Lucy Larcom (1824-1893), who recalls her girlhood in Beverly, Massachusetts, and her experience as a factory girl in the Lowell textile mills in A New England Girlhood (1889), was about seven years old when her father died. She was the ninth of his ten children (two by his first wife), all but three girls. Her affectionate and respectful memories of him give us a glimpse of a nineteenth century father of the old school.

Benjamin Larcom's ancestors had lived in or near Beverly for generations. He had been captain of a merchant ship sailing to European ports but seems to have been retired, at least from seafaring, during Lucy's childhood. Probably he was well beyond middle age when she was born and because of long absences from home may never have been on particularly close terms with his children, especially the girls. In comparison to Lucy's mother's cheerful sociability his "reserved, abstracted manner kept the children somewhat aloof from him." (Larcom, 25). Among his fellow townsmen he was known as "philosopher Ben." He was a studious reader of solid literature about navigation, astronomy, "historical computation" and of Biblical commentaries.

Although not an active presence in the house during weekdays, he took his duties as religious leader of the family very seriously. Every Sunday he tested those of his children still at home on quotations from the Westminster catechism and then, turning his face to the wall, prayed aloud, fervently and at length. After his death, Lucy and the others realized that "His grave clear perception of what was best for us, his brief words that decided once and for all the course we were to take, had been far more for us than we knew." (Larcom, 137).

Lucy began school at Beverly and read and reread the religious tracts and anthologies of poetry in the family library. After a few years poverty forced her mother to move to Lowell, where some of Lucy's sisters already worked, to manage a company-owned boarding house. Lucy herself began working in the mills when she was 11-years-old. Her pay was $1.00 a week and her mother received $1.25 a week for her board.

The hours were long but the work was not hard and was performed in the company of girls of her age. "The mill itself was a lesson for us," she recalled, but acknowledged "it was not, and could not be the right sort of life for a child." (Larcom, 155). In retrospect, she came to believe that the greatest advantage of the experience to her and the mill girls was that it taught them "to go out of themselves, and enter into the lives of others.

"Home-life, when one always stays at home, is necessarily narrowing. That is one reason why so many women are petty and unthoughtful of any except their own family's interests. We have hardly begun to live until we can take in the idea of the whole human family as the one to which we truly belong." (Larcom, 178)

She became a contributor to the Lowell Offering and continued work in the mills for ten years. In 1846, she went to Illinois to teach school and there obtained the equivalent of a college education at Monmouth Seminary. She never married but in 1852 returned to Massachusetts where she lived for forty-one more years, supporting herself (sometimes precariously) by teaching, editing and writing.

A Different Experience
Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909), author of A New England Boyhood (1893), grew up at the same time as Lucy Larcom, not far away as the crow flies, but in very different circumstances. His father Nathan Hale (1784-1863) a nephew of the patriot-martyr of the Revolutionary War, was owner and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser and an early promoter of railroads. His mother was the sister of the statesman and orator, Edward Everett. A crucial difference in Hale's boyhood and Larcom' s girlhood, as worth noting as the comparative poverty of the Larcoms and the relative affluence of the Hales, was the place the father occupied in the respective families. In contrast to Benjamin Larcom's passivity six days a week and revered memory after death, Nathan Hale took a lively interest and exerted a strong influence on his children's life at home and at school. Judging by Hale's recollection of his boyhood his parents exercised their influence by example and expectation rather than by admonition or exhortation.

Hale's memoirs cover the period from infancy until his graduation from Harvard at the age of seventeen but the emphasis is on his boyhood during the years 1824-1835. He could not remember a time when he could not read and started going to school with his older sisters and brother when he was 2 years old. The children were taken to and collected from school by Fullum, the Hales' authoritarian hired man who came to the family before Edward was born and remained after he left home.

