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AlcottWeb: Reference Shelf: News: Worcester Telegram & Gazette |
| AlcottWeb: Home | Communal Life an Experiment Karen F. Nugent; Telegram and Gazette Staff Worcester, MA Sunday Telegram Local News, Page B1 1-29-95 Used with permission. Copyright (c) Telegram & Gazette, Worcester MA http://www.telegram.com Dearest Mother, I have spent a very pleasant morning, and I hardly dared to speak to Annie, for fear she would speak unkindly and get me angry. O (sic) she is so very, very cross, I cannot love her. It seemed as though she did everything to trouble me, but I will try to love her better. I hope you have spent a pleasant morning. Please axcept (sic) this bookmark from your affectionate daughter. P.S. It's not very pretty, but it's all I have to give. Louey HARVARD - If Louey's note sounds like a passage from "Little Women," there's a reason for that: Ten-year-old Louisa May Alcott left the message for her mother while she was living at Fruitlands, years before she wrote the famous book based on her family. The daily notes, often left for one another in baskets, were part of life at Fruitlands, a commune established in June 1843 by Louisa's father, Amos Bronson Alcott. Young Louisa also kept a daily journal during her months at Fruitlands, which is now a museum. By the time she died in 1888, Alcott had published more than 30 books and many more stories were published in magazines. And with the recent release of the latest film version of "Little Women," a surge of interest in Alcott's life is expected to attract visitors to Fruitlands Museums this year, museum spokeswoman Dianne Holzel said. Special events focusing on Alcott will include a living history performance next month by Jan Turnquist as Louisa, and a special exhibit this summer about Louisa's time at the Fruitlands farmhouse. "People are beginning to realize that Louisa May Alcott, and her mother, were such strong women," she said. The group of transcendentalist philosophers who tried but failed to establish a utopian society at Fruitlands included Louisa, her three sisters, Anna, 12, Elizabeth 8, and May, 2 - all portrayed in "Little Women" - and their parents. Her father, who was a philosopher and educator, and his friend Charles Lane, a British transcendentalist, social reformer and mystic, created "New Eden" in an old farmhouse on Prospect Hill. The farmhouse on its original site is one of four museums at Fruitlands. Members of the group ate no meat, drank no alcohol and used no animal products for clothes or daily living. Louisa's mother, Abigail May Alcott, designed and made tunics and bloomers out of linen, so sheep would not be deprived of their wool. Cotton, from slave labor, was not acceptable. The group, besides the Alcotts, Lane and his 10-year-old son, included a nudist, then called an "Adamite;" Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Roman Catholic Paulist Fathers; a man whose diet consisted of crackers and apples; a young schoolteacher and abolitionist; and a woman who fell from grace because it was believed she had harbored forbidden animal products - cheese - in her trunk. Louisa and one of her sisters shared a tiny attic room in the three-bedroom farmhouse. In "Little Women," the main character, Jo March, who is modeled after Louisa, also does her writing in an attic room. While Henry David Thoreau, the most well-known member of the transcendentalist movement, never made it to Fruitlands, number of visitors came and went. Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, a friend of the Alcotts, was a frequent guest. He visited the commune about a month into the effort and wrote, "I will not prejudge them successful. They look well in July; we will see them in December." Emerson predicted accurately: The experiment ended just seven months after it began. According to Sandra Lower and Elaine Donaghue, members of the interpretive staff at Fruitlands Museums, the experiment in communal living failed because of poor planning, and discord between Lane and the Alcotts. Louisa, in particular, took a dislike to Lane. "Mr. Lane was in Boston, and we were glad," she wrote in her journal. Another entry, from late in the year, describes a meeting between Lane and the Alcotts in which separation from the commune was discussed. "I like it (Fruitlands) but not the school part or Mr. Lane," Louisa wrote. The farmhouse in Harvard, Lower said, was selected by Lane for the commune in an effort to get Alcott away from Emerson in Concord. But in their excitement to get things under way, Alcott and Lane decided to plant the 10 acres in June, well after the crops should have been in the ground, rather than wait until the next spring. That, coupled with an early winter, she said, resulted in near starvation for the group. "They had lots and lots of visitors, but no help with the harvest. They were short of firewood. Relationships became strained," Lower said. Lane came to