Hawthome (1866),2 is solidly rooted in the piece of work, a piece for which 'Built by one Thomas Crease (or and His Mosses," The Literary experiences of his New En- the Atlantic Monthly paid her Creese), an apothecary, it was World, 17 and 24 August 1850. used for various business pur- Superscript(2)Tryon, Parnassus Comer, 135. gland boyhood: only $4.00. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (1861) went poses over the years. The Anti- Arvin, Longfellow: His The sun that brief December nomian heretic, Anne Hutchin- Life and Work(Boston, 1963). day off to fight with legions of son, is supposed to have lived 23James D. Hart, The Popular Rose cheerless over hills of Northern troops in the Civil (1634-36) on the lot from which Book: A History of America's gray, War. Its sense of moral righ- this parcel was taken. See Na- Literary Taste (Berkeley, 1961), And, darkly circled, gave at teousness combined with apoc- thaniel Shurtleff, Topographical 131. alyptic visions was typical of and Historical Description of 24Martin Duberman, James Russell noon A sadder light than waning many people's attitude toward Boston (Boston, 1890), 671. Lowell(Boston, 1966). the war. Sue W. S. Tryon, Parnassus Cor- 25Tryon, Parnassus Corner, 107-08, moon. ner. A Life of James T. Fields, 322. Two interesting nineteenth- Mine eyes have seen the Publisher to the Victorians (Bos- 26Ibid., 103-04. century women have Ticknor glory of the coming of the ton, 1963) for the major book on 27Whittier's work in general and & Fields connections) Harriet Lord; this publishing house. Tryon's fine "Snow-bound" in particular have Beecher Stowe (1811-96), the He is trampling out the vin- collection of Ticknor & Fields first received cogent reevaluation in editions is on permanent display Robert Penn Warren, John daughter of the great evangeli- tage where the grapes of wrath are stored; in the Old Corner Bookstore. Greenleaf Whittier. An Appraisal cal preacher, Lyman Beecher, He hath loosed the fateful 3Dictionary of American Biogra- and a Selection (Minneapolis, was the author of one of the phy, Ticknor, William Davis. 1971). most phenomenal books in lightning of His terrible 4Information on Fields and his 28Hart, The Popular Book, 112. American literary history. Uncle swift sword, activities is drawn throughout 29°Quoted in Sterling Brown, "A Tom's Cabin, published in book His truth is marching on. from Tryon, Parnassus Corner, Century of Negro Portraiture in form by Jewett in Boston in Julia Ward was born into a passim. American Literature," 333; in fashionable and wealthy New 5James T. Fields, Anniversary Jules Chametzky and Sidney 1852, sold 200,000 copies in Poem Delivered Before the Mer- Kaplan, eds., Black and White less than a year28 and had in- York family, but left it all to chantile Library Association of in American Culture: An Anthol- calculable effect on the anti- marry the idealistic humani- Boston (Boston, 1838). ogy from the Massachusetts Re- slavery cause and the coming tarian Dr. Samuel Gridley "Articles of Agreement," William view(Amherst, 1969). of the Civil War. Abraham Lin- Howe of Boston. She had per- D. Ticknor and Company, 1843, coln could only half-jocosely haps not the greatest literary cited in Tryon, Parnassus Corner, say when he first met her. "So talent in the world. but more 94. this is the little lady who made than her share of literary ambi- M. A DeW. Howe, ed., Memories this big war." In addition to tion. Ticknor & Fields pub- of a Hostess: A Chronicle of the novel, the story was made lished her collection of verse, Eminent Friendships, Drawn into one of the most popular Passion-Flowers, in 1854-the Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James Fields(Boston, 1922). 98 308 THE BOOKMAN. 9 (Dec. 1896):308-313, one would not necessarily have predicat- as hard as they are and all the while ed of her earlier drawings, but which you know that her eyes, like theirs, have make her an ideal illustrator of a text just a glint of fun in them, just the suspi intended for a healthy-minded child. cion of a twinkle that shows how well Here are all the imagination and insight, she understands the rules of the game, the same startling originality, and the Moreover, each picture makes you feel same felicity of execution, but there is that there is a story behind it, and will also a subtle touch of humour unobtru- excite in the mind of the child who sees sively suggested-the sort of underly- it a strong desire to know just what that ing humour always present in a child's story is. mind when it is playing robbers, for in- We live therefore in the hope that stance, or anything else that is purely ere long there will come to children a make-believe, and which is quite consis- glorious Renaissance of the Natural, tent with the greatest external gravity when they will no more be fed with and apparent faith in the little drama. formulas or made to learn SO many im- It is, in fact, the sub-consciousness of the proving things. Childhood is short fiction as a fiction, the duality of the enough at the best; the dreams of thought, the underlying knowledge children vanish all too soon ; the facts that the play is really nothing but a of life confront them grimly even while play, that SO tickles a child's fancy and the baby look still lingers in their eyes; gives to the whole thing its greatest zest. and surely he is no real lover of his kind Now Miss Norton's pictures in some curi- who would begrudge them this one small ous way