Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 8
1839-12-25
Clear, lovely day. Office. Museum with the boys. Evening, children at the house.
This is Christmas Day. A day of great festivity in many parts of the world but one which is not much celebrated here. I went to the Office and passed an hour, but returned home early in order to take my boys with me to the New England Museum, a place which hardly deserves it’s character. Yet it is much better than it used to be when I went there many years ago. There is not so much that is positively offensive. The boys were much delighted but I noticed with pleasure that they rather sought the exhibitions of stuffed animals than the wax figures and trash. The whole thing is however very much dilapidated.1 We returned home and I read a hundred lines of Oedipus. Received today from my mother a present of a tea set of old china which will I hope gratify my Wife. Wrote on my Manuscripts and finished Pinkerton’s first volume. Evening, the children of Mrs. Frothingham and Mrs. Everett had a little Christmas party at our house. Dr. and Mrs. F. with us. Lecture nearly done.
The New England Museum, located on Court Street between Brattle Street and Cornhill, had been established in 1825 as successor to the Columbian Museum, which had been founded in 1795 and had been at Tremont and Bromfield streets since 1806. In 1839 the Museum was acquired by a new owner, Moses Kimball, and this perhaps occasioned the present visit (Samuel G. Drake, History and Antiquities of Boston, Boston, 1856, p. 806, 814). An account of the wax figures in the museum as they were in an earlier day is in Winsor, Memorial History of Boston
, 4:10.