Читать книгу A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England - R. Todd Felton - Страница 30

For all of James T. Fields’s business acumen (he introduced the system of advances and royalties to American publishing, for instance), he made at least one notable mistake. When a young writer from Concord showed him her stories, Fields was not impressed. “Stick to your teaching,” he told her. “You can’t write.” He did, however, acknowledge the financial stresses that had pushed the young woman into publishing and gave her forty dollars to start a school.

Undaunted by this rejection of her literary efforts, the young Louisa May Alcott kept at writing, producing more than thirty books and collections of stories during her thirty-four-year career. After Little Women had been published to tremendous success, Alcott mailed the forty dollars back to Fields with the note:

Dear Mr. Fields

Once upon a time you lent me forty dollars, kindly saying I might return them when I had made “a pot of gold.”

As the miracle has been unexpectedly wrought I wish to fulfil my part of the bargain & herewith repay my debt with many thanks.

Very truly yours

L.M. Alcott

An otherwise impeccable judge of literature, James T. Fields told Louisa May Alcott to “stick to your teaching ... you can’t write.”

Another publishing house and hub was just a few blocks east, on the corner of Washington and School Streets. If Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore and library introduced many American thinkers to writers from abroad, (4) the Old Corner Bookstore at 3 School Street introduced many Americans to their country’s own writers.

This building, tucked in among the larger buildings of downtown, served as the center of the America’s literary world when Ticknor and Fields operated their publishing business here.

The stunning glass and steel building is the twenty-first-century version of Ticknor and Fields.

From their offices in the Old Corner Bookstore, publishers James T. Fields and William Ticknor brought out many of the major works of the nineteenth century, by authors who even now are some of the best-known names of American letters: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But it was more than a catalog that made Ticknor and Fields such a powerhouse—it was the personal relationships that the men, especially Fields, developed with the writers in their stable. Author Rebecca Harding Davis called Fields “the shrewdest of publishers and kindest of men. He was the wire that conducted the lightning so that it never struck amiss.”

Most of the major writers of the time stopped by the Old Corner Bookstore once or twice a week, and some came every day. As George Curtis noted, it was “the hub of the Hub,” which attracted “that circle which compelled the world to acknowledge that there was an American literature.” Hawthorne, in particular, felt very comfortable here and came whenever he was in town. In Glimpses of Authors, Caroline Ticknor, the publisher’s granddaughter, describes Hawthorne’s “spot”:

In the small counting-room was “Hawthorne’s Chair,” in a secluded nook; there he was wont to sit dreaming in the shadow, while the senior partner was busy at his desk close by: ... There Hawthorne would take up his positions where he could see and yet be out of sight, and in his chair, for many years it was his custom to ensconce himself, whenever he visited the “Corner”; he often spent whole hours there resting his head upon his hand apparently in happy sympathy with his environment.

In some ways, the Old Corner Bookstore was a victim of its own success. After its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century, the publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields left (it later became Houghton Mifflin). The building then became home, successively, to a string of other bookstores, a haberdashery, a photo supply store, and a pizza joint. In 1960 it was saved from becoming a parking lot by the nonprofit group Historic Boston. Now a protected historic site, it has been home to the Globe Corner Bookstore and the Freedom Trail Foundation and is now a jewelry store. In an ironic twist, the small, two-story brick building is now dwarfed by the enormous glass-walled Borders bookstore just across the street.

Another major hub of Transcendentalist activity was (5) the Masonic Temple at 88 Tremont Street. Built in the early 1830s, this enormous Gothic structure served as a lyceum for Boston society. Emerson gave his first lectures there, a series of ten talks on English literature. The building also served as the meetinghouse for James Freeman Clarke’s Church of the Disciples. In addition, an elementary school begun by Bronson Alcott operated out of room 7 from 1834 to 1839.

This enormous Gothic building, the Masonic Temple, hosted many of the Transcendentalist activities, including Bronson Alcott’s famously controversial school.

Given Transcendentalism’s inherent optimism and belief in the pure spirituality of children, it was probably inevitable that it would spawn an educational reform movement. Although many took up this mantle over the years, including Elizabeth Palmer Peabody with her Pinckney Street kindergarten, George Ripley with Brook Farm, and Alcott and Franklin Sanborn with the Concord School of Philosophy, perhaps the best-known endeavor was Alcott’s School for Human Culture, better known as the Temple School.

This small volume documented and explained many of Alcott’s progressive pedagogies and was one of Elizabeth Peabody’s earliest literary efforts.

Founded in 1834 with a class of thirty boys and girls, the Temple School took a radically different approach to the teaching of children than did the public schools of the time. As described in the 1836 Record of a School by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who was serving as his assistant, Alcott believed in the inherent intelligence of his pupils. Rather than education by memorization and recitation, he taught by lecture and discussion. Lessons frequently included a reading by Alcott and then a discussion led by him. Students, whose ages ranged from six to twelve, were encouraged to voice their own ideas and opinions.

The Gospels provided the basis for the discussions and the platform from which conversation ranged across many topics. The most controversial brushed on sexuality and human reproduction, as described in Alcott’s second volume describing his teaching practices, Conversations with Children on the Gospels:

Mr. Alcott. Yes; you have the thought. And a mother suffers when she has a child. When she is going to have a child, she gives up her body to God, and he works upon it, in a mysterious way, and with her aid, brings forth the Child’s Spirit in a little Body of its own, and when it has come, she is blissful. But I have known some mothers who are so timid that they are not willing to bear the pain; they fight against God, and suffer much more.

While this may not offend our modern sensibilities, any discussion of the birthing process, no matter how vague or sober, was scandalous for Victorian Boston. When Conversations with Children on the Gospels appeared in 1836, Alcott was scorched by the outcry. Many parents pulled their students from the school, and when he endeavored to educate a mulatto girl alongside the children of his Boston patrons, the rest of the families abandoned him. The school folded in 1839, devastating Alcott, who was bedridden for a number of months due to the stress of the personal crisis.