sibyx and labwriter read an Emerson biography

Emerson's Study

Lucy and I are doing one of our joint reads again, this time of the Carlos Baker biography about Emerson: Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait, published in 1996. Baker was a professor at Princeton who may be best known for his work on Hemingway--Ernest Hemingway: A life Story, first published in 1969. He also undertook the major task of first editor of Hemingway's letters--Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, published in 1981. At the time of Baker's death, this biography about Emerson was almost--but not quite--completed. Baker's daughter updated his notes and found someone to write an introduction and epilogue.

Anyone is invited to join us--either reading along or posting here about what we're reading.

I already love this book because Baker starts the story in the 1830s, when Emerson was already in his late 20s, so happily we don't have to wade through 20% of the book discussing the minutiae of his or his family's early years. Other biographers could go to school on this one.

Added: Plus I tend to like group biographies better that those that focus on one subject. Seriously, if you have an interest in Concord, the 1800s, or anyone in Emerson's circle (Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, etc. etc.), then please join us.

Oh, what a great opening picture and text. I hope to begin reading today.

I read Louis Menand's book, The Metaphysical Club several years ago and have been fascinated by Emerson and his circle ever since. I wish my local library had a copy of the Baker book. I am going to follow the discussions anyway.

Stasia, can you get it through interlibrary loan?

Oh woe, I'm here to report that I can't find my book. Good grief! Back later, I hope with the book in hand.

Hope you find (found) it!

I, feeling like the apple-polisher, read chapter one (to my surprise, really, I hadn't planned to read more than a page or 2). It was a bit confusing reading about the five brothers and their various health problems. I was brought to mind of the James family, two brothers startlingly brilliant and the others more ordinary - of course, with the exception of Alice James who, in our day, would have also shone in a literary firmament of some sort. I was also brought to mind of the book we read together earlier this year, by Harriet Beecher Stowe -- this group of boys is only a few years older than the children whose lives she follows -- and like them, education is the number one goal that parents have to offer their children. It felt like familiar ground thanks to Harriet.

I was intrigued by the fact that the 'cure' for TB was to go down to the Caribbean islands. It also seems clear that some mental sturdiness in 'Waldo' made him the linchpin of the family early on, and that this role was part of what formed him as a 'patriarch' more or less comfortable in that role. Or if not comfortable then accustomed to being a center around which others orbited.

Only 48 chapters to go! I'm glad they are short, in fact.

Whew, I found the book--in the worst possible place for finding it, which was in its place on the bookshelf. I can't imagine what I was thinking of to put a book I'm currently reading back on the shelf.

Great comments on Chapt. 1, Sib. No kidding, a complicated story here about the five Emerson brothers. What I'm tripping over is what I remember about Elizabeth Peabody's brothers (Elizabeth born in 1804, the same year as Emerson) --George and Wellington, who left home, had health problems, and died rather odd, early deaths. That's also a good comparison with the James family--the siblings a combination of brilliance and ordinariness.

I'm at the beginning of Chapt. 2: "Aunt Mary." I'm looking forward to her. What an incredible resource these spinster aunts were to their families. I wish I'd had one. Don had an aunt like her--his mother's sister--who never married, intelligent, independent, and over-the-moon about her nephew. Lucky nephew.

In the notes for Chapter 2, the chapter about Mary Moody Emerson, Waldo Emerson's paternal spinster aunt, there's a reference to her letters: The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, ed. by Nancy Craig Simmons. It would "only" set me back $48 at amazon. I won't pay that price, but I'll keep an eye on it to see if it comes down any. Baker calls her "the most notably eccentric of all his relatives" (17).

Mary's biography: Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History, by Phyllis Cole, published 1998. Her dates: 1774-1863. A review of the biography says this: "Cole examines the position of a woman in this patriarchal family. Barred from the pulpit and university by her sex, she also refused marriage to become a reader, writer, and religious seeker."

Uh oh....... you're in trouble now! Problem with that sort of book is that it only ever came out in a smallish edition....and no paperback..... Hope to read a little about Mary today.

It's the way I roll, sib. Haha.

I read the Mary Moody Emerson chapter last night. Four foot three! That isn't just small, that is tiny tiny. I'm particularly interested in Mary's reverence for her puritan forbears and her own more starchy and practical 'everyday' beliefs -- how she just made it work for her, contradictions and all. Emerson is very amusing too, in the few quotes -- and I love her starchy comment to him that his poetry wouldn't matter since his prose was so much better!

2 done, 47 to go!

Mary Emerson seems to be something of a "missing link" between the Calvinists and the Deists. I love Emerson's quote: "Aunt Mary wished everybody to be a Calvinist except herself" (19).

I can't say that so far I'm riveted by the Emerson book. I think the best I can say about it is that I'm working at it. The chapters which each include someone in Emerson's life make the life seem a bit choppy, at least in the early going. The format seems somewhat contrived and awkward.

I'm going to post briefly on Chapts. 3-5, so this is your "spoiler alert" if you haven't read these yet.

Chapt. 3, "Ishmael Abroad"

He went on a 9-month trip, hoping a change of scenery would improve his outlook. He kept a longhand record of his tour, some 50,000 words long. The "maritime leg" of his journey took 40 days.

I don't have much to say about this chapter. I'm probably more interested in the "group" part of the biog that I am in Emerson himself. He's pretty dense--or maybe I am. Heh.

Chapt. 4, "Lydian"

Chapt. 4 is about Emerson's second wife, Lydian. I guess she didn't eat much. Her doctrine: "the food you don't eat does you more good than the food you do." Her daughter said that in the years between ages 18 and 30, her mother was sometimes called "the living skeleton." She was another one who took calomel, which was a mercury compound that she evidently used to purge herself (Louisa May Alcott had serious health problems from the calomel they gave her when she became ill nursing soldiers during the Civil War).

One of the things that struck me in this chapter was the young Emerson (in 1835) working on a historical discourse that he would give to the citizens of Concord on the 200th anniversary of the incorporation of the town.

Emerson and Lydian are married--that's about it for this chapter. His brother (Charles) dies, apparently of TB.

Chapt. 5, "Bronson Alcott"

In which we meet Bronson Alcott engaged with his Temple School and his "assistant and scribe, a thirty-year-old bluestocking named Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who taught Latin and arithmetic."

Alcott came to Emerson's attention when Emerson read the book about Alcott's school, Record of a School, written by Elizabeth Peabody.

Baker says that the friendship between Alcott and Emerson lasted for more than forty years.

In everything I've ever read about Alcott, I've never liked him, not even a little.

I've only read chapter 3, but in a book like this there's no such thing as spoilers.....

It does feel choppy -- I'm simply grateful, for the mo' that the chapters are so short that I really can read 'one a day' without much effort.

I was fascinated that Emerson went around and met Coleridge, Carlyle and Wordsworth! These encounters have an influence, I think, beyond the interview itself, like a 'laying on of the hands' some kind of direct transmission. Emerson is really the first American philosopher to be taken seriously by the Europeans -- and I feel intuitively that these meetings mattered to Emerson's development, creating a kind of synergy. E. took some Romantic ideas, but made them his own.... It's also interesting to me that Emerson was able to get to see these men, that they were sufficiently interested in him to take the time.

His comment about Venice: overhung with 'the smell of bilgewater' -- I'm sure it was way worse than it is now!

Where, I wonder, did the money to finance this trip and his time spent philosophizing and writing came. -- He began 'teaching' almost immediately, but -- independently? Where? How did he make himself known?

>13 sibylline:. If his Aunt Mary had any money of her own, I'm sure she would have gladly financed such a trip. Just speculation. It's interesting that Baker doesn't say anything about how Waldo was supporting himself when he was abroad.

I found my old copy of the Riverside Edition of Emerson: Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Stephen E. Whicher. My edition was published in 1960; I believe this thing orginally came out in 1957. The book is in pristine condition, so I didn't exactly read the covers off the thing--heh. From my marginal notes, I evidently read "The American Scholar"; "Self-Reliance"; and "The Poet."

The selections are arranged chronologically, and they include parts of his journals and also letters.

I'm thinking that along with the Baker book, considering the way it's written, it would be useful to find a timeline of Emerson's life. --here's a chronology.

From what Baker quotes about Emerson and his fellow passengers on the European trip, it's probably safe to say that Waldo had a difficult time finding people who didn't in some way or another disappoint him. Baker quotes from a letter to his brother Charles: "I would give all Rome for one man such as were fit to walk here, and could feel and impart the sentiment of the place" (26). It's also ironic that at the same time he wrote to his Aunt Mary: "God's greatest gift is a Teacher and when will he send me one, full of truth and of boundless benevolence and heroic sentiments?" (26). I wonder what Aunt Mary thought on receiving that letter--maybe, What am I, chopped liver?

Then I found something along the same lines in the Riverside. He was pleased that he was able to meet the men he wished to see--Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth. About them he wrote in his journal, Sept. 1833: "Many things I owe to the sight of these men. I shall judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men forever. To be sure not one of these is a mind of the very first class....Upon an intelligent man, wholly a stranger to their names, they would make in conversation no deep impression, none of a world-filling fame; --they would be remembered as sensible, well-read, earnest men, not more" (14).

I'd love to know what they thought of Emerson, who was 30 years old when he made that assessment.

Good stuff, Becky. I've read about Lidian -- does seem a bit abrupt, the proposal! But I enjoyed the anecdotal info about Emerson's penchant for nicknaming. I'm only functioning at half today, so I will say no more!

I hope you're OK today, Sib.

#4: I probably could, but it looks like you guys would be done with the book before I ever got my hands on it. The last ILL book I asked for took 2 months to get to me.

Hi Stasia. Jeeze, I had no idea ILL took so long.

I've been looking forward to Chapt. 6, "Margaret Fuller". I have a Fuller biog that I've been wanting to get to, but I decided to read this Emerson group biog first.

