USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 3
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"The History of the American Episcopal Church, 1587-1883" (1885), a "History of Hartford County, Conn." (1886), Benjamin F. Butler's Autobiography (1892), which was completed, after a lawsuit, for another publisher, and he is said to have borne an important part in the plans for Winsor's " Narrative and Critical History of America" (1886-S9). In the Boston Directory Jewett first appears as a publisher in 1879, with an office at 79 Milk street. Between that year and 1892, when his name appears for the last time, he had a succession of business addresses. In the late 80's liis firm becaine the Jewett Publishing Company, of which he was president. He lived in Brook- line, and, at about the time of the disappearance of his name from the Boston Directory, became involved in financial difficulties and left Boston, to live, thereafter, on the Pacific Coast and in New York.
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a large wheel, and the spokes were so many that it would be impossible in brief compass to account for them all with much more than their names. Let us rather look at a few of Winsor's collaborators, as typical figures, and let us begin with his three colleagues on the committee that planned the details of the enterprise.
Of a man so well known as Edward Everett Hale, named first in Winsor's Preface, there is no occasion to speak with particularity in this place. In 1880 he was already fifty-eight years old, and was so identified with Boston in both its historical and its contemporaneous aspects that even a small company of ad- visers in such an enterprise as the "Memorial History" would have been incom- plete without him. It was his special function and capacity to bring the past and the present into a vital relation, and the broad inclusiveness of his local interests could be counted upon to invest his suggestions of topics and of con- tributors with a unique value.
Through Dr. Samuel A. Green, born at Groton, Massachusetts, in 1830, and therefore only a year older than Winsor, another wide range of interests was brought into play. Green was a hearty old bachelor, a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School, a student of his profession also in Philadelphia and Vienna, who chose to practise it, so long as his practice con- tinued, on Harrison avenue, in one of the poorer districts of Boston. There he made a multitude of friends among the children, and it was characteristic of him that when, in his old age, he met with an injury on the street and was taken to the hospital, he asked for a bed in the children's ward and got it - to the delight of the juvenile patients when his convalescence enabled him to tell them stories.
Doctor Green became a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1860, and before his death, in 1919, was its senior member, besides having served for many years as its librarian. His early election testified to an early interest in historical and antiquarian matters. But his more active younger years were varied by many other interests, including service in the Civil War as a military surgeon, and the posts of Superintendent of the Boston Dispen- sary, City Physician, and Mayor of Boston. Thus his associations with the life of the city were at once political, humanitarian, and historical. He con- tributed but one article to the "Memorial History," as against Edward Everett Hale's two. Yet it is easy to see that of all the company of Bostonians whose habit it was to frequent the old rooms of the Historical Society in the Tremont street building adjoining the King's Chapel Burial Ground, and in close prox- imity to the City Hall, in which Green was to sit as Mayor in 1882, none could have better qualified than this indefatigable delver in the records of the past to join in planning for a "Memorial History."
The third of Justin Winsor's special advisers was Charles Deane, the veteran of the little group, sixty-seven years old in 1880. This native of Bid- deford, Maine, began a mercantile career in country stores in his native state, came to Boston at twenty, found employment in the dry goods importing house of Waterston, Pray and Company, and in less than ten years was taken into the firm, and - like the true industrious apprentice - married the daughter of his employer, Waterston. For him the acquisition of a fortune was the
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prelude to the indulgence of an early acquired taste for documents, books and reading, especially in the field of New England history. The Massachusetts Historical Society, of which he was elected a member in 1849, gave him many opportunities to exercise his gifts as a scholar and annotator, and by this very exercise he brought his own scholarship to a point which won him from Harvard the honorary degrees of Master of Arts in 1856 and Doctor of Laws in 1886. The library in his own house, close to that of Justin Winsor in Cambridge, was of an historical importance sufficient to justify Winsor's making mention of it in the Introduction to his "Narrative and Critical History of America" as a collection of special value to investigators. In Charles Deane, who contributed to the first volume of the "Memorial History" a chapter on "The Struggle to Maintain the Charter of King Charles the First, and its Final Loss in 1684," Winsor found a counselor well equipped with local lore, well informed with regard to the local historians, and well trained - as nobody would have accused Hale and Green of being - in the more practical dealings with an enterprise calling for conduct on business principles.
