“FRESH, SPARKLING, . . . FULL OF SOUL”
The Phenomenon of Little Women
WHEN Little Women first appeared, readers and reviewers were astonished by how new and original it was. There had been nothing like it before, they felt, at least not for girls. A few entertaining books for boys had been published in recent years, but the vast majority of literature for children, a growing segment of the literary marketplace, was so stilted and pious that it failed to capture the attention of young readers. Most of these books, as one reviewer wrote, “consist of puling, do-me-good copy-book morality, calculated to turn the stomach of any sensible child.”1 These so-called Sunday-school books were written with one goal in mind: to convince children of God’s justice. Characters were stereotypical and flat, either good or bad with little or no moral growth, and the predictable outcome was reward for the good and punishment for the bad, which usually meant illness or occasionally death. The stories were told by wise adult narrators talking down to children, warning them to be obedient to their elders if they wanted to grow up virtuous and in one piece.
To get a sense of how Little Women must have seemed to the children and adults who picked it up in 1868, we can compare it to some of the other books that were then popular with young readers, particularly girls. One very widely read book was British author Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856), whose bookish heroine is seen by some as a precursor to Jo March. (Jo cries over Yonge’s other famous novel, The Heir of Radcliffe, in chapter two of Little Women.) The Daisy Chain starts off with lots of lively dialogue, although it is nearly impossible to keep everyone straight in the family of eleven children plus parents, servants, and visitors. A middle daughter, Ethel, seems somewhat vivacious and interesting, although she is not nearly as compelling as Jo. Rather than assert her right to go to school, for instance, she quietly tries to keep up with her brother in his classical studies (as girls received virtually no education). Her siblings tease her mercilessly simply for wearing glasses, without which she is virtually blind. And daily Bible reading and her class-conscious mother have convinced Ethel that “fame is coarse and vulgar,” as is ambition.2 No wonder Jo was more interested in the gothic thriller The Heir of Radcliffe. By the end of chapter three in The Daisy Chain, a carriage accident kills off the mother and paralyzes the oldest sister, and from there the story becomes a somber affair with the father reeling from grief and the older girls wondering how they are going to take their mother’s place. All of this is underscored by regular references to scripture and the religious ceremonies of the Anglican Church, which form the foundation of the family’s life. It’s not hard to see why Little Women has enjoyed more lasting fame than The Daisy Chain.
Then there was American author Adeline D. T. Whitney’s Faith Gartney’s Girlhood (1863), with which Little Women was sometimes compared, especially by British reviewers. The novel follows Faith from age fourteen to twenty and was one of the most popular books of its time. Just reading the opening sentence, however, gives us an idea of why audiences were so thrilled with Alcott’s relaxed prose:
East or West, it matters not where,—the story may, doubtless, indicate something of latitude and longitude as it proceeds,—in the city of Mishaumok, lived Henderson Gartney, Esq., one of those American gentlemen of whom, if she were ever canonized, Martha of Bethany must be the patron saint,—if again, feminine celestials, sainthood once achieved through the weary experience of earth, don’t know better than to assume such charge of wayward man,—born, as they are, seemingly, to the life-destiny of being ever “careful and troubled about many things.”3
Perhaps nineteenth-century audiences could make some sense out of that, but I doubt those of any subsequent generation could pick up the book without throwing it across the room.
In contrast, readers who opened the plain little volume—available in red, green, or brown—with “Little Women” on the cover wreathed in gold, were electrified from the start after reading the famous opening lines. The novel immediately draws the reader in with four young voices, each expressing her own wishes and desires and hinting at her unique personality:
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
“It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
“We’ve got father and mother and each other, anyhow,” said Beth contentedly, from her corner.
The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly,—
“We haven’t got father, and shall not have him for a long time.” She didn’t say “perhaps never,” but each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was.4
The first part of Little Women was greeted with nearly unanimous praise and predictions that it would remain on bookstore shelves much longer than most of the volumes then being published. The earliest reviewers struck a theme that would never fade away: in the words of one critic, Little Women was “fresh, sparkling, natural, and full of soul.” The same words—fresh, natural, healthy, simple, sincere, realistic, and unaffected—were repeated again and again in the reviews. As another reviewer put it, the story “is related with so much naturalness and vivacity that we predict for it a much more permanent success than usually falls to the lot of modern story-books.”5 The novel’s naturalness came from a narrator who didn’t talk down to children but seemed to be one of them herself, or, at times, a former child who looks back with compassion on her younger self. When she preaches to her readers, she often does it through Marmee or one of the four girls themselves, rather than through a moralizing narrator.
Meanwhile, the English publisher Sampson Low noticed the book’s initial reception in America and arranged to publish an edition in England. It appeared in December 1868 under the title Four Little Women. The Spectator, a British periodical, found the book full of “genuine humor and pathos” and particularly praised the portrait of Jo. Noting that Alcott suggested there was more to come, the reviewer concluded, “By all means let us have it.”6
However, the book’s informal language left a sour taste in the mouths of some British reviewers, who regretted that Alcott’s little women didn’t express “themselves in a more lady-like language.” Over the years there would occasionally be some high-toned snobbery about the girls’ lack of gentility and the rather unfashionable home they came from, but what seemed to trouble Brits was the way Alcott had her young women speaking a “rough and uncouth” language rife with “Americanisms.” The novel was “slightly tainted by vulgarity,” one reviewer wrote. “The language is sometimes not such as we should care to hear from the lips of English girls.”7 It could be argued that the novel’s language more than anything else makes it an American book. What Alcott brought to children’s—and American—literature was the fresh language of American colloquialism, a departure from the stiffness of Yonge and Whitney, and a precursor to the even more “vulgar” speech of the lower-class Huck Finn, who would appear sixteen years later, in 1884.
