By Susan Martin, Processing Archivist & EAD Coordinator

When you work with collections of family papers, there’s often one family member who, for whatever reason, stands out from the pack. This happened with me and Barbara Channing. Even before I knew anything about her, I couldn’t help liking her.

Barbara was born on 28 May 1883 in Brookline, Mass., the middle of the five children of noted psychiatrist Dr. Walter Channing. She had three brothers and one sister, but judging from the letters she wrote to her brother Henry Morse Channing, or “Hal,” she may have been especially close to him. You can find her letters in the MHS collection of Henry Morse Channing correspondence.

Hal was three years Barbara’s senior, and before he entered Harvard, his parents sent him to live and study in Germany for a year. Barbara wrote to him faithfully nearly every week, from August 1897 to August 1898. She was only 14 years old when he left and clearly idolized him.

I think it was her carefree, breezy writing style that first appealed to me. Her letters contrast with those of her father, who, in a loving but stern tone, frequently scolds Hal for the way he spends his money or manages his studies. Barbara’s letters are like a breath of fresh air.

For example, she describes spending her summer swimming, horseback riding, sailing, playing croquet, etc. She realizes how trivial these subjects must seem to Hal, so she excuses herself by saying, “A letter is a letter whether there is anything interesting in it or not.” Her letters are newsy, chatty, and gossipy, and when she runs out of material, she resorts to sending jokes or poems. Here is one of her original compositions:

There was a youth named Hal Channing,
Who after much fussing and planning,
Sailed across the blue sea,
To far away Germany,
And his brain now with German he’s cramming.

The MHS collection unfortunately doesn’t include Hal’s half of the correspondence, but it’s clear Barbara likes to get the same kind of letter from him. Once she tells him, “The kind of letter you wrote to me about all the funny things that happened to you and the funny things you saw I think is much more interesting and funny than a heap of discription [sic] about the scenery.”

Her slang is endearing. Things are bully, dandy, jolly, awfully this, or frightfully that. Modifiers are sometimes combined for emphasis (“It is perfectly terribly hot here to-day.”). Hal, all of 17 years old, is a “dear old man.” Instead of getting angry, people get “wrathy.” My personal favorite is Barbara’s description of her grandmother’s chocolate pies: “whackingly good”!

As cheerful and confident as she seems in her correspondence, Barbara is apparently shy and quiet in real life. She is frequently mortified in the presence of young men. One evening, she attends a dinner party thrown by her oldest brother Walter. She describes her nervousness in the company of the older girls (“I looked like such a little kid”) and her inability to make satisfactory conversation.

In spite of this shyness, Barbara has very close friendships. In almost every letter she mentions the Whitneys, neighbors who seem to be almost a second family for her. The Whitneys consist of father Henry Melville Whitney, mother Margaret (Green) Whitney, four daughters, and a son. The three oldest girls, Ruth, Elinor, and Laura, are around Barbara’s age.

Another of Barbara’s likeable qualities is her good-natured self-awareness. She acknowledges her own faults. These include difficulties at school, particularly with algebra and Latin; a tendency to bicker with her siblings; a certain nonchalance about church; and general naughtiness. But she is trying to improve herself: “I really am going to try not to lose my temper more than once a day. I may have to decide on twice a day.”

She also passes along local gossip, but she’s never unkind. In fact, here’s what she has to say about the engagement of Pauline Shaw to Laurence C. Fenno, which I think is pretty adorable:

Miss Pauline Shaw is just engaged. She is about thirty-five, and he forty. […] It is great fun to see them together in church, you know what I mean. Sort of hidden spoon. When they look at each other, there is a great deal of hidden spoon. They will make such a good couple. There both tall, he a little taller than she, and both very good looking. I’m sure you would like church better if you could see them. I watch them a lot. I suppose it is wicked but I do.

Barbara’s letters reveal an intelligent, lively, and above all very funny young woman. For example, on sending Hal a Christmas card, she quips: “You were always very fond [of] cards. Cheer up, you can give it to me next Christmas.” Here’s another humorous passage:

I do write such rotten letters, and such short ones compared to you. Your’s [sic] are always so nice and long, but really nothing ever happens exciting [here]. But last week Miss Bolles and Hayden got tipped out of the sleigh […] but they didn’t get hurt a single bit so that wasn’t so awfully exciting.

