The inspiration for this writing came from a recent conversation with my oldest sister Amy. We were reminiscing about the plays we attended with our grandmother on my father’s side when we were kids. As to our exact ages, I cannot recall, I only remember that we didn’t exactly enjoy it at the time. Looking back on the cusp of 60 and in Amy’s case, the cusp has been breached, we laughingly voiced our belated appreciation for the attempts made by our grandmother Ruth to expose us to and instill some semblance of culture into our young minds. I remember that we attended several plays, yet the only one that stands out in my mind (for some unknown reason) is Little Women. For the life of me, I cannot tell you what it was / is about as I have never read the book and my attention during the performance was something less than stellar. Having said that, Louisa May Alcott is a giant in American literature, so I know the name and have a basic understanding of the style; I do intend to read the book at some point. Wikipedia has this to say about it.

“The novel has been said to address three major themes: domesticity, work, and true love, all of them independent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine’s individual identity. According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from romantic children’s fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels creating a totally new genre. Elbert argues that within ‘Little Women’ can be found the first vision of the “All American girl” …”   (I’m guessing you can feel my pain as a 1970’s adolescent male trying to wrap my brain around this and still be considered “groovy” and “far out”).

Perhaps more important to the 2022 version of me, Louisa May Alcott serves as a wonderful example of how the years progress and yet the human tendencies remain. The path that led Alcott to write Little Women is similar to the path that many successful people take in life. They succeed in spite of circumstance and in spite of PASSION’s attempt to lead them down very different paths. Passion rarely seems to pay the bills then, as it rarely does now. Yes, there are some people for whom the stars seem to align, they do what they love, and the monetary rewards follow accordingly. I would suggest that this is rare and the examples I provide seem to bear this out.

Louisa May Alcott, born in Pennsylvania in 1832 and was the 2nd of four daughters, born of dreamers. Her father Bronson seems to have been a quintessential liberal before the term was ever envisioned and used as it is today. He was an inveterate idealist in the truest sense of the word. He founded and ran experimental schools, started a community that ate a vegan diet, refused to use animal labor, and eschewed the use of cotton due to a rejection of slavery. His communal leanings, however, were complete and utter failures, and the family constantly struggled financially. Family friends included the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The family was well educated, socially connected, on the cutting edge of high-minded ideals (transcendentalists), and unfortunately had accrued little monetarily to show for it.  Young Louisa May was forced to work at an early age to help the family make ends meet.

Alcott was an ardent abolitionist and feminist by all accounts at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Both characteristics were amazingly uncommon despite revisionist history that suggests otherwise. She volunteered as a nurse (1862-1863) at the Union Army Hospital in Georgetown D.C. Though she had rarely been ill in her life up to this point, after six weeks she contracted typhoid pneumonia and nearly died. After a difficult recovery, she remained sickly for the rest of her life. The war, and her experiences as a nurse seemed to inspire her literary leanings. In 1863 she published Hospital Sketches which, though not a commercial success, seemed to point the way for her, out of the impoverished lifestyle she had known heretofore.

This is where it gets really strange for me. The future author of Little Women (1868) which has been credited with the creation by some biographers as the genesis of the “All American girl” began to focus on her passion as a writer. She begins (under a pseudonym) to write lurid stories of revenge, sex, opium addiction, and cross-dressing under a style which she described as “blood and thunder”. A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline’s Passion and Punishment were two of her best known. She loved the category, but once again the financial rewards were scant at best.

It was only after she was encouraged by her publisher to try her hand at concentrating on stories from her own life and writing a story for girls, that her luck changed. She wrote the following in her journal in response to her publisher’s desire for an about-face.

“Mr. N wants a girl’s story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’ Marmee, Anna, and May (her sisters) all approve my plan. So, I plod away, though 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.”

I find this correspondence astonishing in light of the fact that Alcott went on to create something that has taken on an iconic stature as an expose’ into the inner world of 19th century virtuous girlhood that has included sequels, multiple stage productions, and movies. She wanted to follow her passion and write smut, instead she reluctantly took on a project for which she had no heartfelt attachment and created an American classic. In her lifetime, Alcott made enough money to pull her entire family out of poverty and provided them with the comfortable life they never had. Interestingly, Alcott remained single throughout her life and had this to say when asked about her spinster lifestyle.

“I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body…. because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”

Not sure how all of this happened the way that it did. It truly makes no sense; so much for following your passion and being true to who you are. Sitting in that theater in San Diego all those years ago, I had no idea as to the utter incongruent, twisted, complexity of what I was watching. Had I known, I might have been a bit more attentive. “Groovy” and “Far Out” were far closer than I could have imagined.  

