Notes

Abbreviations

The abbreviations below are used for frequently cited personal names, libraries, archives, manuscript collections, photograph collections, and published sources.

 

Names

CFA: Charles Francis Adams

HA: Henry Adams

MHA: Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams

SSB: Susan Sturgis Bigelow

EC: Elizabeth “Lizzie” Cameron

CMG: Charles Milnes Gaskell

EHG: Ellen Hooper Gurney

JH: John Hay

EWH: Edward William Hooper

ESH: Ellen Sturgis Hooper

RWH: Robert William Hooper

HJ: Henry James

CK: Clarence King

APF: Anne Palmer [Fell] (Clover knew Anne before her 1885 marriage to Nelson Fell.)

WS: William Sturgis

CST: Caroline Sturgis Tappan

 

Libraries and Archives

Houghton: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

MHS: Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

 

Manuscript Collections

Adams: Adams Family Papers, MHS, Boston.

EWH Letters: Edward William Hooper Letters, MS Am1969, Houghton.

HA-CK Papers: Henry Adams–Clarence King Papers, MHS, Boston.

S-T Papers: Sturgis-Tappan Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Swann: Swann Family Collection, family papers held in private hands by descendants of the Hooper family.

WS Papers: William Sturgis Papers, Sturgis Library, Barnstable, Massachusetts.

 

Published Sources

Democracy: Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).

Esther: Henry Adams, Esther: A Novel, ed. and with an introduction by Lisa MacFarlane (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

Five of Hearts: Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990; reprinted 2006).

HJ Letters: Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1975), 4 vols.

LMHA: The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883, ed. Ward Thoron (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1936).

Letters: The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982–88), 6 vols.

Middle Years: Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1958).

Mrs. Henry Adams: Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

 

PROLOGUE

[>]   “smiling landscape”: MHA to RWH, April 24, 1881, LMHA, 285.

[>]   “solid old pile”: MHA to RWH, October 31, 1880, LMHA, 229.
“coziness in the New England sense”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1883, Adams.
An eclectic mix: Commonplace book of Theodore F. Dwight, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“My dear”: MHA to RWH, January 25, LMHA, 321. Clover pursued a type of beauty in the home that balanced discretion with distinctive taste, following the advice found in Charles L. Eastlake’s influential Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details, a domestic guide that Clover had kept on her bookshelf since before her marriage. Clover had bought the 1869 edition, signing it “Clover Hooper, 1870.” Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details, 2nd ed. rev. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1869).
“undemonstrative New Englander”: MHA to RWH, October 20, 1872, LMHA, 50.
“This part of life”: HA to CMG, January 29, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 448.
“who brought people to their house”: HA-CK Papers.

[>]   “a perfect Voltaire”: HJ to Grace Norton, September 20, 1880, in HJ Letters, vol. 2, 307.
“hebdomadal drivel”: MHA to RWH, March 24, 1878, Adams.
“Life is such a jumble”: MHA to RWH, November 5, 1872, LMHA, 56.
“our days go by quietly”: MHA to RWH, November 4, 1883, Adams.

[>]   She draped a bed sheet: MHA, November 5, 1883, album #8, 50.93.
“Nov 5—1 P.M.—Boojum”: This and all subsequent references to and quotes from Clover’s notebook refer to the single unpaginated lined notebook she kept of her photographic experiments from May 6, 1883, until January 22, 1884. The notebook is archived with the Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“Pomeranian blonde”: MHA to RWH, February 18, 1883, LMHA, 424.
“some crass idiocy”: MHA to RWH, November 11, 1883, Adams.

[>]   haunting landscape: MHA, November 5, 1883, album #8, 50.94.
The complicated process: In the back of her notebook Clover kept a sheet of instructions published by Scovill Amateur View Albums, which described “methods of mounting Photographs, so that they will not warp or cockle.” For information on how George Eastman marketed his new camera to women, see Nancy West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
“Ich gehe durch”: Translation by Louis MacNiece in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, 5th ed., vol. 2, gen. ed. Maynard Mack (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985), 550. I thank Uta Walter for identifying this passage from the first act of Goethe’s Faust.
she recorded her world: The archives are filled with all kinds of photograph albums, donated by individuals and families to historical societies, university research libraries, and state and local archives. Such albums are neither art nor literature, neither diary nor document. Yet they nonetheless express, often in extraordinary ways, individual lives as well as social practices. I looked through hundreds of photograph albums dated from 1870 to 1890 at the New York Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library of Congress, and the Beverly Historical Society; and, at Harvard University, the Fogg Museum Library, the Houghton Library, and the Schlesinger Library. For discussions of photograph albums, see Elizabeth Siegel, Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century Photograph Albums (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Amy Kotkin, “The Family Photo Album as a Form of Folklore,” Exposure, vol. 16 (March 1978): 4–8; Marilyn Motz, “Visual Autobiography: Photograph Albums of Turn-of-the-Century Midwestern Women,” American Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1 (March 1989): 63–92; Philip Stokes, “The Family Photograph Albums: So Great a Cloud of Witnesses,” in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 193–205; Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Patricia Holland, “‘Sweet It Is to Scan . . . ’: Personal Photographs and Popular Photographs,” in Photography: A Critical Introduction, ed. Liz Wells, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge Press, 2000).

[>]   “pulled down”: John W. Field to Theodore Dwight, November 9, 1885, Field Family Letters, MHS.
“The Peace of God”: HA to Richard Watson Gilder, October 14, 1896, Letters, vol. 4, 430.
“Clover’s death”: Eleanor Shattuck Whiteside to Mrs. George C. Shattuck [1885], George Cheyne Shattuck Papers, MHS. This letter is undated but was most likely written shortly after Clover’s death. Eleanor concluded her letter to her mother as follows: “Dr. Hooper’s death and Clover’s make a large hole in early associations and memories. By and by I will write to Ellen Gurney. Not now. If you learn anything more I should like to hear.”

 

Part I: A New World

 

CHAPTER 1. “She Was Home to Me”

[>]   “stick out one finger”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“Clover is inestimable”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“I don’t want to tend her”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“wit, her sense of the ridiculous” . . . “same as she did in company”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann.
A lithographic portrait: The portrait of Ellen Sturgis Hooper was given to the Sturgis Library in Barnstable, Massachusetts, by Mary Lothrop Bundy, a direct descendant of Clover’s first cousin, Anne M. Hooper Lothrop.

[>]   “full of genius” . . . “refined”: Margaret Fuller to Arthur B. Fuller, January 20, 1849, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, vol. 5, 1848–1849, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 186.
“whose character seemed” . . . “to her character”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, privately printed by EWH, Swann.
“Cape-Cod boy” . . . “the sea”: William Sturgis, as quoted in Charles G. Loring, Memoir of the Hon. William Sturgis, as prepared by resolution of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1864), 6.
extraordinarily capable seaman: For a description of Sturgis’s successful command of his first trading ship, the Caroline, see Loring, Memoir, 8–10. For more on Sturgis, see also Edward Sturgis of Yarmouth Massachusetts, 1613–1695, and His Descendants, ed. Robert Faxton Sturgis (Boston: Stanhope Press, 1914), esp. 41–42; for more family background, see Francis B. Dedmond, “The Letters of Caroline Sturgis to Margaret Fuller,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 201–3.
boarding school run by two sisters: My thanks to Anna Cook at the MHS for finding information on the boarding school run by the Cushing sisters in Hingham. Francis H. Lincoln, in History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts (Hingham, MA: 1983), 143. Ellen’s access to education was not unusual for a young woman of her social standing. According to Mary Kelley, between 1790 and 1830 “182 academies and at least 14 seminaries were established exclusively for women in the North and the South.” Though education for a young woman was understood as equipping her for her future role as a helpmate to her husband, the curriculum had begun shifting from an entire emphasis on social refinements—music, dancing, reciting poetry—to subjects studied at schools for boys. See Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 67, 71. While at school in Hingham, Ellen wrote to her parents: “We are studying about the war between the Thebans and the Spartans at the time when Thebes was contending for the empire of Greece. I want the Thebans to beat.” As quoted in Otto Friedrich, Clover (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 43.

