Shank’s Mare

My great-great-grandfather’s obituary says: “That Justin Benton came of stock noted for its longevity is shown by the fact that his grandfather lived to be nearly 100 years old, and in his 90th year walked from Tolland to this city and back again.” Tolland, Connecticut, was Jonathan Benton’s hometown, and “this city” was Springfield, Massachusetts, some 22 miles away. Presumably he was walking to visit his son Elisha, who lived there.

I walk for exercise or recreation. Occasionally, but not often, I walk to get from Point A to Point B. My husband does the latter much more frequently, but neither of us would consider walking 20 miles just to get somewhere—at least not by choice.

A century and a half ago, however, many people had no choice. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Louisa May Alcott was living in Concord, Massachusetts, about 20 miles from Boston. Yet she visited Boston frequently. Although stagecoaches and later a rail line (the Boston, Concord and Montreal Railroad) connected the two cities, it’s unlikely that the Alcotts, always scraping by in relative penury in those days, could have afforded coach or rail fare as a matter of course.

We have evidence in her own words that Louisa did cover this distance on foot, though perhaps the fact that she thought it worth noting indicates that it was not usual. Her journal for May 1859 records: “Walked from C. to B. one day, twenty miles, in five hours, and went to a party in the evening. Not very tired. Well done for a vegetable production!” (This last is a reference to her family’s diet; the Alcotts were vegans before the term was invented.)

Well done indeed! Twenty miles in five hours is 4 mph, while I do well to walk for 40 minutes or so at 3½ mph. Of course, Louisa, who was very tall, would have had a longer stride, and, at 26, she was also much younger! Still, it’s quite a notable accomplishment.

Alcott’s journal for May 1861 records that “Nan and John [her sister Anna and husband John Pratt] walked up from Cambridge for a day, and we all walked back.” This was a distance of about 15 miles. This again suggests that walking such distances was literally taken in stride.

In 1862, Louisa was asked to start a private kindergarten in Boston. “Don’t like to teach,” she wrote in her journal, “but take what comes.” Because her school “did not bring enough to pay board and the assistant I was made to have, though I did n’t want her,” she was “visiting about,” staying with various friends, but she soon became “very tired of this wandering life,” especially the uncomfortable position it put her in, and by April she recorded that she “Went to and from C. every day that I might be at home. Forty miles a day is dull work; but I have my dear people at night and am not a beggar.”

Although it beggars belief that she would actually have made a 40-mile round trip on foot every day, I don’t believe she would have described it as “dull work” if she’d been taking a coach or train.

In May of that year she attended a reception for celebrated authoress Rebecca Harding Davis. Davis records that Louisa, before introducing herself, said, “These people may say pleasant things to you,…but not one of them would have gone to Concord and back to see you, as I did today. I went for this gown. It’s the only decent one I have. I’m very poor.” Davis describes this as “sacrificing a whole day to a tedious work which was to give me pleasure.”

This to me is the crucial point: walking is so time-consuming. When I drive instead of walking, it’s not always out of laziness. In some cases, nearby destinations are just stopping points on my way to a much farther one, and almost always there will be burdens to be carried part of the distance. But often, even for short distances, I just don’t feel I can spare the time to walk, especially if there’s a chance the trip will be unproductive.

This was the case recently when I walked up to City Hall for a meeting of the newly formed Street and Traffic Control Committee, which was to discuss placement of crosswalks and crossing signs on newly resurfaced streets. When I arrived at the meeting room, I found it empty. Ultimately a City employee arrived to post a notice that the meeting had been canceled. So I walked home. I hadn’t intended to count that as my exercise for the day (a round-trip of less than half a mile), but it was certainly an exercise in futility!

Current Reading

Several weeks ago I announced my intention to write about my treadmill reading, and so far I have followed up with only one such post. Today I’ll make up for lost time with a compendium of remarks about several books I’ve been reading, both on my Kindle while walking and in hard copy. Mostly I’m still concentrating on Louisa May Alcott, both on Kindle and in print, but I’ll mention only a few of the works by LMA, omitting the ones about her.

