Louisa May Alcott On "The Girl Question," Etc.

by Stephen J. Gertz

A two-page, four-sided autograph letter signed by Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) recently came into the marketplace and immediately left after $4,500 changed hands.

Dated December 30th but without noted year, reference to a recorded  engagement/marriage dates it to 1881, later in Alcott's life, when, as a semi-invalid, she cared for her niece, Louisa, after her sister, May, died in childbirth in 1879. Here referred to as "the precious baby," Alcott is on guard: measles is sweeping through her neighborhood.

Good help, as always, is hard to find, and Alcott devotes attention to "the girl question," seeking  trustworthy and reliable domestic help.

Sickness and poor weather occupy her thoughts but do not prevent Alcott from expressing with delightfully sharp sarcasm her dubious opinion of a friend's belief in the healing properties of homeopathic medicine. Nor on Concord's less than thrilling cultural milieu: a pastry made from coffee grounds is declared to be "the next maddeningly exciting event in Concord." A woman of enormous mental energy her boredom is evident, her wry, ironic wit is palpable.

 
                                                                                                December 30th

Dear Mrs. Talbot

Much obliged for your reply on the girl question.

I had already been to Hollis St. to look up a woman who advertised. She was gone, but another was found who had a good character & and sent me to her last misses to confirm it. So she is to try for a week & if she suits 'all is quiet on the Potomac,' for a time at least.

If she doesn't suit and your girl is still to be had I shall be glad to try her. This domestic upheaval has prevented my running over to see how you were. Better I hope. The weather is not just what one wants for invalids but it's better than the warm damp days we have had.

Poor Mrs. Willis is enjoying measles & very sore throats, & neighbors all bout are in like case, so I mount guard over the precious baby as I don't want her to add any other worry to the teething trial.

Can't Dr. Solhal [?] invent something to make the ---- [pain?] easier?

Wish I had a million for the Hospital Mrs. Willis said yesterday, 'Well if my sore throat does prove to be diptheria I shall go at once to the Homeopathic Hospital & there I shall be taken good care of.' "Hear, hear," says I, and Mrs. Willis said no more about her homeopathic messes in which she firmly believes.

Mrs. Hosmer dined with me today looking very tired after a long spell of nursing, for Florence has been very ill with the poor eyes and does not leave her room yet. A ground coffee pastry is the next maddeningly exciting event in Concord.

Did you know that [Samuel] Ripley Bartlett was engaged to [Eva] Myrtle Whitcomb? Also Sallie Bartlett has a son. These thrilling facts are all the news I have to offer.

Hope you like rambling notes for here is a pleasing mixture. Love to the lads & lasses & much to yourself.

                                                             Yours truly,
                                                                                 L.M.A.

The Mrs. Talbot that Alcott here wrote to was Emily Fairbanks Talbot (1834-1900), a philanthropist, and, with her husband, Dr. Israel Tisdale Talbot, a homeopathic physician (the practice of which Alcott here scorned) and dean of Boston University's School of Medicine, was a contemporary proponent of women's suffrage, a goal which Alcott shared and championed. 

Signed letters written in Alcott's  hand are not rare; twenty-nine examples have come to auction since 1976. But they remain highly desirable and prices continue to rise. This letter, for instance, was last seen at auction thirty years ago, on April 15, 1982, when it fetched a mere $95 at Hamilton's.

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ALCOTT, Louis May. Two-page, four-sided Autograph Letter Signed (ALs). Paper measures 9 x 7 inches. Date December 30, [1881].
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Images courtesy of Aleph-Bet Books, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Sisters in Opium: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Louisa May Alcott.

When "Little Women" And "Little Men" Get Together, Hubba-Hubba.
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Sisters In Opium: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Louisa May Alcott

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, radiant opium addict.

“I am writing such poems - allegorical - philosophical - poetical - ethical - synthetically arranged! I am in a fit of writing - could write all day & night - and long to live by myself for three months in a forest of chestnuts & cedars, in an hourly succession of poetical paragraphs & morphine draughts.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to her brother, 1843.

“Opium - opium - night after night!” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

“Heaven bless hashish, if dreams end like this!” - Louisa May Alcott, Perilous Play (1869).

Of delicate constitution to begin with, Elizabeth Barrett Browning began using opium when she was fifteen to treat the pain from a spinal injury complicated by “nervous hysteria.”

According to Althea Hayter, EBB’s poem, A True Dream (1833), “it is almost a case-book list of opium-inspired imagery, with its slimy, glittering snakes, its stoney face, its poisonous kisses, its rainbow smoke, its breaths of icy cold.”