[>]   Ellen was particularly close: ESH to William Swain, September 1, 1844, S-T Papers. Ellen wrote to Swain, a family friend, to thank him for sending a copy of writing by his son, Robert Swain, who had died some months before. On reading it, Ellen was reminded of her own brother, William: “[Robert’s] letters and journal remind me of my brother William in their simplicity and boyish fun as well as in the earnestness and feeling which weaves through them. I did not know how lovely and affectionate Robert was till I saw it here—his manliness and uprightness I had seen.” She also revealed something of how she understood the loss of her brother, saying that the brevity of Robert’s life “seems to me not so much a broken hope as a beautiful whole, a harmony of simple and select notes.”
“very much” . . . “450 lines of Virgil”: Ezra Goodwin to WS, September 21, 1810, WS Papers. On the back of this same letter, William’s uncle, the Reverend Goodwin, told Captain Sturgis that William’s teacher had been “astonished” by the young student’s “first recitation of Virgil.” He assured the father that he and his wife, Ellen, who was Mrs. Sturgis’s oldest sister, “shall be glad” for William to stay as long as necessary: “He is a child by whom we set great store, and find that the older he grows, the more valuable he becomes.”
Her behavior over time: In a letter following the death of a child of a family friend, Elizabeth Sturgis wrote to her husband, “I am shocked and grieved at the trying event which you communicate—a solemn event which again forcibly reminds us of the uncertain tenure of our present state of being ‘in the midst of life we are in death,’ and every day’s experience convinces us of this truth, darkness and shadows would rest on our condition here; so much of suffering and sorrow; so few gleams of sunshine mid renewing storms; and thro the dark vista the tomb only in prospect; but blessed be the God and father our Lord Jesus Christ, who thro him has revealed life and immortality—‘he is the way, the truth, & the life’; & ‘no man cometh unto the Father but by him’ ‘he is the resurrection and the life’ and believing as I do most entirely that there is ‘no other name given among men by which we may saved’ it is my earnest desire and constant prayer for me and mine that we may all be brought into the ‘fold of the good Shepard [sic]’ and ‘that believing we may have life.’—you know I seldom mention these subjects, I feel that I am not one privileged, or worthy to descant on Him, yet the peace & joy which I am permitted to in believing, has been an ‘answer sure and steadfast,’ thro a trial which would have prostrated my whole nature probably, and certainly my mind; if it had not rested on the ‘rock of ages.’ I realize that one of my treasures is in heaven, and it is my heart’s desire and prayer that we may be prepared to rejoin him; ‘oh thou with what an angel smile of gladness, he will welcome me.’ I feel these inflictions are salutary, and requisite, we are under a Father’s administration; he both gives, and takes away and ‘blessed be his holy name.’” Elizabeth Davis Sturgis to WS, July 27, 1828, WS Papers.
“walking up and down”: CST to Margaret Fuller, December 1844, as quoted by Eleanor M. Tilton in her introduction to The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 31. Five years before, twenty-year-old Caroline worried about her mother, regretting her summer plans for an extended stay on the island of Naushon off Cape Cod. On arriving on the island, she urged Ellen, who had stayed in Boston, to “write me something about mother,” explaining that she was not “comfortable away from home, when I know she is staying there in such a dolorous manner.” CST to ESH, July 9, 1839, Swann.
Practicality and a personal toughness: The oldest of five siblings and the only boy, William Sturgis had had to support his mother after his father died at sea, which had left the family in dire financial straits. For more about Sturgis’s youth, see The Journal of William Sturgis, ed. S. W. Jackson (Victoria, BC: Sono Nis Press, 1978).

[>]   His motto: In a letter to Caroline about her faulty furnace, William Sturgis wrote he would “leave you to take of yourselves. Young people must learn to take care of themselves.” WS to CST, June 17, 1848, S-T Papers. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody quotes Ellen making a comment at one of Margaret Fuller’s Conversations that may also reveal how much William Sturgis valued self-reliance: “Ellen Hooper asked if she did not think that it was the duty of a man in the first place to support himself—if he ought not to be impressed with the idea from the beginning that he must make for himself a place, so far at least as not to be dependent—If this independence on outward support with respect to his physical being was not essential to our idea of a man?” Nancy Craig Simmons, “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: 1839–1840 Series,” Studies in American Renaissance 1994 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 217.
he bought a large summer house: Caroline Sturgis describes the house at Horn Pond in a December 1844 letter to Margaret Fuller: “The front of the house is quite beautiful with the pond stretched out in front & no houses in sight. There is a lovely wooded walk between the canal & pond, an island in the center & pine woods all around.” In the same letter, Caroline tells of accompanying her father to Woburn to look at the property. They spent the day together “wandering over a mountain in the most babe-in-the-woods manner.” As quoted in Tilton, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, 31. Captain Sturgis, for all his austerity, could be good, even fun-loving company.
“Do take the trouble”: ESH to Elizabeth Davis Sturgis, n.d., Swann.
“I have not seen her”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“a mystery of sorrow”: ESH to CST, n.d., Swann.
“moment I have” . . . “one minute loving”: CST to Margaret Fuller, July 21, 1842, in Dedmond, “The Letters of Caroline Sturgis to Margaret Fuller,” 224. Caroline wrote in the same letter that “Ellen is moping and melancholy, Annie is conscientious and hesitating, Sue rude & frivolous & not very funny, & I feel like an icicle.” Though these characterizations of her sisters and herself reveal Caroline’s painful efforts to sort herself out in relation to her family, they also expose something of the emotional upheaval in the Sturgis family.

[>]   “well-balanced character” . . . $300,000: Charles Henry Pope and Thomas Hooper, Hooper Genealogy (Boston: privately printed, 1908), 115.
A miniature portrait: Robert’s likeness was painted by Pierre D’Aubigny in the early 1830s. I want to thank Elle Shushan for providing the identification of this portrait, which is in private hands.

[>]   “gifted by Nature”: The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 402; “so inferior to her”: Margaret Fuller to Arthur B. Fuller, January 20, 1849, in Hudspeth, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, vol. 5, 186; “dull man”: Margaret Fuller to Sarah Ann Clarke, January 18, 1849, in Hudspeth, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, vol. 5, 172.
Fuller liked to pronounce: I am indebted to Megan Marshall for her insight on Fuller. Charles Capper, in his two-volume biography of Margaret Fuller, implies that the Hooper marriage had been a failure in his more general discussion of Fuller’s reactions to her friends’ marriages. But this reflected Fuller’s—and no other—point of view. Conversation, Charles Capper, April 9, 2010. See also Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171.
“one of the happy marriages” . . . “to rest upon”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann.
“You cannot tell”: ESH to RWH, July 27, no year, Swann. Though the postmark does not indicate the year, it is most likely the summer of 1845, when Dr. Hooper was traveling in the South.
James Freeman Clarke, the liberal: American National Biography, ed. John A. Garrity and Mark C. Carnes, vol. 11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 140–41.
“a search for principles”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), xii.