Work

The first of these was Work: A Story of Experience, published in 1873. The story was one that Alcott had been working on for some time when Henry Ward Beecher’s magazine, the Christian Union, offered her $3,000 for a serial to run in weekly installments for six months. She accepted the $1,000 advance and resurrected this unfinished manuscript, begun even before she had written the first draft of Moods, and completed it. Like Moods, it was a serious novel for adults. Whereas in Moods she had explored the idea of marriage and what a woman can expect from it, here she considers the idea of what sort of meaningful career a woman can have, and how she can determine what sort of work she is best suited for.

This is a sprawling book, with the usual Alcott mix of humor, romance, and moralizing. In some ways, the central section of the book (after protagonist Christie Devon has had many adventures in a wide variety of those occupations open to women) is a classic Harlequin plot: Christie and David Sterling become friends and gradually fall in love, but through typical misunderstandings, each thinks the other’s heart is engaged elsewhere, and so they remain silent about their feelings. When they finally declare their love for each other only four-fifths of the way through the book, the reader knows their romance cannot end well. The fly in their ointment is the Civil War, to which duty ultimately calls them both, him as a soldier and her as a nurse. He is fatally shot while helping a fugitive slave escape; she reluctantly survives but is rescued from despond only by the birth of their daughter (delicately conceived offstage).

This novel is read today, if at all, only as a curiosity or period piece, but it is generally regarded by Alcott scholars as being “autobiographical” and therefore primary source material about the author’s life. Anyone familiar with LMA’s biography might find this hard to see, as Christie Devon’s life and career are very different from Alcott’s. But Alcott had first-hand experience of many of the types of work Christie did, including needlework and nursing, and she was certainly familiar with life in a garret in Boston, often in dire penury. Still, this is a work of fiction and imagination and not a retelling of her life story.

Comic Tragedies

Published in 1893 to capitalize on the continued strong sales of “the Little Women books,” this is a compilation of plays “By Jo and Meg,” that is, by Louisa and Anna Alcott. Although LMA is credited as the author, it was published after her death and copyrighted by Anna B. Pratt, and billed on the title page as “WRITTEN BY ‘JO’ AND ‘MEG’ and acted by THE ‘LITTLE WOMEN’.” The “Foreword by Meg” makes it clear that the plays were collaborations between Anna and Louisa, and it was generally thought that Anna was at least as good a writer as Louisa, which is evident in the introductions she has provided for some of these plays.

She leads off with the strongest card, “Norna; or, The Witch’s Curse,” which was evidently a popular favorite, and which is here enhanced by Anna’s notes on how the multiple characters were represented by just two actors with quick costume changes and other subterfuges. There’s no question these girls were clever. Although it’s easy to see why that play would be popular, I actually preferred “The Captive of Castile; or, The Moorish Maiden’s Vow.” The plays seem to trend downhill from there, the last, “The Unloved Wife; or, Woman’s Faith,” being just silly. As for “Ion,” Anna writes, “This play was found too uninteresting for presentation, and was left unfinished, but is here given as a specimen of what the young authors considered very fine writing.” All of the plays feature dialogue of a very high style, i.e., King James/Shakespearean thees and thous and thuses and inversions. This, together with their total implausibility, makes them quite risible, and it may well be that they were not meant to be taken seriously.

Obviously, at this remove even Anna did not take them seriously, but they do give the reader a sense of the type of melodrama that was popular in the mid-nineteenth century. All are set in exotic locales, and it has been noted that after LMA had the opportunity to actually travel to some of these settings, she no longer used them for any of her writing.

Spinning-Wheel Stories

Alcott uses the idea of “a dozen young people” (evidently cousins), gathered at the home of their grandparents (Joel Manlius Shirley and the former Elizabeth Rachel Morgan) for Christmas and housebound, at least at first, by a blizzard, to collect an assortment of stories no doubt previously published in periodicals (the collection was published in 1884). Of special interest is “Eli’s Education,” which is generally regarded by Alcott scholars as a fictionalized account of the childhood and education of Bronson Alcott. Some of the stories dip back into pre-Revolutionary times (“Tabby’s Tablecloth”), and all offer a moral of some sort. I enjoyed them all, even though (and sometimes because) they were very old-fashioned.