EBB’s second major illness occurred in 1837, enduring for ten years. It affected her heart and lungs, and required more of the era’s standard medication for everything; By the time she began corresponding with Robert Browning in 1845, she was using forty drops of laudanum a day, a massive, advanced dosage for an addict.

Browning was not happy about her opium habit. She defended her use of it to him in a letter.

“My opium comes in to keep the pulse from fluttering and fainting...to give the right composure and point of balance to the nervous system. I don’t take it for ‘my spirits’ in the usual sense; you must not think such a thing.”

Browning’s concern, apparently, deepened; she wrote to him a few months later with great intensity.

“And that you should care so much about the opium! Then I must care, and get to do with less - at least. On the other side of your goodness and indulgence (a very little way on the other side) it might strike you as strange that I who have had no pain - no acute suffering to keep down from its angles - should need opium in any shape. But I have had restlessness till it made me almost mad: at one time I lost the power f sleeping quite - and even in the day, the continual aching sense of weakness has been intolerable - besides palpitation - as if one’s life, instead of giving movement to the body, were imprisoned undiminished within it, and beating and fluttering impotently to get out, at all the doors and windows. So the medical people gave me opium - a preparation of it, called morphine, and ether - and ever since I have been calling it my amreeta draught, my elixer - because the tranquilizing power has been wonderful. Such a nervous system I have - so irritable naturally, and so shattered by various causes, that the need has continued in a degree until now, and it would be dangerous to leave off the calming remedy, Mr. Jago says, except very slowly and gradually. But slowly and gradually something may be done - and you are to understand that I never increased upon the prescribed quantity...prescribed in the first instance - no!”

She protests too much; “I don’t take it for ‘my spirits’ in the usual sense; you must not think such a thing.” No, she doesn’t take it to get high, merely to forestall withdrawal symptoms. Unlikely. She lies about her increasing tolerance and necessary dose: Forty drops of laudanum a day is enough to kill a horse; a doctor would never, under any circumstances, prescribe such a huge quantity of the drug to someone just beginning its use.

This is someone who clearly loves her drug.

EBB’s opium addiction was not well known to her contemporaries. Or , as Palmer and Horowitz suggest, it “was not considered remarkable enough to warrant their attention.” It did attract the attention of Julia Ward Howe, who, in 1857, asserted that Mrs. Browning’s poetic imagination was dependent upon opium.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, post-addiction.
The thrill is gone.

•••

Louisa May Alcott began using morphine to ease the after-effects of typhoid fever contracted during service as a nurse during the Civil War. She cannot have been happy about it: The Alcotts followed the Beecher's condemnation of alcohol, opium preparations, and tobacco.

Indeed, Alcott and Catherine Beecher, in The American Women’s Home (1869), a revision of A Treatise on Domestic Economy originally written solely by Beecher in 1841, state that

“The use of opium, especially by women, is usually caused by at first by medical prescriptions containing it. All that has been stated as to the effect of alcohol in the brain is true of opium; while to break a habit thus is almost hopeless. Every woman who takes or who administers this drug, is dealing as with poisoned arrows, whose wounds are without cure.”

(Alcott believed, as did the entire Beecher family, that pure water cured all).

Alcott likely experimented with hashish; it did not bear the stigma of opium.

The Alcott-Beecher collaboration was written at the time, or very close to it, that Alcott began to use opium. She was convinced her post-typhoid ailments were the result of treatment with calomel, the mercury-based, highly toxic anodyne in routine use at the time; opium eased the discomfort of its side-effects. Alcott knew the evils of the opium habit (addiction was a concept unknown in the 19th century), and her stance on the subject made it a moral issue.

That she continued to use it intermittently for the rest of her life is documented. She surely must have felt moral guilt. I suspect that she was actually a full-blown addict as we understand addiction today, her ongoing ailments having less to do with pathology than with withdrawal sickness and the difficulty of ever getting off the drug once and for all and feeling %100 right.

Alcott was a strong woman. She was the primary breadwinner for her family, a work horse, the family’s strength and caregiver. Who cares for the caregiver? She was a successful writer who disdained the works that brought her fame and prosperity, the lurid writing she loved was not commercially successful, and her private self and public image were radically dissonant. She carried the caregiver's enormous burden, exacerbated by ongoing, profound grief over the death of her parents, brother and two sisters. She, to a large degree, put her own needs second to others. She was not a complainer; she held frustrations inside. The one romantic relationship in her life ended poorly. She enjoyed mental stimulation where she found it, was a rebellious spirit, willful, and independent. She experienced a long period of profound depression; some have suggested that she may have been bi-polar. She experienced profound mental and physical pain.

She, in short, fit the profile for a potential drug abuser.