The sole survivor of all the contributors to the "Memorial History" is Mr. John T. Morse, Jr., forty years old in 1880, ninety in 1930. For the earlier work he wrote a chapter on "The Bench and Bar in Boston." In the present volume his words of salutation link a later with an earlier day - and perform that function with a vitality which may well excite the envy of any generation. In 1880 Mr. Morse was among the younger Boston writers. Until that year he practised his profession of law, and has described himself thereafter as "devoted to literature." Already he had written his life of Alexander Han- ilton, and soon after 1880 was winning his high place in American biography by his editorial conduct of the "American Statesmen" series and the writing of some of the best volumes it contains. "Perhaps indiscretion," he wrote on an early page of his "Memoir of Colonel Henry Lee," "is the best character- istic of the biographer," and then proceeded to quote some frank remarks of Colonel Lee about the Essex County Jacksons and Cabots from whom they were both descended. Writing always with a free hand and spirit, he holds the unique distinction of enlivening two kindred volumes published fifty years apart.
Of the many other contributors to the "Memorial History" of 1880 what shall be said? Where were the representatives of the "Augustan Age" of literature in Boston? By 1880 that age had almost vanished, but Whittier was still at hand to open the first volume of the "Memorial History" with his poem, "The King's Missive," and more than twenty pages of "Additional Memoranda" following Doctor Green's article on "Medicine in Boston," near the end of the fourth volume, bear the signature of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Howells and Aldrich are missing, but the editor of "The Atlantic Monthly" who succeeded Aldrich - Horace E. Scudder - appears in excellent contri- butions to the first and second volumes, and such "Atlantic favorites" as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Edwin L. Bynner are represented by two chapters each.
John D. Long, Governor of Massachusetts in 1880, dealt in the third volume with "Boston and the Commonwealth under the City Charter," and
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to the same volume Henry Cabot Lodge, already established at thirty as an authoritative writer on historical subjects, contributed a chapter on "The Last Forty Years of Town Government." Many years later, at the very end of his life, he was to become President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the identification of presidents of that society with the "Memorial History" must be noted. In 1880 Robert C. Winthrop, in earlier years Speaker of the House of Representatives and United States Senator, filled the post, and from him, a descendant of John Winthrop, came, with all fitness, the chapter, "Boston Founded," in the first volume. In 1885 George E. Ellis, a retired Unitarian minister, stepped into the place, which he held for nine years. Theo- logically he was called by the writer of his Memoir for the Historical Society "an Erasmus diluted," but he was an undiluted enthusiast for local history, and contributed three chapters to the "Memorial History." His successor as President of the Massachusetts Historical Society was Charles Francis Adams, Jr., forty-five years old in 1880, and from him proceeded two chapters of the History. With Lodge succeeding Adams in the presidency, the record swings full circle. Still another writer, intimately associated with the Society, was Charles Card Smith, for years its treasurer, and the contributor of three chapters to the History.
From the roll of the Society the names of many other contributors to the History might be drawn. The faculties of Harvard University yield other names, including such scholars as Professors Asa Gray and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, not yet forty years old. From the fields of local journalism came Edward Stanwood, relatively young in 1880, Delano A. Goddard, and George Makepeace Towle. Among the clergy, to name but two, were James Freeman Clarke and Phillips Brooks. Representing what was then the younger genera- tion, Henry Herbert Edes, at thirty-one, devoted two chapters to his native Charlestown. As for "The Women of Boston," there was but one chapter dealing with them, and but one woman contributor, Ednah D. Cheney, in all the four volumes. One looks in vain for the names of Julia Ward Howe, Mary A. Livermore, Lucy Stone, and other representatives of the sex which ever since the days of Anne Hutchinson has been vocal to an extent hardly represented by the solitary utterance of Mrs. Cheney.