Silver Pitchers

I’m still reading this one, another collection of stories, published in 1876. The title story has a temperance moral that would doubtless have received the WCTU stamp of approval. Indeed, I learn from Carol Mattingly’s Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric that Alcott served as president of the Concord chapter of the WCTU in 1883. As Mattingly notes, Alcott “makes reference to temperance in nearly all her novels.” Mattingly refers to “Silver Pitchers” as a “specifically temperance story” and summarizes the plot.

All of the above works are available free for Kindle and can also be read online (in very attractive HTML layout, with illustrations) here. For other presentations, see the University of Pennsylvania’s Online Books Page or the Literature Network.

Other reading:

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, by Simon Garfield. If you’re a fontaholic, you’ll love this book. It’s a quick read but full of useful information. Though I whipped through it in less than 24 hours, I will no doubt refer to it often. It is not available for Kindle, with good reason: in addition to numerous illustrations, which could be represented by graphics, the author uses numerous fonts in the body of the text, and Kindle would not be able to handle them.

A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil McGregor. McGregor is the director of the British Museum, and the book is based on a series of BBC Radio 4 radio programs broadcast in 2010. “The rules of the game,” McGregor writes in his preface, “were simple. Colleagues from the Museum and the BBC would choose from the collection of the British Museum 100 objects that had to range in date from the beginning of human history around two million years ago and come right up to the present day. The objects had to cover the whole world, as far as possible equally. They would try to address as many aspects of human experience as proved practicable, and to tell us about whole societies, not just the rich and powerful within them. The objects would therefore necessarily include the humble things of everyday life as well as great works of art.” I’m still reading this, but on the basis of the 20% of it that I’ve read, I highly recommend it. It is a ponderous tome (3 lbs. 4.8 oz.), not at all comfortable to hold, making it a strong candidate for Kindle reading. Although its lovely color illustrations make it not so suitable for a B&W Kindle, a friend who has just bought a Kindle Fire says that the illustrations are glorious on it.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize. If you watched The Tudors, you will get a very different slant on the Thomases (Wolsey, Cromwell, More, Boleyn, Howard, Wyatt, Cranmer) from this novel, especially Thomas Cromwell, who is the central figure. I’ve read only a small fraction of it, but I’m enjoying it very much so far.

Moods

I had planned, after my visit to the gym today, to write a little about my current treadmill reading. To my surprise, when I arrived at the gym, I found it closed, the parking lot entirely empty. I suppose perhaps the designated volunteer had not arrived to open it or had had to leave early. In any case that gives me a little extra writing time.

What I’m currently reading is Moods, by Louisa May Alcott. This was LMA’s attempt to write, if not the Great American Novel, at least the Great LMA Novel. When she began it in August of 1860, she wrote that “Genius burned so fiercely that for four weeks I wrote all day and planned nearly all night, being quite possessed by my work. I was perfectly happy, and seemed to have no wants. Finished the book, or a rough draught of it, and put it away to settle.” She added, “Daresay nothing will ever come of it, but it had to be done, and I’m the richer for a new experience.”

The new experience was that of writing a novel. As Harriet Reisen writes in Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, “She had trained herself to succeed in genres of writing that had commercial markets—the children’s tale, the poem, the short story, the longer serial fiction, and nonfiction—but had yet to command the novel, the form that she and her readers she respected loved most.”

Moods was intended as a “romantic novel of ideas,” but every publisher she submitted it to insisted it be cut, and the cuts they suggested were the parts Louisa valued most—her ideas about marriage. In February 1861, she returned to the book: “Another turn at ‘Moods,’ which I remodelled,” she wrote in her journal. “From the 2d to the 25th I sat writing, with a run at dusk, could not sleep, and for three days was so full of it I could not stop to get up.” When she was satisfied with the revision, she read it aloud to the family, who of course pronounced it wonderful. “So I had a good time, even if it never comes to anything, for it was worth something to have my three dearest sit up till midnight listening with wide-open eyes to Lu’s first novel.”