I read about Emerson being disappointed in his traveling companions when he went to Europe (#15), and also of Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. In the first paragraph of this chapter, Baker quotes her as writing to someone, "I cannot think I should be disappointed in him as I have been in others to whom I had hoped to look up..." (56). Same sentiment.

She was 25 in 1835. Margaret, like Emerson, was longing for a friend who would "comprehend me wholly, mentally, and morally, and enable me better to comprehend myself" (63).

Emerson's initial impression of Margaret: "Her extreme plainness, --a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, --the nasal tone of her voice, --all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far" (67).

Of course we know (since she appears in this book) that they did become friends, although she had a reputation for being "sneering, scoffing, critical, disdainful of humble people" (68).

She sounds like a young woman with an abundance of intelligence, but as we would say today, little "emotional" intelligence. She was probably just very immature.

On to Chapt. 7, "Father Taylor".

This was Edward Thompson Taylor, a preacher at the Seaman's Bethel located in the North End of Boston. "Father" Taylor sounds like an eccentric character who put on quite a show with his sermons. I'm trying to sort out what kind of a minister he was--I guess a Unitarian. The church would be filled with "rough sailors" in the central pews and visitors on the sides and in the gallery: women, children, Unitarian ministers, Harvard intellectuals, the seriously devout, and the merely curious.

I guess the main thing I would note is that Taylor's preaching was something of a throwback to an earlier day: "Seeing him in action, one could understand how George Fox, . . . George Whitefield, the Methodist ministry, or Father Samuel Moody, Emerson's great-great-grandfather, famous preacher of Mount Agamenticus, Maine, had handled their congregations. Taylor absolutely dominated the assemblage by the 'total infusion of his own soul' into their minds and hearts. 'How puny, how cowardly other preachers look by the side of this preaching,' wrote Emerson. 'He shows us what a man can do.'"

Chapt. 8, "Waldo and Nelly"

I wonder of Lydian continued taking her calomel when she was pregnant. She continued having trouble eating ("dyspepsia" is what she called it), and when she was pregant with their first child, Waldo, in her own phrase, she said she "looked like death" (81). It's a wonder she was able to carry these pregnancies to term.

As the chapter title indicates, this chapter is about the birth of Emerson and Lydian's first two children, Waldo (1836) and Nelly (1838). Here's my favorite quote from this chapter: "When Lydian took her children to Boston to show them off to Mrs. Abel Adams, Waldo Minor, gazing round the victorian parlor, exclaimed, 'How glass their Knobs are!'" (86, 87).



Lydian and Waldo Jr., 1840

Chapt. 9, "Alcott"

You wonder what it was, exactly, that Emerson saw in Alcott. As an earlier chapter stated, they remained friends for 40-some years. Alcott published a book about his school that got him into trouble in the Boston community. One Harvard professor was quoted in a newspaper that "a third of the book was absurd, another third blasphemous, and the rest obscene" (92). Naturally with that sort of public criticism, parents took their children out of Alcott's school, and he was left (as usual) on the edge of poverty.

Emerson was sympathetic and tried to help him by writing a letter that was published in one of the newspapers. He also invited Alcott to come to Concord for a visit. It was around this same time that Emerson wrote his now-famous address, delivered at Harvard in 1837, "The American Scholar."

Stasia -- I would stay on the waiting list, I don't think I will be zipping through at all; it may end up being you and me trailing in Becky's wake!

I'm checking in -- I have read the first Alcott and the Margaret Fuller chapters.... I think Alcott was smart and he was open to thinking and talking about anything so that even if he was apt to go too far -- he was a stimulating and fruitful friend.

I have always meant to learn more about Fuller who seems mainly to have been a woman 'ahead of her time'. I'm wondering how she acquired her education, not that it was so difficult, as Harriet Stowe indicated in Oldtown Folks - through 'high school' education in Mass. for girls and boys could be quite equal if the parents liked the idea and could afford a good school. The minister you describe too, he makes me think of some of the fiery ministers Stowe describes.

I didn't think I was "zipping." I was hoping to do about a chapter a day, and it's been 9 days, 9 chapters. With 49 chapters and an epilogue, that's 50 days, or about seven weeks. I find it hard to sustain an interest in a book if I read much slower than that--for example, the history of the New York Herald Tribune that I read for about 6 months--that was drudgery.

Perhaps Bronson was something of a replacement for Emerson's brother Charles? That would help to explain why Emerson was willing to expend so much energy on the man.

Chapt. 10, "Thoreau"

Defiance of authority, simplicity, quietness--qualities that Emerson valued in Thoreau.

Baker tells us that Emerson was writing essays about his friends--essays he called "characters" and says that "what he valued in his friends was not what made them typical but what made them unique"--his brothers Edward and Charles, his son Waldo, his eccentric Aunt Mary, Father Taylor, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Jones Very, Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc (103). He wrote one of these about Thoreau. I imagine these essays would be fascinating to read.

I love Baker's description of Thoreau and his brother John as "handymen in the old New England sense of knowing how to make things" (106). Emerson evidently didn't share the handyman's skill. Here's another cute quotation from little Waldo, "supervising his father's hoeing in the family potato patch, issued a polite admonition: 'I wish you would not dig your leg'" (106). Little Waldo must have been a joy.

Oh crap. I just lost a post about Chapter 11, Margaret Fuller. I don't know that I have the patience to recreate that post. Phooey.

Nope--I don't. So I'll move on, although before I do I'll end with this quotation from Baker: "By 1839, three years into their friendship, the opulence of Margaret's powers had almost completely overcome Emerson's early prejudice against her" (119).

I got some reading done in this book last night, and I have to say that if you have any issues with the style in which this thing is written, it only gets "more so" as you continue on. I'm at 218/519, and all I can say is this: there must be a better book out there about Emerson and the people he knew.

Was there something in the water in Concord, because these people all come across to me as very strange, with two exceptions--Elizabeth Peabody and Hawthorne. (Although it doesn't seem as though Baker has any use for Peabody.) Then also I think Baker has spent too much time reading primary sources, because in too much of this thing I can't tell Baker's prose from Emerson's--not a positive.

I do believe I'm going to continue reading to the end, but I think I won't be posting here on every chapter, since all that really does is just prolong a painful job of reading.

Lucy, you might have an entirely different reaction to this book. I'd be interested to hear what you think, but I know that right now you're dealing with high water in Vermont. I'll catch up with you later.

I don't have a lot to say about yesterday's reading. Little Waldo died after a 3-day illness in 1842 of scarletina. What a tragedy that must have been for the family. It sounds as though "Waldo Minor" as they called him was the light of everyone's life.

About the same time, Henry Thoreau's brother John cut himself while stropping his razor and died of lockjaw eleven days later. John and Henry were quite close, and it must have been a terrible loss. Life was certainly perilous back then.

Chapter 20 is about Nathaniel Hawthorne. I have the same reaction to him reading about him in this book that I did reading his biography--I find him extremely likeable, in fact, probably one of the most likeable people of the group. Hawthorne was a year younger than Emerson. Their friendship came about through Elizabeth Peabody's connections. It's clear that Baker doesn't have any intention of rounding out EP's character. Again he simply dismisses her here as a "bluestocking"--an educated, intellectual woman, although the word also has a negative connotation of a woman who is something of a frump.

Baker implies that there may have been some "spleen" on the part of Hawthorne towards Emerson because of Sophia Peabody's hero worship of Emerson. Hawthorne was newly married to Sophia at the time that he met Emerson, and when they moved to Concord, Baker says that Emerson was "delighted," although it seems they tended to snark about each other in their journals: "To Emerson, Hawthorne's writings were empty; to Hawthorne, Emerson was a mere dreamer in search of the actual" (214).

Baker says that like Keats fending off the kindly ministrations of Shelley, "Hawthorne was stubbornly determined not to join Emerson's flock of wayward geniuses" (215).

I'm back and I read a quick chapter this morning. Father Taylor was an inspirational preacher and Emerson enjoyed him -- he writes "Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run.... {Truckmen and teamsters} do not trip in their speech. It is a shower of bullets, whilst Cambridge men and Yale men correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence...." Taylor is compared unfavorably with a dry and intellectual preacher with the incredible name of Barzillai Frost. It is revealing of Emerson, who and what draws his interest and approval, and Baker begins, I think to put forward what will probably be a 'thesis' of the book, that Emerson responded to a certain intensity and energy in a person almost as strongly as he did to the content of whatever they had to say. This makes him a little more open-minded to open to influences from different sources. The 'geniuses' with which he surrounds himself are mostly rather opinionated and are less 'open' than he is, but they fascinate him and he can draw and learn more from them and transform it into something bigger, which is why he ends up at the center of the group as the 'leader', I suppose -- he is the sun that pulls these different people into some sort of loose orbit that then is recognizable as 'transcendentalism' -- I'm just dithering here, but that is what I think Baker might be beginning to develop.

Rather like one of Taylor's sermons, I think Baker might be trying to create layers, information and insight, that will create a portrait of the man and the group in a non-linear way..... I'm perfectly happy with the structure, although at p.81, it is still a bit soon to tell. I hope to read at least 2 more chapters today since they are so short.

This afternoon I'm hugely enjoying the chapter (26) of "Thoreau at Walden." I think I've decided that, along with Elizabeth Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne, I also like Henry Thoreau. He was 29 years old when he went to the woods to live and to write.

Along with being a writer, Thoreau was also a worker. In the Yankee tradition, he knew how to "do" things: he built a small cabin on Emerson's land on the north shore of Walden. He had cleared two acres for a garden plot, planted five kinds of vegetables, and, along with the cabin, built a woodshed and privy.

My copy of Walden is a crappy little paperback I think from my high school days with tiny print that makes reading the thing uninviting. So today I bought Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition. I'm looking forward to reading this one.

Ellery Channing had the best line in the chapter, calling Thoreau's new cabin at Walden "a wooden inkstand" (265).