There was also something revolutionary about a narrator who spoke directly to girls without correcting or admonishing them. As the young critic Henry James Jr. observed, with considerable discomfort, Alcott had “a private understanding with the youngsters she depicts, at the expense of their pastors and masters.” There is no denying that Alcott’s fiction wrote around and essentially supplanted—James would say undermined—patriarchal authority as it was manifested in churches, schools, and the home. Another very popular novel, Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore, published the year before Little Women, exemplifies the type of children’s literature that satisfied the “pastors and masters,” featuring as it did a heroine so good and meek that she seems not quite human. Her chief function is evangelical, pointing the way to a virtuous Christian life for all around her. Her main struggle, to the point of suffering a nervous breakdown, is over whether to obey God or her father, the latter of whom threatens to whip her whenever she refuses to follow his wishes when, say, she won’t play a secular song on the Sabbath. Eventually, of course, she reforms even her own father, so that she can comfortably obey all the patriarchal authorities. One reviewer determined that the book “would be peculiarly attractive to all persons who believe that children seven years old love moral tales better than candy, and obedience to their parents better than dolls and pretty pictures.”8 Apparently there were plenty of such people. The book was so popular that Finley continued to publish sequels—twenty-seven of them—until 1905.
While Christian authorities approved of the piety of Elsie Dinsmore, they found Little Women wanting. Specifically, they objected to the lack of overt religiosity in the book. The Zion’s Herald refused to recommend the book, for “it is without Christ.” The Ladies’ Repository declared, “It is not a Christian book. It is religion without spirituality, and salvation without Christ.” Both reviewers advised Sunday school librarians against purchasing the book. The Sunday school portion of the market was considerable enough that Alcott’s publisher, Thomas Niles, was mildly concerned. “Some very good & pious people,” as he put it, objected to the novel’s portrayal of Christmas Day. On the holiest of Christian holidays, not only do the Marches not go to church, but the daughters even perform a play that has no religious content whatsoever. When a new edition of the novel was in the works, only three weeks after the first print run, which was selling rapidly, Niles wondered if perhaps Alcott wanted to replace that scene, although he thought it “about the best part of the whole book. Why will people be so very good,” he wondered.9 The scene stayed and sales continued to climb, even without the support of the pious.
The illustrations, done by Louisa’s youngest sister, May, also lent a certain charm to the first edition of Little Women (copies of which, incidentally, are now priced somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000). As illustrator, May didn’t want to be identified as one of the “Little Women,” Alcott told Niles, but simply as “May Alcott.” Her illustrations—there are four of them—have gotten a bad rap over the years and are often mentioned as having been ridiculed in early reviews. I found, however, that most reviewers liked them, calling them “vigorous and impressive,” “very creditabl[e],” and “clever.” Only the review in The Nation was critical, saying that “Miss May Alcott betrays . . . a want of anatomical knowledge” in her illustrations.10 We might agree today, yet most of them possess a simplicity and immediacy, a kind of childlike innocence, particularly the frontispiece and the portrait of Beth welcoming home her father, that none of the subsequent illustrators was quite able to capture.
Frontispiece illustration by May Alcott from the first edition of Little Women (Roberts Brothers, 1868).
While part one of the book sold rapidly and went into multiple new editions, the public eagerly awaited part two. When it was announced in the spring that the printing would be delayed a bit, readers got anxious. “The curiosity to learn the denouement of ‘Little Women’ amounts to an epidemic,” one newspaper claimed. By this time, 55,000 copies of part one had been sold, and 3,000 advance orders for part two had already been taken. Alcott wasn’t sure what to call the next installment. A friend had suggested “Wedding Marches,” in light of all the “pairing off.” All she could come up with was “Little Women Act Second” or “Leaving the Nest. Sequel to Little Women.” On April 14, 1869, part two appeared under the simple title Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Part Second. Within a month, Sampson Low published it in England as Little Women Wedded, more obviously catering to readers’ expectations.11
Again, reviewers were nearly unanimous in their praise. This time, however, critics weren’t entirely sure whether the new volume qualified as a children’s book. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine thought it “a rather mature book for the little women, but a capital one for their elders,” and wondered, “do not her children grow rather rapidly?” Most didn’t seem to mind, however. The Boston Post declared, “the author has taken eminent possession of that domain in fiction on the border line of what pleases the young and what engages the mature.” Indeed, many of the reviews of parts one and two commented on the book’s interest to readers both young and old. According to an Alcott family friend, Frank Preston Stearns, Little Women was “the rage in ’69,” when everyone from children to grandparents was reading it. He describes merchants and lawyers, clerks in his office, and the elevator boy all merrily asking each other, “Have you read ‘Little Women?” In short, Little Women was a cultural phenomenon that knew no boundaries of age, gender, or class. Its ubiquity is reflected by the reviews that appeared not simply in periodicals for children (of which there were a few) but in newspapers and serious literary magazines, such as The Nation and Putnam’s. The dividing line between adult and children’s literature was not yet clearly drawn, and Little Women benefited from the crossover then possible. As the book’s fame grew, more and more reviewers took notice. Even two years later, the British Quarterly noted that Little Women could still be found “upon every American book-stall, and . . . in almost every American home.”12
Although May Alcott was not happy with her illustrations, this one of Beth welcoming home Mr. March for the first edition of Little Women (Roberts Brothers, 1868), captures a childlike innocence no subsequent illustrator was able to approximate.
