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                          LITTLE WOMEN LETTERS
                                FROM THE
                            HOUSE OF ALCOTT




                     [Illustration: _Frontispiece._
                 ORCHARD HOUSE, THE ALCOTT HOMESTEAD.]




                              LITTLE WOMEN
                                LETTERS
                                FROM THE
                            HOUSE OF ALCOTT


                              SELECTED BY
                            JESSIE BONSTELLE
                                  AND
                            MARIAN DEFOREST


                             [Illustration]


                                 BOSTON
                       LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
                                  1914




                           _Copyright, 1914_,
                         BY JOHN S. P. ALCOTT.


                         _All rights reserved_


                       Published, September, 1914


  Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
        Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A.




                                FOREWORD

NEXT to the joy of giving to the Alcott-loving public "Little Women" as
a play, is the privilege and pleasure of offering this book of letters,
revealing the childhood and home life of the beloved Little Women.

May they bring help and happiness to many mothers and inspiration and
love to many children.




                                CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                                     PAGE

       I. THE "REALLY, TRULY" TRUE                                 1

      II. THE ALCOTT BOY; THE ALCOTT MAN                          10

     III. THE ALCOTT CHILDREN                                     28

      IV. THE ALCOTT BABY BOOK                                    39

       V. LETTERS AND CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN                 59

      VI. THE MOTHER'S INFLUENCE                                  98

     VII. CHILDREN'S DIARIES                                     122

    VIII. GIRLHOOD AND WOMANHOOD                                 140

      IX. FRIENDSHIPS AND BELIEFS                                162

          CHRONOLOGY                                             195




                         LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


    Orchard House, the Alcott Homestead               _Frontispiece_

                                                                PAGE

    A. Bronson Alcott at the age of 53, from
        the portrait by Mrs. Hildreth                             54

    Facsimile of Mr. Alcott's Letter to
        Louisa, Nov. 29, 1839                                     82

    Facsimile of Mr. Alcott's Letter to Louisa, June 21, 1840     86

    Facsimile of Mr. Alcott's Letter to Elizabeth, 1840           92

    Abigail May, Mrs. A. Bronson Alcott, from a
        Daguerreotype                                            106

    Anna Bronson Alcott, from a Daguerreotype                    122

    Abba May Alcott, from a Photograph                           142

    Louisa May Alcott, from a Daguerreotype                      160




                              LITTLE WOMEN
                         LETTERS FROM THE HOUSE
                               OF ALCOTT


                               CHAPTER I

                        THE "REALLY, TRULY" TRUE


WHEN "Little Women," the play, reopened to many readers the pages of
"Little Women," the book, that delightful chronicle of family life,
dramatist and producer learned from many unconscious sources the depth
of Louisa M. Alcott's human appeal. Standing one night at the back of
the theater as the audience was dispersing, they listened to its
comments on the play.

"A wonderful picture of home life, only we don't have such homes," said
a big, prosperous-looking man to his wife, with a touch of regret in his
voice.

"Yes," agreed his young daughter, a tall, slender, graceful girl, as she
snuggled down cosily into her fur coat and tucked a bunch of violets
away from the touch of the frosty night, "it is beautiful; but, daddy,
it isn't real. There never was such a family."

But it is real; there was such a family, and in letters, journals, and
illustration this little book gives the history of the four Little
Women, the Alcott girls, whom Louisa immortalized in her greatest story:
Anna, who is Meg in "Little Women"; Louisa, the irrepressible and
ambitious Jo; Elizabeth, the little Beth of the book; and Abba May, the
graceful and statuesque Amy.

Rare influences were at work in this ideal American home, where the
intellectual and brilliant father was gifted in all ways except those
that led to material success, and the wise and gentle mother combined
with her loyalty and devotion to her husband a stanch, practical common
sense, which more than once served to guide the frail Alcott bark
through troubled seas.

Following her remarkable success as a writer of short stories, Louisa M.
Alcott was asked for a book. She said at first it was impossible, but
repeated requests from her publishers brought from her the announcement
that the only long story she could write would be about her own family.
"Little Women" resulted, and, in erecting this House of Delight for
young and old, Louisa Alcott builded better than she knew. Her Jo has
been the inspiration of countless girls, and the many-sidedness of her
character is indicated by the widely diverging lines of endeavor which
Jo's example has suggested to the girl readers of the story.

In the case of the two editors, both from early childhood found their
inspiration in Jo. One, patterning after her idol, sought success in a
stage career, beginning to "act" before a mirror, with a kitchen apron
for a train and a buttonhook for a dagger. The other, always with a
pencil in hand, first copied Jo by writing "lurid tales" for the weekly
sensation papers, and later emerged into Newspaper Row.

It was more than a year after the success of "Little Women" as a play
had become a part of theatrical history that they visited the scenes
hallowed by the memories of the Little Women. They wished to see Concord
together, so they made a Sentimental Journey to the House of Alcott.