Wonderful photos! This little house has inspired so many!

I took some photos there when I was there in 2008. Some are posted on my blog: http://familyhistorian.blogspot.com/2008/06/boston-diary-june-6-part-1.html

His gravestone is actually on the "part 2" post of that day's happenings:
http://familyhistorian.blogspot.com/2008/06/boston-diary-june-6-part-2.html

Wow, Lori, thanks so much for posting these links! I've never been to Concord, so I really appreciate seeing all of the sights first-hand like this with your descriptions. Fun!

Thank you so much Lori! I noticed the messy bed in the photo that Becky posted too! He seems to me like the type who would have left a tidily made bed..... but what do I know!

I've read three chapters (8,9,10) since last posting, on the birth of the children, on Alcott's publishing disaster and on Thoreau.

.....I have to pause -- I'll come back when I can to finish this post. I'm in the Staples parking lot and my dau just called to say she is done w/her school shopping. So me, the walking wallet, has to go in!

"the walking wallet"--so funny, Sib. You're a good mom.

Thanks. I not all that tolerant -- she forbids me, actually, to go in with her because big box stores make me so anxious and irritable. I'm quite relieved that she is old enough to do her shopping herself.

Back to the three chapters:

From 8 this delicious quote: "Old Dr. Ripley soon came over from the Manse to see his step-great-grandson. He laid the boy facedown across his bony knees and gently pulled his undershirt away from the shoulder blades. When they asked what was wrong, he answered that he had been told that "the child of this couple would probably have wings".... I love that. It's charming and funny with that little New England bite.

In 9 - Alcott, as unworldly and oblivious as ever, publishes a book on his educational ideas that is too radical for the day and has to close down his school. Even Emerson's support isn't enough to counter the tidal wave of 'shocked sensibilities' -- the passage that shocked them all was about childbirth and sounds mainly sentimental to our ears but was considered indecent to even mention at the time.

The whole mood of the book perks up whenever Thoreau is mentioned -- the relationship between Emerson and Thoreau was clearly one of deeply synergistic so that even a small discussion could have deep ramifications and effects -- at one point Thoreau says to Emerson: "We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground."

I also love the description of Thoreau -- Baker compares him to one of Trollope's more delicious characters Mr. Fidus Neverbend 'of whom it is said that he "was an absolute dragon of honesty. His integrity was of such an all-pervading nature that he bristled with it as a porcupine does with his quills." Lovely.

And on to Miss Fuller in Ch 10!

I'm enjoying lurking on this thread and reading little bits about a whole host of characters who are just names to me. I had no idea how much they were all interconnected. And I love Thoreau's little cabin - I'd like to know more about him.

Welcome Genny!

Oh Genny! What an adventure you have before you! Thoreau's writing is astonishingly lucid.

For my part I have been reading here and there about Margaret Fuller for most of my adult life without really delving into her writings or even a decent bio. Clearly this has to be rectified. She makes me think of George Eliot somehow -- an intellect that simply could not 'play by the rules' of proper womanly behavior of the time. Emerson is a bit put off by her in the beginning -- makes a note on one of her letters that she has been a bit too bold. Baker writes, "In the fall of 1837, thinking of women in general, she had exclaimed to Emerson, "Who would be a goody that could be a genius."

I also loved this quote from Emerson's journal written while Margaret was visiting: "A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to the market and to the blacksmith's shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly."

He also talks about how she is a perfect guest because she can entertain herself for a good part of the day and make brilliant rewarding convo. in the evening!

By the end 1839, Baker writes: "..three years into their friendship, the opulence of Margaret's powers had almost completely overcome Emerson's early prejudice against her."

38 chapters to go!

I think you'll find, Sib, as you read on, that Baker was somewhat put off by her as well. I imagine it's going to be difficult to find a balanced picture of her, what with, on the one hand, scholars like Baker who seem half-inclined to ridicule her (as they do Elizabeth Peabody), and on the other hand, feminist scholars who want to make her some kind of high priestess.

If I had to spend a day with her, I have a feeling that I would be saying to her, "Oh for the love of God, Margaret, dial it back a little."

I'm slogging through the "Captain John Brown" chapter and finding myself annoyed.

Sib, here's George Eliot writing about Margaret Fuller.

What a fascinating piece! Thank you Becky. You find the greatest stuff.

Higginson was obsessed with Brown also? That sort of messianic stuff, no matter what the rights and wrongs of the beliefs, has a crazed and dangerous element.

Reading the chapter (12) on Jones Very (what a name!) -- Poor fellow -- (for the benefit of those of you following not reading, he was a young tutor at Harvard, writing an essay on Shakespeare and somehow worked himself into a psychotic break, thought Jesus was speaking through him/he was in fact him etc.). Emerson was astonishingly tolerant of this, writing in his journal: "Jones Very charmed us all by telling us he hated us all." Emerson was impressed by his 'utter sincerity'. I've never heard of Very, but I assume he will turn up a few more times at least, hopefully sane once more.

I came across Jones Very in the Peabody Sisters book and also in the Nathaniel Hawthorne, which isn't surprising since these people all knew each other. You're right, a sad fellow, he just went insane, I guess. Early twenties--a perilous time, especially for males, I suppose. It's hard to tell if he might have been schizophrenic or bipolar. If I remember correctly, he didn't do too well. Wiki says he spent the last decades of his life in Salem under the care of his sister.

Confession time but I know you'll be sympathetic -- I can't get my nose out of Faithful Place!. I'm hope to read another chapter of EAtE tonight, but.....

I remember the same thing happening to me with that book--so enjoy yourself. {grin}

I am still lurking too. Love the pictures of the cabin. Thanks for posting those.

I'm getting within striking distance of the end of this thing. I'll post along with you as you go, Lucy, so let me know where you are.

Chapt. 13 is another chapter about Margaret Fuller. We're in 1839 or so here, little Waldo is age 3 and the Emersons have a new baby, Ellen. Alcott is in Boston, needy as ever, cutting "heavily" into Emerson's working time, although Emerson continues to think him an "extraordinary soul" (129). So I'll meet you here when you're ready, but enjoy the LD weekend.

Oh -- Thank you for waiting up for me -- I have just finished 13 so you are exactly on target. This chapter is a bit of soap-opera - Margaret, in love with Sam, is rejected by Sam, who is in love with Anna, who rejects Sam when he wants to be a nartist not a banker..... sigh..... as the world turns Transcendental style.

So Margaret thinks up things to do, start a magazine, start classes for the intelligent ladies of Boston.... Emerson enjoys his home, garden and children, and.... I think..... loves being the central figure around whom these smart and attractive women swirl.....

It's supposed to rain here all weekend off and on, quite heavily on Monday, which will be terrible for those who have been flooded already. I suppose it's been a boon to have had very fine weather all week. I hope you will have a cool down soon????

Because I just got DSL now I can do things like pop around to check the weather -- many of those sites have so many graphics I've had to avoid them as they take too long to load. What luxury!

I'm having an interesting set of thoughts -- Emerson, Fuller, Ward, would all have jumped happily right onto the Internet. Thoreau, Hawthorne, Very, Alcott..... would have reviled it. Alcott however would have possibly used it on the sly.

I'm having an interesting set of thoughts -- Emerson, Fuller, Ward, would all have jumped happily right onto the Internet. Thoreau, Hawthorne, Very, Alcott..... would have reviled it. Alcott however would have possibly used it on the sly.

Hilarious.

Ch 14 -- Another chapter on the unstable Very. Is he one of these people who isn't really of that much interest except that he was in the close orbit? I just feel sort of ho-hum about him. Astonished that there is a recent bio of him. Somebody tell me what is so interesting about him? Oh I'm being a pill, but I can tell Baker is a bit bored too, at least, I have to struggle with this chapters which are, thank heavens, short. I wonder if much of Emerson's tolerance of him had to do w/sympathy learned as his brother Edward struggled?

On to 15. 35 to go.

Ch 15 Ellery Channing. Another one of these slightly lightweight members of the circle....... He marries Margaret Fuller's sister Ellen, writes poetry that sounds awful to me, but for the time it might have had something in it. Margaret is, at first, quite upset.

Ch 16 What ho! Sam and Anna decide to tie the knot after all as Sam capitulates for capitalism over the life off the grid..... What really emerges in these two chapters is that Margaret Fuller was perhaps just a bit of a manic depressive -- she would have spells where her emotional life would completely overwhelm all rationality - and, among other things, she would declare herself pretty strongly to Emerson. Poor man! In 16 Emerson himself complains about having so many house guests and visitors when all he wants is to be 'alone with the Alone'. This is a evidence, I think, of Emerson's greater complexity as a person, his multi-faceted quality that made him so attractive to everyone. He was simultaneously a loner and a sociable dude. I think there were few things he loved more than good conversation -- that being a silent walk by himself, perhaps. The two in constant competition for his time.

33 to go!

I'm with you, I don't understand the fascination with Jones Very. At the time, he sounds like a gossip-magnet. The title of the biog: Jones Very: The Effective Years, 1833-1840. He had a pretty short period of being "effective," it sounds like.

Ellery Channing sounds like he was a problem to himself and others all of his life. I agree with you about his awful poetry, which Emerson called "voluminous elegance" (153). I find myself at times wondering about Emerson. Does he have any discernment?

Baker says of Channing, "most of all he courted idleness" (155). It's no real wonder that Margaret Fuller was upset about her sister marrying this man.

Ch 17 is a bit of a scattered chapter, introducing two new characters: Fanny Elssler the ballet dancer and Charles Newcomb another young sprig whose intellect took Emerson's fancy. Emerson loves the ballet (to his surprise), and tries to find a place in which to fit Newcomb. Alcott is in his usual mess and it is arranged for him to go "Alcott House" in England where he, apparently, has some fervent and affluent admirers......