[>]   “the truth of religion” . . . “into the world”: George Ripley, as quoted in Gura, American Transcendentalism, 142. Perry Miller defines the Transcendentalists as “children of the Puritan past who, having been emancipated by Unitarianism from New England’s original Calvinism, found a new religious expression in forms derived from Romantic literature and from the philosophical idealism of Germany.” Perry Miller, The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), ix. Robert D. Richardson states: “For better or worse, American transcendentalism was uncohesive, preferring to unravel rather than compromise its belief in the sovereign worth of each separate strand of yarn.” Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 250.
Although Robert Hooper sympathized: Robert Hooper was a long-time trustee of the Worcester Lunatic Asylum, the first hospital of its kind in Massachusetts. Wanting to provide more humane forms of treatment, Hooper urged the board to convert space in the hospital into workrooms so that patients could do something productive with their time. He may have gotten some of his ideas for improved treatments for the insane from his training in Paris. RWH to Edward Jarvis, September 24, 1862, BMS c11.2, Boston Medical Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University.
The Sturgis sisters: The sisters joined a group of women that included Lydia Maria Child, already a well-known author; Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, an abolitionist and the new wife of the historian George Bancroft; and Sophia Willard Dana, who would later found the utopian Brook Farm with her husband, George Ripley. Simmons, “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: 1839–1840 Series,” esp. 195–202. According to Phyllis Cole, Fuller’s Conversations occupied the “intersection of liberal religion and feminist reform,” incorporating an ethos of individualism that marbled Transcendental thought. Social, political, and personal transformation would occur through the education and development of every individual woman’s potential. Cole, “Stanton, Fuller, and the Grammar of Romanticism,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 4 (2000): 546. At Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s bookshop, which was located in the downstairs parlor of a two-story brick townhouse, patrons could buy or borrow books published overseas that were not easily found in American bookstores. Peabody’s shelves were lined with books by the German idealists Kant and Hegel, the novels of Victor Hugo and George Sand in French, the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a set of Goethe’s writings in German that ran to fifty volumes. Her shop became a central meeting place to discuss ideas, “a gathering place for . . . intellectual companions, a locus of conversations both organized and informal.” Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, 391–98; for more information on Peabody’s bookshop, see Gura, American Transcendentalism, 123–27.
“character and mind” . . . “induction”: ESH, quoted in Joel Myerson, Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Writers in Their Own Time series. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 43. This is what Ellen said, according to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who took careful notes of comments at Fuller’s Conversations. See also Kathleen Lawrence, “The ‘Dry-Lighted Soul’ Ignites: Emerson and His Soul-Mate Caroline Sturgis as Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts,” Harvard Library Bulletin, vol. 16, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 37–68. Lawrence’s article is the single best source on Caroline Sturgis, her complicated relationship with Emerson, and her involvement in the Transcendental movement.
“light, free, somewhat”: Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 213.

[>]   “sympathized with”: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9, 1843–1847, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 111.
“some writing” . . . “different channel”: ESH to Maria Weston Chapman, October 14, no year, Ms. A.9.2, vol. 24, no. 38, Boston Public Library.
Ellen turned, instead, to poetry: All subsequent quotes from Ellen Sturgis Hooper’s poetry are taken from a folio collection of her poetry, privately printed in 1871 by EWH, given to the author by a descendant of the family. A copy of the Hooper folio can be found at the Houghton Library.

[>]   “a more interior revolution”: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, as quoted in Marshall, The Peabody Sisters, 183.
“very happy together”: ESH to RWH, n.d., Swann.
“sit at the parlor window”: RWH to unknown addressee, n.d., Swann.
“a certain bravado” . . . “simpleton as usual”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann.
“nearly wild with delight”: ESH to CST, n.d., Caroline Sturgis Tappan Papers, MS Am 1221 (180), Houghton.

[>]   Give kisses on her eyes”: ESH to RWH, n.d., Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“I long since abandoned”: ESH to CST, May 19, 1843, Swann. The letter was sent to Caroline in care of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord.
Doctors prescribed everything: Sheila Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 13–25; William H. Burt, Therapeutics of Tuberculosis: Or, Pulmonary Consumption (New York: Boericke and Tafel, 1876), esp. 9–14; Richardson, Emerson, 91–92.

[>]   “for your attentions”: ESH to SSB, n.d., Swann. Ellen also sent along a small charcoal drawing she made of a young slave girl in South Carolina. Lousia Hooper Thoron, Clover’s niece, later identified the place correctly on the back of the drawing, but not its date, listing it as 1849. Robert and Ellen were in the South a year earlier, in the spring of 1848.
“I shall be very sorry”: ESH to WS, March 15, 1848, Swann; “delighted to hear so good”: ESH to WS, April 19, 1848, Swann.
“my precious silver grey”: RWH and ESH to WS, April 6, 1868, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“frequent excursions” . . . “to have come”: RWH and ESH to WS, April 6, 1848, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“is about the same as when”: WS to CST, June 17, 1848, S-T Papers.
“have interest” . . . “burn them unread”: Half-sheet titled “Directions,” 1847, Swann. Ellen’s letters were preserved by the family, and though there is no direct evidence her children read through her papers, it is also hard to imagine that they did not.

[>]   “Patience! Patience!”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann.
A small marble headstone: William W. Sturgis Jr. was reburied in Mount Auburn Cemetery on October 25, 1834, after Captain Sturgis bought one of the first of one hundred lots in the new cemetery. Sturgis paid sixty dollars for a three-hundred-square-foot lot, number 310, on Catalpa Path. Circular, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Historical Collections, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA.
“To-day I read beside”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann. To those who knew her, Ellen became after death a kind of “Transcendental angel,” according to Miller, The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry, 272. Wendell Phillips, the rabble-rousing abolitionist speaker and activist for women’s rights, liked to copy out Ellen’s most well-known poem next to his own signature in the autograph books of his Lyceum audience members. Carlos Martyn, Wendell Phillips: The Agitator, rev. ed. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1890), 446.
“How the sunlight crinkles up”: SSB to Mary Eliot Dwight Parkman, n.d., Parkman Family Papers, MS Am 2120 (57-69b), Houghton. The rest of the letter reads: “How shall I bear the long lonely summer days—she will never come to me again. Oh, shall I ever go to her?”
“his saddest days”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, November 6, 1848, privately printed by EWH, Swann.

[>]   Clover’s older sister, Ellen: Ellen also cherished her mother’s poetry. In later years, she wrote to Alice Howe James, the wife of William James, “I send also my mothers poems. She died at 36. It is some of it—like the few strokes in a portfolio of drawings—that it is hardly fair to show—but others have I think great beauty.” EHG to Alice Howe (Gibbens) James, n.d., William James Papers, MS 1092.9–1092.12 (4305), Houghton.

 

CHAPTER 2. The Hub of the Universe

[>]   “take all the care I can”: SSB to Mary Eliot Dwight Parkman, n.d., Parkman Family Papers, MS Am 2120 (57–69b), Houghton.
“dresses up” . . . “sad and touching”: SSB to CST, n.d., 1849, S-T Papers.

[>]   “religious feelings”: Harvard University Memoirs, 1830 (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill, 1886), 143–44.
pew number 45: Henry Wilder Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel from the Puritan Age of New England to the Present Day, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881).
“good breeding”: Clover found the scrap of paper, with the excerpt of George Sand copied in French, in her father’s desk. Sand is quoting her own grandmother’s account of married life. The entire quotation reads, in translation, “It’s that we knew how to live, back then; we didn’t have important infirmities. If one had gout, one walked anyway and without grimacing; good breeding meant that we hid our suffering.” George Sand Fragment, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“well-balanced and even”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann.
Betsey Wilder, who became: Even as a grown woman, Clover frequently asked her father to give her greetings to Betsey, saying she often missed Betsey’s “good care.” MHA to RWH, July 26, 1872, LMHA, 20. Clover and Clover’s mother, Ellen, spelled Betsey’s name differently at different times, not always including the second e.
Not much is known: Though little information can be found on Miss Houghton’s school, many schools for girls were run out of individual homes. For an example of the courses offered at different grade levels, see Circular and Catalogue, Albany Female Academy (Albany, NY: Munsell and Rowland, 1860), 4–6.
At eleven, Clover: MHA to Ellen Hooper, July 5, 1854, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.