Barbara frequently teases Hal, knowing he’ll be embarrassed by her affection, but she’s also genuinely proud of him. She writes, “It is so nice to think of my big brother, good and fine enough to be able to have Mamma and Papa send him abroad alone.” She pleads with him to send her his picture, one of him looking her “square in the eyes.” He relents, and she keeps the picture on her dressing table.

All of this is not to say there are no dark clouds in Barbara’s life. In fact, the Channing family gets quite a scare in September 1897 when Barbara’s “severe attack of bowel trouble” turns out to be appendicitis and she requires an emergency appendectomy. The case is “unusually severe,” but she pulls through.

Dr. and Mrs. Channing, not wanting to worry Hal, don’t reveal the extent of the danger until after the fact, when Dr. Channing confesses to Hal, “Our anxiety and suffering to see Barbara so ill was quite beyond words, and even as I wrote you, the question of life and death was pending.” One of the few letters from Hal included in the collection is his reply:

I cannot tell you how much I have felt for dear Barbara, it has been such a terrible illness, and no on[e] except Barbara could have borne it as she has. She must have shown great patience and bravery, as I have heard that appendicitis is an exceedingly painful thing, and the slow convalescence must be very trying to one with a disposition as energetic as Barbara’s. It is terrible to think now what might have happened, and I so far away from home.

During Barbara’s recovery, Mrs. Channing writes, “She looks very well, and is just her old jolly happy self, joking often & enjoying all there is to be enjoyed.” Barbara, unable to sit up in bed, scribbles a little note at the bottom of her mother’s letter sending Hal “heaps of love.” Her sense of humor certainly survives intact. When Hal himself gets sick, she chides him, “You have not any business to behave that way. One sick in a family is plenty.”

Another significant event that weaves its way into the Channing family is the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Hal is ashamed to be away and wants to return to the states and join the army. His father advises him to defer his decision, saying the matter isn’t as urgent as he believes and there are enough men for the war. In Barbara’s letters, we get a slightly different spin: “Papa won’t let Walter go and your [sic] younger, so I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t let you. He doesn’t know that you think you ought.”

The war, however, does preoccupy her. She writes about it several times, saying things like, “It seems so terrible to think of war. I suppose we don’t half imagine how bad it will be. […] I can’t really think what an awful thing war is.” And later:

It seems perfectly fearful to think about this war and somehow I simply can’t think it is justifiable. You won’t go into it. If they really needed you it would be different only it would be terrible to have you go away. I only hope that all will be settled soon, though things seem to be worse all the time. I won’t be mournful anymore.

Barbara Channing married Dr. Donald Gregg in 1912 and died on 28 Mar. 1960 at the age of 76. She is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass.

Henry Morse Channing returned to the states, attended Harvard, and became a lawyer. The MHS also holds a collection of the diaries he kept while he was studying in Europe between 1897 and 1898. He married Katherine Minot in 1904, and the couple named their oldest daughter Barbara, probably after his sister.

I’ll leave you with one of Barbara’s typical sign-offs:

I would like to say a lot of affectionate and nice things but I wont for I suppose you would think they were silly but if you don’t, know that it’s just the same as if I had written them down and you will always be the same very dear brother. Ba.

By Laura Williams, Visitor Services Coordinator

As I look forward to future days when the doors of our institution are once again open to the public, it has been difficult not to miss walking through the beautiful Back Bay neighborhood on my usual commute. This neighborhood has been home to the MHS since March of 1899, though it hasn’t always been made up of the beautiful tree lined streets we see today!

There are so many interesting pieces from our collections regarding the development of the Back Bay neighborhood, beginning with the Boston & Roxbury Mill Corporation records from 1794-1912. When Back Bay was still just a bay of water, this company had previously used a dam on the bay to draw power for its mills. Unfortunately, this led to improper draining and a backup of wastewater that created a horrible smell. This was the way of it until 1856, when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decided to fill in the Back Bay and to construct a new neighborhood on top of the wasteland. [1] These records serve as a valuable piece of history for the understanding of city planning and development in Boston during years of momentous change.