Ch. 18 A sad one -- as you mentioned earlier - Waldo minor dies suddenly of scarlatina and the household is plunged into grief. Emerson w/his characteristic calm is able to focus on other things, but Lidian is not. Thoreau's brother also dies at that time of tetanus and Henry also has a pretty sharp decline. Margaret visits for 40 days (how biblical) and reveals that she has matured a great deal, although she finds herself impatient with Lidian's grieving, sensing layers to the grief and feeling perhaps that Lidian was unduly prolonging it. I've watched several people cope w/the loss of a child and can only conclude that temperament is everything.

A good anecdote about Waldo minor: "He named the parts of the toy house he was always building.... by fancy names which had a good sound as the 'Interspeglium' and the 'coridiga'"

One offering by Charles Newcomb contained this insane sentence which even Emerson couldn't excuse: "The thing which is beautiful acts as a thing upon the child, and Being answer Being than looks at each other and feels each other as what they internally are." Ow.

Names of some religious groups from a gathering E. attends: "Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians....."

Emerson has developed a rather harsh attitude toward the endurance of marriage that I find interesting. "It would not do to abrogate the laws which make Marriage a relation for life, fit or unfit. Plainly marriage should be a temporary relation, it should have its natural birth, climax, and decay without any violence of any kind, -violence to bind, or violence to rend...." it goes on from there.... Is it my imagination but that sentence one and sentence two contradict eachother? I suppose the second is meant to partake of a 'perfect world'. It has occurred to me however to wonder, if people do end up living well into their 100's if a new definition of marriage might not be necessary. One book I read about marriage talks about how most marriages (ending in the death of one spouse, usually the wife) didn't last much over ten years in the middle ages, and not much over twenty until quite recently. Food for thought.

I felt a lot of sympathy for Emerson's wife. I can't help but wonder if a lot of Lidian's poor health, physical and emotional, came directly from the issues surrounding their unsuitability for one another. I think she probably was always under the emotional burden of being the second wife--second to a first wife who must have grown more perfect in Emerson's memory as the years went by. Good grief, he even changed her name from Lidia to Lidian so that it would be more "euphonious" with Emerson.

Baker makes her out to be something of a fool, and I found myself having less and less patience with his flat portrayal of her personality. Quotations like this one aren't balanced with anything else, nor are they given any context by Baker, leaving the reader with the idea that Lidian must have been a whack-job: "At home in October Ellen accompanied her parents to the annual Cattle Show, where a horse stamped on the hem of Lidian's dress, eliciting one of her famous screams, though she cooed at all the cows and 'asked if the sun couldn't be screened from bossy's eyes'" (474).

Also, if she really took as much calomel in her early life as he indicates, then she must have had major issues with mercury poisoning. That's what the light sensitivity would have been about--also the insomnia, emotional lability, memory impairment, her complaint of always being "hot." Even her chronic dyspepsia could have been caused or exacerbated by the calomel.

I have to push on with my day--swimming today. Bye for now.

Oh Horrors. I just put a random paragraph of my writing from this thread into "I Write Like" and it came up that I write like H.P. Lovecraft--"American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction." Hahahaha. If the shoe fits....

That's funny. I should try it!

No argument from me about Baker's total lack of..... interest, sympathy, understanding, you name it. I don't think he necessarily means to make Lidian out to be a whack-job, there certainly is a kind of knee-jerk archetype of the 'pathetic' wife who 'didn't understand' or 'come up to the level of' and just wasn't worthy in general of the wonderful brilliant husband - more discerning biographers tend to get that it takes two -. The calomel biz is just plain creepy. I think I'll go read about it, as I have been meaning to.

So what was wrong with plain old prune juice, may I ask???????
Was Lidian an anorexic??? She was really really skinny, no? Hmm. Weirdness and sadness indeed.

Didn't she say somewhere that from the age of 18 to 30 she was known as "the living skeleton"--or something like that.

There's a novel I'm tempted to try, but then again sometimes I'm put off by historical novels. It's Mr. Emerson's Wife, by Amy Belding Brown. She is praised for her solid research in the reviews, but this is definitely a work of fiction. I think she writes about the relationship between Lidian and Thoreau--steamy stuff, or some such. Of course this would have to be a novel, because that would be nothing but pure speculation. However, you know how it is when you're researching something and you start reading between the lines--maybe what she found there has some validity. Who knows? I almost hope Lidian and Thoreau did have something going, since her relationship with Emerson seems pretty one-sided and thin.

What a thought! Thoreau seems singularly uninterested in anything to do with 'steamy' -- in that regard Hawthorne and Fuller seem the healthiest more or less..... at least by our standards.

19. Theodore Parker sounds like someone with his head firmly fastened on his shoulders -- He took Emerson's sometimes vague notions, combined them with Kant's ideas, stirred them up and came up with some interesting stuff about the individual's relationship to God and so forth. It's nice to read about someone who is grounded.

I finally broke down and looked up the word 'contumacious' -- wilfully disobedient, etc. What I had surmised, more or less.

And then in 20 it's Hawthorne and the thawing and development of some kind of rapport between the two men. I did get a giggle out of Margaret Fuller trying to foist her sister and bil on the newlyweds at the manse -- that's just plain evil! It's quite amusing too that Emerson is so rude about Hawthorne's writing! But I think H. was very very observant about human nature and behavior in a way that made others uncomfortable (and still does). In some ways he is to the soul as Thoreau was to nature, in his ability to dive in and describe and dissect. Anyhow, I like Hawthorne too -- find his caution in throwing himself in with the other 'eccentrics' showed some sense.

Also finally looked up "Ishmaelitish" which Baker seems to use to describe Emerson's iconoclastic tendencies to go his own way vis a vis notions of God, doctrine, etc. I find it an annoying term -- vague -- and he never explains what he means by it, at least, if he did I missed it.

The description of Theodore Parker comes from 1838 when he was a young man, and Baker makes this assessment of him: "Parker's reaction to the Address {Emerson addressing the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School} was fairly typical of Emerson's catalytic effect upon the men of his age and station among the Unitarians of the late 1830s." And Parker's reaction to the Address: "So beautiful, so just, so true, and terribly sublime was his picture of the faults of the Church in its present position" (199). Parker was a graduate of the divinity school. He must have hugely annoyed the Unitarians.

There seems to be no reform movement of the time that Parker didn't embrace--peace, temperance, education, the condition of women, penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, the physical destitution of the poor, abolition, etc. --This comes from his first biographer John White Chadwick in Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer. I think it would be fair to call him a radical abolitionist, but that comes along in later chapters.

"Two of Emerson's adjectives for his friend were 'contumacious' and 'clever.' Neither of them could be fairly applied to Emerson himself even when the Ishmaelitish mood was most upon him" (205).

I don't imagine "clever" coming from Emerson was meant to be complimentary to Parker. Heh. Also, like you I wish Baker would explain the "Ishmaelitish" reference rather than leave the reader to puzzle it out.

Well, I'll stay tuned to the Parker drama then.

21. is mostly focussed on Alcott, who is bouncing around full of his usual idealistic notions. A small experiment in communal living is undertaken at 'Fruitlands' and, of course, fails -- but finally Emerson gets them settled on a little farm nearby where Alcott seems to pull himself together somewhat to do repairs and take care of some of the needs of his family. They certainly would fit right into things today -- Mom was into the gluten-free, lactose-free, macrobio-locovore sort of diet -- those poor girls! -- anyhow, Emerson employs him to make a little summer-house/shed and Alcott applies himself with a will -- partic. to Thoreau's amusement he 'laughingly told Emerson that working with Alcott was like being nowhere, doing nothing.' "'in spite of all their joint activity,' the strange edifice had not yet fallen down." Alcott says of it "I call this my style of building 'the Sylvan'. Emerson called it Tumbledown Hall.

Now that Em has all these cranks nearby, instead of being delighted he admits that "I look with a sort of terror at my gate."

22. More happily, Hawthorne's arrival in 1843 at the Manse is more welcome -- their friendship continues to warm. A charming picture of H and Sophia settling in to the house as newlyweds and scratching their names, dates, and poetry onto the windows of the study. They seem reasonably happy with each other, responsive and even sensible, which is a relief.

By the end of today I hope to be at the half-way mark at the end of Ch. 25.

I read two chapters yest and then neglected/forgot to account for them here!
23. Channing is back in Concord. A bit of the chapter is taken up with a description of a visit to a Shaker village. (Admirable, but also a bit too into themselves, concludes E). "Although they worked hard, they lived for show, with their buildings ostentatiously neat." Also, writes Baker, paraphrasing mostly, "They were doers, not lovers, so exagerrating the virtues of celibacy that a chance visitor might imagine that he had entered a 'hospital ward of invalids afflicted with priapism.'" And so on. E is good at sarcasm when he feels like it. Lidian, also, is pregnant at 42 which is something I can empathize w/easily since I was 41 when I had my one and only. Edward is born, amid what seems like less fuss and fanfare than Waldo, (of the girls there is barely a mention except in passing, they matter so little). Emerson steps up his anti-slavery rhetoric and, well, Channing potters around ineffectually. He was obviously someone who was fun to have around, good company. Beyond that, his charms don't seem to have had lasting power.

24 Thoreau, who has been indispensible to Lidian for almost two years, goes off to NY to work as a tutor to E's nephew, Willy out on Staten Island. He enjoys the beauty of the place, and finds friends to entertain him in NY (I find the image of HDT in NYC deliciously anomalous) including Henry James, Sr. (also a fascinating connection). He writes Lidian what is almost a love letter, which Lidian can't keep to herself and takes to Emerson..... after that T is more circumspect. I'm glad T liked Lidian enough to write her fulsomely. T doesn't thrive in that environment and is homesick and so he returns after about a year....

Yesterday's reading took me over halfway. Maybe I can read 4 chapters today, although that is unlikely.