regard marriage as an impediment to higher thinking. He urged Alcott to adopt celibacy and go with him to live in a nearby Shaker village. Although devastated by the failure of his dream, Alcott chose his family. "It was a crisis period for Bronson. He was not a traditional 9-to-5 father. But the family supported each other completely. They were an extremely close-knit family," Donaghue said. When Fruitlands ended, Alcott became deeply depressed for the remainder of the winter of 1844. The next year, he was able to do a little gardening, but it was Louisa who began bringing money in through her writing, Lower said. The family moved to a house in the Still River section of Harvard after they left Fruitlands, and then to several other houses before they moved to Orchard House in Concord 15 years later. As Louisa got older, she began to support the family by selling somewhat sensational stories to magazines. Bronson Alcott encouraged Louisa to write "Little Women," which was published in 1869 when Louisa was 32, as a children's story containing good values, although she was reluctant to write about the family. Her first book, "Moods," had been published in 1864, but was not well-known until after the success of "Little Women." A newly discovered manuscript, called "A Long Fatal Love Chase," is to be published by Random House soon, Holzel said. Louisa died childless and unmarried at age 56. "She always said she'd rather be a free spinster and paddle her own canoe," Lower said. According to Donaghue, Louisa had caught typhus during a brief stint as a nurse in the Civil War, and was treated with compounds containing mercury. "That weakened her for the rest of her life," Donaghue said. Bronson Alcott lived to be 88 years old, and his famous daughter died three days after his death. Her death from pneumonia may have been brought on by standing outside in the cold, wet weather at his funeral, Donaghue said. "The healthful living seemed to have worked for him," Donaghue said. Part of Alcott journal survives at Fruitlands Before she died, Louisa May Alcott ordered that all her letters, journals and private papers were to be destroyed upon her death, including a journal she kept at age 10 while she was living in a transcendentalist commune established by her father at Fruitlands farmhouse in Harvard. But part of that journal, kept from June 1843 to January 1844, was discovered at a house in New Hampshire in 1971 by Tom Blanding, a Concord author who is writing a biography on Henry David Thoreau, and who started a successful effort a few years ago to save Walden Pond from development. "There had been stories going around the Thoreau Society for years about a lost diary of Alcott's hidden in a wall of a house in New Hampshire. It was more or less dismissed as a tall tale. Nobody checked it out," said Blanding, a Grafton native. Until the day Blanding and a friend were visiting in Dublin, N.H., and decided to track down the house where the Alcotts had lived in nearby Walpole. "We knocked on the door, and asked the man who answered if he had found anything to do with the Alcotts. He was skeptical at first, but after I convinced him that I was not a charlatan, he went to a closet and pulled out a cardboard box that was 90 percent dust and 10 percent papers," he said. After examining the papers, Blanding could tell they were Alcott-related, and found out they had been stored in the attic and had probably fallen through some cracks. In the box, he found a play the family had written, called "The Rivals," as well as Abigail May Alcott's account book from Fruitlands, which showed that she had sold off some dishes and silver for income, and some books. But the real prize, Blanding said, were several pages from Louisa's Fruitlands journal. He said the journal describes pleasant days in the summer, just after the communal experiment began, but Louisa's entries became sadder as the months went on. On Aug. 4, 1843, she wrote: "Today I washed dishes, had lessons, sewed until dinner, and had a bath." Another day she wrote: "Today we went to Mrs. Willard's and played. Then I read in "Oliver Twist' and thought." But an entry from November is somber: "I was unhappy today. We all cried, and I cried in bed. I prayed to God to keep us together." Blanding said communal living experiments were not unusual during Alcott's time, but the Fruitlands community was considered a radical group. He said Thoreau and Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa's father, were close friends and shared the same basic world view. "They believed that everything is related. There were a lot of collective reform efforts then, and utopian ventures were common," Blanding said. "But Thoreau believed that reform begins with the individual. Bronson was exasperating in some ways; he tended to have his head in the clouds. He had complete faith that nature would work in harmony with man." |
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