The sun was shining, and the air was crisp--just such a day as Miss
Alcott described in the Plumfield harvest home, the last chapter in
"Little Women." They spent hours in Orchard House, touching reverently
the small personal effects of Louisa M. Alcott, seeing the shelf
between the windows in that little upper room, where she wrote and
dreamed. They even climbed to the garret and wondered which window was
her favorite scribbling seat, with a tin kitchen for her manuscripts, a
pile of apples for her refreshment, and Scrabble, the bewhiskered rat,
for her playfellow.

Through the woods back of Orchard House they followed the winding
pathway to the Hall of Philosophy, half hidden among the trees, where
Bronson Alcott had his Conversations, where Emerson and Thoreau were
often heard, and the most intellectual debates of the century took
place.

At sunset they visited Sleepy Hollow, the resting place of the Alcotts,
with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne close by--a goodly company,
neighbors still as they were for so many years when they made Concord
America's literary shrine.

Evening came, and the two pilgrims read together the Alcott journals and
letters. The ink was faded, the quaint, old-fashioned writing was hard
to decipher, but, beginning with a letter to Louisa written by Bronson
Alcott when his daughter was seven years old, they read on until the
dawn.

Only one result could be expected from such an experience. They asked
permission to publish the letters and such portions of the journals as
would most completely reveal the rare spiritual companionship existing
between the Alcott parents and children. And, asking, they were refused,
because of a feeling that the letters and journals were intimate family
records, to be read, not by the many, but by the few. This same
sentiment withheld the dramatization of "Little Women" for many years.

"You forget," they argued, holding fast to the dimly written pages,
"that Bronson Alcott and Louisa Alcott are a part of America's literary
heritage. They belong to the nation, to the world, not alone to you."

This course of reasoning finally prevailed, but not without many months
of waiting. And thus, with the consent of the Alcott heirs, the book of
"Little Women Letters from the House of Alcott" came to be.




                               CHAPTER II

                                   I

                             THE ALCOTT BOY


ONCE upon a time in the little town of Wolcott, Connecticut, was born a
boy destined to offer to the world new and beautiful thoughts. He was
laughed at and misunderstood; but the thoughts were truth, and they have
lived, although the boy grew weary and old and passed on.

The boy was Amos Bronson Alcott. He was a country lad, used from infancy
to the rugged life of the farm, with its self-denial and makeshifts. The
seeming disadvantage, however, proved quite the opposite. His close
communion with Nature brought him nearer to the truths of life. For him
God ceased to be a mythical object to be studied and read about on
Sunday; but, as he roamed the fields and climbed the hills, the lad
found Him in the rocks and the woodlands, and in the sparkling streams.
He became a reality. The boy and God were friends.

Of schooling he had little. When work at the farm permitted, he attended
the country school near his father's house. "Our copies," he told his
little daughters, "were set by the schoolmaster in books made of a few
sheets of foolscap, stitched together and ruled with a leather plummet.
We used ink made of maple and oak bark, which we manufactured ourselves.
With this I began keeping a diary of my doings."

This was when the boy was twelve. His hours at school were few, but as
he went about his daily tasks on the farm, his thoughts grew and grew
until his mental stature far exceeded his physical. He read as he guided
the plow along the furrow, sometimes unmindful of his work until a
sudden punch from a neglected handle, as the plow struck a stone, would
bring him back to earth with a thump. He sowed seeds in the moist, sweet
earth, but his face was turned to the skies, and he knew the clouds and
the stars. When he gathered firewood, his eyes were keen for the soft,
dainty mosses, the clinging lichens. As he picked berries for the home
table, he never missed the whirr of a bird wing or passed unnoticed the
modest flowers half hidden in the soil. Nature was his library, and she
spread out her choicest treasures to this growing boy.

A love for all of God's creations characterized him. He was fond, not
only of the growing things in the wood, but of all life. His love for
animals amounted almost to a passion, one reason for his being a strict
vegetarian and insisting upon bringing up his little family on a
vegetable diet. But in boyhood it was not always clear whether humanity
or the craving for knowledge made him so considerate of the plodding
team in the field. Never was team more carefully tended. Many were its
hours of grazing, when the noonday sun rode high in the heavens, and the
Alcott boy, book in hand, curled up under the shade of a gigantic elm
and read until the shadows began to lengthen. But these lapses were only
occasional, for the lad was faithful to his tasks, except when he
yielded to the lure of the printed page.

When scarcely more than a child he began to keep a record of his books
and his reading, showing the first traces of the reflective,
introspective quality of mind which later led him to set down in letters
and unpublished manuscripts his inmost thoughts. He cultivated the same
habits of thought in his children, one reason, doubtless, for Louisa's
accurate and realistic descriptions of the lives of the four Little
Women of the Alcott family.