>62 sibylline:. Chapt. 21--another Bronson Alcott chapter. From reading biographies of Louisa May Alcott, I had the impression that when they lived at Fruitlands, those children nearly starved. I think water and apples was what they had to eat much of the time. Emerson was a good friend to him; it's hard to say what would have happened to that family without Emerson's help. As for funding for Alcott's far, Emerson wrote, "But for a founder of a family or institution, I would as soon exert myself to collect money for a madman" (218).

Chapt. 22, Hawthorne at the Manse

Ditto what you said here, Sib. Poor Hawthorne wasn't pleased about Thoreau going to Staten Island and Ellery Channing coming to Concord to live in the farmhouse near Emerson: Ellery, thought Hawthorne, 'was but a poor substitute for Mr. Thoreau.' Thoreau seems to be one of the few people whose company Hawthorne enjoyed (229).

My experience of Sophia Hawthorne, from other biographies, is that her letters are full of purple prose, always over the top and effusively emotional, which makes her an easy target for ridicule. I don't know if she was just sort of generally emotionally unhinged, or maybe she just wrote that way. There seems to be a subtext here of Sophia having a "thing" for Emerson, but also of Emerson having an eye for lovely young girls. Baker writes about Sophia, "Herself rather plain-featured, she had known him long enough to recognize that his interest perked up in the presence of more beautiful and graceful than she was" (230). This was in reference to Sophia's friend who was visiting, Anna Shaw, the young woman of the "golden curls" whom Emerson so admired. "Tall and straight, but noticeably pale and thin, Lidian could not now compare physically with such incipient goddesses as Anna Shaw, and Sophia knew it" (230). I'm not exactly sure what Baker is getting at here, although I'm thinking that in many ways, life with Emerson must have been something of a trial for Lydian.

Chapt. 23, Channing in Concord

I also noted Lydian's age for this last pregnancy. For someone who seems to have been so chronically ill, it's amazing that she was 1) able to get pregnant at that age in the first place; and 2) able to carry the pregnancy to term. I go back and forth about Lydian and her health. It does seem as though many of her physical problems were most likely symptoms of mercury poisoning from the calomel; yet she had this late pregnancy, plus she lived into her 90s. She's a curious woman.

On their walks together, Emerson and Channing kept track of the building of the railroad. Some pretty condescending remarks from him about the Irish laborers building the railroad (236)--something to the effect that they were better off working here with "peaceful shovels" than the pikes they might have been carrying in the Old Country, working from "dark to dark for fifty cents a day." In his journal of the same year (Sept. 1843) he wrote, "See this great shovel-handed Irish race who procede everywhere the civilization of America, and grade the road for the rest!"

Chapt. 24, Thoreau in New York

I wonder if there was every any talk in the town about Thoreau living in Emerson's house ("occupying the room at the head of the stairs in Emerson's house for twenty-one months") while at the same time Emerson was gone from home on "extended absences" (243). An unmarried man living with a married woman whose husband is frequently out of town? And there was no "talk"? Although evidently Emerson's mother was also living in the house at the time--and maybe also his sister. Baker mentions this, but barely (246). It would take another kind of biography to get a feeling for what the household was like, since that doesn't seem to be Baker's aim here. From his letter quoted here to Lydian, we do get a sense of Emerson's self-imposed ignorance about what home life was like for her when he was away: "With the good Louisa by your side {Baker: a "faithful and energetic servant"}, and all your helpful company, and the thin critical man removed so far away, I think of you as very placid" (246).

I'm thinking that whatever their relationship, Thoreau's move to New York must have been a loss to Lydian. Plus she was also pregnant at the age of 41.

Thoreau has gone to Staten Island to teach Latin to Emerson's nephew, son of Emerson's brother William. Evidently William and Thoreau didn't get along, and he returned to Concord. I'd be interested in more details of Thoreau's meeting with the editor of the Tribune, Horace Greeley.

I think it was about this point in the book, Lucy, that I was finding it something of an uphill climb. However, after this point my notes pick up, so I must have been liking it better. Take heart!

I'm glad to hear that -- I 'like' everything I'm reading at the mo' but I'm not loving anything.

Of course, Baker's stated focus is on the friends and the social circle -- but .... it's all so suggestive and incomplete. Thoreau's tendre for Lidian, Emerson's weakness (personally I think it was harmless and applied to both male and female youth) for 'beauty'. I say harmless because he was just as easily captivated by intelligence or sincerity - he seems to have been attracted to certain extremes. I've seen that quality in a few of the more charismatic teachers I've encountered. Nonetheless Emerson has to have been a trial as a husband, involvement at home was dependent on whether he needed to be writing and lecturing and who was around to distract him......

25 I was glad to see Margaret thrive in New York -- fascinated by her connection with Greeley and Molly. I did some extensive reading about Greeley as a senior in high school, and the Fuller connection went right by me. Interesting that she was not naturally a good writer -- or rather -- a good editor of her own prose. A shame, too. I'm sure it was all because she was a frustrated virgin, eh. I mean, cripes.

26 And at last Thoreau makes it to Walden....... curious though that it was initially an idea tossed out by Ellery the layabout -- I suppose if that was ALL he did, give Henry the idea, that justifies his entire presence and existence.... ? But does it excuse the bright orange shoes? I actually kind of like this guy.

Emerson on Thoreau's convo: 'consisted of a continual coining of the present moment into a sentence and offering it to me. I compared it to a boy who from the universal snow lying on the earth gathers up a little in his hand, rolls it into a ball, and flings it at me."

27 Parker moves to a new church where he will stay. He is one of the most 'different' of Emerson's circle, in that he is so much a man of action. It seems as if he and Emerson frequently teetered on disagreement but must have had a balancing effect on one another. An interesting relationship. Parker says this of Emerson, "that his work incorporated 'the idea of personal freedom, of the dignity and value of human nature, the superiority of man to the accidents of man'" (not sure what that last phrase means, but it sounds great!).

OK so I'm a bit flippant today.... forgive! I do hope you are right and that it does get a wee bit more engaging. I'm going to try again for 3 chapters today.

On your other thread you mention a "teeny" font, which is enough these days with my eyes going south to put me off of any book. The font of my edition is quite readable. I think that makes a huge difference. Sorry that yours is small. I'll be back with more later....

Yeah, I got a pbk copy -- cheep -- you get whatcher pay for is the lesson, innit?

Chapt. 25, Margaret Fuller in New York, 1844-46

Ha--So it sounds as though you agree with Horace Greeley: Baker quotes a passage about her from Horace Greeley's memoir, Recollections of a Busy Life: "Noble and great as she was, a good husband and two or three bouncing babies would have emancipated her from a good deal of cant and nonsense" (259). Baker's comment is that Greeley "offers independent support for Emerson's view." I know you're being flip. I think as much as anything, Fuller was looking for a vocation--something to do that matched her brainpower.

When Fuller went to work for Horace Greeley at the NY Tribune as a literary critic, she was the first (one of the first?--I guess it doesn't matter--she was one of the earliest) woman journalist in America. Baker mentions her employment there as if it were pretty much an everyday thing.

OK, so I went back to my notes on the book about the NY Herald Tribune: That book says she was the first woman to serve as a regular editorial staff member on a prominent American newspaper. The biography of Margaret Fuller by Paula Blanchard would be a good source for more information about her--Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution. I promised myself I would read that one next, yet I put it back on the shelf, maybe because I didn't want to get into it right away after finishing Baker's book.

I'm not so sure I agree with you about Emerson's weakness for young women as being harmless. There's a certain creepiness factor that starts to come into play at some point, at least for me. Here's another one in this chapter--Caroline Sturgis, a friend of Margaret Fuller. It was clear that he was a man who enjoyed women. He liked them with intelligence and spirit. He also had a very distinct prejudice against the female mind (and it's too bad that Baker doesn't deal with Emerson's attitude head-on), that the best and brightest female mind would always be inferior to the best and brightest male mind. I guess it's fair to say that he was a product of his time, when men like Emerson treated their women/wives as a cross between angels and idiots, and we have to remember that he was dealing with women who were at a distinct disadvantage in their education. He sent his daughters to Mrs. Aggasiz's school in Cambridge--so that was a plus, but it would be interesting to know where the impetus for that came from. Additionally, Emerson also seems to have forgotten what his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson meant to his own development in his younger years; as the years went by he viewed her more and more condescendingly as just an eccentric old lady. --Just throwing out some thoughts here.

I am entirely with you on the Emerson and women front. He at least wanted to try - a legacy I suppose from Aunt Mary. It doesn't surprise me that he sent his daughters to a good school, from Harriet Stowe we know that families valued having educated women so that, at the very least, they could a) develop their own religious life b) educate their young children c) be reasonable company for the men. Few men were willing to even pretend to consider women as intellectually equal, even potentially. It never seems to occur to any of them that married and fertile women even of this social class, were so distracted (understatement) by family duties, losses, etc. that they were simply too unreliable, scattered etc. at least until the children were grown -- then they were often so absorbed in being a helpful grandma that they might never get back to say, some Greek translation that had begun wonderfully thirty years earlier..... I don't really think that men of my father's generation were much better. I think our generation is 'trying' and the next one, with many exceptions, as far as I can tell is moving on somewhere new. Where that might be, I don't know!

OK so moving on myself....

28 Hawthorne, broke and worried, scarpers off to Salem. I'm loving him in this chapter -- nicknames for his baby: 'the small troglodyte' and even better 'bundlebreeches'. Hawthorne is maturing inwardly I think as this sentiment indicates: "We should be no better than parsnips, if we could not still look over our shoulders at the Power that drives us, and escape from private insignificance into a faith in the transcendent significance of our doing and being." He has also become fully aware that he is a more ... complete..... person than Emerson in that he is comfortable with himself as a sexual being. This aspect of Emerson is something that maybe Hawthorne sees more clearly and fully than most?