Louisa returned to her manuscript from time to time, constantly revising it, but still with no real hope of publication. After the runaway success of Hospital Sketches, her thinly veiled account of her own experiences as a nurse in a military hospital in 1863, she found herself much in demand, with several publishers clamoring for more work. Publisher James Redpath took it in February 1864 but then pronounced it too long for a single volume, adding that “a two volume novel was bad to begin with,” that is, that two volumes would be inadvisable for a début novel. “Would I cut the book down about half? No, I wouldn’t, having already shortened it all it would bear.” So she took the manuscript back and continued to shop it around, but every publisher said the same—too long.

In October, “as I lay awake one night a way to shorten & arrange ‘Moods’ came into my head. The whole plan laid itself smoothly out before me & I slept no more that night but worked on it as busily as if mind and body had nothing to do with one another. Up early & began to write it all over again. The fit was on strong & for a fortnight I hardly ate slept or stirred but wrote, wrote like a thinking machine in full operation. When it was all written, without copying, I found it much improved though I’d taken out ten chapters & sacrificed many of my favorite things, but being resolved to make it simple, strong & short I let every thing else go & hoped the book would be better for it.” She sent the book to A. K. Loring, one of the publishers who had previously rejected it, and he proposed to “bring the book out at once.”

The book was published in December, and the first edition sold out quickly. In January 1865, Louisa writes, “Notices of ‘Moods’ came from all directions, & though people didn’t understand my ideas owing to my shortening the book so much, the notices were mostly favorable & gave quite as much praise as was good for me.” Actually, critical reception was quite mixed, and Louisa was still dissatisfied with the results of her drastic cuts. She was especially outraged when Loring, without her consent, reissued the book in 1870 to cash in on the success of Little Women. Louisa received a copy while traveling abroad and wrote from Dinan, France, on June 1, 1870, “I am so mad at Lorings doings and letter that I must begin a new budget to you, by way of frothing my wrath.” Loring owned the copyright on the book, and “The dreadful man says that he has a right to print as many editions as [he] likes for fourteen years! What rights has an author then I beg to know.”

She objected to the new illustrations Loring had commissioned, saying they did not look at all like her conception of the characters, and, as Harriet Reisen writes, “Her sense of violation was so powerful that she took umbrage even at the author’s photograph Loring had chosen for the back cover. She declared it ‘horrid’ and sent it ‘floating down the Loire.’” On June 9, she wrote, “I have blown Loring up and beg him not to say that ‘I think Moods’ as it is ‘my best work,’ but as it was.” She also instructed her family, “if Loring writes lies about ‘Moods,‘ put a notice in the Transcript contradicting him.” Loring “is a provoking man,” she wrote, “and ought in decency to have let me know his plan in time to change if I liked.”

Certainly the book could have stood some revision. Harriet Reisen gives this assessment of the book:

As literature, Moods has aged poorly. The heroine’s behavior, meant to be charmingly childish, feels forced and silly. Overheated trappings weigh down a clumsy plot. To a modern reader, the book seems little more than a nineteenth-century Harlequin romance, a fantasy about a young woman with a choice of two attractive suitors. But Louisa’s tale of the volatile young Sylvia Yule was written in all seriousness and meant to be taken at face value, and for no one did it have more value than for Louisa, who wrote, published, and rewrote it over a period of more than twenty years.

John Matteson, in Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, says much the same:

Even as she expressed pride in her accomplishment, Louisa knew that Moods was not all she had hoped it would be. It had been too aggressively poked, prodded, redacted, and rewritten to retain the freshness of its original conception. A subplot was cut back so severely that a once-central character now appeared only in the first chapter, and the relation between her story and the remainder of the novel was rendered vexingly unclear. Louisa had begun the novel as a psychological study of her heroine. By the time the editing was finished, the story no longer read like a nuanced meditation on an unbalanced mind, but like a tangled romance. A work of high ambition and extreme candor, Moods fell victim to the inexperience of its author and to the overly commercial sensibilities of its editor.

It is a pity that Moods ended up as such a compromise, for no book Louisa wrote ever mattered to her more intensely than this one. Louisa had worked on Moods off and on for more than four years. Even after the book was published, Louisa could not bring herself to leave it alone; she published the book, heavily revised, in 1882. Even then, it did not satisfy her. Rereading her journals a few years before her death, Louisa wrote commentaries to herself in the margins. All the marginalia dealing with Moods express regret and disappointment, mingled with a certain sad affection for the book she wanted to make great but, after more than twenty years and countless rewrites, was able only to make good.