As for the religious press, the Zion’s Herald again had its objections, especially that Beth’s death scene made no reference to God and her ascent to Heaven. Conservative Christians generally saw nothing to admire in the vaguely transcendentalist spiritualism of the March family. In response, Alcott lampooned the field of pious children’s books when Jo tries her hand at writing a story for children. Jo finds that she cannot “consent to depict all her naughty boys as being eaten by bears, or tossed by mad bulls, because they did not go to a particular Sabbath-school, nor all the good infants who did go, of course, as rewarded by every kind of bliss, from gilded gingerbread to escorts of angels, when they departed this life, with psalms or sermons on their lisping tongues.” Never shy to criticize beloved institutions where she saw hypocrisy or injustice, Alcott let the pious gatekeepers of children’s literature know what she thought of them, and they responded in kind. Even three years later, the Christian Union would designate Alcott’s works as “wholly bad” and unfit for Sunday school libraries.13 Her readers didn’t mind. America was becoming increasingly secular, and Americans no longer required that books for children preach the Bible. Marmee gives her girls a book to guide them in their efforts to become better people, but the book is not specified. Scholars today believe it was the New Testament, although many have believed it was Pilgrim’s Progress. Either way, it is significant that Alcott didn’t name it.
Also unnamed was the book’s illustrator, Hammatt Billings. May Alcott was either removed from the project or unwilling to continue, and the more professional Billings—illustrator of the most famous American book before Little Women, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)—was enlisted. While we don’t know what Louisa thought of May’s drawings, she hated those by Billings and promptly sent them back. On the proof of a portrait that was designed for the frontispiece and showed Amy and Laurie together in Europe, she wrote, “Oh, please change em!” Neither of the likenesses lived up to her ideal. Amy looked too old and was not nearly “picturesque” enough, while Laurie looked too young and unattractive. Alcott was more explicit in a letter she wrote to her friend Elizabeth Greene. Billings had made Amy “a fat girl with a pug of hair, sitting among weedy shrubbery with a light-house under her nose, & a mile or two off a scrubby little boy on his stomach in the grass looking cross, towzly, & about 14 years old!”
Alcott was not happy with Hammatt Billings’s first attempt at this illustration of Amy and Laurie in Europe. (Princeton University Library)
Niles set Billings to work again, and when the new picture came, Alcott thought it an improvement. Amy was “pretty,” but now Laurie, who looked like “a mixture of Apollo [and] Byron [was] no more like the real Teddy than Ben Franklin.” She couldn’t delay the book any longer, however.14
Billings’s biographer calls his illustrations “adequate if not inspired.”15 Undoubtedly they have a stiff refinement that robs the characters of their vitality. Amy, who is supposed to be seventeen, looks almost matronly. Alcott’s complaints notwithstanding, Laurie more or less matches what he seems to be in the text; but his expression is blank, giving him no personality. Much more successful, and one of the very best illustrations ever done for Little Women, was Billings’s “Jo in a vortex.” Here Jo, with her hair in rags, looks a bit like a Medusa and has the kind of wild look that seems just right for Jo. The picture captures, in what could have been a static scene, the intense energy of creative work, complete with pages fluttering to the floor. The picture almost looks like it is moving, with Jo scratching away, then crossing out a passage, and finally tossing the paper aside as she comes up with a new idea. Billings’s biographer calls it “the perfect visualization of creative genius at work.”16 Billings also did two more illustrations: one of Professor Bhaer playing with Tina (one of Jo’s charges) and one of Beth and Jo at the seaside.
Alcott was much happier with Billings’s second drawing, which became the frontispiece for the first edition of Little Women, Part Two (Roberts Brothers, 1869).
Billings’s image of Jo in her vortex is one of the most successful illustrations ever done for Little Women (Roberts Brothers, 1869).
Little Women’s publication history does not end with the appearance of volume two; the text would take on many forms over the years. Throughout the 1870s, the two parts of the novel were offered as a two-volume set. The only differences were minor textual corrections and two new illustrations by Billings for part one that replaced the original ones by May. But in 1880, the novel would change dramatically when Roberts Brothers decided to publish a one-volume version. This would not be merely a repackaging of the two parts but a newly revised, illustrated edition, released in time for the holiday season. Niles wanted to enshrine Little Women as a book of lasting value for families to keep and turn into family heirlooms. It was a “sumptuous edition,” as one rapturous reviewer put it, with its green and gold cover and gilded edges. The first children to have read the novel had by then entered adulthood, another reviewer wrote, and “the memory of this [fascinating] story has become a little dim.” Indeed its sales had begun to slip, but they would pick up again with the 1880 edition.17
The new edition contained an astonishing two hundred new illustrations by Frank T. Merrill, a competent journeyman illustrator whose most famous work would be this edition of Little Women. Alcott was again involved in proofing the illustrations, writing notes on the backs of Merrill’s drawings where they fell short of how she imagined her characters. Jo was “always made to look too old for her years.” Laurie was sometimes too stiff or too old, at other times too young and wearing the wrong expression. On the back of one portrait of Professor Bhaer, she wrote, “Eyes too starring. Bhaer was not frightened of Jo.” Merrill took her advice and gave him a whole new head and made similar alterations of other drawings she objected to. Most of Merrill’s drawings Alcott heartily approved of, however, writing “Capital,” “Lovely,” or “Jolly” on the back. She wrote to Niles, probably after the revisions were complete, that they were “all capital, and we had great fun over them.”18
The illustrations are sprinkled throughout the volume’s 586 pages and become rather overwhelming, but a few stand out. The frontispiece, an echo of May Alcott’s, is one of the most elaborate drawings. It shows Marmee with the girls gathered around her, this time with Mr. March’s letter as the focus. It would become a central scene for illustrators and film directors for decades to come.