[>]   “I got a box full”: MHA to Eunice Hooper, July 29, 1851, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“a flitting hither and thither”: Henry James, Selected Stories, ed. John Lyon (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 26.
“I am taking painting lessons”: MHA to EHG, August 19, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“under the present circumstances”: SSB to CST, 1851, Caroline Sturgis Tappan Papers, MS 1221 10, Houghton. This letter to Caroline, in more detail, reads, “And yet I find it difficult to take up the thread which has been for one year kept united between us by written communications. I want to see you and your last baby and your first baby and I think I should like to see how you live and what you have about you. . . . However, I am ‘picking up’ so they say, which is better than being ‘picked up’ by Barnum for promiscuous exhibition. I couldn’t think for one minute dear child of leaving my baby and certainly not for ½ a minute of bringing him, therefore my dear girl I can’t come, which deduction clearly evolves itself from the statements just made. I hope to some time or other. I fear lest we shall not know one another when we do meet. We certainly cannot recognize our mutual infants. My baby does everything cunning, patty cakes, puts people bye bye, smacks his lips like Grandfather, clucks to the horses, imitates pussy cat by a prolonged squeak, kisses by bunting his head about indefinitely, tells where Mama’s eye is by nearly eradicating it with his forefingers. He is very bright, has a great variety of expressions, a very wild eye, bow mouth and a particularly good nose, high broad forehead and is the image of Henry. Father and he are very confidential and happy together and I really regret to leave this calm nest, which I am to do on Monday next for Anne Hooper’s. However I think it will be very pleasant there and under the present circumstances I find all places where I go quite similar in one respect—i.e.—Henry is not in them—suffice it to say. He is gone and I have consented. The personal experiences resulting from these facts are not easily narrated in a letter. May you never have to try it dear Cary.”
“pact with loneliness”: SSB to Mary Eliot Dwight Parkman, n.d., 1848, MS Am 2120 (69a–b), Houghton.

[>]   her “sudden death”: Susan’s obituary in the June 10, 1853, edition of the Boston Daily Evening Transcript read as follows: “Sudden death. We regret to learn that Mrs. Bigelow, wife of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, of this city, died very suddenly last evening at the country residence of her father, the Hon. William Sturgis, in Woburn.”
“Generally, we must rely on” . . . “to be shaken”: Ralph Waldo Emerson to CST, July 4, 1853, in Tilton, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8, 371.
various family members: In the joint family letter, Eunice Hooper, Dr. Hooper’s oldest sister, with whom Clover was staying, told Nellie that Clover had been “very bright and happy since she has been here and not so desirous of a change as she is sometimes when she is with us.” Eunice Hooper to EHG, August 1854, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“My dear Miss Hooper”: MHA to EHG, August 1854, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“before me so I”: MHA to EHG, September 10, 1854, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
extended tour of Europe: For a description of Caroline’s European travels, see Cornelia Brooke Gilder and Julia Conklin Peters, Hawthorne’s Lenox (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008), 38–39. See also George Dimock, Caroline Sturgis Tappan and the Grand Tour: A Collection of 19th-Century Photographs (Lenox, MA: Lenox Library Association, 1882), 61–69.

[>]   erotic friendship, “my Muse”: Ralph Waldo Emerson to CST, May 10, 1845, in Tilton, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8, 27.
severed connection: Aunt Cary’s flight to Europe expressed a need to get away from family, an action that may have led to Clover’s subsequent detachment from her aunt. Years later, on hearing others “rave” about the “depth and freshness of her [Aunt Cary’s] mind,” Clover would remark that her impressions of her aunt were “dim” and that “she must be more amiable and patient than I remember her.” MHA to RWH, December 3, 1882, LMHA, 404.
Clover could be sensitive: Clover even threatened her father once when his return letters hadn’t arrived as soon as anticipated: “Write me immediately a very long letter or I won’t write you another word.” MHA to RWH, August 1, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“As for Alice I can”: This letter is undated and incomplete, and there is no opening salutation indicating the recipient. But a letter in a nearby file, written with similar stationery and ink, has the line “I shall be 16 in September,” which would make the year 1859. Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.

[>]   “The ring accompanying”: MHA to unidentified recipient, presumably Annie M. Hooper, n.d., Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“passem of blue”: This phrase in Clover’s satire likely means “a scrap” or “an example.” It could also be that she meant to write passim, meaning “here and there.”

[>]   “the thoughts in Nature”: Lucy Allen Paton, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 399.
It was the best education: For descriptions of the Agassiz School and who attended, see Paton, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, 45–51, 394–401; and Louise Hall Tharp, Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 137–44.
“a good scholar”: WS to unknown recipient, December 26, 1859, quoted in Mrs. Henry Adams, 38.
“Was there ever anyone”: Catharine Lathrop Howard, Memorials and Letters of Catharine L. Howard, compiled by Sophia W. Howard (Springfield, MA: Springfield Printing and Binding Co., 189?), 448.
“the hub of the universe”: Oliver Wendell Holmes’s original phrase was actually “hub of the solar system.” It became more commonly cited as “hub of the universe,” keeping the Holmes attribution. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Every Man His Own Boswell,” The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Atlantic Monthly (April 1858): 734; Annie Fields, Authors and Friends (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1897), 135.
“write me often”: EWH to MHA, February 15, 1863, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.

[>]   “no other establishment”: as quoted in Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21.
“a line of cleavage”: Dale Baum, quoted in Carol Bundy’s The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell Jr., 1835–64 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 78.
“the almighty dollar”: Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1957, first published in 1842), 27.

 

CHAPTER 3. Clover’s War

[>]   “a model one”: More Than Common Powers of Perception: The Diary of Elizabeth Rogers Mason Cabot, ed. P.A.M. Taylor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 182.

[>]   “Nobody thinks of anything”: Mary Warren Dwight to “Annie,” April 23, 1861, Dwight-Warren Family Papers, MHS.
“I don’t wonder” . . . “color ordered”: MHA to Annie Hooper, May 8, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.

[>]   “the never-failing fountains”: The Sanitary Commission of the United States Army: A Succinct Narrative of Its Works and Purposes (New York: Published for the Benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission, 1864), 12. The report states the commission’s objective in this way: “to bring to bear upon the health, comfort, and morale of our troops, the fullest and ripest teachings of Sanitary Science in its application to military life” (5). Activities of the NEWAA, headed by Abigail Williams May, included caring for wounded soldiers and organizing the collection and delivery of a wide range of supplies to the Union army, such as uniforms, bandages, sheets, medicine, soap, preserves, pickles, tea, coffee, crackers, and bread. See also Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000); and Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
“Dr. Howe’s ‘Sanitary’ rooms”: MHA to RWH, December 5, no year (most likely 1862). Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe was one of the founding members of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and a friend of Dr. Hooper. See Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, ed. Laura E. Richards (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1909), 479–507.
“very nice” . . . “shan’t be lonely”: MHA to RWH, August 1, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“insatiably hospitable”: James, Notes of a Son and Brother, 213.
“The weather has been intensely”: MHA to RWH, August 1, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.