In addition, the MHS is home to photographic documentation of certain aspects of this project. Below I have highlighted some pieces from the Arthur Asahel Shurcliff collection of glass lantern slides which show many plans and views of the Back Bay neighborhood. Shurcliff worked in the planning and development of Metropolitan Boston beginning in 1905, and served as an active member of the Boston Parks Commission and the Boston Planning Board. Shurcliff’s success in landscaping architecture extended outside of Boston as well, in the planning of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, the Plymouth Rock Shrine at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and consulting for the development of Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts.These lantern slides were digitized at the MHS in 2018, and show a unique view of the developing community.

Enjoy a look back at the MHS’s neighborhood and see what differences stand out to you! Explore the full collection of lantern slides here.

To begin, I have included a map by Benjamin Dearborn depicting  previous proposed plans for the Back Bay area, circa 1814. Due to impending sewage and wastewater buildup as result of similar plans, the land would later be filled in.

These plans show the Boston Park Department’s ideas for the Extension of Jersey Street c. 1912. Peep the MFA!

Aerial view of Back Bay c. 1920’s.

View of Back Bay c. 1920’s.

This image shows Shurcliff’s plans for widening roadways in Back Bay c. 1925.

[1] History. (2015, September 23). Back Bay Association. www.bostonbackbay.com/about-back-bay/history/

By Rakashi Chand, Senior Library Assistant

Today is Women’s Equality Day, a day to commemorate the certification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. The Amendment’s adoption was certified on 26 August 1920 by U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby: the result of a decades-long movement for women’s suffrage.

Amidst the backdrop of WWI and the Influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, American women were helping the war effort, caring for their families, and fighting for their rights. Today, we are again facing a global pandemic and the fight for social justice and equality is far from over. It feels as though this current mindset is bringing us closer to the minds and actions of our foremothers, transporting us through time.

For almost a century, organizations and diverse communities fought for equal rights across the nation. Yet even after the 19th amendment went into effect, the fight was not over for many, especially women of color. The literacy tests and violence that prevented black men from voting in the South kept black women from the polls until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Other groups were also restricted. Native Americans gained some voting rights through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, while immigrants of Asian descent gained some voting rights when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. It would not be until 1980 that male and female voter turnout would be equal. This serves as a timely reminder for us to wholeheartedly participate in the process of democracy and cast our votes in the election of 2020.

The battle for suffrage took the form of protests, picketing, hunger strikes, lectures, newspapers, pamphlets, and voices. The MHS holds many pro- and anti-suffrage items in its collection including prints, pamphlets, newspapers, personal accounts, and letters. I would like to share some of these items with you on this special anniversary.

To begin, some anti-suffrage items:

• The Anti Suffrage Rose, by Phil Hannah, published by the Woman’s Anti-suffrage Association, circa 1915
• Anti-Suffrage Calendar 1916, including pages for January and February
• Some Reasons Why Women Oppose Votes for Women, circular by the Women’s Anti-Suffrage Association of Massachusett
• Vote No on Woman Suffrage, circular
• The Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women Records

And now, some pro-suffrage items:

• Women’s Suffrage, Engraving by Fredrikke S. Palmer
• Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Victory Parade; Instruction for Marchers
• Suffrage Parade, May 1914

This October, the MHS will host the 2020 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference, “Shall Not Be Denied”: The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of Their Ratifications.  This conference revisits the long journey to secure voting rights for African Americans and women in United States history. It considers the legal precedents and hurdles that each amendment faced, the meaning and uneven outcomes of each, the social context that allowed for ultimate ratification, the role of key individuals and groups in these respective contexts, and how each amendment has been remembered over time. Learn more and register at www.masshist.org/conferences.

Today we stay apart and stay at home to stop the spread of COVID-19, but let us all come together to honor the trail blazers who remind us that change is possible.

by Catherine Treesh, Yale University

No one in town dared “look at, much less Enter my house, for fear of falling under suspicion of being accomplices in the supposed Treason; every one forbid[den] on pain of Imprisonment to carry a scrip of paper for me to my husband.”[2]

This was Martha Walker’s recollection of Montreal in the summer of 1775. Married to the radical merchant Thomas Walker, Martha suffered alienation and harassment as her husband’s allies — the rebellious Americans — invaded her city.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has one of the only copies of Martha’s account of these months. She recorded her memories of this summer many years later, but her narrative still crackles with emotion and high drama. Not only a compelling story, Martha Walker’s account raises possibilities and questions about how women navigated the political turmoil of Revolutionary North America.

