On Harriet Beecher Stowe Biography: Snippets from Carol

My friend Carol emails to tell me what she did on her recent visit to Hartford, Connecticut.

"We did have a good time. [Visiting in Connecticut] Betty Cary at 88 is doing amazingly well. She went with us to Hartford Athenaeum and to Litchfield and Watertown. Connecticut is beautiful and rich with our country's history. I've returned with a bio of Harriet Beecher Stowe to read and one of her late works - Poganuc People. She was born and educated in Litchfield and was a teacher and advocate for women's education that eventually led to abolition and women's franchise. Early 18th C. was an exciting time in America - and in England, too. We drove around Hartford Retreat (now called the Institute for Living), grounds designed by Olmsted, who would eventually die there. The Retreat was modeled after an institution in England that pioneered in humane treatment for the insane."....

"Although the book has some delightful high points, I wouldn't recommend it for the book group. It devotes 4 rather tedious chapters to the details of female education and the administration of female academies in Litchfield, Hartford and Cincinnati run by her sister Catherine. There are some other quotes I'd love to share with you when I find time to type them out. The chapter on her marriage endorses what Trollope said about the difficulty of finding servants and time to write (which Harriet - and likely Frances - were doing for income while caring for babies.) They came thick and fast, 7 altogether, for H. and Calvin. Their method of birth control was periodic separations!

"In "Poganuc People" a memoir of her childhood written late in life, she talks about servants, the only people who had time for her in the busy parsonage, also crammed with babies. Servants refused to enter by the back door, though it may have been more convenient. They also refused to answer to a bell. They must be verbally summoned, if only by a child. Nabby, the servant in question, said she felt not only as good as the ladies, but superior, because she was paid a dollar a week and they got nothing!"

"Here's a quote from Joan D. Hedrick's Harriet Beecher Stowe that I enjoyed and laboriously typed rather than struggle withh my scanner:

"In England, he [Calvin Stowe, newly married to Harriet, who could not go on the trip with him because she immediately got pregnant] displayed a confident American perspective on British institutions, and had his revenge on Frances Trollope. He had no awe for the House of Lords, filled with what looked to him like "a parcel of old gracious grannies". "I wish you could have seen some of those old withered up, spindle-shanked, baboon faced specimens of humanity, with their big white perukes and long black robes noble lording one another." He preferred Shrewsbury on market day, where he entertained himself by observing the "whims and oddities" of the common people. Wherever he went he recorded for Harriet's enjoyment the accents that he heard about him."

Carol