His favorite books in boyhood, and, for that matter, in manhood, were
the Bible and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which he read and reread
and commented upon. Years later he mentions in his journal that he made
it a practice to read "Pilgrim's Progress" every year, which is a
remarkable record to the modern boy and girl who find it difficult to
struggle through that wonderful allegory even once.

Bronson Alcott took his chance and made a stepping-stone of every
difficulty. Each obstacle he encountered in getting an education created
in him an even stronger determination to gain one. The modern boy has
the world of books opened wide to him through the library and the free
school. The treasures of art are spread out before him in the museums.
He is surrounded by helps. The boy of to-day is studied as an entity.
The boy of the last century could tell quite a different story.

So the Alcott boy, passing long hours in the woods, reading, thinking,
getting close to Nature and to God, walked as one apart, seeing the
invisible. While still a boy, he began casting off the garment of a
conventional creed and to think for himself of God, the creation, of
life, unconsciously putting from him the trammeling, cumbersome
conventions with which man has often hidden truth.

Out of this the man Alcott emerged--a great soul.


                                   II

                             THE ALCOTT MAN


With Bronson Alcott the craving for knowledge was scarcely stronger than
the craving for adventure, so it is not surprising that in the first
flush of young manhood he did not settle down to life on the farm. He
longed for the great world lying beyond the hills and valleys of
peaceful New England. He wanted experience, and experience he had.

He went South, hoping to teach school, as he had original ideas on the
training of children. Unsuccessful in this, he decided to be a peddler,
naively remarking that "honesty of purpose could dignify any
profession."

Think of the courage of this boy, for he was scarcely more than a boy, a
philosopher at heart, living in a world of dreams and books, his
ambitions all for intellectual rather than material achievement,
tramping the southern countryside, undauntedly peddling buttons,
elastic, pins and needles, and supplying all the small wants of the
country housewife! Often he encountered rebuffs, sometimes he had a
hearty welcome, for the visit of the country peddler was eagerly awaited
by the children. At times, when night came and he was far from the
shelter of an inn, he had to beg a lodging from some planter. On one
such occasion, as he entered the grounds, he saw a huge sign, "Beware
the dog." A shout from the house also warned him, and he saw dashing
toward him a savage-looking dog, powerful enough to have torn to pieces
the slender young peddler-student. But his love for animals triumphed.
Alcott stretched out his hand. The huge creature stopped short; then,
recognizing a friend and a fearless one, he bounded on, tail wagging,
barking joyously, snuggling his nose into the young man's palm, which he
licked as he escorted his new-found friend to the house. Animals always
recognized in Alcott an understanding comrade.

From most of these trips Alcott brought back money to add to the scanty
funds at home, but on one memorable occasion the love of finery proved
stronger than the necessity for saving, and he returned to the farm
penniless, but dressed in the latest fashion, having used his savings
for a wardrobe that was the wonder of the countryside. That one debauch
of clothes satisfied him for life; after that his tastes were markedly
simple. With him the "dandy period" was short-lived indeed. That he
repented bitterly of this one excess of folly is shown in his journals,
where he sets down minutely what to him was a mistake that amounted
almost to a sin. As a rule, he was singularly free from folly. His
thoughts were too high, his ideals too lofty, for him to be long
concerned with trifles such as clothes, and the next expenditure
mentioned in his journal is for the "Vicar of Wakefield" and Johnson's
"Rasselas." Ever impractical, one likes him the better for the little
human moment when the vanities of the world overcame him.

At last he secured a school, and then began the realization of his
ideals regarding the teaching of children. His methods were original and
highly successful, especially with the very young. He established a
mental kindergarten, and the fame of his teaching spread abroad. Through
his work as a teacher he achieved his greatest happiness, for it led to
his meeting with the woman who was destined to become his wife.

As the result of correspondence between himself and Mr. May of
Brooklyn, Connecticut, whose attention had been attracted to the work
of the young teacher, Alcott, then twenty-eight years old, drove from
the Wolcott home to Brooklyn, where he met Abigail May of Boston, who
was visiting her brother. With both it was love at first sight, a love
that grew into a perfect spiritual union.

It seemed almost providential that Bronson Alcott should have come into
Abigail May's life at just this time, when her heart had been touched by
its first great sorrow--the loss of her mother. Hitherto she had been a
light-hearted girl, fond of dancing and of the material side of life.
The young philosopher, with his dreams and his ideals, brought a new
interest into her now lonely life, and all that was spiritual in her
nature responded as he freely discussed his plans and ambitions with
her. In her he found both sympathy and understanding.

A year of letter-writing, a frank and honest exchange of thought,
brought out the harmony of their natures and developed in both a sense
of oneness, laying a firm foundation for the comradeship which was not
broken through all the years, even when the wife and mother passed into
the Great Beyond.

