Guest post: Salt! Salt!: The Death of Edward Vernon Sparhawk

1837 wasn't a good year for Edward Vernon Sparhawk. He had likely contracted tuberculosis while caring for his wife, Julia, who lost a long, painful battle with the disease the previous summer. Writing as "Pertinax Placid" in the May 1835 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger — the first of three issues he edited before Edgar Allan Poe took over in August — Sparhawk addressed his young son and foretold an untimely end:

The dreaming pauses 'midst thy play, as if of sudden thought,
The speaking glances of thine eye, when with hope and gladness fraught—
These tell a tale of after times, when I no more shall guide
The wand'rings of thy youthful feet, or lead thee by my side—
When the fondness of a father's love thou never more canst know,
And I shall in an early grave sleep tranquilly and low.

Virginia Capitol, c. 1831

In June, a robber bludgeoned Sparhawk from behind as he walked home from work. The assailant broke both his jaws and left him unconscious, in exchange for a few coins and a pen knife. A frail man to begin with, by winter Sparhawk was no longer strong enough to continue his job as a reporter at the state Capitol in Richmond.

Still, the year had bright spots. In July, Sparhawk purchased and became editor of the Petersburg, Virginia, Intelligencer. Then, in August, his marriage to Eloise Warrell relieved any fear that when his disease took its final turn, there would be no one to take care of his children. By the start of 1838, he was well enough to go back to work. He arrived at the House of Delegates on the morning of January 6, where his colleagues noticed his mood was much improved.

Crossing the grounds of the Capitol after the House had adjourned, Sparhawk was stricken and called out for help. Passers by rushed to catch him as he crumpled to the ground. He cried for "Salt! Salt!", but any relief for the hemorrhage arrived too late. His body was carried to his mother-in-law's house, and he was buried the next day at Shockoe Hill.

An accomplished poet, prose writer, reporter, printer, editor, and a persistent instigator, Edward Vernon Sparhawk died a week shy of his 37th birthday. In a life marked with tragedies, he strived to be the person neither his father nor brother had the chance to become. Years earlier, coping with his brother's death at sea, he summarized the human journey:

So o'er the ocean of life as we're sailing,
    Wild waves our peace annoy;
Seeming, each blast of the tempest prevailing,
    Hope in our breast to destroy:
The calm of tranquility, softly returning,
    Quells the storms of the breast;
The rainbow of hope, in our bosom still burning,
    Points to eternal rest.

*Chris Hoffman is writing the first full biography of Edward Vernon Sparhawk. A member of the Boston Biographers Group, Chris lives with his wife, their cat, and their dog, and can be found on Twitter @xprhoff.

Guest post: Birth of Higginson

American literary history doesn’t feature too many significant villains, but Thomas Wentworth Higginson would certainly seem to qualify. Higginson, who was born on December 22, 1823, has come to be known principally for two destructive roles in relationship to Emily Dickinson: his editorial critiques of her poetry in her lifetime (which, the accounts often go, discouraged her even further from seeking publication or audience); and his editorial revisions of her poetry after her death (which led to the standardized versions of her works that first gained national prominence in the late 19th century and were only challenged many decades later).

While Higginson did contribute to some of those posthumous revisions (such as insisting that each poem have a title), it seems clear that most were due instead to Mabel Loomis Todd; Higginson himself expressed strong reservations about what was being lost in the process. Moreover, and to my mind even more importantly, Higginson's evolving editorial relationship to Dickinson while she was alive was far more complex, and more meaningful to the poet, than the standard narrative suggests. Higginson wrote with sensitivity and candor about the stages, limits, and possibilities of that relationship, through the specific lens of Dickinson's challenging and compelling letters to him (which constitute, as do all of her letters, poems in their own right), in an 1891 essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Emily Dickinson's Letters."

If the standard narratives of Higginson's roles and relationship with Dickinson are thus frustratingly simplistic and inaccurate on their own terms, the focus on them also obscures his hugely meaningful contributions to American literature, culture, and society throughout the second half of the 19th century. Perhaps one reason why Higginson and Dickinson could not quite understand each other was that for Higginson, the social and political realms were apparently entirely inseparable from the literary; virtually all of his published works engage directly with his activist and progressive goals and efforts. A dedicated abolitionist and the Colonel of the first authorized regiment of U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War (the First South Carolina Volunteers), Higginson later wrote Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870) about those experiences. A lifelong advocate for women’s rights, he published readable arguments for those ideas in works such as Common Sense about Women (1881) and Women and Men (1888). And when he turned in his final decade to biographies and anthologies of American literature, such as the lectures collected in A Readers History of American Literature (1903), he not only helped define our literary tradition for a new century, but illustrated his own prominent place in that tradition.