[>]   “Miss C. Sedgwick introduced me”: MHA to RWH, August 7, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“nearly a year since”: MHA to Annie Hooper, April 1, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“What fearful times” . . . “by being blue”: MHA to unknown addressee, August 13, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. It’s not entirely clear where Clover stayed during the summer of 1862. Her likely host would have been her Aunt Cary, but Clover doesn’t clearly indicate one way or the other. She mentions, however, that she spent the day or went to dinner at Aunt Cary’s, which implies that she slept somewhere else as she’d done the previous summer.
“self-support by their own”: Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), 184.
“natural taste”: EWH to MHA, January 25, 1863, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.
while Clover’s more distant cousin: Clover’s mother’s younger sister, Mary Louisa Sturgis, married Robert Gould Shaw Jr. in 1841. He was the brother of Francis G. Shaw, who was the father of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Colonel Shaw’s mother was Sarah Blake Sturgis, a descendant of the large Russell Sturgis branch of the family.

[>]   “very nicest men”: MHA to CST, March 1863, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“having such a good”: MHA to EHG, August 13, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
His war photograph: A family album of mostly Hooper siblings and cousins also includes Mason’s photograph, indicating his closeness with the family, and perhaps his attentions toward Clover. Swann.
“I was very much afraid” . . .

[>]   “come back from the dead”: MHA to EHG, August 5, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“pitiless cold” . . . “standard”: MHA to CST, March 1863, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. William Powell Mason Jr. (1835–1901), a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, married Fanny Peabody on November 25, 1863.

[>]   “festive spree” . . . “to be remembered”: MHA to CST, March 1863, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. Quincy Adams Shaw, born in 1825, was the younger brother of Clover’s uncle Robert Gould Shaw Jr.

[>]   “strewn so thickly”: quoted in Thomas O’Connor, Civil War Boston: Homefront and Battlefield (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 105–6.
bloodshed at Gettysburg: EWH to EHG, July 19, 1863, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (5), Houghton.
“imagine no holier”: Frank Shaw, as quoted in Lorien Foote, Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 1.
The man who: Ned Hooper wrote fifteen letters to Clover between March 11, 1862, and October 26, 1863. MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.
Ned had wanted to be an artist: Interview with descendant, June 27, 2008.
Taking after his father: Ned Hooper settled on a career that suited his talents and temperament; he would serve as Harvard’s treasurer from 1876 to 1898.
“a young man”: James Freeman Clarke to Edward L. Pierce, February 14, 1862, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (1).

[>]   “The Island is lovely”: EWH to MHA, March 11, 1862, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.
“nothing now except”: EWH to MHA, March 26, 1862, EWH Letters, MS 1969 (3), Houghton.
“When we first”: EWH to MHA, March 11, 1862, MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.

[>]   “diligent, intelligent”: Only the date, July 13, 1863, was preserved on the newspaper clipping. On a postcard, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw wrote that Ned was held in “the highest opinion” by everyone. The comment by Shaw was copied many years later by his niece Louisa Jay in a letter to Louisa Ward Thoron. Louisa Jay wrote, “In looking thro some Civil war letters the other day I came across the following from my Uncle R. G. Shaw. It was written to his mother from St. Simon’s Island and was dated June 18, 1863. ‘Ned Hooper at Beaufort is the head of the whole contraband department. Every one has the highest opinion of him. I should like to have remained where I could see him every day.’” Newspaper clipping and letter, Louisa Jay to Louisa Ward Thoron, May 13, 1955, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (11), Houghton.
prized her brother’s letters: Clover’s return letters to Ned are missing.
“Then and there” . . . “going like race horses”: MHA to Mary Louisa “Loulie” Shaw, May 23 and 24, 1865, LMHA, 3–10. Loulie, a year younger than Clover, was her first cousin, the only child of Mary Louisa Sturgis and Robert Gould Shaw Jr., the paternal uncle of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Clover was also distantly related to Colonel Shaw through Shaw’s mother, Sarah Blake Sturgis. See LMHA, 465–67.

[>]   “I pine so” . . . “twice a week”: Alice Mason Hooper to Anne Sturgis Hooper, October 17, 1864, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. For information on William Sturgis Hooper, see Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Sever and Francis, 1866), 189–203. Later, in December 1864, Alice passed on Clover’s news that a recent dinner party, hosted by Caroline Sturgis Tappan to give people the chance to meet Ralph Waldo Emerson after his Sunday evening lectures, had been “very successful.” Alice M. Hooper to Anne Sturgis Hooper, December 19, 1864, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.

[>]   “crammed” . . . “everyone clapped”: Alice Mason Hooper to Anne Sturgis Hooper, August 6, 1865, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“one would rather”: Quoted in Hamilton Vaughan Bail, “Harvard’s Commemoration Day, July 21, 1865,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2 (June 1942): 266.
Other dignitaries followed: New York Times, July 25, 1865. The coverage of the memorial service that day took up the entire front page of the New York paper.
The Hooper family had already left by the time of Lowell’s reading. As Alice Mason Hooper wrote to her mother-in-law, “We had to go away before it was over—because as usual Uncle Will [Clover’s father] got fidgety about their train so we left an hour before it was necessary.” To have missed anything of that dramatic day must have grieved Clover.

 

CHAPTER 4. Six Years

[>]   “wretched-looking scrawl”: MHA to Fanny Chapin, September 15, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“pen and ink will be banished”: MHA to RWH, January 27, 1878, Adams.

[>]   each Civil War stereograph: War Views, Adams-Thoron Photographs, Photo. Coll. 42, MHS.
The war had not changed: See William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
album with a gold-embossed: Henry Adams Photograph Collection, Photo. Coll. 40, Album 5, MHS.
“In that Civil War”: Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 478. Wendell was a professor of literature at Harvard College from 1880 to 1917.
The cataclysm had badly shaken: For a vivid description of the city’s transformation, see Middle Years, 7. Charles Dickens wrote to his friend Charles Sumner, the long-time Massachusetts senator, on his return visit to Boston in 1867 for a reading tour of A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers, that his twenty-five-year absence seemed “but so many months” except for the city’s “sweeping changes.” Quoted in Stephen Puleo, A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston, 1850–1900 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 154. Henry Adams would fear becoming what Bostonians became mocked for. “I care a great deal,” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge in 1875, “to prevent myself from becoming what of all things I despise, a Boston prig (the intellectual prig is the most odious of all).” HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 26, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 227–28.

[>]   “I feel about this”: MHA to CST, August 31, 1863, Unprocessed Thoron papers, *93M–35 (b), Houghton.
“certainly the most married”: Alice James to Anne Ashburner, February 13, 1875, in Rayburn S. Moore, “The Letters of Alice James to Anne Ashburner, 1873–78: The Joy of Engagement (Part 2),” Resources for American Literary Study, vol. 27, no. 2 (2001): 198.
“capacity for personal attachment”: Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science, vol. 22, no. 14 (1887), 527. Ida Agassiz Higginson, older sister of Clover’s friend Pauline Agassiz, remarked on Gurney’s capacity to “look all around things.” Quoted in Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club: 1855–1870 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918), 444.
“to have such a bright person”: Fanny Hooper to Lillian Clarke, June 1868, Swann.

[>]   “her hair”: Ellen Tucker Emerson to Edith Emerson, January 8, 1858, in The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, ed. Edith E. W. Gregg; foreword by Gay Wilson Allen, vol. 1 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 139.
“lovely head”: Bliss Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, vol. 2 (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), 373.
“‘Cupid has made’” . . . “housekeeping and solitude”: Ellen Tucker Emerson to unknown addressee, n.d., Gregg, The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 1, 501.
women outnumbered men: The 1870 census records the Massachusetts population as 1,457,351 residents. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1960), 13.
114 Beacon Street: The Boston Directory, Embracing the City Record, General Directory of the Citizens, and a Business Directory for the Year (Boston: Adams, Sampson, & Company, 1862). See also www.bosarchitecture.com/backbay/beacon/114 .html.
“drifts towards her thirties”: MHA to APF, April 26, 1885, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“constantly ailing . . . to be called invalides”: Abba Goold Woolson, Women in American Society (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 189–93.

