Margaret Fuller (39 page)

But there were far larger numbers of poor Irish immigrants new to the city as well, whose plight Margaret took up in a series of articles on “The Irish Character,” both out of principle and because of fellow feeling. Margaret was an immigrant to New York herself, along with most everyone else she knew, lured to a city whose half-million residents had “needs enough” to fuel an urban economy unlike any other in the New World. Margaret’s old friend from Boston Lydia Maria Child was here now, writing for the weekly
Broadway Journal,
edited by a Virginian, Edgar Allan Poe. Waldo’s older brother William had settled on Staten Island to work as a lawyer; William Channing was in Manhattan preaching to his Society of Christian Union, and in the fall before her own arrival, Margaret’s brother-in-law Ellery Channing had left Ellen and little Greta in Concord once again to try his hand at writing for the
Tribune
as well—where their employer, Horace Greeley, was himself a New Hampshire man.

It was in Horace Greeley that Margaret recognized a “go-ahead, fearless adroitness” that was simply “American.”
Waldo’s deprecatory assessment that Greeley was “no scholar,” but rather a “mother of men . . . an abettor,”
captured the very reasons Margaret quickly warmed to the tall, unkempt newspaperman, whose thick wire-rimmed glasses, settled unsteadily on his ruddy baby face, were the only hint of erudition in a carelessly rustic ensemble that usually included an old white coat of Irish linen, heavy boots, and baggy black trousers.
The “go-ahead” Greeley had traveled all the way to Cambridge the previous September to press for Margaret’s acceptance as she deliberated over his offer of a job, and his proposal that she take a room in his home on Turtle Bay, the former summer residence of New York banker Isaac Lawrence, had helped make up her mind. Margaret had already met Greeley’s wife, Mary, a sometime invalid who’d suffered numerous miscarriages and stillbirths, during one of Mary’s summer residences at Brook Farm, an enterprise that husband and wife supported as ardent “associationists.” Margaret had found Mary to be a witty conversational partner. She may even have proposed Margaret for the
Tribune
literary editorship, and she welcomed Margaret to the isolated Turtle Bay homestead, two miles beyond the more “thickly settled parts of New York,” where, as Margaret learned, her hostess had insisted on settling in the tumbledown waterfront mansion for the sake of their one surviving child, two-year-old Arthur, whose health was a lingering concern.

Horace and Mary Greeley were “Grahamites and Hydropaths,” according to Margaret, followers of the latest health and dietary fads, and they were temperance-minded teetotalers as well.
Margaret was chided for taking “strong potations”—her daily cup of coffee or tea—and for wearing leather gloves (“Skin of a beast!” Mary Greeley would exclaim),
but otherwise she enjoyed the remote residence. Maria Child described the route she took to visit her friend: exiting the Harlem omnibus at 49th Street, as Margaret had instructed, then following “a winding, zig-zag cart-track . . . as rural as you can imagine, with moss-covered rocks, scraggly bushes, and a brook that came tumbling over a little dam.” Finally, after passing through three swinging gates, Child reached the house, overgrown with vines and climbing roses, and “so old and picturesque” she could scarcely believe it had been “allowed to remain standing near New York so long.” There were gazebos “dropping to pieces,” and a “piazza” at the back of the house, “almost
on
the East river, with Blackwell’s Island in full view.” Margaret’s room looked out over “a little woody knoll, that runs down into the water, and boats and ships are passing her window all the time.”

Margaret simply felt that “I like living here,” where “all flows freely.” In New York City she had discovered “I don’t dislike wickedness and wretchedness”—the squalor of the more “thickly-settled parts” and the houses of reform she could see across the water on Blackwell’s Island—any more than the “pettiness and coldness” of Boston and Concord.
Although the Greeleys squabbled at times—the more intellectual Mary suffered from the “ennui” Margaret had identified in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
—Margaret sometimes overheard Horace and Mary singing duets in the evening, and their son, Arthur, loved to swing in the hammock on the piazza with Margaret as she read books for review. She was not missing her New England friends and planned not to visit Boston until at least July.