For all those reasons, we would do well to afford Higginson that place as we continue to redefine our literary and cultural heritage.

*Ben Railton is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He has previously served as President of the New England American Studies Association and currently maintains the AmericanStudies blog. His most recent book, Redefining American Identity, was published by Macmillan in March 2011.

Guest post: Holmes and his hunt for Holmes

Image Source

Though he is most famous for his role as a Justice of the Supreme Court, an appointment which was made December 15, 1882, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was also the son of poet and author Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Years prior to his appointment, Holmes, Jr. had been a Captain for the Twentieth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army during the Civil War. He participated in a number of major battles and was wounded first at the Battle of Ball's Bluff where many of his Harvard classmates fell and then again at Antietam in the fall of 1862. When his father received a telegram informing him that his son was wounded through the neck at Antietam he set out on a journey to find him and wrote his account of the story in a piece titled "My Hunt after ‘The Captain’." It was first published in The Atlantic in December 1862. The search lasted many days after false leads, backtracking, and a combination of train and carriage rides. Although anxious, Dr. Holmes commented on the many incidental sights and conversations during his travels.

...though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth that I did look out of the car- windows with an eye for all that passed, that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time even laugh very much as others do who are attacked with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.

His descriptions of the battlefields and hospitals brought home to the Northern readers a bit of the reality of the war:

We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off to the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise directions, over the hills. Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide creek in which soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which we did not then know, but which must have been the Antietam. At one point we met a party, women among them, bringing off various trophies they had picked up on the battlefield. Still wandering along, we were at last pointed to a hill in the distance, a part of the summit of which was covered with Indian corn. There, we were told, some of the fiercest fighting of the day had been done. The fences were taken down so as to make a passage across the fields, and the tracks worn within the last few days looked like old roads. We passed a fresh grave under a tree near the road. A board was nailed to the tree, bearing the name, as well as I could make it out, of Gardiner, of a New Hampshire regiment.

At one point he visits a Union camp and speaks with some Confederate prisoners of war:

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the prisoners, what they were fighting for. One answered, "For our homes." Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested great indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their number, a sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly derogatory to those who would not stand up for the cause they had been fighting for.

After numerous attempts to find the Captain, traveling hundreds of miles and at times being so close but missing each other, the two finally share a reserved reunion and head home to Boston:

I saw my Captain; there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many cities.
"How are you, Boy?"
"How are you, Dad?"
Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay, which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture.

* Jessica Bussmann is the Education and Volunteer Coordinator at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. is buried.

Guest post: Death of Henry David Thoreau

May 6, 1862: Henry David Thoreau died 150 years ago today. Throughout the winter of 1861-62 Thoreau was confined to the house as his health deteriorated. He had picked up a cold in the winter of 1860 from Bronson Alcott which eventually developed into bronchitis, then tuberculosis. Thoreau even took a trip to Minnesota in the early spring of 1861 in search of health, but the change of scenery and climate made him no better.

Now that he was house-bound, Thoreau began to busily prepare several of his old essays for publication. In February 1861 he had gotten a request from his publisher, James T. Fields, to submit his works for the Atlantic Monthly. Thoreau gladly accepted Fields's offer but his previous run-ins with publishers left him cautious. He wrote Fields, "Of course, I should expect that no sentiment or sentence be altered or omitted without my consent." Throughout the late winter and early spring Thoreau re-worked several of his old lectures and put them into publishable form. "Walking," "Life Without Principle," "Autumnal Tints" and "Wild Apples" were all submitted to Fields for publication.

Thoreau was so weak at times that he couldn't even lift a pen, and his sister Sophia worked on the manuscripts while her brother dictated. By April Thoreau couldn't even climb the stairs to his bedroom, so his family brought his old Walden Pond cot downstairs to the front parlor. Bronson Alcott reported that Thoreau was "feeble," yet his spirits remained high. A friend later commented that he had never seen "a man dying with so much pleasure and peace." When asked by his aunt if he'd made his peace with God, Thoreau replied, "I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt."

On May 6, 1862 the end was near and, as his family gathered around him, Thoreau slipped into his final rest. He'd been working on his "Maine Woods" manuscripts and his thoughts remained on writing until the end; his sister and mother distinctly heard him say "moose" and "Indian" before he passed. Henry Thoreau died at 9:00 a.m. His sister Sophia commented that she felt as if "something very beautiful had happened — not death." Henry David Thoreau was just 44 years old. "Walking" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in June 1862.