29 Margaret heads, at last for Europe, and I find myself sad, knowing where after her brief happiness this is all going...... but at least she has this happy last couple of years. She does seem to mature and blossom with her handsome and devoted Ossoli, we can only wonder what she would have become had she lived. Thank you for the info about being first women journalist.

A great Emerson quote I can relate to: "This voyage of mine is not much. It would be much if I were ready for it: but I am not. All my life is a sort of College Examination. I shall never graduate. I have always some tormenters ahead." Emerson, btw, has gone off to Europe leaving Lidian once again alone with Thoreau as her 'majordomo'.

30 The Alcotts meanwhile struggle along. Bronson becomes friendly with a young woman named Ednah Littlehale (where have these names gone????). Whatever sort of person Alcott was you had to know him in person, I think, like Ellery Channing...... What I do think is that Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne all benefitted greatly from the ideas and dreams of these two, more than we'll ever know. They were more able to manifest aspects of those ideas -- either by doing things, like T. or writing essays and novels. At the end of the chapter we are apprised of Margaret's death.

Ch 31 (into part 3 - the fifities) And now the circle of friends suffers its first permanent loss with Margaret Fuller's death. The friends pull together to write a biography.

Ch 32 This is an odd chapter and illuminates vividly how the bio comes to life whenever Thoreau walks into the room. Baker starts imaginately in the mind of a young student who comes to consult the great Emerson and finds this odd dour man with him, who puzzles him, but in the end, clearly has a close and interesting relationship with Emerson. But the tenor of the chapter is, that as Emerson's young men (T is barely younger, btw) grow up, they become more critical of Emerson, more aware of his flaws and shortcomings, and begin to distance themselves from him, although, in his actual presence they are as responsive as ever. It seems they can only resist his influence from afar.

I'm a hair under 200 pages which means at the rate I'm going about ten more days..... I can't say I will miss this book either although I am much better informed. I'll have to see how it settles, I think, to make a final judgment.

Chapt. 32, "Thoreau and Channing"

Sib, I'm wondering if you recall that Ellery Channing's sister Mary was married to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She was something of a physical and emotional wreck, if I recall. What a web of relationships! Little wonder that Baker was drawn to write a group biog.

I agree with you that the book picks up in every place where we encounter Thoreau. I like him in much the same way that I like Hawthorne.

I liked Chapt. 33, "The Lenox Connection," where we meet Caroline Sturgis again and Hawthorne. I think from Chapt. 32 on the book picks up. I was surprised to find that it was actually a pretty fast read from this point on. I guess it's because I was feeling more engaged with these people.

It had crossed my mind to wonder how and if Higginson was connected to this lot -- and, of course, there it is, not just a connection but even a family one.

It's interesting isn't it -- that Emerson himself doesn't animate Baker. Thoreau brings him to life and Hawthorne too although to a slightly lesser degree.

"Emerson himself doesn't animate Baker"--what an excellent point! Very curious.

33 is a lively chapter - mostly about Hawthorne who is really coming into his own. He spends a couple of years (lazy.... should check!) living in Lenox and at first it is a paradise, but after awhile, as always happens, he becomes bored with the people and lonely in the place. The HUGE thing that happens however is his friendship with Herman Melville -- they have a galvanizing effect on each other, esp Hawthorne on Melville. It is implied that it is possible Moby Dick might not have developed into the 'big' novel it became without the incentive and encouragement that Melville gained just from being friends with someone so calmly ambitious and confident and working at peak powers. H's description of dealing with his little boy when his wife is away for three weeks is hilarious and feels very contemporary and hands on -- he really really loved his children and was willing to make sacrifices to be with them.

He says this about Emerson "I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow.... Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man.... I love all men who dive Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more...."

Apropos of nothing "Elizabeth Lloyd" the visiting Quaker from Philadelphia is a family connection.....

The H's get into a weird squabble with Caroline Sturgis over apples in the apple orchard and vamoose, but it was only an excuse, I think. They are back in Concord briefly because Franklin Pierce, schoolmate from Bowdoin, is running for pres and H. writes the campaign bio and then, in return, when Pierce is elected receives the remunerative consulship to both Liverpool and then (by clever management) Manchester also. The H's are then off to Europe! I have to say, of all of the 'eccentrics' Hawthorne is the least eccentric, most down-to-earth of the lot. What a contrast to poor hapless Alcott!

OK, so you have me scrambling back to my notes for Chapt. 33.

I remember an account of Anna Alcott from an Alcott biog. She moved to Highwood ("Tanglewood" per Hawthorne--heh) to help Caroline with her children, and she was miserable. I have no idea why I remember that factoid. I think she was stunned to be treated as something like a servant by Caroline.

I think it helps to know that Melville was 15 years younger than Hawthorne, so he looked up to him.

Hawthorne is sort of hilarious--he couldn't stay put anywhere. I wonder what that was about? Anyway, he's definitely one of my favorites, along with Thoreau.

I am mad mad mad. I wrote a nice summing up of 35 and 36 and hit post and it disappeared.... I DON"T KNOW WHY!!!! Now I've removed my post-its on the things I quoted and etc.

Sigh.

Caroline -- seems to have had a Lady of the Manor complex.

Ah yes, the age gap, I'd forgotten how large it is.

I'm a bit like Hawthorne, very restless.

On to 35 -- Ellen -- sent off to the Sedgwick Girl's Academy in Lenox where she thrives. Her desire however is to return home and be the housekeeper (which in part seems to have consisted of running around checking the ripeness of pears). Meanwhile Emerson is occupied writing heady stuff about freedom and necessity, when he isn't supervising roof repair and picking pears. His mother, now in her 90's dies peacefully. Ellen eventually comes home and does, in fact, take over.

36. Along comes Whitman. Methinks he would have been right at home in our celebrity mad era. The quote I liked is from Charles Eliot Norton -- to the effect that in Whitman was combined a Concord Transcendentalist and a New York Fireman.

Finally -- yesterday while I was muddling about in my studio I saw a book wedged behind a pillow, and lo and behold, it is called Tales from the Enchanted Isles by none other than Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It is cataloged here and I never noticed. Not only that, but I am fairly sure I have even read it.

This means I have too many books, I suspect.

this time I am copying before trying to post.....

Oh, I so hate losing posts. It's disheartening.

Oh, you lost the 35 chapter post about Ellen. I had all kinds of questions about her (Emerson's daughter, for those of you who are following along)--like, what was she like, really, since I didn't trust Baker to really give a rip about her.

In this chapter it's 1853 and Ellen is 15 years old. She's been sent to Mrs. Charles Sedgwick's School for Girls in Lenox Village, so she was quite far from home (relatively, of course).

This caught my attention from the chapter: c.1854, 1855. Caroline Tappan's sister, Susan Bigelow, bought arsenic at a shop and took her life with it. Good grief. (353) Caroline Sturgis Tappan's papers are at Harvard, along with letters to/from her sister Susan. I think those letters would probably be interesting to read.

In this chapter, to no one's surprise, we find that Emerson writes to his daughter Ellen to report that her mother is "very feeble" and that he probably can't spare her to go to school "anywhere. I think we shall have to instal you as housekeeper for a time sole and sovereign to make your blunders and correct them yourself, and find out by hitting and missing and hitting again, the true and perfect way. Meantime your Mother will be relieved, which she needs" (358).

Baker reports Ellen referring to these housekeeping chores as "the treasures of my kingdom" which made me wonder what sort of person Ellen was, anyway.

I found two volumes of her letters at Amazon.used and I bought them. I'm here to tell you that this girl/woman was an absolute saint. She gave her whole life up to taking care of her aging parents, her married sister when she was having her children, those nieces and nephews, and also to her brother Edward. "Selfless" is the only word for her. From spending a little time with her letters, I would say that I can't see that she had a bad word to say about anyone--not ever, not once in her life. How someone could be so selfless and other-directed for her entire life, I can only say that it's beyond my experience. I've never known anyone like this. I can't imagine it, but NOTHING bothered this woman. At one point I actually got to wondering if she was retarded or something--that sounds horrible.

This is typical of her attitude in her letters, all her life, when she writes to a friend about having to leave the school in Lenox and come back to Concord because her parents need her. Remember that she's 15 years old or some such. "I am just as happy here as there, always just as happy as I can be, but I love Lenox and all there so much it makes me feel bad to think about it." That's as close as she ever came to a complaint.

Oh Becky you had me cackling my head off! Who indeed! I do know a couple of people who are bit that way -- one of them is a cousin who is simply always cheerful. Her sister is quite neurotic and when that sister took the cheerful one in to see her therapist, later the therapist told her that she was lucky -- that her cheerful sister was one of sanest people she had ever met! Anyhow this same cheerful cousin actually had settled in, after she finished college to look after her widowed father and was a bit miffed when he remarried! She loved running that household -- as you say -- beyond my comprehension too. On the other hand I don't think she had to do a lot of heavy labor, there were servants to do that, in one description it sounds as if she scampered about checking in various draws of desks and bureaus to see of the specialty pears that Emerson loved were ripe! Not too arduous by half! Looking at that family photo she must be the very tall one on the left who is SMILING!

Yesterday somehow I only managed one chapter.

37 returns to Theodore Parker and a gradual uptick all around in NE in abolitionist fervor due to the Compromise of 1850. Emerson pokes his head out of his shell once again, but seems careful to also keep a safe distance away from the more passionate leaders of the movement. It is interesting that Emerson does note something to the effect that you can't avoid the questions of your own time, all the time.

I confess never enjoy reading about John Brown -- he gives rise to too many mixed feelings in me -- so probably I am putting off that chapter. I am a bit like Emerson, I fear!

So I careened through 38, and now that's done. In the context of the fact that it is a book about Emerson, and that Brown wasn't one of his circle, he was an influence, certainly, serving to flush Emerson out of hiding and into taking up a position. The quote in that last paragraph does seem like an example of Emerson writing at full tilt, all pistons firing. It's easy to imagine how that kind of measured rhetoric in the hands of a strong speaker would be heady stuff.