Most of the illustrations, however, look rather stiff and idealized. Professor Bhaer looks a bit like Santa Claus and all of the girls something like Gibson girls, although the real Gibson girls popularized by Charles Dana Gibson didn’t start showing up until the 1890s. Merrill’s girls have pointy noses and long lashes and look more like manikins than real girls. His portraits of Jo, besides making her look too old, give little sense of her character, for the most part. She looks like any other proper young woman of the period, not the rough-and-tumble personality readers love. But Merrill does deserve credit for the wonderful drawing of Jo wearing her writing cap, which has become iconic.
In an echo of May Alcott’s frontispiece, Frank Merrill captured what would become the iconic scene of Marmee reading Mr. March’s letter to the girls (Roberts Brothers, 1880).
Merrill’s illustration of Jo writing is his most successful portrait of her (Roberts Brothers, 1880).
Just as Merrill’s drawings flatten and standardize the novel, so the text of the new edition smoothed the rough edges of Alcott’s original creation. The text was extensively altered, mainly to get rid of the slang and colloquialisms, clean up the grammar, and make the whole sound more genteel and proper. No correspondence has survived to indicate whether Alcott was involved in making the changes, but she must at least have approved of them. It is likely that she let the publisher take charge, having little patience for those who tried to tame her boisterous prose. In response to critics of her informal language, she had written these words in her next novel, An Old-Fashioned Girl, published in 1870:
I deeply regret being obliged to shock the eyes and ears of such of my readers as have a prejudice in favor of pure English, by expressions like the above but, having rashly undertaken to write a little story about Young America, for Young America, I feel bound to depict my honored patrons as faithfully as my limited powers permit. Otherwise, I must expect the crushing criticism, “Well, I daresay it’s all very prim and proper, but it isn’t a bit like us,” and never hope to arrive at the distinction of finding the covers of “An Old-Fashioned Girl” the dirtiest in the library.19
Alcott didn’t care a fig for her adult readers. She wrote solely for the nation’s youth.
Niles, on the other hand, wanted Little Women to be treasured by youngsters while also gaining the respect of elders who had the power to confer on it the status of a classic. So he had his copy editors clean up the text, resulting in dozens of changes, some minor, some more significant. The girls don’t stay at the New Year’s Eve dance until past ten, but only until “past nine”; ain’t is changed to “am not” or “are not” throughout; grub and peg become “work”; spandy becomes “new”; I guess not is changed to “I think not”; and red as a beet is now “red as a peony.” Jo is no longer allowed to say that Aunt March “worries you till you’re ready to fly out of the window or box her ears”; instead, she says “fly out of the window or cry.” As with the illustrations, the text also begins to portray the characters as much more flawless in their appearance. Whereas the narrator tells us that Marmee “wasn’t a particularly handsome person” in the original, in 1880 we are told, “She was not elegantly dressed, but a noble-looking woman.” Even Laurie gets a makeover. No longer as tall as Jo and possessing a “long nose,” he is now taller than Jo and has a “handsome nose.”20
Overall, the changes tone down the original text’s lively language and tame its playful spirit. It was as if, writes critic Susan Gannon, the publishers were “anxious to provide readers with a polished, established, suitably improving ‘classic text.’ ” The changes came at a time when Americans were increasingly anxious about regional dialects and informal slang and sought to impose a more regularized language on the nation. Niles thought the “change in style,” as well as the illustrated, one-volume packaging, were the reasons for the increase in sales over the next few years. In 1881, Roberts Brothers issued this revised version in a smaller, cheaper, one-volume edition with only four illustrations. It would become the standard version of Little Women, the one read through the generations. Only in the twenty-first century would a few publishers resurrect Alcott’s original text and restore the vibrant language for which it was first known, thereby restoring the novel’s distinct realism.21
In England, the new version of Little Women also became the standard, with the added alteration of English spelling (grey instead of gray, labour instead of labor, etc.). However, Alcott’s novel has had a very different publication history in Britain than in the United States. Alcott was not able to secure copyright in England; to do so required her to be present in the country when it was first published. As a result, multiple pirated editions appeared. The publisher, Sampson Low, was so aggrieved by this siphoning off of its profits that it included a “Special Notice to the Public and to Booksellers” at the back of its edition. While Sampson Low had merged the two parts into one volume in 1871, its competitors were still selling them in two separate volumes, giving the public the impression “that they were buying two distinct works—that they got in paper covers for one shilling the same volume which Messrs. Low sell for 3s. 6 d., in cloth, gilt edges.” In retaliation, Sampson Low decided to compete directly by offering the volumes at a cheaper price, using the titles Little Women and Little Women Wedded, while continuing to produce the more expensive one-volume edition. That book was called A Story of Four Little Women, but it never really caught on.22
The English public preferred two books instead of one. While part one remained Little Women, different publishers gave a variety of titles to part two, including Little Women Married, Little Wives, and Nice Wives. The most enduring was Good Wives, which first appeared in 1872 in the Lily Series of cheap, one-shilling editions of American books, published by Ward, Lock, and Tyler.23 The net result of this confusion and piracy is that readers in the U.K., Ireland, Canada, and Australia to this day find in their libraries and bookstores both Little Women, which includes only part one, taking the story up to Meg and John Brooke’s engagement, and Good Wives, which continues the story up to Jo and Professor Bhaer’s running of the Plumfield school. Therefore, I’ve found readers from England happy that Beth didn’t die in Little Women or blissfully unaware that Jo rejected Laurie and married Professor Bhaer. For many British children, in other words, Little Women has been a very different book.
WHETHER IT APPEARED in two volumes or one, Little Women undoubtedly changed the shape of children’s literature. A host of imitators cropped up, eager to ride the wave Alcott had created. The popular novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, for instance, published “Our Little Woman” in the children’s magazine Our Young Folks in 1872.24 But the most successful imitation was What Katy Did, by Susan Coolidge (the pen name for Sarah Woolsey), also published in 1872. The heroine, Katy Carr, is another Jo, eager to be famous one day and unwilling to settle into proper young womanhood. She is tamed, however, in a rather cruel way. An accident paralyzes her and forces her to become an invalid. (The influence of The Daisy Chain is, regrettably, also obvious.) Over the years as Katy is forced to watch life rather than participate in it, she learns to live for others rather than for herself. Despite the morose plot, the novel spawned four sequels.