*Richard Smith is an independent historian specializing in the antebellum period, with a special interest in the Transcendentalists. He has been involved in Living History for 20 years and for the last 11 years has portrayed Henry David Thoreau in and around Concord, Massachusetts. For more on today's guest blogger, visit www.MeetHenryDavidThoreau.com.

Guest post: Revealing Fanny Fern

Fanny Fern’s famous first novel, Ruth Hall, was released amid much hoopla in December 1854. Fern, the pseudonym for Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington, had recently left Boston and had settled in New York to write, first for the Musical World and Times and then for the New York Ledger. In the few years leading to the release of her first novel, critics and fans unsuccessfully tried to learn her identity and gender. Speculation about just who Fanny Fern really was rose to a fever pitch, especially upon the much-awaited release of Ruth Hall. Mason Brothers, her publisher, struggled to print enough copies to meet the never-before-seen demand for an American novel, yet utilized one of the most-successful early advertising campaigns to fuel that demand. Early critics insisted on reading the novel as autobiographically-based, something Mason Brothers denied, even as they publicized these speculations.

When Fern left Boston, she left behind her first two editors. One of those, William U. Moulton, editor of the True Flag, made it clear that he was bitter and angry at Fern for several reasons. Moulton was not used to dealing with a business-minded woman and resented Fern’s requests for earnings increases (to bring her income closer to a living wage) and especially resented her “abandoning” Boston (and the True Flag) for the greater earning power and prestige to be had in New York City. Although Moulton gladly profited from Fern’s pithy writing when he had her under his commission, nevertheless, he seemed disturbed and annoyed that she failed to conform to conventional feminine expectations of the era.

On December 30, 1854, just a few weeks after Ruth Hall was released, Moulton did the unthinkable – he outted Fanny Fern. Moulton announced that Fern’s identity was that of Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington, the scandalized ex-wife of Boston merchant Samuel Farrington, and, moreover, posited that Ruth Hall was a biographically-based novel laced with unflattering and, perhaps, false, representations of her family and acquaintances, including Moulton himself and Fern’s famous poet/editor brother, N. P. Willis. Fern’s novel, indeed, was biographically-based, and she wrote it with the assurance of anonymity. But, once her identity was known, it wasn’t difficult for readers to identify possible true-life models for the novel’s characters. Fern was hurled to the critical, though fascinated, masses, which devastated her personally, but ultimately led to making her book a phenomenal success.

*Debra Brenegan teaches English and Women’s Studies at Westminster College in Missouri. She is the author of Shame the Devil (SUNY Press), a historical novel based on the life of nineteenth-century journalist, novelist and feminist, Fanny Fern.

Guest post: Fanny Fern’s “The Model Husband”

Sketch of Fern by her daughter.
From collection of Smith College.

Fanny Fern's first published article was "The Model Husband," published June 28, 1851 in the Olive Branch, and it appears to be a light-hearted sketch of the typical nineteenth-century woman’s ideal spouse. Her inversion of gender roles drives the comic innuendo, with her model husband dutifully taking over baby feedings through the night and even into the dreaded wee hours of the morning "while Mrs. Smith curls her hair." Fern’s details of the irksome tasks of childcare would have rung true with most young mothers at the time. The model husband cheerfully absorbs the annoyances and inconveniences normally saddled upon women of the era, down to "the soft molasses ginger bread that is rubbed into his hair, coat, and vest during these happy conjugal seasons." The humor also derives from Fern's sense of what women really wanted from a husband: time to curl their hair and "receive the congratulations of the parish gossips."

Yet Fern craftily hides a deeper need that she would more explicitly demand in her later works, especially Ruth Hall, published four years later. In it, Fern sketches a profile of her model husband as ideal publisher. Significantly, his greatest virtue is respect of her economic autonomy by paying her a fair wage and not interfering with her writing or her relationships with her readers. What women wanted more than time to curl their hair and gossip is signaled in the first sentence of "The Model Husband": “His pocket-book is never empty when his wife calls for money.” In 1851, Fern was writing for the Olive Branch under a paltry wage and stringent editorial constraints compared to those of her later position under Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger. Thus she did not feel at liberty to dilate upon men’s economic domination of women in the public sphere until landing her position with Bonner years later. Her depiction of women’s wants in a man in this early column, therefore, tend to feed directly into the sexist stereotype of women as self-indulgent creatures with no desire to produce outside of the domestic sphere.