Reminiscing further on my younger years, I can remember the days before countless cable channels, the internet, podcasts, and the like. We used to have relatively few choices and we turned to something called The TV Guide to see what was on the few channels we had to choose from. Everyone watched the same few channels and predominantly similar shows; favorite television shows became social bonding mediums and companions in a sense. I recall more than once that I couldn’t resist the charms of Little House on The Prairie. Not necessarily a choice you would share with friends (we all considered ourselves hip and cutting edge of course) as it was wholesome and a bit old fashioned. Nevertheless, the program enjoyed tremendous success and ran for several seasons (1974-1982). It had sequels and spin offs, yet these were the golden years. The series was based on a series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1935 the beginning) and depicted growing up in the Midwest in the late 1800’s. She began writing Little House in the Big Woods and several other similar books in her 60’s. All of this sounds quite commonplace and homespun in a red, white, and blue Americana way. Not so fast, just like with Louisa May Alcott, things start to get a bit strange.

The Wilders, Laura, and husband Almanzo struggled mightily on the prairies of Dakota Territory in the late 19th century. They struggled with crop failure, crippling debt, harsh weather, fire, and disease. A fire burned down their home at one point and at another low ebb, Almanzo was so incapacitated by diphtheria that he suffered a stroke. Rose Wilder Lane was born in what is now South Dakota in 1886 and the family eventually settled in the Ozarks. Rose hated her family’s existence and felt humiliated by having to ride a donkey barefoot to school among other indignities of her hard-scrabble life.

Rose Wilder went on to live a rather fast-paced, interesting, and cosmopolitan life as she relished her ultimate escape from the austere pioneer experiences of her youth. She worked as a telegrapher, taught herself several languages, read voraciously, and became a writer. She also married and divorced within several years (which included separations from time to time until the actual divorce). By all accounts, her marriage (1909-1918)) to jack of many trades salesman/ promoter Claire Gilbert Lane was tumultuous from the beginning and it has been suggested that she even attempted suicide and considered herself bipolar. We do know that she experienced a miscarriage soon after the marriage while in Salt Lake City, Utah.  She lived in San Francisco, Paris, New York, Berlin, and Albania. In short, her life became the epitome of everything diametrically opposed to the life she had known as a young girl. From the slow lane to the fast lane in the blink of an eye.  

For the most part she made her living as a writer. She wrote firsthand accounts of the lives of famous people such as Henry Ford, Charles Chaplin, Herbert Hoover, and Jack London. She was known for dramatizing the facts a bit if it made for a better story; her famous subjects were often quite unhappy with her fabrications / embellishments. Nevertheless, Rose Wilder Lane became one of the highest paid female writers in America at that time. Known to be quite the lavish spender on travel and other extravagances, she spent the vast majority of what she earned (sometimes she simply gave it away). This included the building of a new fancy home and purchasing a car for her still self-sacrificing and frugal parents. They were against it, yet Rose Wilder Lane insisted. They disliked the house and Almanzo crashed the car soon after getting it.

In 1928, at age 46, Rose Wilder moved back to the family farm; divorced, childless, emotionally subject to bouts of depression, but confident in her writing career and the stock market investments she had made over the years of her prolific literary career. She had even convinced her parents to also invest. The Great Market Crash of October 1929 and subsequent Great Depression were right around the corner and times became quite difficult just as they had become reunited. Everything changed in 1930 when Laura Ingles Wilder presented her daughter with a rough, autobiographical manuscript of her life on the prairie as a young girl. Rose Wilder took one look at Pioneer Girl and apparently saw the potential. Interestingly, much like Louisa May Alcott and her early writing, the story was targeting an adult audience and publishers wanted her to rewrite it as children’s book. Her daughter knew a thing or two about spicing up a story to make it more interesting. In a letter to her mother, she mentioned the rewriting / editing process. “A good deal of the detail that I add to your copy is for pure sensory effect.” Wilder responded in kind. “Do anything you please with the damn stuff if you will fix it up.” An astonishing exchange that suggests that real life and “real life” may have been worlds apart. No one really knows for sure how much Lane altered the original writing of her mother. When they were working on By the Shores of Silverlake (1939), Wilder wrote to her daughter and mentioned that the books would have been “a flop” without “your fine touch.”

The fabulous irony of the unlikely collaboration is that Rose Wilder Lane did everything she could to escape the world of her youth, only to find out that the grass isn’t always greener (in spite of her seemingly successful accomplishments). And finally, she essentially enables the creation of the Little House books that went on to great commercial success and acclaim. Lane detested that world, yet she embraced it, and enlivened it, in order to monetize it. In so doing, she played a huge role in creating a beloved classic brand that is, like Little Women, a part of our American literary persona.

