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5. Lydia M. Child
Maria Francis Child (1802-1880), the daughter of a baker was born in Medford, Massachusetts, and received her formal education in the schools of that city. After her mother's death in 1814, Lydia lived for several years with a sister in [page 206:] Maine, and later with her brother, Convers Francis, a Unitarian minister at Watertown, Massachusetts. Her first book, the novel Hokomok (1824), was prompted by an article in the North American Review which called attention to the use that could be made in fiction of American historical materials. From 1825 until 1828 she conducted a private school in Watertown, and in 1826 she began the Juvenile Miscellany, one of the early periodicals for children. In 1828 she married David L. Child, a lawyer of Boston.
Mrs. Child was an early propagandist for the abolitionist movement; her An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) attracted much attention and was followed by Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery (1835), and other similar works. From 1841 until 1849 she and her husband lived in New York, where she first edited, and then assisted her husband in editing, the weekly Anti-Slavery Standard. After 1852 the Childs lived at Wayland, Massachusetts, where she continued her writing and her interest in public affairs. Her husband died in 1874.
In addition to biographical works and collections of tales and poetry, Mrs. Child's large and heterogeneous literary output includes A Brief History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations (1832), Letters From New York (2 vols., 1843-1845), written originally for the Boston Courier, and The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages (3 vols., 1855). Among her novels are The Rebels; or Boston before the Revolution (1825) and Philothea (1836) a romance set in the age of Pericles. [page 207:] The American Frugal Housewife (1829), the most popular of her works on domestic economy, went through thirty-three editions by 1855. Correspondence Between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason of Virginia (1860) resulted from a controversy that followed the governor's rejection of her offer to nurse John Brown after he had been wounded and imprisoned.(1)
“My natural inclinations drew me much more strongly toward literature and the arts than toward reform,” Mrs. Child confessed, “and the weight of conscience was needed to turn the scales.”(2) She gave herself earnestly to serious purposes, but her gravity was mixed with a naïveté which some of her contemporaries found amusing. She never forgave N. P. Willis for his occasional references to such household hints in her Frugal Housewife as “Hard gingerbread is nice to have in the family.”(3) Charles T. Congdon recalled that at a time when Americans had seen few violin virtuosos, the Norwegian Ole Bull “burst upon us, and I am afraid, took advantage of our uneducated condition”: [page 208:]
Dear Mrs. Lydia Maria Child [he continued], the kindest and cleverest of women, was among those who were most egregiously taken in. Of course, she knew nothing whatever of violin-playing. A smart musical boy, with a knack at the bow, might have cheated her; but when told that the piece was called “The Mother's Prayer,” she became instantly devout, heard aspirations in every trill .... She was the New York correspondent of “The Boston Courier,” and she actually wrote to that journal — then edited by old, hard-headed Joseph T. Buckingham — that in giving this piece, Mr. Ole Bull's hands seemed often clasped in prayer.(4)
Other than the “Literati” sketch, the only piece of writing by Poe which concerns Mrs. Child is the notice of Philothea in the Southern Literary Messenger for September, 1836, most of which is taken up by a summary of the plot of the novel. Poe's impression of the book was generally favorable. He praised its morality, the interest of its plot, and particularly its fidelity to the spirit of ancient Greece; considered as a vehicle for reproducing this spirit, the novel, he wrote, is “an honor to our country, and a signal triumph for our country-women.” But the book belonged to a species that not even the most gifted writer could make popular, for “We have little of purely human sympathy in the distantly antique .... ”(5) In 1845 Poe reprinted the review with no significant change in the Broadway Journal.(6)
ln the “Literati” sketch of Mrs. Child, which fails to mention her abolitionist writings, Poe wrote respectfully of her abilities as an author. Her “many compositions of high merit” [page 209:] have won her, he stated, “a just celebrity.” She “invariably writes well” for the magazines, and her papers “are distinguished for graceful and brilliant imagination — a quality rarely noticed in our countrywomen.” The candid personal description of Mrs. Child did not flatter.(7)
Poe and Mrs. Child had friends in common in New York and might easily have met,(8) but evidence of personal acquaintance is lacking.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 207:]
1 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Contemporaries, Boston, 1900, pp. 108-141; “Lydia Maria Child,” The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1888, VI, 286-308; Walter C. Bronson's sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography; the Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia (1880), II, 210-211; the National Cyclopedia, II, 324-325; Appletons' Cyclopaedia; Ethel K. Ware, “Lydia Maria Child and Anti-Slavery,” Boston Public Library Quarterly, III, 251-274 (October, 1951); IV, 34-49 (January, 1952).
2 Higginson, Contemporaries, p. 140.
3 Daughrity, “The Life and Work of Nathaniel Parker ‘Willis,” p. 213.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 208:]
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 209:]
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PNYL, 1954] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe and the New York Literati (Reece)