Although "The Model Husband" appears radical for the time, it only vaguely hints at the bold revolutionary battle Fern would wage in Ruth Hall for women’s right to become professionals in an otherwise male-dominated public market. In Ruth Hall, her concern is to revise the publisher’s business ethic to allow room for well-paid professional female authors. Such a pioneering ideological stand would have been instantly censored in the Olive Branch. Yet Fern does manage in "The Model Husband" to subvert the dominant ideology of the Cult of True Womanhood, especially according to Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy (1846). Specifically, she inverts True Womanhood’s demand that women submissively self-sacrifice out of duty to their families by instead indulging middle class women’s forbidden urges—all of which are harmless and perfectly reasonable—that their conventional roles systematically deny.

In crafting "The Model Husband," Fern thus expresses her complaints about the inadequacy of typical accepted male roles in the positive light of female fantasy rather than the polemic condemnations and diatribes she would frequently vent in her later Ledger columns. In Ruth Hall, she would savage former stingy and abusive employers like so many bad ex-husbands. The dark underside of "The Model Husband" is that Fern herself endured perhaps the worst marital nightmare imaginable. During her brief torturous second marriage, her husband Samuel Farrington chronically raped her, driving her to seek shelter in a hotel. Ironically, Fern had originally gravitated to him to assuage her financial needs since he was a model husband whose "pocket-book is never empty." The seeming panacea of the wealthy husband freely sharing his cash with his wife came at a great cost to Fern personally, and she would finally tell the full story of this aborted marriage in her second novel, Rose Clark. Thus her tone in "The Model Husband" remains genial if only to mask the lion she would unleash in her later works.

*David Dowling teaches in the English Department of the University of Iowa. He is the author of several books on 19th century writers, including Chasing the White Whale: The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today (University of Iowa Press, 2010) and the forthcoming Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America (to be released Fall 2011, Louisiana State University Press).

Guest post: Marriage of the Piatts

On June 18, 1861, Sarah Morgan Bryan married John James Piatt. In the early months of the Civil War, the marriage of the daughter of Kentucky slaveholders to a young man from Indiana seems the ultimate example of opposites attracting. But the two twenty-five year olds shared poetic talent and ambition (both had recently begun their published careers: John with his debut collection, Poems of Two Friends, co-authored with William Dean Howells; and Sarah with poems such as “Waiting at the Party,” in the Louisville Journal) and three years later released a co-authored collection, The Nests at Washington and Other Poems (1864).

For Sarah, co-authoring her first collection with her husband could be said to foreshadow much of her career: she would come to be known largely for poems about and for children, such as those collected in Poems in Company with Children (1877), A Book About Baby (1880), and Child’s-World Ballads (1887). Even when she focused on more mature themes, as in her first solo collection A Woman’s Poems (1871), she often did so through the dual and interconnected lenses of courtship and motherhood: the book’s first and third poems, “The Fancy Ball” and “Her Metaphors,” describe young women’s social aspirations; its second and fourth, “After Wings” and “The Little Stockings,” address a mother’s perspective on her children’s lives; and the balance continues throughout.

Yet simply describing these poems’ topics does a great injustice to Piatt and her significance to American poetic and literary history. Her dense, layered, multivocal style differentiates her from any contemporary poets, and makes even the most seemingly straightforward topics rich and resonant: “After Her First Party” views a teenage girl’s first social experience through the voices, perspectives, and identities of both the girl and her mother, lending humor and wisdom to both sides of this multi-generational dialogue; “A Pique at Parting” begins with that most clichéd of courtship subjects, one woman’s jealousy of another’s relationship with her suitor, and over five stream-of-consciousness stanzas extends its speaker’s sharp and evolving perspective to a striking range of themes. Her best poem, “The Palace Burner,” uses an ordinary domestic moment—a mother and her son looking at some newspaper images—to create one of American literature’s most deep and compelling examinations of class and gender, submission and rebellion, the layers of any individual’s identity and how we do and do not communicate them to our families, our communities, and even ourselves.

*Ben Railton is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He serves as President of the New England American Studies Association and maintains the AmericanStudies blog. His most recent book, Redefining American Identity, was published by Macmillan in March 2011.

Guest post: Crane and his vicious satire

It is difficult to think of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage as anything less than one of the great American works of the late 19th century. When it was published by D. Appleton and Co. in late 1895, it initially earned what H. G. Wells called "an orgy of praise." Reviewers commended Crane's unique story about a young private in the Union Army who battles shame and fear while yearning for military glory. Some even praised the novel's realism, although Crane was only 24 at the time of publication and had yet to witness battle. He later jokingly stated he had found inspiration from the "rage of conflict on the football field."