When Edward was between six and nine, and had nothing to do but grow old enough to enter Boston Latin School, his father intentionally put him in a school conducted by a man who was not a hard task master. An alert and lively boy, Edward was tolerant of but not over fond of the school. Fortunately his father arranged for him to be taught the elements of Latin there so that he was able to skip the first tedious year at Boston Latin School.

Until he entered this venerable public school, his education had been in private schools. Here he sat side by side with sons of the wealthiest and most prominent men of Boston and also "side by side with the sons of day laborers, I suppose." (Hale, 33). Although he asserted the boys were not aware of class differences, his language suggests he did not get well acquainted with the sons of day laborers. About half the students in his class, bored by heavy emphasis on memorization, left after a year or two; "they were generally the boys of quick and bright minds who went off into business." (Hale, 28).

Hale described his years at Boston Latin School as "a curious double life;" while waiting for school to open and during recess he enjoyed "perfect terms of companionship" with his school fellows; as soon as school was over he rushed home, declining invitations to visit the wharves or accompany his friends on other expeditions. (Hale, 36-37). The reason was that he and his brother, Nathan, always his favorite companion, found "Home was the happiest place of all." (Hale, 44). Home provided "an infinite variety of amusements" and almost everything wanted for purposes of manufacture and invention: "carpenters tools and a work bench, equipment and supplies for chemical experiments, and printing material and a press." The latter alone furnished endless occupation in printing miniature books and a four-page newspaper, The Fly. (Hale, 44-45).

Reading was as an important part of Hale's childhood as it was in Larcom's. He had more books at his disposal, since his home contained copies of books sent to the Daily Advertiser for review, and his taste was more secular. His favorites, fondly recalled after sixty years, included Robinson Crusoe, Sir Walter Scott's shorter poems, a compendium of scientific data, dictionaries of biography and quotations, and The Boys Own Book, a cyclopedia of information on games, gymnastics, chemistry, chess, boxing, wrestling and fencing.

After infant school, Edward and Nathan went to school and played apart from their sisters Sarah and Lucretia. In the evening "we four," separated in age by less than five years, gathered around the dinner table to exchange reports of the day's activities, read, study, and play quiet games3no noisy ones were permitted3until bedtime. As time went on "we four" were joined by "the little ones," Edward's younger brothers and sisters. When their school offered prizes for compositions or translations the Hales, observing an unwritten law of the family, always competed. The law was that you can do anything you want to do if you really try.

In 1834, after his brother left for college, Edward became bored at school and, for the first time, less than happy at home. His parents withdrew him from school in order to grant him a few months of comparative idleness before he too entered Harvard. Now he explored the wharves on his own and visited his father's newspaper and book printing offices. An apprentice took time to help him improve his skills at setting type. In later life, Hale was fond of saying that if necessary he could support his family as a compositor. (Hale, 61, 157). It always made him proud to know that he was "a printer and the son of a printer," an occupation devoted to the spread of information and knowledge. (Holloway, 23).

Hale graduated from Harvard in 1839 and began teaching at Boston Latin School. Instead of going to divinity school he studied theology on his own and obtained ordination as a Unitarian clergyman. In 1846, the same year Larcom left Lowell, Hale began his life work as a preacher, first in Worcester and from 1856 until his death in Boston. Even before his ordination as a minister he had begun his equally productive and illustrious career as an author.

There is only occasional mention of Lucretia Hale in Edward Everett Hale's A New England Boyhood but we know the entire family3four sisters, one of whom died at age two, four brothers, and their remarkable parents3were linked by common interests, especially in reading and writing and by abiding affection. Lucretia (1820-1900) went to Elizabeth Peabody's school and, while Edward was at Harvard, completed her formal education at the prestigious George B. Emerson School for Young Ladies.

Like Lucy Larcom, Lucretia remained unmarried. Unlike Lucy, who was forced by adversity to become semi-independent at an early age. Lucretia continued to live at home until her parents died in the mid-1860s. As one of the older of a large number of brothers and sisters there were many ways she could be useful at home. When "the little ones" grew up Lucretia began publishing stories, sometimes on religious themes, in The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. Eventually she helped break new ground in children's literature by writing stories to amuse young people rather than instruct or uplift them.