Alcott’s pervasive influence is also visible in the career of another writer who was just starting out when Little Women first appeared: Constance Fenimore Woolson, who would become one of the most popular and critically acclaimed American authors, compared to Henry James and George Eliot. Early on, however, Woolson felt obligated to imitate Alcott, after one of her mentors gave her “fully an hour’s eulogy of Miss Alcott’s ‘Little Women.’ ” It was the “fashion,” she wrote to a friend, to “exalt . . . stories for children to a place which it did not seem to me belonged to them. I thought that they had their own sphere, and that it was a very high one. But Shakespeare still existed, and Milton; the great historians, the great essayists, the great writers of fiction. But in the U.S. at that time, one would almost suppose to hear the talk . . . that the writers for children were greater than all these.” And Alcott above them all. Despite her misgivings, Woolson tried her hand at writing for children and produced The Old Stone House (1873) under the pseudonym Anne March, an obvious nod to Alcott’s work. The novel won top prize in a competition for D. Lothrop’s Sunday School series, suggesting how much Little Women had affected even the religious portion of the literary market. One of Woolson’s characters, Bess, wants to become a famous artist and clearly shares some of Jo’s and Amy’s qualities. (She loves to ride horses, like Amy, and is a bit of a tomboy, like Jo.) Imitation did not ensure success, however. Not having achieved even a small portion of the sales Alcott had, Woolson gave up on writing for children.25
Chief among those pressured to imitate Alcott’s success was Alcott herself. Roberts Brothers wanted her to start writing another similar novel as well as a sequel as soon as possible, to “make hay while the sun shines.” Despite her concerns about breaking down again from overwork, she cranked out An Old-Fashioned Girl. It began its serial run in Merry’s Museum in July 1869, only three months after the appearance of part two of Little Women. The novel is about Polly Milton, a girl from the country who visits her sophisticated cousins in the city and teaches them the virtues of being old-fashioned. When the story ended in December, letters poured in again from fans wanting to know what would happen to Polly when she grew up. For the book version, therefore, Alcott satisfied their curiosity, adding another twelve chapters to the edition hurriedly prepared by Roberts Brothers, who published it in March 1870.26
As soon as she was finished, Alcott put down her pen and planned an extended rest from writing. In April she took May to Europe, accompanied by May’s friend Alice Bartlett. They lingered in France until the fall, when they crossed the Alps for Italy and decided to spend the winter in Rome. While there, news arrived just before Christmas that Anna’s husband, John Pratt, had died suddenly after a short illness. Learning that he had left Anna and their two boys with no debts but also with no income, Alcott began work on the promised sequel to Little Women. While May sketched and absorbed all she could of Italian art, Louisa devoted herself to her writing, this time to provide for her widowed sister and nephews. “I must be a father [to them] now,” she felt. After a month in London in the spring, Louisa came home to Concord, arriving in June 1871 to find Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys just out and 50,000 copies already sold.27
In the novel, set not long after the conclusion of Little Women at Plumfield, a boys’ boarding school, Alcott was able to indulge her love of boys and to fictionalize many of her own exploits as a child. Jo March was fifteen at the start of Little Women, but many of the characters in Little Men are much younger and at the right age for the larks that Louisa indulged in before the advent of puberty. The twelve boys and two girls at the school play the same pranks and get in the same scrapes she recalled from her days in Still River and Concord when they lived at Hillside. In chapter eight, Alcott insisted that “most of the incidents are taken from real life, and the oddest are the truest; for no person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people.” Just as the young Louisa was known to wander off and get lost, a tomboy named Nan, a younger version of Jo, wanders off confidently with one of Jo’s young sons and proceeds to get them lost. Mrs. Jo, as she is now called, also relates Louisa’s own story of putting little stones up her nose when she was young. She got the idea from her mother, who told her of the children who never dreamed of putting beans up their noses until their mother warned them one day as she left, “don’t let baby fall out of the window, don’t play with the matches, and don’t put beans up your noses.” As soon as their mother left, “they ran and stuffed their naughty little noses full of beans.” Louisa couldn’t resist either. Unable to find any beans, she used pebbles, which only the doctor was able to remove after hours of pain. Jo tells the story to her son Rob, who, thankfully, “[takes] the warning to heart” and is not compelled to imitate it.28
Alcott also found a use for the story of the transcendentalist writer (and former assistant at Temple School) Margaret Fuller’s visit to Hillside in the 1840s. Just when Fuller asked to see the “model children” Bronson was raising, the Alcott children came barreling around the corner, baby May in a wheelbarrow, Louisa playing horse and being driven by Anna, and Lizzie pretending to be a dog and barking loudly. In Little Men, Mrs. Jo is boasting to Mr. Laurie about the children’s improvement when “they came up in a cloud of dust, looking as wild a set of little hoydens as one would wish to see.” Mr. Laurie laughs and says, “So these are the model children, are they? It’s lucky I didn’t bring Mrs. Curtis out to see your school for the cultivation of morals and manners; she would never have recovered from the shock of this spectacle.”29
With her popularity, Alcott didn’t have to worry anymore about her audience being overly shocked by her characters’ antics. The most outrageous—and humorous—is when the children decide that the vengeful spirit they have conjured, “The Naughty Kitty-mouse,” demands that they make a sacrifice, and they proceed to make a bonfire of their favorite toys. Even Daisy, Meg’s demure daughter, is persuaded to throw the beautiful paper dolls Aunt Amy made for her onto the fire. Then little Teddy, Jo’s youngest, gets involved: “The superb success of th[e] last offering excited Teddy to such a degree, that he first threw his [toy] lamb into the conflagration, and before it had time even to roast, he planted poor dear Annabella [a noseless doll] on the funeral pyre. Of course she did not like it, and expressed her anguish and resentment in a way that terrified her infant destroyer. Being covered with kid [leather], she did not blaze, but did what was worse, she squirmed.” Her arms proceed to rise above her head, her glass eyes pop out, and finally she collapses in a heap of ash, “frighten[ing] Teddy half out of his little wits.” He runs toward the house screaming for his “Marmar.”30