The Alcott-May courtship was ideal. Retaining the heaven that lay about
him in his infancy, keeping his close companionship with God and God's
great laboratory, Nature, Bronson Alcott demanded something more than
mere physical attraction in choosing his wife. A certain quaint
circumspection characterized their love-making. Abigail May once wrote:
"Mr. Alcott's views on education were very attractive, and I was charmed
by his modesty," and long after their engagement she spoke of her lover
as "her friend." He was, and so he continued to be in the highest sense
of the word.

So satisfying were those friendship-courtship days, that apparently both
were loath to end them, for another twelvemonth passed before the
announcement of their betrothal, and it was nearly three years from the
date of their first meeting before their marriage in King's Chapel,
Boston, where the brother who had been the means of bringing them
together performed the ceremony.

As their marriage day approached, there was little festivity and none of
the rush that usually precedes a modern wedding. Everything was simple,
quiet, and sure.

This is Bronson Alcott's letter, asking a friend to act as best man at
his wedding.

    Dear Sir:

    Permit me to ask the favor of your calling at Col. May's at 4
    o'clock precisely on Sunday afternoon next, to accompany me and
    my friend Miss May to King's Chapel.

                                                With esteem,
                                                    A. B. Alcott

    Thursday, May 20,
        112 Franklin St.                                   1830.

So began the Alcott pilgrimage, their fortune consisting of love and
faith and brains. In these they were rich indeed, and thus closed
another chapter in the life of the gentle philosopher, of whom Ralph
Waldo Emerson once said: "Our Alcott has only just missed being a
seraph."




                              CHAPTER III

                          THE ALCOTT CHILDREN


FOR some months after their marriage the Alcotts lived in Boston, where
the young enthusiast taught a school for infants. Again his fame as a
teacher traveled, and he received an offer from the Quakers of
Philadelphia to start a school there, an offer so tempting that the
Alcotts moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania, where Anna and Louisa were
born.

Eugenics and prenatal influence were not discussed then as they are
to-day, but in the Alcott family nearly a century ago they were being
thought and lived. Bronson Alcott and his wife considered children an
expression, not of themselves, but of divinity, and as such to be
accepted as a trust, rather than as a gratification of their own human
longing for fatherhood and motherhood. They felt it their parental
privilege rather than their duty to aid the human development of the
child and thus further the fulfillment of its destiny. Each little soul
was humbly asked for and reverently prepared for. From the moment they
knew their prayer had been granted, the individuality and rights of that
soul were respected. It was considered as a little guest that must be
made happy and comfortable, carefully cherished, mentally and
physically, while its fleshly garment was being prepared and the little
personality made ready for its earthly appearance. How careful they were
of every thought and influence, for to both parents this period was the
most sacred and wonderful in their lives and in the lives of their
children.

The depth of his joy and the simplicity of his faith are exquisitely
expressed in the lines which Bronson Alcott wrote before the birth of
his first child, Anna:

                         TO AN EXPECTANT MOTHER

    The long advancing hour draws nigh--the hour
    When life's young pulse begins its mystic play,
    And deep affection's dreams of Form or Joy
    Shall be unveiled, a bodily presence
    To thy yearning heart and fond maternal eye,
    The primal Soul, a semblance of thine own,
    Its high abode shall leave and dwell in day,
    Thyself its forming Parent. A miracle, indeed,
    Shall nature work. Thou shalt become
    The bearing mother of an Infant Soul--
    Its guardian spirit to its home above.
    But yet erewhile the lagging moments come
    That layeth the living, conscious, burden down,
    Firm faith may rest in hope. Accordant toils
    Shall leave no time for fear, nor doubt, nor gloom.
    Love, peace, and virtue, are all born of Pain,
    And He who rules o'er these is ever good.
    The joyous promise is to her who trusts,
    Who trusting, gains the vital boon she asks,
    And meekly asking, learns to trust aright.

Louisa, the second child, born on her father's birthday, was the most
intellectual and the most resourceful of the Alcott children, reflecting
in her own buoyant personality the happy conditions existing before and
at the time of her birth, when her father had attained his greatest
material prosperity and was also realizing his mental ambitions in his
little school, and her mother was temporarily relieved from the cares
that so often weighed heavily upon her.

Shortly before the birth of Elizabeth the father makes this entry in his
journal:

                             THE ADVENT COMETH

    Daily am I in expectation of beholding with the eye of sense,
    the spirit that now lingers on the threshold of this terrestrial
    life, and only awaits the bidding of the Reaper within, to usher
    itself into the presence of mortals. It standeth at the door and
    waiteth for admission to the exterior scene of things.... Let
    the time come. Two little ones in advance await its coming; and
    greetings of joy shall herald its approach.

The birth of Elizabeth is followed by this entry in his journal:

    At sunset this day