Thomas Walker belonged to a small group of merchants who were angered by Parliament’s recent legislation and wanted to protest with the rebelling Americans. In the winter of 1774-1775, Thomas ran a pro-American information campaign. He disseminated pamphlets from the Continental Congress; he sent his political allies throughout Quebec to convert illiterate French Canadians; and he met with radical emissaries from Boston to coordinate their efforts.[3] For all of this work Thomas gained notoriety:  the governor of Quebec, General Guy Carleton, targeted him as a treasonous rebel who must be stopped.[4]

Martha’s account picks up several months into her husband’s organizing, when Thomas had moved his operations to their country home and the governor had reached his breaking point. She describes how Governor Carleton used Thomas’s absence to terrorize the Walkers’ household for information. Soldiers kidnapped her servant and threatened him “to be hung up immediately if he did not divulge all he knew of [the Walkers’] correspondence (with the Rebels).”[5] A few weeks later, soldiers intercepted a messenger carrying one of Martha’s letters. Martha recalled how soldiers “stript him from head to foot; & even the linings of his shoes were ripped up to search for Letters.”[6]

Martha was traumatized by the governor’s intelligence-gathering and intimidation campaign. Left alone in Montreal to deal with it, Martha met with the governor and demanded to know what crimes she and her husband had committed. She tried to convince Governor Carleton that her husband was a loyal subject and “did not correspond with the Rebels.” Deaf to her many arguments, the governor had already made up his mind. He insisted that Thomas “was a dangerous Man” and that “the safety of the Province required” that they should both leave the colony immediately.[7]

And so Martha fled Montreal, joining Thomas at their country home to “share his fate.”[8]

What a fate it was! After the Americans’ failed invasion of Montreal in September 1775, Governor Carleton ordered Thomas arrested for high treason. When the soldiers came to collect Thomas, they got into an old-fashioned shoot out. The gunfire ended when soldiers set fire to the Walkers’ home, forcing Martha and Thomas to escape out of a second story window. As he dragged Martha away from her burning home, a soldier scolded her: “you have been very forward, in this affair of the Rebellion… We know, what you have done.”[9]

But did the soldiers actually know what Martha had done? And how much can we know now?  Despite all of its captivating descriptions, Martha’s narrative gives us few clues as her involvement with her husband’s organizing. Throughout her account she denies that either she or her husband were in league with the Americans. But historians know that Thomas was indeed the ringleader of rebellious colonists in Montreal, and that the couple ended up under the political protection of the nascent United States. So was Martha lying when she told the governor that her husband wasn’t corresponding with rebel Americans? Was she a brilliant political operative attempting to use her status as a wealthy woman to gain the governor’s sympathy? If Martha was involved, why would she deny it years later in an unpublished manuscript? Martha’s narrative alone can’t answer these questions, but it does give us insight into the many and varied ways women were political players during the American Revolution.

[1] Mrs. Thomas Walker, “The Shurtleff manuscript, no. 153: Being a narrative of certain events which transpired in Canada, during the invasion of that province but the American Army, in 1775,” ed. Rev. Silas Ketchum (Contoocook, NH: The New Hampshire Antiquarian Society, 1876), 35.

[2] Walker, “The Shurtleff manuscript, no. 153,” 44.

[3] For more on Thomas Walker and pro-American organizing in Quebec, see Chapters 3 and 4 in Mark R. Anderson, The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony:  America’s War of Liberation in Canada, 1774-1776 (Hanover, NH:  University Press of New England, 2013).

[4] For Governor Carleton’s official dispatches complaining about Thomas Walker, see CO 42/34, British National Archives, Kew, England.

[5] Walker, “The Shurtleff manuscript, no. 153,” 39.

[6] Walker, “The Shurtleff manuscript, no. 153,” 41.

[7] Walker, “The Shurtleff manuscript, no. 153,” 42.

[8] Walker, “The Shurtleff manuscript, no. 153,” 45.