all manage to suggest this very corner of delight and enter with sullen feeling you feel that she is within the tread to mar the heaven that lies about charmed circle herself, that she is play- us in our infancy. ing with the children and making believe H. T. P. DAYS WITH MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS AND HER FRIENDS. That we may come without delay to after an ominous pause, I wonder if any young an understanding of the spirit which is lady can tell me what this poem means? behind a delightful new book, Authors There was no reply. Can you tell us?' was the next question and Friends, by Mrs. James T. Fields, a pointed at the poor little girl who had just passage at the beginning of a paper on dropped out of cloudland. I thought it ex- Tennyson which it contains may very plained itself, was the plaintive reply. With a well be quoted. Its least value does not slight air of depreciation, in another moment the next recitation was called for, and the dull lie in its being one of the few passages clouds of routine shut down over the sudden in which the reading of direct autobiog- glory. Shades of the prison house then and raphy, rather than reminiscence of there began to close over the growing child. others, seems to be permitted One joy had for the present faded from her life, that of a sure sympathy and understanding 'There is a keen remembrance, lingering Not even her teacher could see what she saw, ineradicably with the writer, of a little girl com- nor could feel what lay deep down in her own ing to school once upon recitation day with a glowing heart. Nevertheless, Tennyson was piece' of her own selection safely stored away henceforth a seer and a prophet to this child in her childish memory. It was a new poem to and to the growing world ; but for some, who the school, and when her turn came to recite could never learn his language, he was born her soul was full of the gleam and glory of too late." Camelot. She felt as if she were unlocking a treasure-house, and it was with unspeakable It is because Mrs. Fields herself was pleasure to herself that she gave, verse after born just early and just late enough, verse, the entire poem of 'The Lady of Shalott.' and through circumstance and native Doubtless the child's voice drifted away into endowment came into the closest inti- sing song, as her whole little self seemed to drift away into the land of fancy, and doubtless also macy and sympathy with the men and the busy teacher, who was more familiar with women whose names shine forth most Jane Taylor and Cowper, was sadly puzzled. clearly in our century's record of letters, When the child at length sat down, scarcely that her book has an uncommon charm knowing where she was in her sudden descent from the land of marvel, she heard the teacher and value. say, to her amazement and discouragement, Even if James T. Fields had not been A LITERARY JOURNAL. 309 MRS. FIELDS'S STUDY. precisely what he was as a man, his posi- To an equal share in this life of ser- tion as one of the large-minded firm of vice and co-operation Mrs. Fields came Ticknor and Fields, and as editor of by right. It is something to have known the Atlantic Monthly at a time when the the men and women who filled the hours giants in American literature nearly all of that life ; it is much more to have lived in and near Boston, would have been able to know them, to have had made his doors a familiar entering- the powers of understanding and pro- place for those elect ones whose thoughts voking the best things in their natures, and talk were best worth hearing. But and to have held their friendship long Mr. Fields was something far more after the circumstances which gave it than publisher and editor. He had a birth had been left in the past. gift for friendship, a generosity of mind It is twenty-five years since Mr. and heart, and a sympathy with the Fields, in his familiar Yesterdays with things of the intellect and spirit which Authors, opened the doors of his library, few men of any employment possess, and talked freely of the portraits on the and which peculiarly fitted him for the walls, the great friends who had come work he had to do in the world. To and gone across the threshold, and the remove the name of Fields from the intimacies with them and others with most important chapters of our literary whom he had met only on English soil. annals would be to give up the one These same doors Mrs. Fields opens name that appears on nearly every page. again in her Authors and Friends. Now Without the least assumption of the we are permitted to go in and out with dignity of a pope in the hierarchy of let- those other intimates of her husband ters, he was in the truest sense the servus and herself who have outlived him. servorum of that divinity which rules the The reminiscences are drawn from the brotherhood of the pen. same sources as those to which Mr. 310 THE BOOKMAN. wonder whether one's presence gives any such pleasure to oth- ers as to one's self. Yet inti- mate as the intercourse is, the reader feels again and again, without being told, that re- serves are kept, and he is glad of it. There are biographies enough and to spare in these days of ours which leave one with the feeling of having in- truded unwittingly upon scenes too private for an outside eye. When one finds one's self in such a room, it is best to say without hesitation, " I beg your pardon, I think I must be going." With the exception of the shoit concluding paper on