Not everyone found the novel to their liking, however. On April 16, 1896, The Dial published a passionate letter from its proprietor, General Alexander C. McClurg, a Civil War veteran as well as publisher and book collector. In his lengthy missive, McClurg attacked both The Red Badge of Courage and those who continued to sing its praises. Mistakenly believing that the novel was first published in England, only to be viciously let loose stateside, he wrote of it being "only too well known that English writers have had a very low opinion of American soldiers."

McClurg did not mince words. He deemed the book itself "a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies." The character of Henry Fleming was nothing more than "an ignorant and stupid country lad" without "a spark of patriotic feeling." Crane's writing was riddled with "absurd similes" and "bad grammar." Most damning of all was the fact that "nowhere are seen the quiet, manly, self-respecting, and patriotic men, influenced by the highest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles." McClurg summed up by stating the book ought not have been published in the country at all, "out of respect" for the American public.

The letter unleashed a torrent of responses. While several agreed with his sentiments regarding the novel's literary merits (or lack thereof), most did not. Many thought McClurg's attacks against The Red Badge of Courage and its young author unfair. As British author and critic Sydney Brooks wrote, the General "came out on the warpath, arrested Mr. Crane as a literary spy, court-martialled him, and shot the poor fellow off-hand."


*Maria Atilano is a Sr. Library Services Associate at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. She is a frequent contributor to Wikipedia, having written the articles for Crane, "The Open Boat," and The Red Badge of Courage, amongst others.

Guest post: Mardi Gras, 1873

New Orleans in 1873

Mardi Gras has always been a serious business in New Orleans – fun, yes. But fun freighted with meaning. Amid the profound economic and social devastations of the Civil War, the Carnival season of 1873 was no exception. That year, parading organization the Mystick Krewe of Comus – the group credited with inventing many of the traditions of modern Carnival, including costumed street parades and floats, in 1857 – used Mardi Gras as a medium for satire. Members (all belonging to New Orleans’ white social elite) wore papier-mâché costumes: President Ulysses S. Grant was portrayed as a tobacco grub and Benjamin Butler – Union occupier of New Orleans during the Civil War – was transformed into a hyena. Enshrined on a throne was a banjo-playing gorilla, a telling symbol of the violent reassertion of white supremacy that was already underway in the city.

The literary implications of Mardi Gras in 1873 were of a different order. Eagerly observing the Comus parade was journalist and author Edward King. He was in town as part of a grand tour of the former Confederate States which formed the basis of a series of pioneering articles for Scribner’s Monthly, later published in a single volume as The Great South (1875). King’s sympathetic portrait of the South was a vital part of the national narrative of reunion that was just getting underway. His glowing portrait of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebrations – which pointedly ignored the politics on display – was clearly designed to enchant Northern readers:

Thousands of people assemble in dense lines along the streets included in the published route of march; Canal street is brilliant with illumination, and swarms of persons occupy every porch, balcony, house-top, pedestal, carriage and mule-car. Then comes the train of Comus, who appears only at night, and torch-bearers, disguised in outré masks, light up the way… After the round through the great city is completed, the reflection of the torch-light on the sky dies away… and the fearless, who are willing to usher in Lent with sleepless eyes, stroll home in the glare of the splendid Southern sunrise, yearly vowing that each Mardi-Gras hath verily surpassed its predecessor.

King’s depiction of Mardi Gras for a national audience helped establish Carnival in New Orleans as a tourist destination. But it was not the most important literary consequence of Carnival in 1873. Whilst watching Comus parade through the streets of New Orleans, King befriended a part-time journalist and part-time cotton clerk named George Washington Cable (pictured). In this casual acquaintance, as Christopher Benfey has put it, “the seeds of modern Southern literature" were sown.

After the parade, Cable took King on a tour of the city, and the pair ended up at Cable’s home in the Garden District. There, he read King the stories about New Orleans that he had been working on in his spare time. King was so smitten with what he heard that he lobbied his editors at Scribner’s to publish them. Eventually, they did: Cable’s “Sieur George” was published in October 1873. Soon, Cable was poised at the head of a Southern literary renaissance. Just as swiftly, his vision of New Orleans – a vision that was marked by a profound concern for the effects of slavery, war and Reconstruction in a way that was diametrically opposed to the neo-Confederate satires of the Comus Krewe members – became the dominant popular image of the city. All thanks to a chance Mardi Gras meeting. Fun, yes. But serious fun.