[9] Walker, “The Shurtleff manuscript, no. 153,” 49. See also Anderson, The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony, 121-122; Thomas Walker, “Mr. Walker’s Statement” in Peter Force, ed., American Archives, 4^th Series, vol. 4, 1176-1179.

by Susan Martin, Processing Archivist & EAD Coordinator

This is the sixth part of a series about the letters to William and Caroline Eustis at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here to read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.

On 24 Sep. 1816, James Monroe wrote to William Eustis, U.S. minister to the Netherlands at the Hague, who had recently returned from a trip to Paris. Monroe’s letter contained this wistful passage about the city:

A view of that great metropolis, must be, at all times interesting, by the spectacle it exhibits, of the state of society, the sciences, & the arts; but from the disasters which have befallen it, in these latter years more especially, I fear that it has lost much of its charms. With many men in every party there, I was intimately acquainted. With some I was much connected in friendship; but some of these have disappeard, and others have experienced such changes, that there remain very few, to whom I could address a friend.

I was struck by the passage. Monroe was describing, in a personal way, the cataclysmic transformation of Paris wrought by the French Revolution and its aftermath.

When he wrote this letter, Monroe was just a few weeks away from his election as the fifth president of the United States. The 58-year-old Virginian and Democratic-Republican had already had an illustrious career: he’d served as a senator, ambassador, governor, Secretary of State, and Secretary of War. Here, he was reminiscing to Eustis about his tenure as minister to France twenty years before.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the heart of the Age of Enlightenment. However, when George Washington appointed Monroe minister to France in 1794, the country was in the throes of the most violent phase of the French Revolution. Monroe arrived, in fact, just after the Reign of Terror and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, which he heard about on his landing at Le Havre.

Monroe was “an ardent admirer of France and her Revolution,” explains historian Charles Hazen in his 1897 work Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (p. 120). In his speeches and correspondence of the period, Monroe drew parallels between the French and American republics. Hazen describes Monroe as an “optimist” and “enthusiast” on the subject: “There is no passage in Monroe’s papers to show that he anticipated the breakdown of the Constitution, or the advent of a despot. […] He looked at everything with a strong republican bias, and his conviction that republicanism had come to stay in France seems to have remained unshaken” (p. 135-6). Monroe served as minister to France for two years.

In 1816, however, with the Bourbon Restoration in full swing and reactionary royalists and ultra-royalists returned from exile, Monroe was disillusioned. And his reference to friends that had “disappeard” takes on an ominous tone when we consider what happened to many of the revolutionaries.

He still had one friend in France, though, and that was the famous Marquis de Lafayette.

William and Caroline Eustis had visited Lafayette, and Monroe eagerly asked after him, his health, his circumstances, “who compose his family?” All three men were veterans of the American Revolution, and as Monroe said, “The friends of our revolution must always take an interest in [Lafayette’s] welfare, especially those who participated with him in that glorious struggle.”

The letter is long, running to four pages. Like much of the correspondence between public figures of the time, it covers a variety of subjects and alternates between official business and personal anecdote. Beginning with Monroe’s memories of Paris, the letter moves on to a detailed discussion of trade relations with the Netherlands, praise of Col. James Morrison of Kentucky, an inquiry into the weather, and news of the Monroe family.

James Monroe died on 4 July 1831. He was, coincidentally, the third U.S. president to die on Independence Day; John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died exactly five years before.

To read Monroe’s letter and the rest of the letters to William and Caroline Eustis at the MHS, which have all been digitized, see the guide to the collection here. Our website also includes a number of other online resources we hope you’ll explore.

I’ll leave you with this photograph of Paris taken in the early 20th century from the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

by Hannah Elder, Reproductions Coordinator

One of my favorite things about studying history is the plethora of perspectives and areas that can be explored. While in library school, I discovered the study of book history. Massachusetts, the location of the first printing press in British North America, is an excellent place to study book history. And where better to study Massachusetts history than the MHS? During our time of working from home, I’ve been compiling a list of resources on the history of books, printing, printers, and booksellers in New England. I’m still working on the list, but I wanted to highlight some of the items from it in the meantime.

One of my favorite pieces of printing history at the MHS is a typewritten manuscript entitled “John Wilson Reminiscences.” Written in 1903, it contains the memories of John Wilson, who worked with his father, also John Wilson, as a printer in Boston and Cambridge in the nineteenth century.