And off to bed and two more chapters, so I can get caught up, I hope! Only ten or eleven to go! Huzza!

Chapt. 38 "Captain John Brown"

Not too long ago, I slogged through a hugely detailed description of the whole Kansas-Nebraska Act, John Brown thing in Battle Cry of Freedom. Like you, this was not my favorite chapter. But one of the reasons I wanted to read the Emerson book was to get this group's take of the politics of the 1850s and what was coming their way; and additionally, to see what they had to say about the aftermath of the Civil War.

My reading of Brown is that he was a megalomaniac who believed he was sent by God "to be the deliverer of the slaves the same as Moses had delivered the children of Israel." One of his plans was to "set ablaze the whole country from the Potomac to Savanah" (382).

I think the radical abolitionists used Brown and he used them. I found this to be an interesting sentence, coming from Baker: "With the possible exception of Higginson and Frank Sanborn, none of his Yankee adherents yet knew for certain{emphasis mine} where and when he would launch his attempt to incite thousands of slaves to rebellion."

I'm just wondering: what exactly did these abolitionists tucked away in northern Massachusetts think would happen if and when Brown was successful in burning down the South and inciting "thousands" of slaves to rebel? What about the Quakers among them? What was their attitude towards this rhetoric that seemed for all the world to be inciting war? What did they do about it? I'm frankly rather tired of reading the same old dumbed-down approach to the "history" of the John Brown raid.

Obviously, the issues here that concern slavery and the rights of blacks and abolition and secession all the rest of it are hugely more complicated that they are made out to be in books like Baker's. I would submit a short list of interesting books to read, and then I'll just move on.

Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865, by Ryan P. Jordan.

Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts, by Elise Lemire.

Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow.

The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo. I have this book. If I can get it away from DH, I'll read it next. One of his major theses is this: Why not peaceful emancipation? "Dozens of countries, including the possessions of the British, French, and Spanish empires, ended slavery peacefully during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only in the United States was warfare associated with emancipation."

Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, by C.S. Manegold. I just bought this book at amazon.used. It looks like a fascinating read.

Those all look like worthy and provocative books and I've added several of them to my wishlist. The Civil War is a muddle, no argument from me, not the least mysterious of which is that the majority of the leading officers, mainly generals, both sides, were all from the same graduating class at West Point. As in, FRIENDS, many of them. I find that simply creepy. Was it another war game to these boys? Full disclosure B, not that this will surprise you at this point as I think you have me pretty well figured out, but a 2G grandpa of mine was one of those men, a talented and able man, who did go on, after the war to do good things as a bureaucrat, re-organizing the armed forces etc. I went through a time of reading a lot a lot about the war and ended up with my brain in a tailspin. I'm sure I'll get back to it sometime - but my takeaway then was that it was one of those unfortunate situations where many forces, small and large, came together to create a serious disaster. No easy unravelling, in other words, no one finger to point anywhere.

My brain is a bit woolly this morning, time for coffee, then I'll do my chapters and come back.

Well, after scampering about in a great rush to boil 20 lbs of potatoes for tomorrow's library 'fete' and fundraiser, I settled in w/my chapters.

39 We return here to Whitman and the absorbing question of whether or not he was 'all over red' -- he had a very reddish complexion apparently..... He meets Alcott and A. describes it 'like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run.' Whitman's rep. is becoming 'established' - in a manner of speaking - since the point was that Whitman represented something new and not immediately easy to apprehend.

40 Returns to what Emerson himself is up to during the same period. Home and out lecturing mainly..... an odd interlude when moving his mother and sons' remains to the new Sleepy Hollow Cemetery he looks into Waldo's coffin. Then this on bankers an banking, quite a propos today, I would say: "Nobody knows how far each of these bankers and traders blows up his little airball on what infinitely small supply of soap and water. They all float in the air alike as balloons and planets..... until they strike one another, or any house." Lidian continues to be ill, Anna Ward converts to Roman Catholicism to the dismay of E. and others, Bulkely dies, and he makes friends with John Murray Forbes, the founder of the Naushon island phenom. He sprains an ankle and writes amusingly of all his doctors advising different treatments. The family acquires a parrot that he calls 'a green cat'.

The chapter ends with this about his friends, that he respected '...the private power of each person, - the door into nature that is opened to him; that which each can, let him do, satisfied with his task and its instructions and its happiness."

104 pages to go!

I lost the post for my notes of Chapt 39, "Whitman in Person," but I remember thinking something to the effect that if Alcott had lived today, he would be leading Concord's Gay Pride Parade. I think the whole wife/children/family bread earner thing just didn't fit with who he really was.

Chapt. 40, "The Man in the Turret"

The time for this chapter is the late 1850s. I think it's fascinating to note that Baker says the Emerson family had a "resident seamstress." From what I understand, often women who worked at this trade went from house to house, spending weeks at each home, making dresses for the season for all the women of the house. And then she would move on to her next client. So I don't know if Baker is confusing this sort of "resident seamstress" with someone who actually lived with the family year-round. I tend to think it was the former. Sarah Orne Jewet refers in letters from time to time to the family seamstress being in residence. Another domestic detail that obviously wasn't on Baker's radar.

I noted in this chapter that Ellery Channing and his wife were separated. Then after a couple of years they came back together and had a fifth child together, and then the next year his wife Ellen died of TB. My own poor dear grandmother was constantly pregnant while also having TB and also died (pregnant again) at an early age from the disease. I've often fantasized about taking a horsewhip to my grandfather. Oops, maybe too much information--heh.

The Emerson girls, Ellen and Edith, were sent to the school in Cambridge run by Mrs. Agassiz--although here again, Baker shows his inattention or ignorance by saying that they went to the school run by the "family of Louis Agassiz in their home in Cambridge." There's a very good biography, even though it's old (published in 1954 or thereabouts) about the Agassiz family: Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston by Louise Hall Tharp. The school was developed and run by Agassiz's wife, Elizabeth Carey Agassiz. It opened in 1855. In the biography I read about Clover Adams, it said that this was the best school to send girls from Boston in the late 1850s--it was on the par of today's high school. Louis Agassiz was constantly in debt, despite the fame of his explorations, so his wife started the school in order to support the family. Also, without Mrs. Agassiz, there probably would have been no Radcliffe--she was co-founder and first president of the college. It was thanks to her insistance that the girls who went to Radcliffe were taught by Harvard professors.

This is great information Becky, much better than my feeble summaries. You are definitely right about the fact that the Emersons would not have had a live-in seamstress year round, that was for the seriously rich. I've been in houses that have an odd little room on the second floor - and I can remember someone telling me it was for the seamstress to work in. I've put one of those rooms in something I've written. I wonder where they fit in, the seamstresses, who they ate with, the kitchen or the family - I would bet some of the very skilled ones were relatively 'genteel'.....

Your summaries are excellent, not "feeble," Sib. I was wondering the same thing, where in the family a seamstress would fit in. The way I remember Sarah Orne Jewett talking about their seamstress, I'd be willing to bet she was treated as a visiting family friend, although I'll bet not everyone treated them that way.

Have fun at your library fundraiser.

Plowed through 41 and 42 just now.

41 Intrigued by the mention of John Brown's daughter living with the Emerson's..... these sorts of mentions are so tantalizing. Much of this chapter focuses on Whitman, Emersons somewhat feeble attempts to get him to remove the sexual poems, Whitman refusing to consider, but all of it politely and good-naturedly transacted. A scare when Eddy contracts typhoid , although he recovers this seems to have weakened him permanently. Most significant is the return from Europe of Hawthorne. Henry James Sr. writes of him "He has the look of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives." For all his time abroad, he is still shy. Una Hawthorne has some kind of fever/fit and a woman 'named Rollins' comes out from Cambridge to 'administer electric shock treatments' which work, apparently. Although, perhaps Una was going to get better anyway. The pears in the orchard fall untimely in a windstorm, Emerson enjoys stereoscope. Curiously, in this chapter, one has the feeling of a shift, that the modern world of innovations and rapid change is just on the horizon. The chapter closes with a warning of Thoreau's impending death.

42 The War begins.... Emerson sees it as an inevitability and is, albeit sadly, all for doing whatever has to be done. Eddy is on fire to enlist, but it is obvious that he is not up to it. E. goes to Washington and meets Lincoln, liking him better than he thought he would. Thoreau dies in early spring after a long decline which he met with his usual calm and wit. Another intriguing aside is that the two girls spend part of the summer in Newport with the James family, a raucous and lively and fun bunch. I don't remember, from reading the endless Edel bio, anything quite this jolly. And there is no mention of Alice. At last Lincoln explicity links ending slavery with the Union effort and Emerson is very relieved and glad. He gives Lincoln the benefit of the doubt for having moved steadily towards this end but not rushing into it. Edward takes a long trip around the US but does not return any healthier and is sent back to Harvard.

Ellen's letters, the quotes Baker chooses anyway, make her seem the child patterned the most in her father's mold -- she is funny, observant and fundamentally good-natured. Also, it appears, a relentless loner, part of a family, yes, but not eager to set up her own household and give up the benefits and freedoms of being single. Of course, I don't know if she marries later on, but somehow I am guessing not.

I found another book that looks to be of interest that I'm going to add here to the list: Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, by David Herbert Donald. It was originally published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. It's still in print and is available in a 2009 paperback edition.

I bought myself a two-volume edition of Ellen Emerson's letters. I wanted to see for myself what sort of person she was and also get her take on a few things if possible. Her letters are very homey and full of information about what it was like to run a household like the Emerson's. I just read this, and thought it showed something about her personality. It was a letter to her father in 1859 (she was either 19 or 20 years old): "Mr. Thoreau came on Saturday and I gave him some pears and showed him your teak, teek, tique, tiek, teik cane (I hope one of those is right)."