*Thomas Ruys Smith is a Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the UK. His new book, Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century, will be published by Continuum in May. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Guest post: Miss Leslie and stewed pumpkin

Take a quart of stewed pumpkin. Put it into a sieve, and press and strain it as dry as possible. Then set it away to get cold. Beat eight eggs very light, and stir them gradually into the pumpkin, a little at a time, in turn with a quart of rich cream and a pound of sugar. Mix together a quarter of an ounce of powdered mace, two powdered nutmegs, and a table-spoonful of ground ginger, and stir them into the other ingredients. When all is mixed, stir the whole very hard. Cover the bottom of your pie-dishes with a thin paste, and fill them nearly to the top with the mixture. Cut out narrow strips of paste with your jagging-iron, and lay them across the tops of your pies. Bake them from an hour to an hour and a quarter. Send them to table cool. They are best the day they are baked.

This pumpkin pie recipe, appropriate for Thanksgiving, comes from Eliza Leslie (known as Miss Leslie), who was born earlier this month in 1787. Her Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats was one of the earliest American cookbooks, published anonymously in 1828. She also wrote etiquette books, juvenile literature, and was an editor of, and contributor to, literary annuals. The variety of Miss Leslie's literary interests to some extent reflects the diverse subject matter of lady’s magazines, publishing didactic and sentimental stories side by side with work departments, recipes, and the like.

Miss Leslie also edited a famous Philadelphia gift book, The Gift, a Christmas and New Year Present. Eight volumes of the annual were issued from 1833 to 1845; contributors included Edgar A. Poe, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Illustrations were done by Thomas Sully and Eliza’s brother, Charles R. Leslie. The quality of The Gift was, indeed, exceptional; to compare, Miss Leslie’s other project, The Violet: A Christmas and New Year’s Gift, or Birth-day Present was purely commercial and generally tasteless.

Among Miss Leslie’s own contributions to The Gift is a lovely tale called "The Ghost Book" (The Gift for 1839). A boy with a telling name "Caleb" goes looking for a huckleberry pudding or pumpkin pie recipe in the kitchen loft; instead, he discovers a mysterious hand-written book. Caleb shows the book to his friends, and the boys recognize the hand-writing of their school master Orrin Loomis who left their village some time ago. They go to a ruinous and deserted stable in the neighborhood and read the book aloud.

     "If Master Loomis has put a moral at the fore part," – said Stacey, – "just pass it over, and get on at once with the story."
     "You needn’t tell me that;" – replied Harman, – "but the beginning of this book seems to be tore out, for the first leaf has the figure of five on its corner – and if much of the story is missing, it will be pretty hard to make sense of the rest."
     "And how we can but try," – observed Caleb Rowan – "half a loaf’s better than no bread."

However reading a book without a moral can be dangerous, as Miss Leslie's story shows. Loomis narrates how he was haunted by a mysterious ghost from the closet while living in the family of one of the boys, David Gleason. Then Loomis moved to the house of another boy, Stacey Brooks; his last house was that of Caleb Rowan. Finally the schoolmaster describes that one evening he went to the same old stable to read a book and suddenly "was startled by a strange and unearthly sound that seemed to proceed from a dark corner” behind him. Affrighted by his voice, Harman Brooks interrupts reading at the words “the horrors of my story are coming on." The same moment the boys hear three knocks at the door; they scream falling on each other… and hear the voice of Orrin Loomis, their master.

Loomis was visiting the village on the way to one of the western colleges where he got a job and, passing the stable, was struck by the voice of Harman Brooks "reading something which he soon recognised as the rough copy of a tale, in writing which he had amused some of his leisure hours, intending it for one of the periodicals of the day." He convinced the boys that "the whole narrative of what they called the ghost-book was an entire fiction." The boys were "relieved and delighted" to hear that. We may assume that the reader holding an exquisite and elegant annual in her hands felt "relieved and delighted" too. By the end of the story, she came to realize how much more enjoyable it is to read the gift book than the ghost-book, especially the one with the moral missing!

*Alexandra Urakova is a Senior Researcher at the Gorky Institute of World Literature and Associate Professor of English at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia. She is the author of The Poetics of Body in the Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (Moscow, 2009). On gift books see her essay "'The Purloined Letter' in the Gift Book: Reading Poe in a Contemporary Context" in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 64.3 (2009): 323–346.

Guest post: Death of Poe and Holmes

*Today's guest blog is by novelist Matthew Pearl, whose historical fiction mysteries include The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow. His third novel, The Last Dickens, follows the publisher James R. Osgood in pursuit of the last manuscript of Charles Dickens. Matthew has also written a two-part guest blog for The Edgar Allan Poe Calendar. For more information, please visit his web site.