Here is a bit of their story:

The elder John Wilson got his start in printing as an apprentice at a printing office in Glasgow, Scotland. He held positions at printing offices across the United Kingdom and Ireland, eventually opening his own shop in Manchester, England. There, the younger John Wilson joined his father’s shop, working at the hand-powered printing press. After several years of growth, and a succession of larger and larger premises, the elder Wilson decided to move to a larger city. Wilson describes his father’s decision making as such:

In 1846, feeling that Manchester was not a publishing centre, my father thought it would be advisable to move to London. Having, however, some friends in Boston, Mass. and his family being large, he thought that, perhaps, the latter place would be better. To decide the matter, I said to him one day, “Well, father, suppose we toss up. Heads I win, tails you lose.” We tossed and heads won. So we decided to go to America. (Wilson, 2)

Once the Wilsons arrived in Boston, they were met with great generosity from the community. In one anecdote, Wilson recalls a visit from the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Peabody in which the minister offered to assist the Wilsons in expanding their business. Wilson requested funding for an Adams Power Press. This machine powered press would allow the Wilsons to print far more material and expand their business. In a matter of days, Peabody gathered investments from twenty four backers, enough to buy a new press and move into a larger shop. The investors included Rev. Dr. Francis Parkman, Peter C. Brooks, J. Ingersoll Bowditch (who also bought a sign for the shop), N. L. Frothingham, and George Washington Warren. With the success of the new press, the Wilsons were able to pay back their investors within two years.

Over the years, John Wilson and Son printers worked on publications for many prominent Bostonians (including MHS’s own Charles Francis Adams) and Massachusetts organizations. The firm even printed the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society for a number of years. A selection of the more than 350 publications printed by the John Wilson and Son available at MHS include:

• Act of incorporation and by-laws of the Benevolent Fraternity of Churches
• Catalogue and circular of Dr. Dio Lewis’s Family School for Young Ladies, Lexington, Mass. 1866
• A discourse on the death of Daniel Webster : delivered Oct. 31, 1852 / by the Rev. Charles Mason
• The great tree on Boston Common / by J.C. Warren
• Proceedings on the occasion of laying the corner-stone of the Sailors’ snug harbor of Boston, on July 14, 1856
• Sheep industry in the South / by John L. Hayes
• Theodore Lyman (1833-1897) and Robert Charles Winthrop, Jr. (1834-1905) : two memoirs / by Charles Francis Adams
• Zeisberger’s Indian dictionary : English, German, Iroquois–the Onondaga and Algonquin–the Delaware / printed from the original manuscript in Harvard College Library

The elder John Wilson passed away in 1868, but his son continued in the printing business. In 1879, the University Press in Cambridge was offered for sale and John Wilson purchased it, along with Charles E. Wentworth. They kept the name John Wilson and Son.

Univer

Also in the MHS collection are three letterbooks from the University Press era of John Wilson and Son. The letterbooks include indices of correspondents, as well as acknowledgements for supplies and manuscripts received, copies of letters sent with proofs and regarding editorial changes, receipts for cash received, and reports of printing prices.

A final item related to John Wilson and Son is William B. Reid’s “My reminiscences covering a period of sixty years with John W. Wilson & son, printers.” Reid was an employee at the printing firm under the younger John Wilson and continued on after Wilson’s death in 1903. I have yet to view this account, but I’m excited to read another perspective on the printing firm.

To find more items related to book history and printing in the MHS collection, take a look through our catalog, ABIGAIL. To learn more about the library and our services during the COVID-19 closure, visit the Reference Services During COVID-19 Closure page of our website.

By Judith Maas, Library Assistant

Each month the Reader Services department at the MHS offers a new display of thematically related books in the library’s reference room. Prior to our closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I had been exploring our collection of materials on the James family for a book display and found a wide assortment of items, both by and about family members. To keep the library’s tradition going, I decided to bring my planned display online, along with brief descriptions of each book. I hope these selections inspire some enjoyable late summer and early autumn reading!

In a New York Times interview (Aug. 7, 1991), Yale scholar Lewis states that he had first intended to create a television series portraying the lives of several generations of a great American family. That idea evolved into this epic family biography, ten years in the making. The story begins in 1789, when William James, the son of a farmer, emigrates from Ireland to Albany, New York, and builds a fortune in real estate, trade, and banking. At the heart of the book is the story of William’s son, Henry, Sr., Henry’s wife Mary Walsh, and their five children (among them Henry, William, and Alice). Lewis not only traces the lives of individual family members but explores how family relationships influenced their literary, psychological, and philosophical outlooks.

