CELIA’S WORLD
It is beyond a reasonable doubt that our vivid shared image of the Hontvet House comes largely from Celia Thaxter. Her “A Memorable Murder” essay was something risky and powerful when it appeared in 1875. Laurence Hutton, a critic and literary editor of Harper’s Magazine who spent ten years summering at Appledore with the Laightons, recalled Celia Thaxter reciting this famous work to her visitors: “I have seen her auditors literally moved to hysterics as she related the story . . . which I consider one of the strongest pieces of prose in the English language.”
While such high praise as Hutton’s usually fades with time, Celia’s essay is enjoying increasing critical attention. She is now credited as a founder of true crime literature, the kind that rises above the seedy, gruesome, and exploitative murder accounts intended for “lowbrow” audiences. As a native Shoaler, Celia was already an expert at describing the island environment that became the scene of the crime. To further evoke pity for Karen and Anethe, Celia took her readers inside the minds, not only of the three female victims, but of the killer himself.
Her essay followed in the footsteps, scholars now suggest, of Thomas De Quincey, the early nineteenth-century essayist and self-confessed opium addict. The successful crime writer must evoke a “sympathy of comprehension” De Quincey wrote, that allows the reader to enter into the feelings of the person who is on the brink of death. It was not enough, he wrote, to merely recount the facts or describe the scene. Like a great poet, the crime writer must also replicate the tempest that rages inside the mind of the killer, tapping into his jealousy, vengeance, ambition, and hatred. The successful crime writer, De Quincey said, should recreate the murderer’s inner hell, “and into this hell we are to look.”
In Blood & Ink, a guide to “fact-based crime literature,” scholar Albert Borowitz sees a direct line dating from these early writers to Truman Capote’s so-called “non-fiction novel.” Capote also used strong evocative settings and fictional elements in his 1966 bestseller In Cold Blood, the psychological study of a mass murder in Kansas. Hailed as a break-through genre, Capote’s true crime classic, Borowitz suggests, is actually “a logical outgrowth of the pioneering nineteenth century crime studies of Thomas De Quincey and Celia Thaxter.” Norman Mailer is also cited as a modern author who followed in the same track. Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Executioner’s Song, about serial murderer Gary Gilmore who was executed by a firing squad in 1977, is another successful marriage of “highbrow” literature with the true crime genre.
Celia’s murder narrative appearing in the prestigious Atlantic gave it enormous literary clout. For that, we can thank her husband, Levi Thaxter, educated at Harvard, and his Boston family connections. Levi was not only Celia’s childhood tutor, but he also helped put the Isles of Shoals on the must-see list for vacationing New England artists and intellectuals.
The fact that the murders happened in Celia’s own backyard, on an island her family owned, was also a critical factor in the success of her essay. Her descriptions ring true. Louis Wagner disturbed the peace of her tranquil isolated world. He shattered the dreams of her beloved Norwegians. So for Celia, seeing Wagner hanged was personal. But the murders also impacted Celia on a metaphorical level. Wagner came to represent an inescapable force of Nature. It was as if he could not be stopped. On her beautiful island, surrounded by predatory creatures, the dangerous ocean, and deadly storms, Wagner was one more evil element forever lurking on the horizon.
The quality and originality of “A Memorable Murder” was hers alone. “Celia Thaxter’s life and personality were absolutely unique,” critic Laurence Hutton reminds us. Raised on barren islands by the brilliant but iconoclastic Thomas Laighton, she grew up innocent and wild. She really was, as Nathaniel Hawthorne described her, the “pretty Miranda,” who in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest was banished to an island at the age of three with her magical father, Prospero.
Celia joined no religious group and had no social pedigree, and yet, to her adoring public, she represented the perfect example of Victorian womanhood. She was a handsome and charming hostess, “simply dressed always, but most effectively, in some Quakerish garb of grey stuff with soft veiling material about her own throat,” Hutton wrote. “Her hair during the later years of her life was quite white and her manner was invariably cordial and cheerful.” She was best known for harmless little poems about sea moss and sandpipers. And yet, when threatened by Louis Wagner, she became the literary equivalent of Annie Oakley, a sharpshooter of words.