Louisa May Alcott in later life.

She surely would have gone to great lengths to hide her opium use, particularly as she grew older and her health began to break down (the result of long-term addiction?). In every early portrait or photograph of her she is not smiling, her eyes are open and dull. In a photo of her in her later years, her eyes are sunken and hooded, and her features are drawn. Yet her eyes gleam and she bears a Mona Lisa smile. It is the portrait of an opiate addict.

Louisa May Alcott died of intestinal cancer; she was undoubtedly using morphine - which by then had supplanted laudanum as the preferred opiate - in massive doses to ease her discomfort.

While there is little doubt that EBB’s work through 1848 was influenced by her use of opium, it was not overwhelmed by it. There is also little doubt that LMA’s writing was most certainly not.

These two sisters in opium were successful writers in spite of their addiction to opiates, not because of of their use of them. Talent, will, and strong work ethic triumph over the drug - until addiction completely takes over everything. That has been the case with every celebrated artist-addict.

It is unfortunate that every generation has to learn this lesson. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and William S. Burroughs have, in their fashion, been the bane of artist-writers, who, seeking to emulate their literary heroes, presume that if they use drugs, too, then they shall be similarly gifted, have the doors of perception open up to them and allow expression of the ineffable.

The only thing unspeakable is that too many continue to believe this fantasy.
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References:

The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1945-1846. Edited by Elvan Kinter. (Harvard University Press, 1969).

Hayter, Althea. Opium and the Romantic Imagination. (University of California Press, 1968.

Palmer, Cynthia and Michael Horowitz. eds. Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady: Women’s Writings on the Drug Experience. (William Morrow, 1982).

Stern, Madeleine B. L.M. Alcott: Signature of Reform. (Northeastern University Press, 2002).

When "Little Women" and "Little Men" Get Together, Hubba-Hubba

True first editions of Little Women and Little Men in the publisher's original cloth.

“I plod away, through I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls, or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it... Sent twelve chapters to Mr. N [Thomas Niles, her editor at Roberts Brothers]. He thought it dull; so do I. But I work away and mean to try the experiment; for lively, simple books are very much needed for girls, and perhaps I can supply the need.” - Journals of Louisa May Alcott, 1868.

Another day in Plodville, perhaps, for LMA but a great day in Rarebookadoon, the pastoral hamlet just down the road from Brigadoon that I call home, where classic literature grows on antiquarian trees and the ripe fruit falls onto the ground where chipper, eagerly awaiting printers rake, collect, and press the literary leaves into sheets that jolly craftspeople bind up into fine Levant morocco leather that happy goats were pleased to sacrifice:

I recently had a first edition, first issue set, in the original cloth, of Little Women, accompanied by a first of Little Men, pass through my hands. Little Women has become a notoriously rare book to find in its originally published state. And while Little People of America may take me to task for saying so, genuine Little Women and Little Men are not often found in each others' company.

Illustrations to Little Women by May Alcott, one of Louisa's sisters.

That Alcott was not crazy about these books is well-known; she really disliked writing juvenile literature. She preferred writing luridly sensational tales of murder, suicide, adultery, thugs, feminism, transvestitism – in short, pulp fiction - and stories such as Perilous Play (1869), published a year after Little Women, about a picnic amongst young adults that begins on a low point and ends on a high.

"’If someone does not propose a new and interesting amusement, I shall die of ennui!’ said pretty Belle Daventry, in a tone of despair. ‘I have read all my books, used up all my Berlin wools, and it's too warm to go to town for more. No one can go sailing yet, as the tide is out; we are all nearly tired to death of cards, croquet, and gossip, so what shall we do to while away this endless afternoon? Dr. Meredith, I command you to invent and propose a new game in five minutes.'

"’To hear is to obey,’ replied the young man, who lay in the grass at her feet, as he submissively slapped his forehead, and fell a-thinking with all his might.

"’Time is up now, Doctor,’ cried Belle, pocketing her watch with a flourish.

"’Ready to report,’ answered Meredith, sitting up and producing a little box of tortoiseshell and gold.

"’How mysterious! What is it? Let me see, first!’ And Belle removed the cover, looking like an inquisitive child. ‘Only bonbons; how stupid! That won't do, sir. We don't want to be fed with sugar-plums. We demand to be amused.’

"’Eat six of these despised bonbons, and you will be amused in a new, delicious, and wonderful manner,’ said the young doctor, laying half a dozen on a green leaf and offering them to her.
"’Why, what are they?’ she asked, looking at him askance.

"’Hashish; did you never hear of it?’"

Bong-bon-bons are consumed by all. A very interesting afternoon ensues. The story first appeared in Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner which , at the time, was billed as the "great family paper of America."