[>]   problem in the nervous system: Ellen L. Bassuk, “The Rest Cure: Repetition or Resolution of Victorian Women’s Conflicts?” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 141–42. Neurasthenia seemed to beset those with a more refined and delicate nature, making it, for those in the middle and upper classes, also a more coveted diagnosis than hysteria, with its implication that the patient was acting out or was uncontrollable. Both men and women were diagnosed with neurasthenia, and cures varied widely. The most popular treatment, the rest cure, developed by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell after the war to treat battle-fatigued soldiers, was nonetheless most often prescribed for women. The patient would be isolated in a sickroom far from the strains of family life and forbidden to read or write; a strict daily regimen had to be followed: enforced rest, a diet of bland fatty foods, and “passive exercise” such as hydrotherapy and massage. Some patients improved and some famously worsened, as dramatized by the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” See Nancy Theroit, “Women’s Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step Toward Deconstructing Science,” Signs, vol. 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 8. By 1910, subsequent to the work of Freud, neurasthenia went out of fashion as a diagnosis, replaced by psychoanalytic explanations for the patient’s symptoms. See F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Barbara Sicherman, “The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 32, no. 2 (January 1977); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 84–92; Natalie Dykstra, “‘Trying to Idle’: Work and Illness in The Diary of Alice James,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul Longmore and Laurie Umanski (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
“appendage to five cushions”: The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1964), 81. See also Jean Strouse, Alice James: The Life of the Brilliant but Neglected Younger Sister of William and Henry James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980); and R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991), 380–81.
She was interested in art: Kirsten Swinth documents how women “entered art in unprecedented numbers after the Civil War, flooding art schools, hanging their pictures alongside men’s, pressing for critical recognition, and competing for sales in an unpredictable market.” Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 1. In addition, several colleges had started to admit female students, though not Harvard College. Oberlin College, the first coeducational school, was established in 1833; Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, an all-female college, was founded in 1837; and Vassar College began classes in 1865. Regardless of these developments, in the 1860s, college was not considered a suitable option for a young woman of Clover’s social class.

[>]   a life member: First Annual Report of the Directors of the Massachusetts Infant Asylum, 2nd ed. (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1868), 36.
founding member: Our Dumb Animals, vol. 5, no. 1 (June 1872), 305.
“I hope you’re not going” . . . “orphan girl to sew”: Ellen Tucker Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, August 27, 1868, in Gregg, Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 1, 502. This letter is also the source that confirms Clover’s involvement with Dorchester’s Industrial School for Girls and the Howard Industrial School for Colored Women and Girls in Cambridge.
“perfectly delightful”: MHA to Eleanor Shattuck, February 5, 1871, George Cheyne Shattuck Papers, vol. 24, MHS.
“plunged”: MHA to RWH, September 15, 1872, LMHA, 39. Clover recalled reading through the history with Ida to her father after meeting Professor Mommsen while in Berlin. Clover’s copy of Mommsen’s book is dated 1865–66.
“full of funny stories”: Ellen Tucker Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, August 27, 1868, in Gregg, Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 1, 502.

[>]   “Switzerland in the summer”: MHA to Catharine L. Howard, March 3, 1869, LMHA, 473.
“mild drizzle” . . . “whispered once”: MHA to Eleanor Shattuck, February 5, 1871, George Cheyne Shattuck Papers, vol. 24, MHS.

[>]   “hot sun” . . . “effect on the brain”: MHA to Eleanor Shattuck, March 15, 1871, George Cheyne Shattuck Papers, vol. 24, MHS. Phillips Brooks, first cousin of Henry Adams, became rector of Trinity Church, Boston, in 1869.

 

CHAPTER 5. Henry Adams

[>]   “Dr. & Miss Hooper”: Facsimile of Henry’s engagement book, reproduced in LMHA, opp. xiv.

[>]   “oasis in this wilderness”: HA to CMG, May 22, 1871, Letters, vol. 2, 110.
“the design” . . .“very steadily”: HA to Brooks Adams, March 3, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 132.
“never in his life”: T. S. Eliot, “A Sceptical Patrician,” Athenaeum (May 23, 1919): 361–62.
“The history of my family”: As quoted in Paul C. Nagel, Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; reprinted by Harvard University Press, 1999), 3.

[>]   “the only one”: Charles Francis Adams, July 4, 1829, in Diary of Charles Francis Adams, vol. 2, ed. Aïda DiPace Donald and David Donald (Cambridge, MA: Belknap–Harvard University Press, 1964), 398. For early Adams family history, see especially David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Nagel, Descent from Glory; and Stephen Hess, America’s Political Dynasties (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 11–49.
“strange as it may seem”: As quoted in Middle Years, 316.
He had the habit: For details of how Henry held his hands in his pockets, see “Henry Adams Again,” New York Times, June 15, 1919.
“very—very bald”: HA to CMG, March 30, 1869, Letters, vol. 2, 24.

[>]   Henry had grown up: For a discussion of Henry’s early life and education, see Ernest Samuels, The Young Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 3–52. Henry would be less engaged by Boston’s Transcendentalist fervor than many of Clover’s relatives were; his family was rooted more in the political than the religious debates of the time. Later, as editor of the North American Review, he would sum up his opinion of those “who pondered on the True and Beautiful” in a review of Octavius Brooks Frothingham’s Transcendentalism in New England, an early history of the movement. Except for Emerson, “whose influence is wider now than it was forty years ago,” Henry dismissed most Transcendentalists as those who sought “conspicuous solitudes” and “looked out of windows and said, ‘I am raining.’” Henry Adams, “Critical Notices: Frothingham’s Transcendentalism,” North American Review, vol. 123, no. 253 (October 1876), 470–71. Garry Wills rightly notes, however, that Transcendentalism may have “left a deeper mark” on Henry than he acknowledged, given the “nature mysticism of his novel Esther” and how his “later admiration of ‘Oriental religions’ paralleled Thoreau.” Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 39.
“One of us”: HA to CFA Jr., December 13, 1861, Letters, vol. 1, 265.

[>]   “a golden time”: As quoted in Samuels, The Young Henry Adams, 121; “biggest piece of luck”: HA to CMG, April 16, 1911, Letters, vol. 6, 441.
again worked as a journalist: For a listing of Henry’s publications during this time, see Samuels, The Young Henry Adams, 317–18.
“it is the teacher”: CFA to HA, July 11, 1870, Adams.
“utterly and grossly”: HA to CMG, September 29, 1870, Letters, vol. 2, 81. Henry protested to President Eliot, “I know nothing about Medieval History,” to which Eliot replied, “If you will point out any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will appoint him.” Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 348.
“greatest teacher”: Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 349.

[>]   “I allotted to each man”: C. E. Schorer, “A Letter from Henry Cabot Lodge,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 3. (September 1952): 391.
“a man of pure intellect”: Stewart Mitchell, “Henry Adams and Some of His Students,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, vol. 66 (October 1936–May 1941): 307.
library books on reserve: Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 348.
“cultivated their genealogies”: Middle Years, 7.
“makes me so unhappy”: Louisa Catherine Adams, as quoted in Nagel, Descent from Glory, 206.