In this brief survey of the makers of the "Memorial History," names as notable as many of those mentioned have been passed over. It is not complete- ness but significance that has been held in view. And what does it all signify? Perhaps this - that Boston fifty years ago, acutely as ever conscious of its own history, could count in its population of less than half its present number a goodly company of local investigators and chroniclers. The day of specializa- tion, in anything like its modern sense, was still to come, and the "mob of gentlemen who write with ease" was relatively larger, one may surmise, than it is today. When a small city, grown from a large town, became an object of study, the several topics presented less of complexity, and even a specialist of the time could command the leisure to slip over into other fields than his own. This. made inevitably for a certain urbanity and distinction, with a flowering which the inost assiduous gardeners of a modern time can hardly hope to emulate.
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These, in a word, are not the spacious days of 1880. There is, nevertheless, an abundantly good case to be made out for the present. For one thing it would be hard to stand anywhere else and to see in so mellow a perspective - neither too near nor too far - the leisurely gentlemen (and one lady) of 1880, knowing and loving their little city of Boston, capable of writing about it with a judicious blending of authority and charm, and planting in the minds of their successors of a half-century later a query which they must leave, with whatever misgivings, for posterity to answer: Will a retrospect in 1980 find the chronicle of 1930 at all commensurate, on its smaller scale, with that of 1880?
BOSTON MEMORIES OF FIFTY YEARS
By EDWIN D. MEAD
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In writing of my memories of the last fifty years in Boston, I am helped in definition of the task by the fact that the beginning of the period marked a sharp change in my own relation to Boston. It was just then that I returned from an absence of more than four years, beginning in the summer of 1875, passed in study at the universities of Cambridge and Leipzig.
I had lived in Boston for nine years before 1875, coming from my country home in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, by the Connecticut, in 1866. The doors to the larger Boston life were opened to me by William Dean Howells, to whom my debt of gratitude for service then and growing service and inspira- tion ever afterwards is very great. His wife was my cousin, born in the same beautiful hill-town with myself, but early removing with her family across the river to Brattleboro, Vermont. Hers was a family of marked talents. One of her brothers was Larkin G. Mead, the eminent sculptor; another was William R. Mead, the equally eminent architect, member of the conspicuous archi- tectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. Howells, visiting in Brattleboro and Chesterfield after his return from his Venice consulate, became interested in me as a bookish boy, and secured a place for me in the countingroom of Ticknor and Fields, the famous Boston publishers, which was the express goal of my youthful aspirations. He had just become the editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," with his home in Cambridge; and he continued to live in and about Boston until, after resigning the editorship of the "Atlantic" in 1881, he moved to New York a few years later .* His life in Boston and the association of Boston with his works were the subject of an admirable article by Sylvester Baxter in the "New England Magazine" for October, 1893. More important from the point of view of the present paper is Howells' own book, "Literary Friends and Acquaintance." Its chapter on "Literary Boston As I Knew It" and its special chapters on Holmes, Longfellow and Lowell furnish the best picture which exists of the Boston to which I came as a boy and from which I went for my student life in England and Germany. It describes my point of departure for this chapter of memories and points the contrast between 1930 and half a century ago. An important supplement is the recently published collection of Howells' letters, edited with such true feeling by his daughter, a collection full and most valuable in the section reflecting her father's Boston life.
The publishing house of Ticknor and Fields was the center of the literary life of Boston in that, its golden age. It was then at 124 Tremont street, at the corner of Hamilton place, directly opposite Park Street Church. The firm had moved here from the famous "Old Corner," the corner of Washington and School streets, just before; and there was never in Boston before or since so attractive a haunt for literary folk and lovers of books. James T. Fields was
* EDITORIAL NOTE .- The last appearance of his name in the Boston Directory was in 1887.
