The Tenth of January: gallery of tragedy

"Look at that girl! I’d kill myself if I looked like that!" It was meant as a whisper, but Asenath Martyn heard it anyway. She knew what she looked like: she had a hunched back and a scar across her mouth, the result of abuse from a mother who was now dead. Sene, as she was known, knew something was wrong with her simple life, living with her father in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and working for the Pemberton Mills. She loved a boarder in their home, Richard "Dick" Cross, and the two had become engaged. She had learned, however, that Cross intended to marry her only out of pity, and that he really loved Sene's friend, the pretty Del Ivory (who "counted her rejected lovers by the score"). In this case, however, Del loved Dick back.

Such is the narrative in "The Tenth of January," a short story by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, set in late 1859 and early 1860, but published in the Atlantic Monthly for March 1868. It was later collected in Men, Women, and Ghosts in 1869. What Sene and the other characters did not know, but contemporary readers certainly did, was that the real story would come to its climax on the titular date, January 10, 1860, when everyone would be killed in one of the most horrific industrial accidents in the history of the United States.

When the Pemberton Mills collapsed without warning that day, its five stories turned to rubble within a minute or so, an estimated 500 to 750 were inside — in addition to the scores that died (some charred beyond recognition), survivors were mangled or cut to pieces. Most of the victims were young girls. Charitable donations to their families amounted to $4000 within two days. In fact, on the list of victims, an "Asenath Martin" was marked as unrecovered or unidentified. Phelps describes the scene in her fictional account:

A network twenty feet high, of rods and girders, of beams, pillars, stairways, gearing, roofing, ceiling, walling; wrecks of looms, shafts, twisters, pulleys, bobbins, mules, locked and interwoven; wrecks of human creatures wedged in; a face that you know turned up at you from some pit which twenty-four hours' hewing could not open; a voice that you know crying after you from God knows where; a mass of long, fair hair visible here, a foot there, three fingers of a hand over there; the snow bright-red under foot; charred limbs and headless trunks tossed about; strong men carrying covered things by you, at sight of which other strong men have fainted; the little yellow jet that flared up, and died in smoke, and flared again, leaped out, licked the cotton-bales, tasted the oiled machinery, crunched the netted wood, danced on the heaped-up stone, threw its cruel arms high into the night, roared for joy at helpless firemen, and swallowed wreck, death, and life together out of your sight, — the lurid thing stands alone in the gallery of tragedy.

But Sene, Del, and Dick did not know any of this was coming. Sene had been secretly struggling with what to do about Dick; she knew it was best to cut off the engagement so that he and Del could be happy together. But that meant sacrificing her own happiness, or as little of it as she had anyway. But Phelps narrates that, "Asenath was no heroine, you see." On the morning of January 10, however, she had made a decision which left her unburdened (presumably, she would give up on Dick, but the text is not clear at this point).

She goes to work, feeling more and more settled in her decision, more at peace with God and her disfigurement... when disaster strikes. Phelps tells us that the telegraph cables spread the message far and wide, that people were swept up in the horrible news... at least temporarily, before going back to their own lives. But what of the people of Lawrence and the Pemberton Mills? What of Asenath Martyn, her father, her lover, and her friend?

One that we love may go upon battle-ground, and we are ready for the worst: we have said our goodbys; our hearts wait and pray: it is his life, not his death, which is the surprise. But that he should go out to his safe, daily, commonplace occupations, unnoticed and uncaressed, — scolded a little, perhaps, because he leaves the door open, and tells us how cross we are this morning; and they bring him up the steps by and. by, a mangled mass of death and horror,— that is hard.

Today, and in her own lifetime, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was best known for her 1868 novel The Gates Ajar and its sequels. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that "The Tenth of January" should be remembered today as one of her most powerful, most well-written, and most emotionally moving works. Her talents are on full display here: in descriptions of the town, in the relatable feelings of uncertainty in the lead character, the harrowing descriptions from inside the collapsed structure, and the gut-wrenching realism of its aftermath (not to mention the tantalizing ending). Though long for a short story, it can be read in one sitting. I can't recommend enough that today's readers take the time to do so.

The Gates Ajar: the happiest thing in the world

"One week; only one week to-day, this twenty-first of February." Thus begins the 1868 novel The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The book features a woman named Mary who has difficulty coping with the death of her brother, a soldier named Roy, who died a week before the story opens. Friends, in trying to cheer her, told her she should have been ready for anything, including his death: "Everybody knows by what a hair a soldier's life is always hanging." Mary, in response, notes, "I suppose it is all true; but that never makes it any easier."