As they became better acquainted, both at home and in the
Tribune
offices, where her host-and-employer often worked late into the night, Margaret decided Horace Greeley was “in his habits, a slattern and plebeian,” but “in his heart, a nobleman.”
Maybe best of all he allowed Margaret to write as she chose, never minding “what turmoil it might excite, nor what odium it might draw down on her own head.” He was the rare man who felt no challenge to his own authority from Margaret’s strong will; instead, he admired her for it. “She never asked how this would sound,” Greeley marveled, “nor whether that would do, nor what would be the effect of saying anything; but simply, ‘Is it the truth? Is it such as the public should know?’”
As literary editor, Margaret was more partner than employee. Together they were “flying on the paper wings of every day,” as Margaret wrote of the news business in her New Year’s Day column at the start of 1845. Both were ever on the lookout for “the new knowledge, the new thought, the new hope” that might bring “the clear morning of a better day.”
Although the willfully unrefined Greeley delighted in teasing Margaret on occasion for what he considered her “entirely inconsistent” requirement that men display an attitude of “courtesy and protection” toward women in public with a mocking cry of “
LET THEM BE SEA-CAPTAINS IF THEY WILL!
”—the joke itself marked the vast difference between the two
patresfamilias
in her life, in Concord and New York City.

16

“A human secret, like my own”

T
HE TREK FROM TURTLE BAY TO THE
NEW-YORK TRIBUNE
offices was a long one, and Margaret sometimes preferred to write at home when reviewing books. But her material was the city itself, and points beyond. Even so slight an incident as a wealthy woman’s officious treatment of an Irish boy on an East River ferry could make a column: “Prevalent Idea that Politeness is too great a Luxury to be given to the Poor.” One day William Channing took her on a tour of the notorious Five Points slum. On another, he escorted her up the Hudson to Sing Sing, where she’d been invited to address the women prisoners, her first formal public-speaking appearance.

It was Christmas Day, among the most sorrowful of the year for the prison’s inmates. The chairman of Sing Sing’s Board of Inspectors escorted Margaret to her seat at a desk in the front of the prison chapel—should a woman stand to speak, especially on a holy day in a house of worship? But then she rose “like an inspired person before these women,” recalled her new friend Rebecca Spring, a Quaker philanthropist and supporter of William Channing’s New York Prison Association, and “spoke to them not as to criminals, but friends.” Margaret told her hundred female listeners, most of them convicted as prostitutes, they weren’t “fallen” women. “It is not so!” she exclaimed. “I know my sex better.” She proceeded to outline a program of self-reflection and mutual introspection they might pursue while at Sing Sing—like her Conversations, and in keeping with the originating ideals of the “penitentiary” movement—that would turn their “defying spirit[s]” into “better selves” and supply them with the courage to prevail in “the struggle when you leave this shelter!”

And so, most weekdays, Margaret left her own shelter at Turtle Bay, made her way past the three swinging gates and down the zigzag path to ride the Harlem line along rural Fourth Avenue into the city, entering the thicket of four- and five-story commercial and apartment blocks that began just north of Union Place at 14th Street and extended all the way south to Castle Garden and the Battery promenade. Exiting the omnibus near City Hall Park for a glimpse of greenery and municipal grandeur before ducking inside the “dismal inky”
doorway of the
Tribune
building at the corner of Spruce and Nassau, Margaret climbed to the third-floor editorial rooms, passing the massive steam-powered cylinder presses on the first floor, quiet now after a night of whirling out the morning edition, dispensed to waiting newsboys and -girls at five
A.M.
Upstairs among carelessly arranged sofas and bookcases stuffed with reference texts were stationed several pine tables for reporters to use as writing desks. Margaret had her own, easily identified by the piles of books waiting for review stacked beneath it on the floor.

During Margaret’s first months on the job, Ellery Channing was often on hand as one of the scribbling men in shirtsleeves at the other writing tables. But by April, Greeley had discovered Ellery’s inability “to make his own work,” and Margaret’s brother-in-law was fired.
She was angry at Ellery for wasting the opportunity, but she was also relieved. His presence, reminding her of the old family obligations, had put a crimp in the freedom she’d anticipated in choosing to pursue a profession in New York. She welcomed the excuse to travel into the city and follow her own whims, whether to attend concerts or lectures in the evening or to visit the houses of friends like Maria Child, on Third Street in Greenwich Village, or to the literary salon in the home of Anne Charlotte Lynch, on Waverly Place at Washington Square.

The success of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
made Margaret a celebrity even at Waverly Place, at these regular Saturday-evening gatherings of New York’s elite writers and editors—Poe, Sedgwick, Duyckinck, O’Sullivan—where the admiring Elizabeth Oakes Smith noticed that, in the overfull rooms, Margaret’s “fine head and spiritual expression at once marked her out from the crowd.” Anne Lynch’s soiree held the Saturday after St. Valentine’s Day in 1845 made the newspaper, with Margaret depicted sitting at table, “her large gray eyes lamping inspiration and her thin quivering lip prophesying like a Pythoness.”
Shortly after, Poe’s
Broadway Journal
ran an unflattering review of Margaret’s book, accompanied by an even less flattering cartoon, captioned “Portrait of a Distinguished Authoress,” featuring a haughty, mannish, ringleted creature at her writing desk, holding a book and peering at it nearsightedly. Misogynist envy jostled with sisterly admiration for Margaret among New York’s literati.