As far as we know, Celia Thaxter never returned to Smuttynose Island after the murders. Wagner had destroyed her childhood love of the island, and it was overtaken by what one Victorian travel writer called “a melancholy celebrity.” As her own celebrity grew in the decade following the trial, she suffered the death of her beloved mother, Eliza, her estranged husband, Levi, and her loyal editor, James T. Fields. In 1879, William Morris Hunt, one of the greatest artists of his era and Celia’s lifelong confidant, was discovered drowned in a small pond behind the Appledore Hotel.
“I found him,” Celia wrote to a close friend after Hunt’s death. “It was reserved for me, who loved him truly, that bitterness . . . We took him in, put [him] in blankets, rubbed and rubbed. It was mockery. He had been dead for hours.”
There were good times, too. Celia toured Europe, tended her famous island flower garden, and became an expert at painting ceramic cups, dishes, and vases she sold at a profit to tourists. Her sons John and Roland married and gave her grandchildren. She published many poems and stories for young people, often focused on nature and the environment. She painted and listened to musicians play Beethoven at her summer salons. With Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, she was hailed as one of America’s best female writers. Advertisers asked her to endorse products ranging from typewriters to cigars. She appeared in an educational card game called “Authors” alongside the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Dostoevsky.
In 1884, a half dozen survivors of the famous “Greely party” were discovered alive after years marooned in the Arctic. Upon arriving at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to recuperate, General Adolphus Greely made a special trip to the Isles of Shoals to thank Celia Thaxter for a book of her poetry he had carried on his journey. “It tided over many a weary hour of our solitude,” Greely told her.
But the ripe years waned quickly. When her mentor, the Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, passed away in 1892, she was among thousands of mourners who viewed his body as it lay in the parlor of his simple home in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Two years later, on August 26, 1894, Celia Thaxter said she was tired and went to bed early. She died the following morning at age fifty-nine. Two of her beloved Scandinavian girls named Mina and Nicolina Bernsten were with her at the end. According to her brother Oscar, Celia asked Mina to open the bedroom window in the morning. When Mina turned back to the bed, Celia’s “spirit was gone.” Her body lay in state on a bed of wildflowers in her parlor at Appledore. A few close friends and family carried her coffin to a low, rocky hill behind her cottage where her parents, Eliza and Thomas, were buried. Her friends then made a pilgrimage to Celia Thaxter’s favorite childhood places and the source of her poetry; they traveled in a small sailboat one day to the lighthouse on White Island, to the stone chapel on Star Island, and to the graves of the lost Spanish sailors on Smuttynose Island.
With their famous sister gone, life was never the same for Oscar and Cedric. By 1897, when hundreds of Unitarians held the first of many summer conferences at the Oceanic, the Laighton brothers were in financial freefall. Cedric died in 1899 and the bank foreclosed on Oscar’s mortgage. On September 14, 1914, the grand Appledore Hotel and most of its surrounding cottages burned. Two years later, the bank threatened to sell the Oceanic Hotel to a commercial resort company. The Star Island Corporation, a Boston-based group of Unitarians and Congregationalists, stepped up and purchased the islands. Now based in Portsmouth, the nonprofit group operates the “vintage” hotel for summer visitors. The island scenery has changed little since the second Oceanic opened its doors in 1875. “Uncle” Oscar Laighton, a bachelor to the end, was a fixture at the Star Island conferences until his death in 1939, three months shy of his hundredth birthday.
Appledore Island, its few ramshackle cottages overgrown with poison ivy, became a military base for spotting submarines in World War II. Appledore got a new lease on life in the 1960s when it was adapted into a summer marine biology school for undergraduates. It continues today, run cooperatively by Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire. The Shoals Marine Lab is a natural laboratory, an “island of learning” for the study of birds, fish, and other marine life. And each year, on a small plot of land where the grand hotel once stood, Marine Lab volunteers lovingly recreate the historic island garden of Celia Thaxter.
Celia’s view of Appledore as heavenly and her rejection of Smuttynose as hellish was an irresistible symbol for at least one visiting minister in the mid-twentieth century. Reverend Carl Heath Kopf of Boston, known as the “teen minister,” compared the two islands in a radio sermon on sexuality for his young listeners. Appledore, he said, represented the sweetness of reading good books and living a moral life. Smuttynose, by contrast, symbolized cheap, tawdry books and sinful habits. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, goodness and evil are “set as close within us as Appledore and Smuttynose are at the Shoals,” Kopf sermonized.