Charles Dicken’s provides another example of the extraordinary circumstances that can lead one to fame and fortune. Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England (1812); the author of such classics as The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-1839), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1849-1850), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) certainly struggled through a difficult, if not downright appalling childhood. His father was incarcerated in a debtor’s prison when young Charles was 12 years old. Dickens was forced to leave school (though he later returned but remained bitter about his lost childhood for the rest of his life), and work in a factory under miserable conditions. He certainly could have become a causality of the conditions and circumstances that governed his formative years. Much like Louisa May Alcott, and Rose Wilder Lane, his early childhood experiences instead seemed to spur him on to something greater. Somehow, hardship enabled the genius of their work. Also, like the two aforementioned women, he had a talent for the written word, and most likely Dickens saw writing as a strategy to distance himself financially from the psychological scars of what those early years must engendered in him. His personal story also veers off into the head-scratchingly strange and implausible, which we have explored with Alcott and Lane. Their circumstances though all very different, certainly share the characteristic of childhood interrupted, perpetual indigence, and the harsh realities of 19th century life introduced well before the optimal timing. Especially from the perspective of 2022 American youth as there were no safe spaces and being offended didn’t count for much. Offense was standard operating procedure.  

Dickens would go on to become a popular and highly successful writer. In fact, he became the most famous celebrity of his era. He singlehandedly created a style of story- telling which has become known as “Dickensian” which would come to be associated with poor working conditions, overcoming a difficult life, and repulsive characters which serve as foils for the “heroes” of his stories. At the height of his fame and fortune his father came looking for money. Dickens wrote the following to a friend.

“I was amazed and confounded by the audacity of his ingratitude. He and all of them, look upon me as a something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage. They have no idea of, and no care for my existence in any other light. My soul sickens at the thought of them.”

Bear in mind that Dickens, by age 45 had been married for over 20 years and had 10 children with his wife Catherine. His marriage became a victim of his success apparently as he fell in love with an 18-year-old actress (Ellen Ternan) who was part of the cast of a play entitled The Frozen Deep, which he cowrote with his friend Wilkie Collins. His growing frustration with the domestic life and his rather large brood can be seen in another letter in which he felt he deserved credit “for having brought up the largest family ever known, with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves.” Ternan seems to have offered escape and excitement in a world that was suffocating to him. Divorce was a frowned upon option in those days, and his break with Catherine came to be known as an “amicable separation.” His affair with Ternan lasted for the rest of his life though he was very careful about keeping her out of the public eye as the optics would have been challenging to his career ambitions.

Suffice it so say that his private life was a bit of a mess at the same time that his celebrity and renown seemed to be soaring. He seems to have been a casualty of his success and the drive that led him to work tirelessly on his craft. That drive appears to have come from the insecurity and depravity of his early years and all the subsequent resentment that went along with it. He was apparently incapable of enjoying the fruits of his success, and there was always another opportunity to promote himself to greater heights of fame in spite of the cost to his health, both mental and physical. In many ways, Dickens may have been the first celebrity “entertainer” whose lifestyle led directly to his demise.  

Near the end of his life, Dickens toured more and wrote less. His one man shows included dramatic lighting, a maroon curtain, a red reading stand, and multiple character reenactments with numerous voice changes (male and female). One of his most popular reenactments was a murder scene from his novel Oliver Twist which the included shrieking and screaming of the female victim. It was said that his heart rate skyrocketed when performing this particular scene. He ultimately suffered a series of small strokes, experienced paralysis, and was unable to eat solid foods. Nevertheless, the tours were wildly popular, and it was said that audience members were subject to crying and fainting. Who knows if that is true, but it speaks of the visceral experience he evoked.  His doctors finally put an end to the tours after his last one in which he performed 76 times in American cities. Dickens went back to work on another novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 58 before he could finish it, less than three months after his final stage performance.  

I had imagined idyllic lives for the authors of these three classic literary figures. I am not sure as to why I would assume this. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, and Mark Twain (just to name a few) all point to the pain and suffering that often inspire great writing. Little Women, Little House in the Big Woods, and A Christmas Carol somehow seemed to be the work of people immune from the typical angst and inner turmoil. I suppose it is easy to forget that these authors were flawed people who used their respective personal experiences to assuage the slings and arrows of highly imperfect lives. Alcott would have rather written about a seedier side of life, yet she pivoted and prospered, Wilder Lane helped her mother to polish and essentially change that which she seemingly detested and snatched commercial fame and fortune in a most unlikely way, and Dickens, a damaged man, due to the trauma of his youth, found a way to utilize his extraordinary talents in a way which at least partially, exorcised the demons. He became a celebrated author and international celebrity in the process. Though none of this fits into a neat package, and perhaps that is the point (it rarely works that way it), their work speaks for itself, and it has survived the test of time. How it got to us is less important than the fact that it did? The answer to that question is open to debate for sure.  

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Charles Dickens

Tale of Two Cities

TMC 4/1/22