Her best known creation, the Peterkin family, made its debut in April 1868 in Our Young Folks, one of whose editors was Lucy Larcom and in whose pages Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy first appeared. The stories were collected in The Peterkin Papers (1880) and The Last of the Peterkins (1886).

The Peterkin family, in addition to Mr. and Mrs. Peterkin, consists of three more or less grown children, Agamemnon, Solomon John, and Elizabeth Eliza, and three little boys, always putting on or taking off their rubber boots. The family is close-knit, well-off, amiable and well-intentioned, estimable in every way except that none of its members has a grain of common sense. The stories follow a formula set in the first, "The Lady who Put Salt in her Coffee:" One of them finds him or herself confronted by a problem whose solution is obvious to the reader but beyond the comprehension of the Peterkins; each member of the family propose a different answer, which when acted upon, makes matters worse; finally an outsider, often the Lady from Philadelphia, comes to the rescue with a simple and practical way out of the dilemma.

Various writers have suggested that Lucretia satirized her own family in The Peterkin Papers. It is hard to recognize her parents as the bemused Mr. Peterkin and the addled Mrs. Peterkin; one student (Wankmiler, 97) asserts that Lucretia shared some of Mrs. Peterkin's traits as well of those of Elizabeth Eliza. It is possible that a sister's eye could discern foibles in Nathan, Edward, and Sarah Hale that could be incorporated in Agamemnon, Solomon John, and Elizabeth Eliza Peterkin; the "little ones" Lucretia knew in her childhood could have been reincarnated as the "three little boys."

The strongest reason for rejecting the idea that members of the Hale family were the originals of the Peterkins is that the Hales didn't need The Lady from Philadelphia. They had Fullum. Abel Fullum (c. 1790-1886) was the family's faithful man Friday, hired man, coachman, house man and nanny who had come into the Hale's service around the time Lucretia was born and remained with it long after the children grew up. He was an authority on all things requiring manual skills and practical knowledge. Moreover, as Edward recalled, "he was a born tyrannt (Hale, 47) who would never have permitted the Hales to get into the Peterkins' silly muddles.

In an introduction to The Complete Peterkin Papers (1960) Nancy Hale, granddaughter of Edward and grand niece of Lucretia, concludes that the latter, having "stayed too close to home" for so many years vented her exasperation with a "patently ridiculous family life" by ridiculing it in The Peterkin Papers. (N. Hale, unnumbered pp 4-5).

It is possible that the "togetherness" and "cloying closeness" modern writers object to in the Victorian family was a natural product of large families rather than a social invention. Even with the help of a servant or two there was always a lot of cooking, washing, sewing and caring for the sick, young and old to be done—plus visiting and entertaining cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents on both sides of the family.

A large, loving, supportive family was the only kind Lucretia had ever known. She told the Peterkin stories to children of friends for their entertainment and sold them to magazines to make money rather than for the sake of protest. Acting on the principle that you can do anything you want to if you really try she used her artistry to make the sort of family life she was familiar with both recognizable and funny. After 130 years readers continue to regard the Peterkins with affection rather than scorn and, with their own lapses in mind, laugh aloud when they reread the Peterkins' misadventures.

References

Hale, Edward Everett. A New England Boyhood, (1893). A New Edition with Foreword by Edward D. Mead. New York: Grosett and Dunlap, 1976.

Hale, Nancy. "Introduction" to The Complete Peterkin Papers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960.

Holloway, Jean. Edward Everett Hale, A Biography. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1956.

Larcom, Lucy. A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1893.

Wankmiller, Madelyn C. "Lucretia P. Hale and the Peterkin Papers." The Horn Book 34 (April 1958): 75,103; 137-47.