[>]   “fearfully trying”: HA to CMG, July 13, 1870, Letters, vol. 2, 74.
“too awful to dwell on”: Abigail Brooks Adams, as quoted in Edward Chalfant, Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams, His Second Life, 1862–1891 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1994), 722.
“one of my trusted supports”: CFA, Diary, May 20, 1879, Adams.
“is merely that” . . . “get along somehow”: HA to CFA, January 7, Letters, vol. 2, 124.

[>]   “a very uncomfortable week” . . . “everyone’s nerves”: HA to CFA, January 14, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 125–26.
“I have great reliance”: CFA to HA, January 30, 1872, Adams.
“so far away superior” . . . “It is Clover Hooper”: HA to Brooks Adams, March 3, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 132.
“happy as ideal lovers”: HA to CMG, May 30, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 137; “has a certain vein”: HA to CMG, June 23, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 140.

[>]   Clover’s family welcomed: Many years later, Henry would remember with pleasure that he had been made a co-executor of his father-in-law’s estate, along with his brothers-in-law, Ned Hooper and Whitman Gurney. HA to CMG, May 10, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 611.
“I am sure” . . . “delighted with”: Oliver Wendell Holmes to CFA, March 14, 1872, Adams.
the engagement had “surprised”: CFA, Diary, March 2, 1872, Adams.
“Heavens!—no!—”: CFA Jr., Memorabilia, May 3, 1891, Adams.
She assured her: MHA to Eleanor Shattuck, March 8, 1872, George Cheyne Shattuck papers, vol. 24, MHS. Clover indicated that Eleanor’s younger brother, Frederick, almost got in the way of her engagement. Tell Fred, she wrote Eleanor, “that he nearly stopped all this—that if he had sat one hour longer that fatal Tuesday P.M. this might never have come to pass—so I like him better than ever. Henry outstayed him.”
“horrid dream” . . . “put my whole heart into it.”: The original of this letter has not been found; quoted in Mrs. Henry Adams, 105–6.

[>]   “One of my congratulatory letters”: HA to CMG, March 26, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 133–34.

[>]   a derogatory term: The term bluestocking originated in England in reference to a group of eighteenth-century women intellectuals. It had by the nineteenth century turned into a mocking sobriquet.
“My young female”: HA to CMG, May 30, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 137.
found the ceremony “peculiar”: CFA Jr. wrote to his father: “The wedding was like the engagement—peculiar.” He added: “everyone to his fate.” CFA Jr. to CFA, June 28, 1872, Adams.
“We think our wedding” . . . “kindness and assistance”: MHA and HA to RWH, June 28, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 141–42. Henry’s letter is on the reverse side of Clover’s letter to Dr. Hooper.

[>]   Wedding gifts inundated: MHA to EWH, July 7, 1872, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“time for seeing Egypt”: The Adamses used the 1867 edition. Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, A Handbook for Travellers in Egypt . . . (London: John Murray, 1867), 2.

 

CHAPTER 6. Down the Nile

[>]   “very beautiful”: MHA to RWH, July 26, 1872, LMHA, 17.
“cursed the sea” . . . “Think it may have”: MHA to RWH, July 9–July 19, 1872, LMHA, 14.

[>]   “gossamer-like web”: Henry Adams, review of Their Wedding Journey, by William Dean Howells, North American Review, no. 235 (April 1872): 444.
“see all we want”: MHA to RWH, July 9–July 19, 1872, LMHA, 15.
“Often think of Beverly”: MHA to RWH, July 9–19, 1872, LMHA, 16.
She enclosed with her letter: “Sketch of Stateroom on Board a Ship.” Sketch by MHA, July 13, 1872. Copy of photograph from MHA Photographs, photograph number 50.133, MHS.
“scour” . . . “young colts”: MHA to RWH, July 23, 1873, LMHA, 133.
“We feel”: MHA to RWH, July 26, 1872, LMHA, 19.
“full of roses . . . were nowhere”: MHA to RWH, July 26, 1872, LMHA, 18. For a vivid description of Charles Milnes Gaskell, see William Dusinberre, “Henry Adams in England,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (August 1977), 163–86. Dusinberre (178) argues that Henry James used Gaskell as a model for Lord Warburton in The Portrait of a Lady.

[>]   “too ferocious to be liked”: Education, 207.
“very charming” . . . “gasp”: MHA to RWH, August 7, 1872, LMHA, 20–21.
“until brains and legs”: MHA to RWH, September 8, 1872, LMHA, 37.
“pictures in the gallery”: MHA to RWH, August 23, 1872, LMHA, 25.
“They had never heard”: MHA to RWH, August 23, 1872, LMHA, 26.
“the role of old married people”: MHA to EHG, September 5, 1872, LMHA, 30.

[>]   “Travelling would be”: MHA to RWH, August 23, 1872, LMHA, 29.
“so rich that I was quite”: MHA to RWH, September 8, 1872, LMHA, 36.
“bad luck in the matter”: MHA to RWH, September 15, 1872, LMHA, 40.
“hard”  . . . “good fun”: MHA to RWH, September 8, 1873, LMHA, 37.
“though it’s dreary”: MHA to RWH, March 11, 1872, LMHA, 82.
“to patch up”: MHA to RWH, November 17, 1872, LMHA, 57; Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (1867) lists three pages of items “useful for a journey in Egypt.”

[>]   Boston had erupted in flames: The city lost over 775 buildings to the fire, which ranged over more than 60 acres. Estimates of total damage were between $70 to $75 million. Twenty thousand people lost jobs and many were left homeless. The exact number of dead and wounded was never made official. See Stephanie Schorow, Boston on Fire: A History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston (Beverly, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2003); F. E. Frothingham, The Boston Fire (New York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham, 1873).
“rejoiced to hear”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1872, LMHA, 63.
“Beverly is certainly”: MHA to RWH, August 7, 1872, LMHA, 24; “I miss you all”: September 8, 1872, LMHA, 38; “I miss you very, very much”: MHA to RWH, October, 20, 1872, LMHA, 52.
“I miss you” . . . “I do very often”: MHA to RWH, November 17, 1872, LMHA, 58.
“Clover gained flesh”: HA to RWH, November 10, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 153.
“dimly lighted streets”: MHA to RWH, November 23, 1872, LMHA, 59.

[>]   “competent and faithful”: MHA to RWH, March 1, 1873, LMHA, 78.
“We saw them”: MHA to RWH, December 5, 1872, LMHA, 61.
“the air [is] bracing”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1872, LMHA, 63.
“tried to write”: MHA to RWH, December 5, 1872, LMHA, 60.
“One day is so like”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1872, LMHA, 63.
“letter-writing is not”: MHA to Fanny Chapin Hooper, December 14, 1872, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
not to “show”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1872, LMHA, 64.
“which they balance” . . . “miserable”: MHA to RWH, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 64.

[>]   “I must confess” . . . “shortcomings”: MHA to RWH, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 65–66.
“I never seem to get”: MHA to RWH, January 3, 1873, LMHA, 66.
“How true it is”: MHA to RWH, February 16, 1873, LMHA, 75. Clover made this statement about herself when she got tired of looking at Egyptian antiquities, frustrated that she didn’t understand more about what she was seeing.
Clover and Henry strolled: They also picnicked with the Roosevelts from New York, who were traveling in their chartered dahabeah directly ahead; their young son Teddy, at fourteen, had a voice his mother described as “a sharp, ungreased squeak.” Quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 1979), 36.

[>]   “The wind is not purer”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, October 7, 1839, in Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–66), 260.
“Dear, sweet Ellen Hooper”: Anna Hazard Barker Ward to ESH, August 15, 1848, Swann.
“I doubt if we find”: MHA to RWH, January 24, 1873, LMHA, 67–68.
“working like a beaver” . . . “we have yet seen”: MHA to RWH, February 5, 1873, LMHA, 71.
“we waited” . . . “on the river”: MHA to RWH, February 16, 1873, LMHA, 74, 76.