Edgar Allan Poe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. both died on October 7, one in 1849, the latter in 1894. There are many interesting ways to compare and contrast Holmes and Poe from the points of view of a biographer, a historian, or a reader. I have some thoughts on the two figures from the perspective of a fiction writer who has used both as characters in novels.

I chose Holmes as the central figure in my first novel, The Dante Club. This was not an obvious decision, because the story (as the title suggests) really is an ensemble, and I had my pick of terrific historical personalities from a small group that helped complete the first American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. For a while, I leaned toward James Russell Lowell, another colorful poet and close friend of Holmes's. Why did I end up hitching my wagon to Holmes? Holmes's strength as a character reflects one of his personal strengths in life: versatility. In writing a novel about poets who must embark on a dangerous investigation, the historical novelist could ask for no better recruit than Holmes: not only a popular poet, but a Harvard Medical School professor, a physician, and himself a novelist — not to mention a savant at conversation, wit and socializing.

Think of the challenge of writing about writers and trying to make it engaging and dramatic. A writer's central occupation involves sitting at a desk and, well, writing, and their personalities are often introverted. Not material that necessarily lends itself to external drama. Being one myself, I know I'd make a pretty boring character! No wonder doctors, lawyers and police officers are such frequent choices as protagonists for books, films and television. But Holmes erases these worries, and grants you wonderful settings for scenes, as well, other than a writer's library. I'm not the only one to think so, either: check out Tess Gerritsen's The Bone Garden for another Holmes adventure.

Poe presents such a different profile to the fiction writer. His persona is so larger than life and enigmatic, many novelists are tempted to make him come off as somewhat demented, similar to some of the characters he created. Fellow novelist Louis Bayard and I actually contributed a joint article about the appeal of using Poe as a character for Poe Studies journal. Unlike Lou, whose novel The Pale Blue Eye caught up with Poe as a young cadet at West Point, in my novel, The Poe Shadow, Poe has just died and the intrigue surrounding his death animates the story. I've told Lou I think he's very brave by using Poe as a character. For me, trying to compete with reader's own ideas of what Poe would be like as a person was too daunting, and a hit-or-miss proposition. Unlike Holmes, whom many of my readers discovered for the first time in my novel, everyone has their "own" Poe. That's part of the way I wanted instead to use Poe's "shadow": to show how unattainable the real Poe is, and how that could send my characters on an adventure of discovery that, in the context of my novel, becomes a matter of life or death.

I also liked the idea of reminding my readers that enjoying and caring about Poe in 1849 took courage and originality, that he was not the icon he is today. Having this distance from Poe, rather than placing him center stage as a character, also allowed my characters to realize, as I did, that, unlike the mythical Poe, at the end of the day Poe was looking for a normal, stable, family and financial life... one that might have looked something like Holmes's, had Poe survived long enough to see his plans through.

Guest post: Mount Auburn Cemetery consecrated

Mount Auburn Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark, was consecrated on September 24, 1831. In his consecration address, Justice Joseph Story (later buried in the cemetery; see image at right) noted that, "Here are the lofty oak, the beech,... the rustling pine, and the drooping willow... All around us there breathes a solemn calm, as if we were in the bosom of a wilderness."

Both literature and horticulture have been important elements at Mount Auburn since its inception. The cemetery's founding drew upon roots from earlier literary proponents of Romanticism expressed in landscape design and it was originally incorporated under the auspices of the then new Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1829. Mount Auburn cultivated necessary early support from Bostonians interested in both horticulture and literature.

Indeed the Cemetery drew upon literature even for its name. In the early 1800s, this rolling, wooded land that once had been a colonial-era farm became known colloquially as "Sweet Auburn." This name drew from Oliver Goldsmith’s nostalgic poem "The Deserted Village" (1770) which references a fictitious town of Sweet Auburn. Founding trustees of the cemetery named its highest hill Mount Auburn.

A visitor today may stop at monuments commemorating dozens of literary figures as well as explore the horticultural diversity of this nationally-acclaimed arboretum. The cornucopia of individuals with literary affiliations at Mount Auburn is varied: novelists, poets, playwrights, historians, editors, publishers, journalists, legal and classical scholars, technical writers and children's book authors, among others.

Many of those writers use horticultural imagery. For example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow begins his poem "The Village Blacksmith" with, "Under the spreading chestnut tree / The village smithy stands." In "A Gleam of Sunshine" (1845), he writes:

The shadow of the linden-trees
Lay moving on the grass;
Between them and the moving boughs,
A shadow, thou didst pass.

