Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) captivated public attention as a young writer in the mid 1820s with her romantic and historical novels, Hobomak and The Rebel, and her children's magazine, The Juvenile Miscellany. Her early success spawned the possibility of financial independence which became necessary not long after her marriage in 1828 to the improvident lawyer and editor David Child. The fame of her domestic guide, The Frugal Housewife illustrated the growing American audience of women readers to which Maria Child then aimed The Girl's Own Book. Out of necessity rather than choice Child became the breadwinner of the couple, a role that was to keep her actively publishing and editing for the remainder of her life. Despite their pecuniary circumstances the young antislavery sympathizers plunged headily into the unleashing Garrisonian fury. While David Child began addressing antislavery assemblies and joined the fiasco of an experimental free-labor colony in Mexico, Maria Child published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). As a result sales for her previous books plummetted and she was forced to surrender the editorship of her magazine.

As proslavery mobs rioted across the North, antislavery societies multiplied. The next five years became some of the most prolific of Maria Child's life as she published stories, poems, advice books and antislavery tracts, raised money for antislavery causes, participated actively in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and accepted delegate invitations from Philadelphia to New York. She consistantly expressed a desire however for the peace and resources to return to more literary and philosophical pursuits. Her novel Philothea (1836) expressed an occupation with spiritualism that she was to pursue in her literary circles in Boston, with Emerson's wife and Margaret Fuller, and later in New York. Thoreau and Edgar Allen Poe expressed their delight with the book which was dedicated to her brother Convers Francis, a Harvard theologian and a good friend of Emerson's. It's publication presaged Maria Child's growing disenchantment with the political divisions of the Antislavery movement. A Garrisonian, Maria Child defended the Massachussets Anti-Slavery Society (the "Old Organization") against the American Anti-Slavery Society's attempts to force members to vote, its attempts to circumscribe women's active participation, and some of it's aggressive lines of action. The Child's financial position nevertheless prevented any resistance to their appointment as editors of the A.A.S.S.'s official weekly newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard and they moved to New York in 1841. Maria Child's two year management of the paper increased its circulation, reduced its debts, and coincided with the Antislavery movements calls for disunion in the wake of the Gag rule. In 1843 she published a collection of her weekly columns as Letters From New York which was so successful her publishers were calling for another edition within two months. Nevertheless detesting the controversies inherent in her job she relinquished her editorship to her husband and cut all ties with the organized antislavery movement. In her remaining years in New York she grew to relish an independent Bohemian lifestyle. She befriended several artists and musicians, witnessed the Astor Place Riots, published stories influenced by Swedenborgianism, and grew increasingly interested in the principles of the women's movement. She also began work on a religious history influenced by Spiritualism.

The turbulence of the slavery question in the 1850s rekindled Maria Child's enthusiasm with it. Writing on the violence in Kansas, and to Charles Sumner upon his beating in the Senate, she began to relinquish her declared pacifism. Stirred by John Brown's raid she offered to nurse him in prison and upon his suggestion attended to looking after his family instead. Her Correspondence to Governor Wise of Virginia was published along with several antislavery and Republican tracts through the war: The Right Way, The Safe Way; The Patriarchal Institution; and The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act. She also edited and published the memoirs of a fugitive slave, Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and brought out The Freedmen's Book which has been credited for being one of the few postwar books that imparted a sense of racial pride. Although interested in merging the causes of black people's and women's suffrage, Maria Child was always more dedicated to the former. Her life's work was praised at length by her friend Wendell Phillips at her funeral.

Scope and contents:

The Collection consisits of ninety mostly personal and often playfully provocative letters dating from approximately 1835 to 1877. Most of them are from Lydia Maria Child to her wealthy Boston abolitionist and philanthropic friends, the Lorings, and date from 1839 to 1859. They thus concentrate on the period of Maria Child's distress with the institutional politics of antislavery, her editorship of the Standard, her growing attachment to New York Bohemia, and the publication of Letters From New York. Many of the letters deal simply with her day to day finances, friends, and family.