Lady Tennyson, all the por- tions of the present volume have appeared from time to time in magazines, though new material has frequently, and with great advantage, been added. In the paper on Mrs. Stowe, for example, there is enough that did not appear in the Atlantic last summer to make the article practically a Jaws T. Feed new production. Separated, moreover, as the successive magazine papers were in time and place, it was impossible to Fields turned frequently-letters more note, as one now does, how they vary or less directly connected with books in atmosphere and treatment with the which concerned him as a publisher ; and subjects with which they deal. The memorials, written and unwritten, of daily lives of Longfellow and Holmes are the friendships with which the business more clearly reflected, perhaps, than of books came inevitably to occupy a those of any Authors who were Mrs. Fields's Friends, for with none of the per- secondary relation. In these reminiscences of Longfel- sons in the book was there a more con- low, Holmes, Emerson, and their con- stant personal intercourse. Whittier, in temporaries, Mrs. Fields gives evidence his habit as he lived, walks in and out of qualities of the first value, though with some frequency ; Emerson, elusive not of the widest distribution, in bio- and shy, with less, but the flashes of his graphical writing. For one quality let talk and letters brighten many pages. us give special thanks. She does not Mrs. Stowe, living more continuously at a tell the reader more than he is entitled distance from Boston, is seen mainly in to know. He is admitted to high ac- her visits to town, but most vividly in quaintanceships, and feels that double her frank and spirited letters to both of gratification which comes of being well her friends in Charles Street. The paper introduced-a sense that the new ac- on Mrs. Thaxter appears elsewhere as an quaintance is seen at his best, and that introduction to a volume of her letters, one is received without a suspicion of and, lacking letters therefore itself, is coldness. This last sensation may be a harmonious study of a life and char- termed fanciful in a mere reader ; but acter. So, too, the accounts of Tenny- the feeling of personal contact is real son and his wife, with whom of neces enough in the book to make one half sity the personal intercourse was more A LITERARY JOURNAL. 3II broken than with the others, are studies happened to Dr. Holmes, this charac- of personality. teristic letter, reproduced in Mr. Morse's As the treatment of the different Life, from Mrs. Fields's article in the themes varies, so, to a striking degree, Century, was promptly written does the atmosphere of personality with which each separate paper is instinct. 296 BEACON STREET, The simple, loving benignity of Longfel- February II, 1872. low as a man has entered into Mrs. My DEAR MR. FIELDS : On Friday evening Fields's picture of him. From the ac- last I white-cravated myself, took a carriage, and found myself at your door at eight of the count of Emerson one learns to appre- clock, P.M. ciate keenly the truth and significance A cautious female responded to my ring and of a single phrase- a kind of squirrel- opened the chained portal about as far as a like shyness and swiftness' - that is clam opens his shell to see what is going on in used in describing his reading of an Cambridge Street, where he is waiting for a customer. essay. Dr. Holmes, the droll, shrewd, Her first glance impressed her with the con- true-hearted little man, stands out ex- viction that 1 was a burglar. The mild address actly as the Autocrat should appear. with which I accosted her removed that impres- The Friend Whittier is the very per- sion, and I rose in the moral scale to the com- paratively elevated position of what the unfeel- son his poems reveal. He felt a cer- ing world calls a sneak thief." tain brotherhood with Burns," says By dint, however, of soft words and that look Mrs. Fields, and early loved his of ingenuous simplicity by which I am SO well genius but where were two more un- known to you and all my friends, I coaxed her like?" Where indeed ? Yet where into the belief that I was nothing worse than a rejected contributor, an autograph collector, an could truer words for Whittier the Ab- author with a volume of poems to dispose of, or olitionist be found than these of a other disagreeable but not dangerous charac- younger poet, who sings of Burns ter. She unfastened the chain, and 1 stood before her. To him the powers that formed him brave * * * * I calmed her fears, and she was calm, A mighty gift of Hatred gave- And told A gift above All otner gifts benefic, save me how you and Mrs. F. had gone to New The gift of Love. York, and how she knew nothing of any literary debauch that was to come off under your roof, He saw 'tis meet that man possess but would go and call another unprotected fe- The will to curse as well as bless, male who knew the past, present, and future, To pity-and be pitiless and could tell me why this was thus, that I had To make and mar, been lured from my fireside by the ignis fatuus The fierceness that from tenderness of a deceptive invitation. Is never far." It was my turn to be afraid, alone in the house with two of the stronger sex, and I re- tired. The eager strenuousness of Mrs. Stowe, On reaching home I read my note, and found the abundant life of Mrs. Thaxter, the it was Friday the 16th, not the 9th, I was invit- serenity, dark and fair, of Lord