As these scenes suggest, life at Plumfield, including plenty of free time and exercise outdoors, was drawn straight from Louisa’s childhood. Her father’s educational theories, which he had been prohibited from using with other children, had been thoroughly carried out at home with his own, especially the oldest two, Anna and Louisa. He opposed the standard practices of teaching by rote, preferring the Socratic method of questioning students and encouraging self-discovery and self-expression. In Little Women, Mr. March had been relegated to the background and given the quasi-profession of a respectable minister. But his presence is fully felt in Little Men, in the character of Professor Bhaer, who runs the educational side of Plumfield. The students receive an unconventional education, relying less on books and more on conversation. “Latin, Greek, and mathematics were all very well, but in Professor Bhaer’s opinion, self-knowledge, self-help, and self-control were more important,” the narrator explains, directly echoing Bronson Alcott. Every afternoon, Bhaer takes the children out for walks, believing that the body as well as the mind must be exercised, and finding, like a good transcendentalist (and borrowing a somewhat mixed-up quote from Shakespeare), “sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, and good in everything.”31
If she had felt that she had to keep her freethinking father largely out of Little Women, Alcott had no such worries by the time she wrote Little Men. The first novel’s popularity had made not only the daughter famous but also the father. Forever after, Bronson would be known as the father of the “little women.” Suddenly his lectures were crowded, and afterward people gathered eagerly around to ask questions about Louisa and the rest of his family. Now when he returned from his lecture tours in the West, his pockets were full of money, and he was eager to spend it on the daughter who had made him a celebrity. When Louisa came home from Europe, she was delighted to see that he had fixed up her room with his earnings.32
With Little Men, Alcott was able to take her father’s rehabilitation even further. So successful was her redemption of his reputation as an educator that Roberts Brothers published a revised version of Record of a School. The book contained the reports of Bronson’s conversations with his students at Temple School, compiled by his assistant, Elizabeth Peabody, that had caused all of the trouble back in the 1830s. Louisa was quoted in the preface, explaining that Plumfield was modeled on Temple School, and that “not only is it a duty and a pleasure, but there is a certain fitness in making the childish fiction of the daughter play the grateful part of herald to the wise and beautiful truths of the father.”33 In some ways Plumfield, as its name suggests, also reflects the utopian experiment of Fruitlands. In fiction, however, Alcott could temper the extremism of her father’s ideas and focus on the practical application of his theories. By doing so, she brought him the fame he and Abigail had always believed he deserved. When he thereafter founded the Concord School of Philosophy in the front room of Orchard House, the crowd exceeded the house’s capacity. Eventually a building, which still stands, was erected on the grounds to accommodate the growing numbers of people who came each summer from all around the country.
While Bronson enjoyed his new fame, Louisa was uneasy with hers, and each book only added to her discomfort. There were eighteen more, including the six-volume series Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag as well as two other girls’ stories, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, and her adult novels Work and A Modern Mephistopheles (the latter a sensation novel published anonymously). She also had the chance to revise her first novel, Moods, in 1882. One of her last works was the concluding volume in the Little Women trilogy, Jo’s Boys: And How They Turned Out, published in October 1886. Picking up ten years after the end of Little Men, it shows the boys and girls of that book coming into adulthood and attending Laurence College, a legacy left by Laurie’s uncle. Mrs. Jo is now a famous author, having, in answer to a request from a publisher looking for a book for girls, “hastily scribbled a little story describing a few scenes and adventures in the lives of herself and her sisters.” She enjoys having been able to make her mother’s final year comfortable, as Louisa did in real life, but Jo is no less accepting of the intrusions of her many admirers than her creator, whose journals show her sneaking out a back window when strange visitors arrive demanding to see her. “This sight-seeing fiend is a new torment to us,” Louisa wrote in the summer of 1872. Living in Concord on one of the main thoroughfares surely didn’t help. Literary tourists could stop by Orchard House, peek at Hawthorne’s former house next door, swing by the Emersons across the road, and then head up the hill to the Sleepy Hollow cemetery to see the final resting places of Hawthorne and Thoreau (although Thoreau’s fame was still in its infancy). Alcott mercilessly lampooned the autograph seekers, journalists, and nosy readers who regularly knocked on her door in a letter she wrote to the Springfield Republican in 1869. A new hotel called “The Sphinx’s Head” was opening in Concord to cater to the “pilgrims to this modern Mecca,” she jested. They would be provided with telescopes to view the Oversoul on its overhead flight and lassoes to apprehend the literary lions roaming their natural habitat. Emerson could be seen out walking at 4, William Ellery Channing at sunset, and Bronson Alcott (ever eager to meet his fans) would “converse from 8 a.m. till 11 p.m.” Meanwhile, “one irascible spinster, driven to frenzy by twenty-eight visitors in one week,” was considering using a garden hose to keep unwelcome visitors away.34
In Jo’s Boys, Alcott took the satire even further, portraying one day in Jo’s busy life when she is trying to finish some writing that is due at a magazine. First the mail comes, full of requests for autographs, donations, advice, even the use of her name to help get one aspiring writer published. Then come the knocks on the door. First is an impertinent newspaperman who wants to write an article about her. Next are a mother and three girls from Oshkosh, hoping to meet her and get a memento, in a scene inspired by a woman who once told Alcott, “If you ever come to Oshkosh, your feet will not be allowed to touch the ground,” a prospect she found rather uninviting. And finally, before lunch, a young ladies’ seminary picnics on the lawn, having been denied entrance. Jo has a particular horror of young female admirers, Alcott herself having once been nearly “kissed to death by gushing damsels” at a women’s convention. In the afternoon, seventy-five college boys arrive at Plumfield in the rain and tramp with their muddy boots throughout the house. An hour after their departure, a strange lady arrives wanting an old piece of Jo’s clothing to weave into a rug she is making with the remnants of famous authors’ clothes. Not much writing gets done that day. More than anything, Jo/Louisa lamented the lack of privacy. “I cannot shut my doors even in free America,” Jo protests.35
Alcott was not always unresponsive to her fans, however. She carried on a correspondence with some readers, most notably the five Lukens sisters from Brinton, Pennsylvania. In 1871 the Lukenses had started their own manuscript newspaper, called Little Things, patterned after the March girls’ Pickwick Portfolio. They carried it on for two years and turned it into a typeset paper that had over a thousand subscribers. Alcott was one of them. She also gave the Lukens sisters advice for their budding writing careers and even invited them to visit her. She retained an interest in them over many years, writing to sister Maggie Lukens as late as 1886.36 Sadly, virtually none of her other fan letters survive.