Viewing the story of the James family as “internal rather than external, a biography of minds in action” (v), Harvard scholar Matthiessen incorporates many primary documents into his study—letters, essays, journal entries, and criticism; the work thus serves as both anthology and biography. A review in the journal Modern Language Notes by Quentin Anderson (Feb. 1949) highlights those selections that show how William and Henry viewed each other’s work as well as criticism by family members of the writings of Emerson, Carlyle, and Hawthorne. According to Anderson, “Although the work as a whole does not much enrich our sense of what went on in the family circle, it does give us excellent opportunities to see the members of that circle facing outward and appraising the world about them” (117).

The elder William James’s fortune granted his son, Henry James, Sr. (1811-1882), the freedom to engage in diverse philosophical and spiritual pursuits, among these the thought of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg and that of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. In lieu of an ordinary occupation, Henry, Sr., became a self-styled “seeker for truth” (306), writing essays, befriending writers and intellectuals, and tending to the education of his children. He encouraged lively debate at the family dinner table, and the children experienced cosmopolitan, if erratic, schooling, as he shepherded the family back and forth between America and Europe. Habegger, formerly an English professor at the University of Kansas, explores the role of youthful hardships in shaping Henry, Sr.’s, character and ideas; his studies and writings and their intellectual context; and his highly original approach to raising children.

Barzun’s study of William James (1842-1910) is multifaceted–part biographical portrait; exploration of James’s thought and writings; cultural history;  and loving tribute, with Barzun viewing James as a friend, inspiration, and teacher: “his ideas, his words, his temperament speak to me with intimacy as well as force….He is for me the most inclusive mind I can listen to….” (4). The eclectic approach seems apt for James, a thinker who distrusted strict classifications and systems.

Barzun, a historian and essayist, recounts James’s slow, difficult journey from aspiring artist, to medical student, to psychologist and philosopher. He examines his essays and major works, considering the Principles of Psychology to be James’s masterpiece and describing his great subject in that work as “thoughts and feelings as experienced” (36); here is where James coined the phrase “stream of consciousness.” Discussing the sometimes misunderstood concept of “pragmatism,” Barzun distinguishes between mere expediency and what James meant by the term: “an attempt to explain how the mind ascertains truth” (83). Seeing James as an “assessor” (184) of his era, Barzun devotes a chapter to the emergence of modernism out of the upheavals taking place during the 1890s and early 1900s.

Edel’s scholarship on Henry James (1843-1916) was an act of devotion and a lifetime pursuit. In addition to writing a five-volume biography, Edel edited anthologies of James’s letters, plays, essays, criticism, and stories. The biography, published between 1953 and 1972, has been noted for its scholarly thoroughness, narrative skill, and use of psychoanalytic interpretation.

Volume 1, The Untried Years, takes James from childhood through to his late 20s, when he returns to America from his Grand Tour of Europe. Among the subjects Edel treats are James’s family relationships, his feelings of rivalry with older brother William, his schooling, his early writing efforts, and his relationship with his cousin Minnie Temple, often seen by critics as the prototype for the character Milly Theale in the novel The Wings of the Dove. Writing in the Sewanee Review (Jan.-Mar. 1955), critic Joseph Frank says of volume 1, “…it is good to be reminded of the sheer inexhaustible delight in the complex variety of the human scene that a leisurely and  ample biography often provides” (168). For Edel’s views on what he called the “noble and adventurous art” (WL, 19) of biography, see his Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (Norton, 1984, 1959).

Alice (1848-1892) was the youngest of the James children and the only daughter. At age 19, she suffered the first of many mysterious illnesses. While her brothers William and Henry grew up to achieve glory in the fields of literature and philosophy, Alice settled into invalidism, her day-to-day life private and circumscribed. Yet however confined her world, she desired self-expression and an outlet for her talents and intellect. As Strouse writes in her introduction, when she was able, James held salons in Boston and London and conducted correspondence courses in history for women across the country. She was a devoted letter writer and an observant diarist. In this biography, Strouse places James’s life in its familial and cultural context while treating her particular hopes and struggles as worthy of study and understanding in their own right; though Alice James’s story does not fit our usual notions of success and accomplishment, her “attempt to find something whole and authentic in her own experience,” Strouse contends, “gives her life its real stature and interest” (xvi, 1982 pbk. ed.).