These letters chart Maria Child's loss of "pleasure" in "anti Slavery" until the martyrdom of John Brown renewed her "youth and strength." They witness her antagonism to the aggressive tactics of elements of the American Anti-Slavery Society and her defence of the "Old Organization." It is in terms of intra-organizational criticism that she justifies her job at the Standard despite reservations. Later however the letters witness her declining commitment to pacifism. They describe a remarkable fearlessness to the danger of the mobs in New York, and they note the challenges that the Standard faced. They speak of Maria Child's withdrawal from cliques of reformers and antislavery organizations, though clearly her hermitage was constantly broken by meetings with the likes of Catherine Beecher and Margaret Fuller. Throughout, she declares a radical social egalitarianism while demonstrating a contemporary racial paternalism and liberalism. Of particular interest concerning antislavery and race are: (1) To George Kimball, Jan 1835, on Texas and the freemen plantation in Mexico; (3) To Louisa L., April 1839, concerning the discord within the movement; (6) To "Nonny", Dec 1840, of a story about "our colored man... our retainers"; (8) To Ellis L., May 1841, about guilt for accepting money for editing the Standard; (9) To Ellis L., June 1841, where she insinuates the A.A.S.S. with proslavery form; (13) To Ellis L., May 1842, about the Boston and Philadelphia cliques and N.Y. mobs; (17) To Louisa L., May 1843, about the New York Letters and Angelina Grimké; (48) To Ellis L., December 1852, with reference to Charles Sumner and Catherine Beecher; (57) To Louisa L., October 1856, about Kansas and Frémont; (69) To Oliver Johnson (A.A.S.), Dec. 1859, on John Brown's execution; (70) To William Cutler, July 1862, on the questions of wage slavery and social equality; and (72) To Anna L., Oct (1871?), on a "mulatto girl" asking for handouts.

More peripherally the letters are witness to the homosocial support networks of Victorian America despite their author's exceptional ability to transcend the limitations imposed on her sex. Of the latter she was painfully aware, complaining here of the impropriety of a "young lady" staying at the Globe Hotel, determining to "always avoid belonging to any association of men" because of her "experience," noting how her critics preferred to attack her as a woman rather than deal with the facts, how some were shocked to meet a woman like her, and complaining about her gendered financial liabilities despite her disfranchisement. Indeed she detaches gender stereotypes from biological sex as she writes repeatedly of the "small female minds of both sexes." Writing domestic guides for women and attending Emerson's lectures on domestic life never reconciled Maria Child to domestic work of which she often complains here. On the other hand she seemed to relish romance and also writes of her caring for a, "wild Irish girl," and her poor niece Maria, and her taking in of Dolores, a poor Spanish woman, as her companion. Particularly relevant are her letters: (67) To Louisa L., December 1857, a story of two babies engaged in the struggle of the sexes; (71) To Anna L., July 1871, on suffrage for societal efficiency and female education.

Lydia Maria Child's letters also chart her critical attitude to religious and social injustice in general. This is born out in accounts of specific incidents of charity to orphans abandoned in the Tombs. Calling Angelina Grimké a "flaming Millerite," Maria Child also makes fun of her patron Isaac T. Hopper's Quakerism, claims to prefer the "Lord Pope" to the "Lord Presbyters," and "shocked... Christian piety by saying if Mendelssohn were a Jew, I hoped I should get into the Jew's Quarter in heaven." Her "dislike to respectable Puritanical character" crops up repeatedly in these letters. In one letter she jokingly claims her "right to be damned." She praises Plato as a forefather of "modern socialists" and writes of the world of the spirits and of her "bigotted Swedenborgian[ism]." In terms of her pacifism she recounts an argument she had with Samuel Colt over "his battery." Her letters moreover present a consistant picture of her preference for the soul-inspired music of the underdog against anything machine-like, or tainted by the "diseased ambition of wealth and show... and respectability." She criticizes the "ruffianly Forrest" and the Astor Place Riots for demagoguery and violence while repeatedly noting the blindness of aristocracy and arguing for a world in which "all ranks, and sexes, and sects, and barriers of all sorts," would be ignored. In an elusive search for freedom she claims pleasure in acting "contrary to statutes made and provided."

Reference:

Clifford, Deborah Pickman. Crusader for Freedom: A Life of Lydia Maria Child (Boston, 1992)

Recat. 10/96 nh

Subject index to the Lydia Maria Child Papers

Listing of letters in the Lydia Maria Child Papers

Publications by Lydia Maria Child at the Clements Library

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