Suffice it to say, LMA did not publish the story under her own name. Whether she had first-hand experience with cannabis remains unclear; she may have simply been inspired by the Gunja Wallah Company‘s maple sugar hashish candy, a popular confection from the early 1860s through the late 19th century.


She revisited hashish in the anonymously published, A Modern Mephistophes (1877), wherein she provides a much fuller expression of the effects of hashish, which is used by one of the main characters, Jasper Helwyse (an opium addict wise, apparently, in the ways of hell), to seduce Gladys, the young wife of a colleague.

“’Try my sleep-compeller....these will give you one, if not all three desired blessings—quiet slumber, delicious dreams, or utter oblivion for a time....’”

Soon, Gladys displayed "shining eyes, cheeks that glowed with a deeper rose each hour, and an indescribably blest expression in a face which now was both brilliant and dreamy…[and] sat by, already tasting the restful peace, the delicious dreams, promised her."
The rediscovery and identification of the large number of Alcott’s wild, pseudonymous and anonymously written works was the crowning achievement of Madeline B. Stern (1912-2007), who, with her business partner and close friend, Leona Rostenberg, was amongst the preeminent rare book dealers of her day.

“In the old and rare we have made connections; connections between past and present, between our books and ourselves. When the younger generation tells us we are legendary figures, we sometimes think they really mean has-beens. It is true that they study our catalogues, buy our rare books, consult us from time to time, read and collect our co-authored publications. They search our eyes for a legacy.

“Our lives are our legacy. … [and] we look to the future -- to our next find, to our next book, to our next adventure.” - Madeleine Stern & Leona Rostenberg, 1997.

The legacy of Louisa May Alcott rests upon her being the first writer in English to depict the modern young girl - and her little women of the 19th century were prototypes for young women of the 20th century - struggling with "how to have successful careers and happy home lives; how to balance housewifery and professional obligations; how to be supportive wives, mothers, and daughters without being subordinate" (Feminist Companion to Literature in English). In short, how to have it all, an impossible burden but at the time Little Women appeared, a radical light shining into the lives of young girls otherwise destined to enter their traditional role as household drudge. That Alcott was able to pull it off is testimony to the light charm and humor she brought to bear on her juvenalia.

In short, Little Women was a How-To novel on becoming the assertive, rebellious spirit that was Louisa May Alcott. Yet the anxieties wrought by these perplexities then, and certainly now, would be, and are, enough to tempt the young toward a little help from psychotropic friends. The struggle continues to be worked out woman by woman, generation to generation.

For an interesting view of Louisa May Alcott from a fundamentalist Christian perspective, please check out The Homemaker’s Corner. "Mothers, please, do not let your girls partake of the 'dainty meats' of this evil eyed, evil hearted woman!"

Tomorrow: You are cordially invited to a private party where Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Barrett Browning get high.
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The points on Little Women and Little Men are important to identify true first editions.

ALCOTT, Louisa M[ay]. Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Illustrated by May Alcott. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868.

First edition, first printing, without note at the foot of p. 341 regarding Little Women, Part Two; without “Part One” in gilt on the spine; and with Little Women priced at $1.25 on the third page of the advertisements (p. 11). Twelvemo signed in eights. iv, [5]-341, [1, blank], [6, ads (numbered 3, 2, 11, 12, 8, 11)] pp. Frontispiece and three wood-engraved plates (facing pages 116, 135, and 320).

Original green sand-grain cloth with covers ruled in blind and spine decoratively stamped and lettered in gilt. Brown coated endpapers.




ALCOTT, Louisa M[ay]. Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Part Second. With Illustrations. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869.

First edition, BAL State 1 (no notice for Little Women, Part First, at p. iv). Twelvemo signed in eights. [i-iii] iv, 5-356 [360], [8, ads (numbered 16, 12, 11, 3, 2, -, -, 14)] pp. Frontispiece and three wood-engraved plates (facing pages 44, 142 and 193.

Original green sand-grain cloth with covers ruled in blind and spine decoratively stamped and lettered in gilt. “Part Second” stamped in gilt to spine. Brown coated endpapers.





ALCOTT, Louisa M[ay]. Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871.

First American edition (published about two weeks after the London edition), first issue, with Pink and White Tyranny listed as “nearly ready” in the ads. Small octavo. [4, ads], [4], 376 pp. Frontispiece and three wood-engraved plates (facing pages 13, 251, and 369).

Original terra-cotta sand-grain cloth with covers ruled in blind and spine decoratively stamped and lettered in gilt. Brown coated endpapers.





BAL 158, 159, and 167. Peter Parley to Penrod 30. Grolier 100. American, 74.