James’s diary, Strouse notes, contains “a wide range of original reflections on society, politics, literature, history, and the people she knew” (xii). It was first published in 1934, and re-issued in this more complete edition, edited by Leon Edel, in 1964. From the outset, the diary was well-received, as suggested by a review in The New Republic (quoted in  Strouse’s biography): “In some of her insights, some of her assessments of nineteenth-century humbug, Alice James went beyond either of her eminent brothers, and her judgements on the social history of her day have now the air of something like divinations” (358).

By Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Reader Services

During the past few months I’ve been knitting tea cosies (or, as friend likes to call them, “teapot sweaters”!) for friends as a way to keep my hands busy through Zoom meetings. Pictured above is a version of the teapot turtleneck, a free and super easy pattern by Suzanne Resaul. As I was looking for something unrelated in our online catalog earlier this week in order to respond to a researcher’s question I happened to notice that the MHS, though we don’t have a large collection of print ephemera related to textiles (and, alas, only one pattern book that I was unable to access remotely), we do have a handful of print items related to knitting, including a pamphlet from 1861 — Treatise on the Art of Knitting, with a History of the Knitting Loom: Comprising an Interesting Account of Its Origin, and of Its Recent Wonderful Improvements —  extolling the virtues of a home knitting machine that, like the home sewing machine, would revolutionize domestic labor for both family necessity and profit.

The pamphlet begins with an account of the invention of the knitting frame, or stocking frame, by a man named William Lee in Calverton, England in 1589. The likely-apocryphal tale suggests that Lee turned to mechanical invention because the woman he fancied cared more about her craftwork than she did about him and this so enraged him that he decided to put her out of work:

Lee made love to a pretty girl in his neighborhood, who received his ardent attentions somewhat coolly. She was an accomplished knitter, and in his visits she was careful to display less devotion to him than to her hosiery. Disgusted at last with this kind of entertainment, he resolved to devote himself to the invention of a machine to supersede her favorite employment. (7)

In true Pygmalion style, Lee then became more infatuated with his invention than with his former crush; the pamphlet has nothing more to say about whether his stocking frame did, indeed, put the young craftswoman out of business.

In 1861, J.A. Aiken was eager to offer his own (new! improved!) version of the knitting machine. “Knitting by hand is fast going out of date,” reported the Manchester (New Hampshire) Mirror, according to a pull quote reprinted in the pamphlet. “We predict that this Machine will make ordinary knitting needles, a few years hence, a curiosity” (37). Mrs. D.A. Dick of Eaton, Ohio, is reported as providing the following testimonial to the knitting machine’s value in her own home:

I have used one of your machines about ten months and would not part with it for many times its cost, if unable to get another. Beside the care of a large family, it is no uncommon thing for me to make with it a dollar and a dollar and a half a day, and it is no exaggeration to say that with no other cares I could easily make two dollars a day.

I have knit upon it all kinds of cotton and woolen hosiery, and for fancy work it can’t be beat. I have knit shawls, nubias, opera capes, sontags, undersleeves, children’s sacks, comforts, and other articles too numerous to mention.

I can cheerfully recommend any woman desiring pleasant and profitable employment to buy one of your machines. If necessary, borrow the money, and with industry it can soon be replaced with interest. (36)

As knitting by hand has most certainly not gone out of fashion, most readers of this post likely cannot picture (as I could not) the Jonas B. Aiken knitting machine in operation. Happily, the pamphlet provides several illustrations depicting the machine in operation.

Aiken offered two models: a foot-powered and portable model. For the price of $65.00 (roughly $2,000 today) one could purchase an Aiken foot-powered machine; the portable model cost $40.00 ($1,240.00). If you’re looking to start a side gig while we socially distance and remain safer at home, perhaps hunt up a knitting machine and you, too, could “easily make” two dollars ($62.00) a day making opera capes and undersleeves!

The full pamphlet can be read online via HathiTrust.