and ed for. Lady Tennyson are drawn each with a Dear Mr. Fields, I shall be very happy to come to your home on Friday evening, the 16th faithfulness no less convincing than that of February, at eight o'clock, to meet yourself of the cursory remark that has been and Mrs. Fields, and hear Mr. James read his quoted concerning Whittier. paper on Emerson, etc. One could cite many words from the Always truly yours, O. W. HOLMES. book to show the means by which these various ends of living portraiture are at- tained but the book itself is the place It was an older Whittier who came to to look for them. Two widely separat- the door, during one of his last visits to ed passages well serve as an illustration Boston, and found it closed. As clear- of the manner in which two such differ- ly as the joyous Autocrat spoke from ent persons as Holmes and Whittier re- his letter, the aged poet was himself in veal their habits of mind under almost the following lines: similar conditions. At different times stood within the vestibule each of them had gone to the house on Whose granite steps I knew SO well, Charles Street, and had found the oc- While through the empty rooms the bell cupants away from home. When it Responded to my eager pull. 312 THE BOOKMAN. MOTLEY. EMERSON. HAWTHORNE. WHITTIER. HOLMES. LOWELL. LONGFELLOW. A GROUP FROM THE SATURDAY CLUB CONTEMPORARY WITH MR. JAMES T. FIELDS. " I listened while the bell once more " O friend, whose generous love has made Rang through the void, deserted hall ; My last days best, my good intent I heard no voice nor light footfall, Accept, and let the call I meant And turned me sadly from the door. Be with your coming doubly paid." " Though fair was Autumn's dreamy day, Largely typical as these verses are of And fair the wood paths carpeted With fallen of than gold and leaves red, one phase of Whittier's spirit, they rep- I missed a dearer sight they. resent a feeling toward the dwellers in Mrs. Fields's house which could not help " I missed the love-transfigured face, expressing itself in each separate ac- The glad, sweet smile so dear to me, count of her friendships. It is inevi- The clasp of greeting warm and free. What had the round world in their place? table that the letters which Mrs. Fields A LITERARY JOURNAL. 313 has printed should show something of word conversation as we are apt to use it. We the other side of the personal relation, recall the quiet guest-chamber, apart from the noise of the street, and lifted tar above the something of the impression she had river; that room, opulent and subtle with the made upon her intimates. Therefore astral shapes of past occupants-Longfellow, one finds in these pages the constant Whittier, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Stowe, revelation of kindnesses little and large Kingsley, and the rest of their high order-and of a gracious hospitality- whether in always resounding softly to the fine ear with the departed tread of Hawthorne, who used to Boston or in the cottage at Manches- pace the floor on sleepless nights. We remem- ter-by-the-Sea-which Emerson called ber the separation from paltriness and from ' plus-Arabian ; of the comprehending superficial adjustments which that scholarly and sympathy which a womanhood deficient gentle atmosphere commanded." in either heart or head is incapable of ex- A book which extends this atmosphere pressing. Mrs. Fields tells freely of the beyond the limits of the walls that first pleasures the friendships of her fireside enclosed it does something more than have given her. In Mrs. Phelps-Ward's to gratify a curiosity, however worthy, Chapters from a Life, appearing almost about the lives we call great. It takes simultaneously with Mrs. Fields's book, us for a time into a company of higher it is good to read a few words in which spirits, and gives to all, in the measure one guest at her house may be supposed of their capability for receiving, the re- to speak the thoughts of many freshment which comes of breathing a Those of us who received its hospitality re- clear, pure air callits inspiration among the treasures of our lives. We think of the peaceful library into 'Tis human fortune's happiest height to be which the sunset over the Charles looked deli- A spirit melodious, lucid, poised and whole; cately, while the 'best things of thought were Second in order of felicity given and taken by the finest and strongest I hold it, to have walked with such a soul." minds of the day in a kind of electric interplay, which makes by contrast a pale affair of the M. A. DeWolfe Howe. A PSALM OF LOVE. Dreadful and lovely, very stern and kind, Came a vast angel, winnowing down the wind: A raiment as of lightnings veiled his form And when he spoke, his whisper drowned the storm. I cried, and fell before him on the ground, Love, Love the long-desired, at last is found !" Then swiftly sped to clasp his awful feet, Knowing that Love, though linked with Death, were sweet. But he laughed loud across the breathless air, 'Fool, draw not near me: knowest thou not Despair ?'' Yet unappalled to find my fate I came, -And would have come unshodden over flame. Wherefore he, smiling, murmured in mine ear, Learn, thou whose love of Love has cast out fear, Love is Despair, since Love began to be, But Love's new name awaits eternity.' Since then we twain across the lands have trod, As o'er the Syrian fields men walked with God : O Love eternal ! sacred still Despair ! Awful and gracious ! most austerely fair. G. D