Margaret, who found the Lynch salon “not pleasant” and inclined toward the transmission of “second hand literary gossip,”
had already spent that same Valentine’s Day—the “merry season of light jokes and lighter love-tokens,” as she observed in her
Tribune
report—touring the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, then under the enlightened supervision of the Paris-trained physician Pliny Earle.
The dancing party held on a Friday evening for the patients, so differently cared for than the cowering inmates Margaret would later encounter on Blackwell’s Island, demonstrated that “even those who are troublesome and subject to violent excitement” had “the power of self-control” if given “an impulse strong enough” and “favorable circumstances.”
While one member of Margaret’s touring group remarked “how very little our partialities, undue emotions, and manias need to be exaggerated to entitle us to rank among madmen,” Margaret took an opposite view in concluding her
Tribune
account: “that, with all our faults and follies, there is still a sound spot, a presentiment of eventual health in the inmost nature.” The excursion to Bloomingdale had “embolden[ed]” her “to hope—
to know
it is the same with all.”
That hope surely extended to her youngest brother, Lloyd, the sibling for whom she still felt most responsibility in her newly carefree New York days. The nineteen-year-old’s “partial inferiority,” as she now described Lloyd’s mental disability, had so far prevented him from learning a trade or settling into a stable living arrangement.
Yet Margaret continued to find him situations—as a boarding student at Brook Farm, as a clerk in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore—always expecting to locate that “sound spot” in her brother’s troubled nature.

This season Margaret’s personal “presentiment of eventual health” derived from her acquaintance with another doctor in the city whose skills had been developed in France, a native Frenchman named Theodore Leger, who practiced the “supersensual” science of mesmerism in an office near the
Tribune
building. The troubles Margaret sought help for were more physical than psychic, “material” rather than “spiritual,” by the terms of a book she reviewed in the
Tribune
the week before her visit to Bloomingdale—
Etherology; or, The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology.
Margaret had long suffered from pain and fatigue caused by spinal curvature—the lazy “S” that supported her back, leaving one shoulder lower than the other and contributing to the awkward “swanlike” (or pythonesque) extension of her neck so often noted in physical descriptions. She customarily wore a horsehair shoulder pad inside her dress to compensate for her uneven posture. But no matter how well the trick worked in social settings, Margaret’s weak, ill-formed spine added to the shameful sense of homeliness she’d felt all her life in comparison to her pretty mother and sister, and that had overcome her the year before in springtime when she’d felt burdened by “this ugly cumbrous mass of flesh.” She’d hated “not to be beautiful, when all around is so”—when William Clarke was so evidently not in love with her.
If there was “a prospect of
cure
” she would “do almost any thing to ensure it,” Margaret wrote to her friend Rebecca Spring’s husband, Marcus, who knew Dr. Leger and offered an introduction. Nothing “that could now happen” would “make me so happy.”

Mesmeric healing—Dr. Leger’s science, or art—operated on the principle that there
was
a connection between the spiritual and the material and, further, that properties of mind could penetrate physical boundaries to effect cures. At a time when new discoveries about electricity and chemistry, invisible forces with properties that could be proved empirically, were altering the “rule of life,” as Margaret wrote in her review of
Etherology,
showing that “old limits become fluid beneath the fire of thought,” the probability that there existed an
ethereal
“means by which influence and thought may be communicated from one being to another, independent of the usual organs, and with a completeness and precision rarely attained through these,” seemed plausible even to a habitual skeptic like Margaret.
And she had long harbored a fancy that women were particularly receptive to such “magnetic” influences, as they were also called. Woman’s “intuitions,” she’d noted in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
“are more rapid and more correct”; surely this pointed to the predominance of the “electrical, the magnetic element in Woman.”
Although, as Margaret would write in a later review, “we do not yet know the origin, or even clearly the features”
of the medium, and “patience and exactness in experiment” would be required to discover and prove them, she nevertheless believed that “victories in the realm of the mind” were inevitable. Within fifty years, Margaret predicted, there would be “more rapid and complete modes of intercourse between mind and mind.”