Little Women’s admirers had other ways of recording their devotion. Alcott’s novel was, for instance, the book most frequently mentioned in the diaries of late-nineteenth-century young women. And, as scholar Barbara Sicherman writes, “Girls not only read themselves into Little Women, they elaborated on it and incorporated the story into their lives.” M. Carey Thomas, future president of Bryn Mawr College, was reading Little Women in her teens in the 1870s and took on the persona of “Jo” in her journals. Jane Addams, future founder of Hull House, similarly read Little Women over and over again. Countless girls and young women started their own Alcott or Little Women clubs and took on the identities of the March sisters. Many wrote to Alcott about how their group of friends had formed their own “March family.” Students at Vassar planned to dress up as Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy for a photograph they wanted to send to her.37 In 1905 the phenomenon made its way into literature with Marion Ames Taggart’s The Little Women Club, a novel about four girls who not only adopt the March sisters’ names and personalities but also try to reenact the story of Alcott’s novel. By then, Little Women clubs were common across the United States.
The popularity of Little Women continued unabated in those years, even though its author was no longer living. In fact, new readers often didn’t know she had died and kept writing her fan letters, as many as fifty a year, until at least 1933. Louisa May Alcott had died on March 6, 1888, apparently of a stroke, at the young age of fifty-five. Her health had never fully returned after her nursing stint during the war. Some scholars believe that the mercury poisoning she had then suffered aged her prematurely, as she herself believed. Others think she died from lupus. Her death came only two days after her father’s. The two had shared a birthday (November 29) as well as nearly a death date, something that was much remarked in the notices and obituaries. The papers made clear, however, that Louisa’s significance rested on one novel alone. The New York Times claimed, “There was probably no writer among women better loved by the young than she,” Little Women having “endeared her to so many hundred thousands in this country and Europe alike.” The popular writer Harriet Prescott Spofford eulogized her as “the writer better loved by the children of America than Shakespeare himself.” For many decades to come, Alcott would be known solely as “the children’s friend,” the subtitle of the first biography of her that appeared within a year of her death.38
WHILE ROBERTS BROTHERS controlled the novel’s publication until the firm was bought out by Little, Brown in 1898, the valuable copyright of Little Women had been extended beyond Alcott’s lifetime through her heir, John Pratt Alcott, Anna’s younger son, whom Louisa adopted so that he could continue collecting royalties. Her will stipulated that he share the proceeds with the remaining family: his mother, brother, and May’s daughter, Lulu. It also instructed the executor of her will, Anna, to destroy her remaining papers, letters, and manuscripts, or what was left over from the fires she had regularly stoked before her death. Anna destroyed some of them, but not all. She gave a number to a family friend, Ednah Cheney, who published them, with alteration (she had Anna remove passages they thought too personal or injurious to Louisa’s reputation), and then never returned them. It was not until 1950 that independent scholar Madeleine Stern published the first comprehensive biography and revealed to the world that the author of their beloved childhood books was also the writer of opium-laced sensation stories.39
By then, very little could have harmed the reputation of Little Women. After Alcott’s death, the novel thrived as editions proliferated and numerous illustrators reimagined the novel’s key scenes for new generations of readers. In 1915, Little, Brown published the first edition with color illustrations by Jessie Wilcox Smith, a prolific and highly regarded magazine and book illustrator. Many readers still prize this edition as their favorite, and many subsequent editions used Smith’s plates. They introduced a new, highly stylized look to Little Women, turning the March sisters into fashion plates with rosy cheeks and fancy dresses they hardly would have been able to afford.
Jessie Wilcox Smith’s illustration of Laurie proposing to Jo, who has been turned into a fashion plate (Little, Brown, 1915).
Between 1898 and the expiration of Little Women’s copyright in 1924 (part one) and 1925 (part two), Little, Brown sold 1.5 million copies of the novel.40 Thereafter, as new versions by other publishers proliferated—including cheap reprints, newly illustrated gift editions, collector’s editions signed by the illustrator and printed in small numbers, as well as countless abridged editions for younger readers—it became difficult if not impossible to track the novel’s actual sales.