Chapt. 42, "In Time of War"

Yes, the young people were all having a raucous time of it in Newport in the summer of 1862. Lucky them. Baker says that Eddy Emerson was too young for the war, but in 1862 he would have been 18 years old. He was too ill to go to war but not too ill to go on an extended trip out west and also not too ill to attend Harvard. William James was some sort of neurasthenic; Henry James had a "mysterious hurt." Neither one fought in the war. Emerson seems to have been fine with sending all of Boston's and Concord's sons off to war, "the best blood of our educated counties" (438). How lucky for him his son wasn't one of them. Edward graduated Harvard Class of 1866 and was so frail of health that he lived to be 86 years old.

From another of Ellen's letters, Jan. 6, 1863. Edward was well enough to walk from Cambridge to Concord in January--maybe 15 miles or so--and climb in the second story window to get into the Emerson's locked house for a surprise visit.

Eddy strikes me as having some 'issues' - maybe a learning disability, maybe some mental unsteadiness, not fully disclosed, or some measure of both; he seems very protected and very immature, so I am guessing the right choice was made to keep him out of it. The trip around the country was meant to help him mature, probably and maybe return healthier, which he didn't, a further indication. It does seem odd when a frail person (say, Lidian) lives forever -- maybe Eddy had some of her problems?

I don't believe either older James would have made decent soldiers, and given what they contributed instead, I am glad they knew their limitations and didn't go.

On to 43.
Whitman freely uses his association w/ Emerson to promote himself, another 'modern' aspect of the man, not necessarily a pretty one; the war drags on to Gettysburg; Mary Moody dies; on the home front Ellen is reined in by her mother to pay more attention to her; more detail about Hawthorne's death and burial is given, and Edith and Will Forbes fall in love. Will is captured in an encounter w/Mosby. Curiously he is let out 'on parole' and comes home to dance and make merry and fatten up, before returning to 'prison'? Officers in some cases certainly did get different treatment.

I'll come back later, haven't finished 44.

Whether or not someone would have made a good soldier isn't really the point, though, is it--as well as what contribution a person went on to make who was lucky enough not to have to die in that war. Sure, I'm very glad that William James and Henry James were able to live out their lives and make their fabulous contrbutions to the world. But there were 600,000+ other young men of their time who weren't so fortunate, and we'll never know what any of those who died might have contributed. The James boys not only "knew their limitations," but they also had the $300 it took to pay another mother's son to fight in their place.

I'm sure you can tell I'm annoyed by Emerson on this issue. How easy it is to espouse high-flung ideals when they don't involve any sort of personal risk or sacrifice. The best I can understand from what he wrote, Emerson saw the war as "redemption" for America--"for all its sinful years since the century began" (432). I have no patience for his views. None. Had he encouraged his son to go to war, immature or not (oh, and believe me, the war would have made him grow up in a hurry, if that was his problem), sickly or not, at least it would seem as if Emerson had the courage of his convictions. I wondered as I read these chapters how he was able to look some of those Concord families in the face whose sons went to war.

Eddie was rejected as unfit: here

Meanwhile, I've finished 44 Very briefly, Lincoln's funeral and various memorials and the wedding. He writes one of his more controversial essays 'Character' at this time, most controversial in that he makes that point that if not Jesus, then there would have been someone else, through whom God would have spoken. "God sends his messages, if ot by one, then quite as well by another." The Atlantic wouldn't print it. The North American Review did, but anonymously.

I'm working as the librarian at our library today..... not much happening, so I'm reading and fooling around. Here are some pix of the Forbes Mansion today: here

Thanks for the Forbes' link.

>92 sibylline:. What you're pointing to there is a biographical blurb about Edward from the Concord Free Public Library. I'm not surprised that they hand out the standard line about Edward being rejected for the War as unfit. I'm not inclined to let that be the last word, however, mainly because of what he was able to do, physically and mentally, during the war years. I guess I'm more skeptical than you are.

I found a note in a book called Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson's First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age, by Robert D. Habich (no touchstone). But you can read about the book here.

Here's a note from that book:

The anecdote about Edward Emerson's enlistment and subsequent return appears in two versions. Edward claimed that his sister Edith had dissuaded him from serving (see EmLet, 9:149n82) {"EmLet" is his abbreviation for Emerson's Letters}.

Lidian Emerson recalled that John Murray Forbes had convinced Edward that his military service was not worth the risk to his father's health (Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 142).

Jessie Bray recounts Edward's military aspirations in "Not a pure idealist: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, and the Civil War," Resources in American Literary Study 32 (2007): 85-97 {an article that I myself haven't seen--I don't have access to jstor on my computer}.

I think Edward's decision not to serve in the War was more complicated than just weakened health or his social or mental immaturity. It makes a difference (to me, at least) that his own son didn't serve, since Emerson was one of the strong voices pushing for the war and (particularly) justifying the war.

I know you won't budge, but innocent until proven guilty in my book. Anecdote and hearsay don't do it for me.

45. A propos of nothing, I've been cataloging some of the old books we have from our mothers' libraries and I recently put in two volumes of biography of Philip the Second by Wm. H. Prescott, published by Philips and Sampson in 1859 -- interestingly all the rest of the Prescotts I have were put out by Lippincott, so the Philip 2 Prescott must have been in the last round of books to be printed. Otherwise, Emerson is rounding up his poetry and there is some comparison of his themes to various romantic poets, Wordsworth et al, some of which was clear, some of which quite opaque.

46. A continuation of summarizing Emerson's writing activities of this time, awards and some lectures, and a sad detail of a lecture at Harvard where Emerson clearly lost it for a bit -- I've seen that once or twice -- an eminent person, past prime on a bad day (one that comes to mind is Gerald Durrell speaking at the Academy of Natural Sciences not too long before he became too ill to tour around, when he just wasn't .... fully on and needed help as described here, finding glasses etc.) Emerson meets Dickens and finds him a bit uncouth. A listing of all those in Emerson's circle who died around then, the ameliorating arrival of Ralph Forbes, the Hawthornes leave Concord for Germany, and Ellen falls ill and is packed off to a tiny island, Fayal, in the Azores. It is high time, methinks, for Emerson to hang up his hat and let those who wish to hear him, come to Concord.

How I would love to finish E and Chums today, but it is unlikely. Never say never though.

I am done!

47 -- I am most impressed that in 1869 -- in his late sixties -- Emerson climbed Mt. Washington, that is no slouch of a mountain! I have barely skimmed the surface of Plutarch's writing but am a fan of Montaigne, so perhaps I ought..... Emerson and Ellen take a trip to California, the Chicago to SF leg in a private Pullman supplied by Mr. Pullman himself. Emerson meets Muir and sees Yosemite and the Redwoods, which made me feel glad. His good naturedness impresses everyone, but it is slowly becoming apparent that his memory is failing.... In 48 the decline continues, Emerson tries to get his poems and papers together, manages to offend Whitman who bites back. 49 covers the last few years, the house catches fire but Emerson and Lidian, there alone, are got out along with most of their important possessions and Emerson's papers. The decline is not possible to hide now, but Ellen takes him to Europe where he does amazingly well and gets as far as the Nile, which Baker describes as being chockablock with English and Americans also plying up and down in dahabeahs. They head home to the refurbished house, skipping Greece, as Emerson has had enough. From there on his memory erodes steadily and gradually also his body. He goes out inadequately dressed in the rain and catches a chill and is gone. Ellen gets many kudos for assisting him to have a dignified and quiet last chapter.

And that is that.

Overall I would say that Emerson Among the Eccentrics can best be described as a mosaic, each piece by itself (as in, a chapter) not seeming terribly coherent. Baker's aim was to place Emerson in a context, to place his home life into proximity with various friends, to describe without going deeply into any one thing. As such, it is a platform from which to decide which of these characters merit a closer look. Certainly Ellen's letters seem like a no-brainer, more about Hawthorne, a resolve on my part to clean up some loose ends - I have never read A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack and it has sat on my bookshelves for longer than The Education of Henry Adams with the difference that it no longer sits on the tbr shelves but with the rest of Thoreau's works!
I can't rave about the Baker, I moved through it steadily, but I was rarely absorbed, and yet it is chockablock with solid information. **** worth it to those who are interested in Emerson and/or his Circle.

Thank you Becky for another enlightening read, especially thank you for your patience at how slow I've been.

Yes, thank you Lucy for reading this with me.

It's been a couple of weeks or so since I finished, so I'll rely on my notes for my assessment:

I find myself unsatisfied with this book as a biography of Emerson, although clearly Baker calls it a group biography--Emerson Among the Eccentrics. I'd like to know more about his wife Lidian and daughter Ellen, and even his son Eddy. Ellen literally gave up any sort of life of her own to take care of her parents, particularly her mother.

I think his wife Lydian had a very tough time of it, and it's easy to dismiss her physical symptoms as psychosomatic. However, if she really did take a boatload of calomel in her lifetime, then she could actually have been quite chronically ill. --And yet she lived to be 90, so who knows? Is there a better biography of Emerson? Would I have the patience to read it if there were? I'm not really finding one, although there are published volumes of both Ellen's and Lydian's letters. I bought a 2-volume set of Ellen letters.

I put a book on my Kindle called Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson's First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Guilded Age, by Robert D. Habich. The touchstone doesn't seem to work, but the book can be found on LT.

I gave the Baker book 4 stars.

Not our best read, not by a long shot. In fact I'm kind of surprised it is as highly regarded as it is. Not that there is anything wrong with it exactly (scratches head).... it was just.... loose.... somehow.

Congrats on finishing--it's been very interesting following your notes!

One of my great-grandmothers was John Brown's niece.

An interesting children's book, The Diamond in the Window, is rooted in the principles of this group--it is quite entertaining, really, if you get the chance.