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certainly the most interesting and significant figure in the history of American publishing. His own literary talents were large and varied. The chapter on Dickens in his "Yesterdays with Authors," especially full in the section on Dickens' last visit to America, of which Mr. Fields was the real inspirer and promoter, constitutes a striking feature in his picture of literary Boston on the eve of the period we are surveying, and no less valuable is the chapter on Hawthorne. Yet more vivid and revealing, perhaps, is the volume of selections from Mrs. Fields' journals, so sympathetically edited by Mr. M. A. DeWolfe Howe, published under the title of "Memories of a Hostess." The queen of hostesses Mrs. Fields certainly was, with as kcen and true a sense of literary values as her husband, and with an untiring devotion to human valucs. She long survived Mr. Fields, living until 1915, her close companion in her home for many years being Sarah Orne Jewett. It is not too much to say that the house at 148 Charles street was for a generation the most interesting home in Boston, the center of more good society, good conversation and fine aspiration than any other.
In dedicating to Mr. Fields one of his later volumes, Lowell, harking back to Doctor Johnson's old remark upon the happy supplanting of the patron by the publisher, paid graceful tribute to him as the friend who had supplanted the publisher. All of that great literary group would have joined in the tribute.
A great and memorable group it was, a benediction on the happy com- munity whose home it was and whose "darling town" it was. It was an unusual week when Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes or Whittier did not enter the door at 124 Tremont street. Whittier's visits were the most infrequent and we young men did not feel that we knew him; my own chief recollection at this late day is of taking proofs to him at his room at the old Marlboro Hotel and waiting while he looked them over, benignly admitting me and benignly dismissing me. Emerson we revered, and his coming was always an event, but there was no intimacy between him and the "boys"; he seemed to us somewhat remote and clerical. Mr. Fields had to do with the management of some of his later Boston lectures and I think we sold the tickets. I heard his inspiring lecture on "Immortality," given before a great audience at Music Hall, about 1875. After my return from Europe I saw him frequently at the Concord School of Philos- ophy, and in that connection heard him give a lecture in the Concord Town Hall, with his son turning the pages of his manuscript.
None of the group was so frequent a comer as Doctor Holmes, always smiling, always social, always welcome. I think of him now as I saw him so often later in his gallery pew at King's Chapel. He was a faithful churchgoer. His strong desire was to write a great hymn. He believed that "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," written in youth by his college classmate, Samuel F. Smith, would long outlive anything he himself had written. He was probably right; yet there is no nobler hymn in the hyinn book than his own "Lord of All Being Throned Afar."
Bryant sometimes came from New York; Ticknor and Fields published his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Mrs. Stowe, most of whose books they published, came at times from Hartford. The historians came - Park- man, Bancroft, Motley. Prescott and Hawthorne had passed away, but the
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great Boston reformers, Garrison, Phillips, Andrew, Sumner, were still living in Boston and were common visitors. I heard Phillips often, before and after my years in Europe. I recall especially his electric speech at the great Parnell ineeting in Music Hall, while I do not remember a word spoken by Parnell himself.
For Lowell my admiration has grown steadily with the years. His genius was pre-eminently democratic, and his ringing lines perhaps came oftenest to . the help of the crusader for progress. Yet he did not impress the young men at 124 Tremont street as a democratic man. The rare personal charm of Lowell in his youthful period is impressively brought out by Edward Everett Hale in his "James Russell Lowell and His Friends." The idol of us all was Longfellow. As I look back over the years, his face, beneath the thick white hair, seems to mne the noblest that I ever knew, the strongest and the sweetest, the most beautiful face, the most like Raphael's Jove in the Farnesina paint- ings. Howells, who revered him, gave to the chapter devoted to him in his "Literary Friends and Acquaintance" the title, "The White Mr. Longfellow," borrowing the phrase from Björnson. His dignity, his entire brotherliness, his gladness to see again the young men whom he saw last week, made a unique and ineffaceable impression upon every one of us. I recall how, finding Mr. Fields out at luncheon time, he asked if he might wait with me in the countingroom. The half-hour was to me a translation to Olympus and I doubt not he was as glad to talk to the boy as to the man. After my return from Germany, perhaps in 1881, I was one of half a dozen younger men invited by Mr. Longfellow to join older scholars in the organization of the American Dante Society. My credentials must have been slight indeed. I did not know Italian; iny studies of the "Divine Comedy" had been in his own translation. Later I gave lectures on Dante and published a paper on his "De Monarchia," emphasizing Dante's remarkable divination of the needs of world organization, but this interest had not in 1880 found much expression. The first two meetings were at Longfellow's house and were memorable; each meeting ended with an informal supper, at which his talk was charming and illuminating.