Eventually Louisa was able to buy the copyright and printing plates from Loring and regain control of her work. In 1882, when she had become successful and relatively wealthy, she revised the book again and republished it. Harriet Reisen writes: “Of all her adult fiction, Moods had been her favorite, and she had never accepted the shortened version that she believed had spoiled the original work. Now she revised the book, but whatever intention she may have begun with, ultimately she did not restore Moods as an unconventional novel of ideas. Instead she reframed it for her teenage audience. In an introduction to the new edition she said she had cut some chapters, restored others, and trimmed ‘as much fine writing as could be done without destroying the youthful spirit of the little romance.’ She gave the story a new, happy ending.”

If I had been reading this book purely for pleasure, I would have stopped after the first chapter, which is unspeakably awful. But the second chapter takes an entirely new tack and regained my interest. It’s still mostly pretty dreary stuff, but here and there are flashes of the wry humor that enhances LMA’s best books, from Hospital Sketches to the eight novels she wrote for girls. Since I have read plot summaries of both the original and revised versions, the real suspense in reading this book comes from the fact that I’m not sure which version I’m reading! Someone will die in the end; I just don’t know who.

Still Walking, Just Not Writing

Forgive me, readers, for I have been neglectful. It has been over three months since my last post, and even that was pretty lame.

It isn’t that I haven’t thought about posting, but beyond that, I haven’t had any real thoughts while walking. Not to say that I haven’t had some mental activity at other times; in fact, I even briefly considered the idea of a new blog, “What I learned today.” I dismissed that idea pretty quickly. It’s not that I don’t learn something (almost) every day, and some of the things I learn might even be of interest or use to my notional readers, but you and I both know that there’s no way I’d actually write a blog post every day. So forget that idea.

I haven’t much excuse to offer for my lack of thoughts except that my walking these days is done mostly inside, on a treadmill, rather than outdoors. And on Sundays, when I do hit the streets, I don’t seem to see anything worthy of comment.

At the gym, on the treadmill and also on the elliptical machine, I read. Because I read from my Kindle, and because I’m too cheap to actually pay for Kindle content, I’ve been reading (and to some extent rereading) a lot of literary classics and other material that is out of copyright and therefore free. A few months ago I accidentally stumbled upon a previously unknown work of Louisa May Alcott (Shawl-Straps) and subsequently became embroiled in exploration of Alcott’s life and work. I became especially fascinated by the way so much of her work reflects her life experiences, and, as a result, I’m preparing a presentation on “Louisa and the Alcotts in Fact and Fiction” for a book review program next March. I’m reading Alcott’s own works (or at least as many as are available for Kindle) while walking, but I’ve also read several biographies and additional primary source material in hard copy, mostly in books checked out of the library, though in many cases I’ve ended up ordering my own copies.

I’ve also read several contemporary novels based on Louisa’s life and work. The best of these is Geraldine Brooks’s March, a novel about “Mr. March,” the father of the four March girls in Little Women. Alcott doesn’t give Brooks much to work with, so her character is based (as Louisa’s Mr. March was) on Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott, with much of Bronson’s biography grafted onto the life of Mr. March. It is a stunning tour de force, and I enjoyed it very much.

It was also quite interesting to read, one after the other, Louisa and the Country Bachelor, by Anna Maclean, and The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, by Kelly O’Connor McNees. Both books are set in the summer of 1855, when the Alcotts were living in Walpole, New Hampshire. Though both stories incorporate the few known events of that summer, as recorded in LMA’s journals and letters and the journals of other family members, they take dramatically different turns, as McNees has Louisa experiencing a passionate summer romance, while Maclean has her solving a murder mystery!

Never fear, I’m not going to turn this into an LMA tribute blog (there’s already one of those and in any case I’m husbanding my efforts for my March presentation), but it may not be inappropriate to post here occasionally about what I’m reading, and I’ll try to do that more often.