Lucy Larcom's labor of love

I find that people are imagining I have been very industrious this winter, by the way they talk about my new book, which they suppose is something original. I don't want to give wrong impressions in that way, as the selections are more valuable on their own account than mine.

So wrote Lucy Larcom to publisher James T. Fields from Beverly, Massachusetts on May 20, 1866. The book in question was already receiving a little hype, though not yet officially announced. Titled Breathings of the Better Life when published the next year, it was not a book written by Larcom, but edited by her. The book compiled several prose sketches and poems, including several anonymous works and a few traditional hymns. All the selections follow a theme: finding inspiration in saints and Biblical quotes to apply to contemporary life. As Larcom described it, these are "voices that cannot fail to inspire the traveller struggling upward to a better life." Still, she told Fields, "It has been altogether a labor of love with me."

In fact, Larcom wanted to remove herself from the book as much as possible in the hopes of letting the content speak for itself. In her letter to Fields, she asked her name by listed only as "Miss Larcom" — or, better still, even less obtrusively as "L. L." She also emphasized to Fields that the book had to have the lowest cover price possible. Though the final publication did include her full name, the preface in the book carefully ascribed its purpose: an inexpensive book for those who did not have a large library, in a portable size that could be taken to "the workshop, the camp, or the sick-room," and serve like "the presence of a friend." Larcom goes on:

The soul, cramped among the petty vexations of earth, needs to keep its windows constantly open to the invigorating air of large and free ideas: and what thought is so grand as that of an ever-present God, in whom all that is vital in humanity breathes and grows? The want of every human being is a wider expansion to receive from Him, and to give of His; fuller inspirations and outbreathings of that Spirit by which man is created anew in Him, a living soul.

Religion is life inspired by Heavenly Love; and life is something fresh and cheerful and vigorous. To forget self, to keep the heart buoyant with the thought of God, and to pour forth this continual influx of spiritual health heavenward in praise, and earthward in streams of blessing, — this is the essence of human, saintly, and angelic joy; the genuine Christ-life, the one life of the saved, on earth or in heaven.

The book includes both prose and poetry. Few of the listings include the full name of the author, but some are recognizable: Edmund Hamilton Sears, Henry Ward Beecher, and Larcom's friend John Greenleaf Whittier. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former minister, was represented by this excerpt from his long poem "Threnody":

Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
What rainbows teach, and sunsets show,—
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of saints that inly burned, —
Saying, "What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
Heart's love will meet thee again."

Larcom: Their mental activity was overflowing

Lucy Larcom was born in Beverly, Massachusetts on March 5, 1824, the ninth of ten children. When her father died in 1835, the family moved to Lowell so that her mother could run a boarding-house for local mill girls. Young Lucy became one of those mill girls at age 11. In her ten years there, she began writing poetry, soon drawing the attention of John Greenleaf Whittier, who became her life-long friend and advocate. After a short tenure teaching in Illinois, Larcom returned to Massachusetts and edited the children's magazine Our Young Folks, later renamed St. Nicholas Magazine.

Toward the end of her life, Larcom wrote A New England Girlhood. Published in 1889, the book was aimed for "girls of all ages, and [for] women who have not forgotten their girlhood." In it, she describes her early attempts at writing:

My early efforts would not, probably, have found their way into print, however, but for the coincident publication of the two mill-girls' magazines, just as I entered my teens. I fancy that almost everything any of us offered them was published, though I never was let in to editorial secrets. The editors of both magazines were my seniors, and I felt greatly honored by their approval of my contributions...

We did not receive much criticism; perhaps it would have been better for us if we had. But then we did not set ourselves up to be literary; though we enjoyed the freedom of writing what we pleased, and seeing how it looked in print. It was good practice for us, and that was all that we desired. We were complimented and quoted. When a Philadelphia paper copied one of my little poems, suggesting some verbal improvements, and predicting recognition for me in the future, I felt for the first time that there might be such a thing as public opinion worth caring for, in addition to doing one's best for its own sake...

And, indeed, what we wrote was not remarkable, — perhaps no more so than the usual school compositions of intelligent girls... But it was a perfectly natural outgrowth of those girls' previous life. For what were we? Girls who were working in a factory for the time, to be sure; but none of us had the least idea of continuing at that kind of work permanently. Our composite photograph, had it been taken, would have been the representative New England girlhood of those days. We had all been fairly educated at public or private schools, and many of us were resolutely bent upon obtaining a better education... The girls there were just such girls as are knocking at the doors of young women's colleges to-day. They had come to work with their hands, but they could not hinder the working of their minds also. Their mental activity was overflowing at every possible outlet.

The thing for your publishing list this fall

In the mid-19th century, an up-and-coming writer could get no better endorsement than one from John Greenleaf Whittier. On behalf of a young female poet he had befriended, Whittier wrote to his publisher James T. Fields on July 8, 1853:

I enclose to thee what I regard as a very unique and beautiful little book in MS. I don't wish thee however to take my opinion; but, the first leisure hour thee have read it, and I am sure thee will decide that it is exactly the thing for your publishing list this fall.

Whittier noted that these poems were "unlike anything in our literature" and would appeal to both "young and old." It was not until the postscript that Whittier mentioned the author's name: "Lucy Larcom of Beverly [Massachusetts]."