Presented almost as a diary, the book allows Mary to detail her sufferings in a first-person account. Eventually, through conversations with a widowed aunt named Winifred, she begins to discover the truth about heaven — that it is a very real and material place. "A new earth," her aunt says, quoting from the Bible. In fact, she uses various Bible passages and hymns to explain her belief not only to Mary but to others, including a Deacon, to prove that the afterlife is just a better version of life. These "spiritual lives" see sunrises, smell flowers, read books, talk with other spirits, build homes and families. As Winifred explains, her daughter Faith beside her:

A happy home is the happiest thing in the world. I do not see why it should not be in any world. I do not believe that all the little tendernesses of family ties are thrown by and lost with this life... Eternity cannot be—it cannot be the great blank ocean which most of us have somehow or other been brought up to feel that it is, which shall swallow up, in a pitiless, glorified way, all the little brooks of our delight. So I expect to have my beautiful home, and my husband, and Faith, as I had them here; with many differences and great ones, but mine just the same.

Phelps dedicated the book to her father Austin, a minister and educator, "whose life, like a perfume from beyond the Gates, penetrate every life which approaches it." The novel was extremely successful; one newspaper reported it earned the author $20,000 in one month (almost certainly an exaggeration). Whatever the numbers, the book was a huge seller, enthusiastically purchased by a country in grief after the recent horrors of Civil War. Several editions were printed, including an illustrated version with expensive Morocco binding. Phelps even produced a couple sequels.

Theologians were not as supportive of The Gates Ajar as the reading public. One critic in England wrote that the book's "wide circulation... does not speak well for the discrimination of its readers. It is simply a second-rate sensational novel, professedly of a religious character, but betraying so much positive error, and treating serious subjects in such a flippant, unhallowed strain, that no small amount of Christian charity is required to avoid the conclusion, that 'an enemy hath done this!'"

Most welcome and most wholesome tears

A friend recommended to Oliver Wendell Holmes that he read the short story "The Bell of Saint Basil's." Moved by the story, he wrote a letter on May 31, 1891 to its author, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. "I may as well confess that the pathos of your story quite overcame me," he wrote. "I did not know I had so many tears in my emotional fountains... It did me good to have a good, long cry."

The story which left Dr. Holmes in tears follows an elderly couple from Virginia, Mr. and Mrs. Peyton, in the decades after the Civil War. Mr. Peyton serves as President of the fictitious Saint Basil's College, though the aftermath of the war has left him without students. Even so, he makes his way to the chapel every morning to ring the bells and offer a prayer to the empty pews:

Saint Basil's boys have gone beyond the urging voice of the chapel bell. Saint Basil cannot call her roll to-day... Saint Basil was, in short, a college without a boy. She had kept her ancient name, her distinguished President, her college buildings, her extended real estate, her chartered rights, and to some extent her invested endowments. What she had not kept was her students. Virginians spoke of the college as they do of the corn-fields, the mansions, the very chickens; nay, the moon in the heavens: "Oh, you ought to have seen it before the war!"

One day, however, Mr. Peyton discovers a man sitting in the final row. It was the revelation of that man's identity that moved Dr. Holmes. "I could not help writing on the spot, while the impression of your story was still tingling all through me," he wrote to Ward. "The ink on the first page of this note and the tears on my cheeks dried at the same moment. I thank you, then, for all these most welcome and most wholesome tears."

Death of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward died on January 28, 1911 in Massachusetts. In her 67 years, she had been an advocate for various reform movements and written over 50 books — her first (Ellen's Idol) published when she was 20 years old, her last (Comrades) published posthumously.

Ward's most famous book, however, remains The Gates Ajar (published well before her marriage to the significantly-younger writer Herbert Dickinson Ward). That book took her two years to write; she then spent two more years revising it "so many times that I could have said it by heart," she claimed. It was ultimately published in 1868 by Ticknor & Fields.

The Gates Ajar describes a conceptual afterlife where people retain their physical shapes and personalities, basically an idealized or perfected version of the living world. The book's popularity came, in part, from such a positive view on death shortly after the Civil War. She received thousands of letters in response and the book had two sequels: Beyond the Gates (1883) and The Gates Between (1887). Told in the voice of the fictional Mary Cabot, whose brother died in the Civil War, the journal-styled book The Gates Ajar comes to an eventual acceptance of death. From the chapter marked "January":

Morning and noon and evening come and go; the snow drifts down and the rain falls softly; clouds form and break and hurry past the windows; shadows melt and lights are shattered, and little rainbows are prisoned by the icicles that hang from the eaves.

I sit and watch them, and watch the sick-lamp flicker in the night, and watch the blue morning crawl over the hills; and the old words are stealing down my thought: That is the substance, this the shadow; that the reality, this the dream.

*For much of this information, I am indebted to Nina Baym's introduction to a modern collection of Phelps Ward's series, Three Spiritualist Novels (2000).