There was a similar meeting at Charles Eliot Norton's, who, I think, was the vice-president of the Society. I remember especially Mr. Norton's impres- sive account of a walk with Carlyle at Chelsea on the day when the news came of the death of John Stuart Mill at Avignon. It was a revelation of Carlyle's love and gratitude to Mill and of his somewhat remorseful sorrow over the occasion of their separation, a disclosure which ought to have got into his books. Edmund Gosse, then giving a course of Lowell lectures in Boston, was a guest at that meeting. I met him a little later at his home in London, where we shared a common enthusiasm bringing us back to Massachusetts. I had just for the first time visited Scrooby. Finding no good pictures of the places associated with Elder Brewster and the "Mayflower" congregation, I engaged the services of a Manchester photographer, who chanced to be at Bawtry, and with him secured the completest set of Scrooby photographs which then existed or, I suspect, has ever since been made. I used some of them to illustrate an article, "Round About Scrooby," in the "New England Magazine" in 1889. A framed set was hung in the Massachusetts building at the Chicago Exposition in 1893,
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and there is a set at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth. Mr. Gosse delighted me by saying that he had just been up to Scrooby and made some photographs for himself; he gave me his set and I gave him mine.
His interest had been stirred by his visit to Boston and Massachusetts, just as Doctor Creighton's interest was stirred by his visit here in 1886 to take part in the Harvard commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the college. It will be remembered that Doctor Creighton before he became Bishop of London had been the head of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, the college of John Harvard and so many of our illustrious Massachusetts founders, and in that capacity had come to take part in the Harvard commemoration. He learned here more deeply what the Pilgrim Fathers meant to us and what the founders of Boston meant, and when he became Bishop of London he felt the force of the appeal for the return of the Bradford manuscript, then in the Bishop of London's library at Fulham. I had myself visited the Fulham library in 1885. The manuscript of Bradford's "History of Plymouth Plantation" had in some mysterious manner, through British hands in 1776, found its way from the steeple chamber of the Old South Meeting House, where it was deposited in Thomas Prince's New England library, ultimately to the Bishop of London's library, where it was discovered eighty years afterwards. Said Senator Hoar to Bishop Creighton's predecessor, Bishop Temple, as they held the precious volume in their hands at the Fulham library, in 1896: "If there were in existence in England a history of King Alfred's reign for thirty years, written in his own hand, it would not be more precious in the eyes of English- men than this manuscript is to us." Almost immediately Bishop Temple became Archbishop of Canterbury and Doctor Creighton succeeded him as Bishop of London; and by that propitious conjunction of two friends of America, who knew what the Bradford manuscript meant to Massachusetts, its return was soon effected by a decree of the Consistory Court of the Diocese of London. Many of my readers have seen it as it lies in its glass case in the State Library, open at the page where in Bradford's own handwriting is tran- scribed the famous Mayflower Compact. Some, too, were present, as I was, at the memorable meeting in the Representatives' Chamber at the State House, May 26, 1897, when the manuscript was delivered to Governor Wolcott by Ambassador Bayard, and heard the addresses by Senator Hoar, Ambassador Bayard and Governor Wolcott. The occasion remains one of the most impres- sive of my Boston memories.
In 1880 Ticknor and Fields had become, by two steps, James R. Osgood and Company, and James R. Osgood and Company were the publishers of the "Memorial History of Boston," which the present volume, covering the inter- vening half-century, is planned to supplement. Mr. Osgood was Mr. Fields' right-hand man. William D. Ticknor, the long-time head of the house, died before I came to Boston. Mr. Osgood was a man of marked personality and power, universally beloved in the establishment and outside of it. Three sons of William D. Ticknor, Howard, Benjamin H. and Thomas Ticknor, were then or soon afterwards associated with the house. A son of Benjamin H. Ticknor, also named Benjamin H., is associated with the Houghton Mifflin Company today. His sister is Caroline Ticknor, the well-known author of the
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