Larcom had published a few poems here and there, especially in the Lowell Offering, a publication which catered to the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts. She met Whittier in the mid-1840s; the two became good friends and Whittier often promoted her work. Later, they co-edited three books together.

James T. Fields, however, did not see her potential. He passed on the manuscript. It later was given to John P. Jewett, who published it as Similitude from Ocean and Prairie. Whittier concluded Jewett, not Fields, was "the best publisher for it."

Something for stay-at-home travellers

June 21 marks the Summer Solstice, the official first day of summer. Traveling during the hot season is certainly not a modern concept. Targeting that tradition, in 1876, the Lowell, Massachusetts poet Lucy Larcom compiled a book called Roadside Poems for Summer Travellers. As Larcom wrote in her opening preface:

The book begins and ends like the journey of a summer traveller, and may prove an agreeable companion to such as take it with them in their journeyings; for it lingers by brook and river, among mossy rocks and wayside blossoms, and under overhanging trees, and climbs and descends the hills of our own land, and the countries across the sea... And it has, perhaps, something for stay-at-home travellers as well.

The book collected poems (previously-published ones) by notable writers like Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Buchanan Read, Alice Cary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James T. Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Andrews Norton, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Bayard Taylor, Henry David Thoreau, Jones Very and, of course, her good friend John Greenleaf Whittier — as well as several British poets.

One of the contributions from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the poem "Travels by the Fireside." The poem perfectly answers Larcom's prediction that the book would appeal to "stay-at-home travellers as well."

The ceaseless rain is falling fast,
  And yonder gilded vane,
Immovable for three days past,
  Points to the misty main.

It drives me in upon myself
  And to the fireside gleams,
To pleasant books that crowd my shelf,
  And still more pleasant dreams.

I read whatever bards have sung
  Of lands beyond the sea,
And the bright days when I was young
  Come thronging back to me.

The narrator of the poem reads books reminiscent of his youthful travels and returns to those locales in his mind.

Let others traverse sea and land,
  And toil through various climes,
I turn the world round with my hand,
  Reading these poets' rhymes.

From them I learn whatever lies
  Beneath each changing zone,
And see, when looking with their eyes,
  Better than with mine own.

Your old friend, John G. Whittier

The poet John Greenleaf Whittier often encouraged the work of younger writers, particularly women. One of the women for whom Whittier served as a mentor was the Lowell, Massachusetts-based Lucy Larcom. She once invited him to visit but, being unable, he had to refuse. Rather than write a boring letter, however, he wrote her a poem. It is dated March 25, 1866, sent from his home in Amesbury, Massachusetts (don't worry if you don't get his inside jokes and other references):

Believe me, Lucy Larcom, it gives me real sorrow
That I cannot take my carpet-bag, and go to town to-morrow;
But I'm "Snow-bound," and cold on cold, like layers of an onion,
Have piled my back, and weighed me down, as with the pack of Bunyan.

The north-east wind is damper, and the north-west wind is colder,
Or else the matter simply is that I am growing older;
And then, I dare not trust a moon seen over one's left shoulder
As I saw this, with slender horn caught in a west hill-pine,
As on a Stamboul minaret curves the Arch Imposter's sign.

So I must stay in Amesbury, and let you go your way,
And guess what colors greet your eyes, what shapes your steps delay,
What pictured forms of heathen love, of god and goddess please you,
What idol graven images you bend your wicked knees to.

But why should I of evil dreams, well knowing at your head goes
That flower of Christian womanhood, our dear good Anna Meadows!
She'll be discreet, I'm sure, although, once, in a fit romantic,
She flung the Doge's bridal ring, and married the "Atlantic;"
And spite of all appearances, like the woman in the shoe,
She's got so many "Young Folks" now she don't know what to do.

But I must say, I think it strange that thee and Mrs. Spaulding,
Whose lives with Calvin's five-barred creed have been so tightly walled in,
Should quit your Puritanic homes, and take the pains to go
So far, with malice aforethought, to walk in a vain show!
Did Emmons hunt for pictures? was Jonathan Edwards peeping
Into the chambers of imagery with maids for Tammuz weeping?

Ah, well, the times are sadly changed, and I msyself am feeling
The wicked world my uaker coat from off my shoulders peeling;
God grant that, in the strange new sea of change wherein we swim,
We still may keep the good old plank of simple faith in Him!

P.S. My housekeeper's got the "tissuck," and gone away, and Lizzie
Is at home for the vacation, with flounce and trimmings busy;
The snow lies white about us, the birds again are dumb, —
The lying blue-frocked rascals who told us Spring had come;
But in the woods of Folly-Mill the sweet May-flowers are making
All ready for the moment of Nature's great awaking.

Come when they come; their welcome share: — except when at the city,
For months I've scarce seen womankind, save when, in sheerest pity,
Gail Hamilton came up, beside my lonely hearth to sit,
And make the Winter evening glad with wisdom and with wit
And fancy, feeling but the spur and not the curbing bit,
Lending a womanly charm to what before was bachelor rudeness; —
The Lord reward her for an act of disinterested goodness!

And now, with love to Mrs. F., and Mrs. S. (God bless her!),
And hoping that my foolish rhyme may not prove a transgressor,
And wishing for your sake and mine, it wiser were and wittier,
I leave it, and subscribe myself, your old friend,
                                      John G. Whittier.