Fully half of Smith’s eight illustrations were love scenes, including this portrait of Professor Bhaer and Jo, moments before his proposal (Little, Brown, 1915).
One of the earliest of the unauthorized editions was published by John Winston Company in 1926. It was illustrated by Clara Burd, a prolific children’s book artist who also designed stained glass windows for Tiffany. Although the edition was rather cheaply produced using paper that feels like newsprint, the cover contains a stunning color illustration. Inside is a gorgeous frontispiece of the Busy Bee Society and two more color plates as well as a number of line drawings.
In Burd’s portraits, Marmee and the girls are for the most part busy with their hands; in the portrait on the cover, all the girls except for Amy are engaged with themselves, not with us. They are grouped in aesthetic poses, but they also look as if they are just busy living and we happened to come upon them, just as Laurie does when they are all sitting outside conducting their Busy Bee Society meeting. Yet they are still much too beautiful to be realistic. Like Smith’s illustrations, Burd’s are intended to turn Little Women into a pretty dream of Victorian life rather than make the story real to us.
The increasingly doll-like portraits of the March sisters also may have inspired the actual dolls that began to appear in 1933, when Madame Alexander created her series of Little Women dolls. (Since then the company has released new dolls annually.) Shortly thereafter, the most famous illustrator to tackle Little Women took his turn—not in a book, but in the pages of Woman’s Home Companion. Under the title “The Most Beloved American Writer,” the magazine ran a lengthy biographical essay on Alcott from December 1937 to March 1938.41 Accompanying the four-part essay were illustrations by Norman Rockwell, who produced a number of line drawings and four-color paintings for the series. The subdued colors and natural poses are a nice compromise between the overly decorative images in some illustrated editions and the simple line drawings published in the earliest ones. Since then, Rockwell’s paintings have enlivened posters and various Little Women memorabilia over the years.
Just after World War II, in 1946, one of the most remarkable editions of Little Women was released by World Publishing Company. The illustrations by Hilda van Stockum consist of striking silhouettes, more conventional woodcuts, and a few color plates produced with vibrant acrylics. Van Stockum interspersed her domestic, stylized groupings (in color) with dynamic images of the girls that convey their bustling energy better than any other illustrations I’ve seen. It is interesting how the most abstract style (the silhouettes) yields the liveliest images, allowing the reader to imagine the scene not as a picture but as a living thing.
Other notable editions of the period were illustrated by Louis Jambor (1947); Salomon van Abbé (1948); Rene Cloke (1949); Albert de Mee Jousset (1950); Reisie Lonette (1950); the comic artist of World War II–era “Girl Commandos,” Jill Elgin (1955); and Caldecott Honor winner Tasha Tudor (1960). Most of these illustrators, however, took the opportunity to pose the girls in their colorful, voluminous dresses, accentuating fashion over storytelling. Thereafter, newly illustrated editions become impossible to track because more than one appeared each year.42 One noteworthy edition, from 1967, is the Limited Editions Club’s very fine quarto-sized edition of 1,500 copies, each signed by the illustrator, Henry C. Pitz, with a floral tapestry cover and a slipcase. A copy now resides in the Special Collections of the Library of Congress. Pitz, an educator and authority on book illustration in addition to being a prolific illustrator himself, decorated the volume with dozens of line drawings and colored prints in a subdued palette. While maintaining the nineteenth-century atmosphere, he managed to give the book a midcentury feel.
Henry C. Pitz’s artistic rendering of Jo and Beth at the seashore, a popular scene for illustrators (The Heritage Press, 1967). (©MBI, Inc. Used by permission.)
Since its original publication, Little Women has never gone out of print. Over one hundred newly illustrated editions have appeared in English. Foreign illustrated editions come to roughly two hundred. The total number of editions, however, which includes many that simply recycle the illustrations of previous volumes, is difficult to estimate. Currently about 320 versions of Little Women in English, which includes adaptations retold by other authors, reside in libraries around the world.43 These numbers don’t include the picture books and early readers, of which there have been dozens as well.
The phenomenon has not merely been an American or English-language one. By the mid-1870s Little Women had appeared in German, Dutch, and French. Soon it was also translated into Russian, Swedish, Danish, Greek, and Japanese. The title was often altered in these translations. In Dutch it becomes “Under Mother’s Wings,” and in French, “The Four Daughters of Dr. Marsch.”44 In France, a largely Catholic nation, Mr. March’s profession as a pseudo-minister would have been unsettling, so he became a doctor instead. The title is still used in French translations today.
Up through the 1960s, Little Women was translated into at least fifty languages. Several Chinese translations appeared, as well as Arabic, Bengali, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, and Korean. In Moscow it was one of the most popular books in the 1920s, and its popularity extended to rural Russian villages as well. Between 1977 and 2009, a further three hundred translated editions of Little Women appeared in over thirty-seven languages. More than a dozen editions of the novel were printed in each of seven countries: Chile, China, Greece, France, Italy, Japan, and Spain. It has been particularly influential in Japan ever since it first appeared there in 1891 as “A Story of Young Grass,” which signifies adolescence. During the next century, legions of schoolgirls read it, and many women were influenced by Jo’s example to become writers. It remains today the second most popular book among Japanese girls, according to one educator, and is a popular subject of literary scholarship. Most professors in Japan find that their students already know the book well, having grown up reading it and its many adaptations, including several anime versions.45
The popularity of Little Women around the world only grew throughout the twentieth century. The novel’s sales went up and down over the years, but it has never faded from view. While it is impossible to know how many copies have sold since its first publication, considering the vast number of editions from multiple publishers, it is safe to estimate that they approach 10 million.46 But Little Women was much more than a book. The story of the March sisters lived on in many other forms as well, from radio and film to television drama and anime, spreading its influence well beyond the written page.