Nathaniel Parker Willis, buried at Mount Auburn in 1867, wrote "City Lyrics" in 1850. The poem includes the stanza:

Oh woman! Thou secret past knowing!
Like lilachs [sic] that grow by the wall,
You breathe every air that is going,
Yet gather but sweetness from all!

Another Mount Auburn notable is Sarah Sprague Jacobs, who wrote poetry and authored several books for young adults including Nonantum and Natick (1853), which notes:

High upon the straight black cherry
The pigeon swings,—
With its fruit he maketh merry,
Flapping his wings;
As, on the neighboring dead ash limbs,
The stealthy hen-hawk watches him.

Oliver Wendell Holmes makes several references to notable trees in his 1858 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, including:

What we want is the meaning, the character, the expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual. There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which if well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.

While not all of the many literary individuals that are buried here included horticulture in their writings, they certainly chose to be surrounded by horticulture in memorialization at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

*This guest blog was written by Jim Gorman, a certified arborist who is also fond of the written word. He has been a docent at Mount Auburn for the past three years.

Guest post: Irving mourns for his brother

The youngest of eight children, Washington Irving was part of an exceptionally close and devoted New York family. Considered the least practical of his eight siblings, Irving’s brothers had, over the course of the first 35 years of his life, financed a European excursion, scolded him over money management, and sought political appointments for him.

But given the opportunity, Irving was always equally as generous — especially when it came to his older brother Peter. When Irving made it big almost literally overnight with the success of The Sketch Book in 1817, he immediately lost all his profits in one of Peter’s get-rich-quick schemes, an ill-advised investment in steamboats. But Irving was always exceptionally close to Peter, forgiving him without question even as he continued to shoulder his financial burdens.

When Peter died in June 1838, Irving was devastated. Three months later, Irving was having difficulty finding literary inspiration. On September 22, 1838, Irving penned a heart-wrenching letter to his sister Sarah, pouring out his sense of loss:

Every day, every hour I feel how completely Peter and myself were intertwined together in the whole course of our existence... I was not conscious how much this was the case while he was living, but, now that he is gone, I feel how all-important he was to me... I feel that none can be what he was to me; none can take so thorough an interest in my concerns; to none can I so confidingly lay open my every thought and feeling, and expose every fault and foible, certain of such perfect toleration and indulgence.

Irving hoped writing would distract him but it was impossible. He said that his "literary pursuits" were so often carried out with Peter's help "that I cannot open a book, or take up a paper, or recall a past vein of thought, without having him instantly before me, and finding myself completely overcome."

By the end of the year, Irving would be writing again and putting his Tarrytown cottage in order. For the next 21 years, Irving would take care of his brother Ebenezer and his five daughters, allowing them to call Sunnyside home. For Washington Irving, brotherly love was boundless.

*Brian Jay Jones is the author of Washington Irving: An American Original. He is currently working on a biography of Jim Henson. His web site is at http://www.brianjayjones.com/.

Guest post: Thoreau leaves Walden

The second to last chapter of Walden ends:

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.

After 2 years, 2 months and 2 days, Henry Thoreau left his house at Walden Pond and moves back home in Concord.

Thoreau's stay at Walden was a great success and he would never again have such a productive literary period. He finished two drafts of the book he went to the Pond to write, A Week on The Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which would be published in 1849. He wrote a lecture and had it published as an essay, "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," and also began another essay on his 1846 trip to Maine. And he also started a lecture entitled "A History of Myself," an account of his "housekeeping" at Walden Pond. This lecture would eventually become Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden; or, Life in The Woods — but that wouldn't be for another seven years!

Why did Thoreau leave the Pond? In the conclusion of Walden he writes, "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." And Thoreau did accomplish a great deal in those two years, and not just in a literary sense. He grew up in those two years. He lived a relatively self-reliant life and discovered what it meant to "be alive." At Walden, Thoreau lived his life on his terms and and, in his words, endeavored to live the life that he imagined.

When Thoreau left the Pond he moved back into his parents house for about a month. In October, Ralph Waldo Emerson began a one year lecture tour in England. Thoreau would move into Emerson's house as a caretaker/handy man in order to watch over the Emerson family and handle RWE's business affairs while he was gone. Near the end of 1848 Thoreau would move home to his parents' house and would remain with them for the rest of his life.

*Richard Smith is an independent historian specializing in the Antebellum period, with a special interest in the Transcendentalists. He has been involved in Living History for 20 years and for the last 11 years has portrayed Henry David Thoreau in and around Concord, Massachusetts. For more on today's guest blogger, visit www.MeetHenryDavidThoreau.com.