[>]   one photograph of Henry: “Interior of Dahabieh ‘Isis,’” Photographer unknown, n.d., from HA Photograph Collection, 40.160, MHS.
“bought many nice things” . . . “grows on us”: MHA to RWH, March 11, 1872, LMHA, 80.
“How much we have lived” . . . “faculty of memory”: MHA to Anna Hazard Barker Ward, March 15, 1873, Papers of Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Hazard Barker Ward, MS Am 1465 (5), Houghton. Clover and Henry were in Alexandria on March 10, were sailing on the Mediterranean on March 11, and arrived at the Bay of Naples on Saturday, March 15. See LMHA, 80–85.
Henry James apparently did not perceive Clover’s troubles on the Nile, but rather thought that she’d gained health from her travels. He wrote to his father in March 1873 from Rome that “the Clover Adamses have been here for a week, the better for Egypt . . . I saw them last P.M., and they are better and laden with material treasures.” HJ to Henry James Sr., March 28, 1873, HJ Letters, vol. 1, 360.
“sun rise between” . . . “early morning mist”: MHA to RWH, March 16, 1873, LMHA, 85.

[>]   “path lying between”: MHA to RWH, March 29, 1873, LMHA, 89.
“stuffs and accessories”: MHA to RWH, April 20, 1873, LMHA, 95.
“very clever”: MHA to RWH, April 20, 1873, LMHA, 96.
“à la française”: MHA to RWH, April 20, 1873, LMHA, 98.
“very pretty”: MHA to RWH, April 20, 1873, LMHA, 99.
“swell part”: MHA to RWH, May 14, 1873, LMHA, 102.
“If I were a boy”: MHA to RWH, June 1, 1873, LMHA, 108.
“England is charming” . . . “good-humouredly”: MHA to RWH, June 29, 1873, LMHA, 127.

[>]   “enjoyed much”: MHA to RWH, July 23, 1873, LMHA, 134.

 

Part II: “Very Much Together”

 

CHAPTER 7. A Place in the World

[>]   “pulled her down” . . . “a small Boston world”: HA to CMG, August 12, 1873, Letters, vol. 2, 178.
“quite unchanged”: EWH to CST, August 19, 1873, Swann.
“I want you to send”: MHA to EHG, October 27, 1872, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.

[>]   She and Henry hung many: HA to CMG, December 8, 1873, Letters, vol. 2, 183.
They kept a watercolor: HA to Charles Eliot Norton, April 15, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 191.
“excites frantic applause”: HA to CMG, December 8, 1873, Letters, vol. 2, 183.
“My wife is very well”: HA to CMG, October 26, 1873, Letters, vol. 2, 180.

[>]   “nearly all surplus”: HA to CMG, June 14, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 275.
“keep the thread”: HA, review of The Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development, by William Stubbs, North American Review, vol. 119, no. 244 (1874): 233–34, as quoted in Middle Years, 61.
“the reader ought to be”: HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 25, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 195.
He would read aloud: HA to Simon Newcomb, December 23, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 245.
“while writing before”: J. Laurence Laughlin, “Some Recollections of Henry Adams,” Scribner’s Magazine, vol. 69, no. 1 (January 1921): 582.
“I have been hard worked”: HA to CMG, June 22, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 193.

[>]   “farm and woodland”: Joseph E. Garland, The North Shore: A Social History of Summers Among the Noteworthy, Fashionable, Rich, Eccentric, and Ordinary on Boston’s Gold Coast, 1823–1929 (Beverly, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 1998), 33.
“into the depths”: HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, July 6, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 199.

[>]   “our new house is more”: HA to CMG, June 14, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 276. I want to thank Harrison Smithwick and his mother, Mrs. Frances Smithwick, who gave me a tour of Clover and Henry’s Beverly Farms home, which still has many of its original design elements.
“a footpath” . . . “sunlight of the woods”: Mabel La Farge, Letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres by Henry Adams, with a Niece’s Memories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 7–8.

[>]   graduate seminar in history: For a complete listing of Henry’s courses at Harvard, see Samuels, The Young Henry Adams, 340–41.
“German codes” . . . “colt in tall clover”: Laughlin, “Some Recollections of Henry Adams,” 580.
“Nothing since I came to Cambridge”: HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 30, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 280–281.
“long-haired terriers”: La Farge, Letters to a Niece, 7.
“isolated groups”: HA to CMG, February 15, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 216. “I am flourishing as ever and growing in dignity and age. My wife is as well as I”: HA to CMG, March 26, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 189; “My wife is flourishing”: HA to CMG, June 22, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 194; “my wife flourishes like the nasturtiums which are my peculiar joy”: HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, July 6, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 200; “we are and have been very well and flourishing”: HA to CMG, February 15, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 217.

[>]   “As I’ve not bored you” . . . “Marian Adams”: MHA to CMG, March 29, 1875, Adams.
“toned down”: Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London: 1870–1880 (New York: Avon Books, paperback reprint 1978; originally published 1962), 375; “had a good effect”: Rayburn S. Moore, “The Letters of Alice James to Anne Ashburner, 1873–78: The Joy of Engagement (Part 1),” Resources for American Literary Study, vol. 27, no. 1 (2001): 34.

 

CHAPTER 8. City of Conversation

[>]   “As for me and my wife”: HA to CMG, November 25, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 326.
“my university work”: HA to CMG, Sept. 8, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 293.
The October 1876 presidential election: For more on Henry’s last issue of the North American Review and on his dispute with James Osgood, see Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America, 79–86.
“The more I see”: HA to CMG, February 13, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 188.

[>]   “assume control of everything”: HA to CMG, February 15, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 217.
“charming old ranch”: MHA to RWH, August 24, 1879, LMHA, 170.
“as if we were”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams.
“like a gentleman”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams; “always amusing”: HA to CMG, May 30, 1878, Letters, vol. 2, 338.

[>]   “uncommonly lively”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1878, Adams. Eugenia Kaledin states that Emily and Clover would have a falling out later in their friendship but does not cite where she found evidence for any quarrel or misunderstanding. Mrs. Henry Adams, 183. It is somewhat clearer from Clover’s letters that she found Emily entertaining and fun-loving but did not feel close to her nor take her particularly seriously.
“the instrument seems like”: MHA to RWH, February 3, 1878, Adams.
“a whirlwind had picked up”: As quoted in Frank G. Carpenter, Carp’s Washington (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1960), 5.
“What had been a most unsightly”: As quoted in Kenneth R. Bowling, “From ‘Federal Town’ to ‘National Capital’: Ulysses S. Grant and the Reconstruction of Washington, D.C.,” Washington History (Spring/Summer 2002): 16. For an explanation of the proposal to remove the capital to St. Louis, see Fergus Bordewich, Washington: The Making of the American Capital (New York: Armistad, 2008), 272–75.
Washington had always teetered: See Carl Abbott, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C.: From Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. 2–5. For a description of post–Civil War racial politics, see also Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. 291–338.

[>]   “a slaveocracry” . . . “her right”: MHA to RWH, December 23, 1877, Adams.
“a foul contagion”: As quoted in McCullough, John Adams, 134.
“always seemed a most iniquitous”: As quoted in McCullough, John Adams, 104.
“the archbishop of antislavery”: HA to CFA Jr., December 26, 1860, Letters, vol. 1, 213. CFA had been given the nickname “archbishop of antislavery” by Thomas Corwin, a Republican congressman from Ohio.

[>]   “no food and no clothes”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1877, Adams.
“only place in America” . . . “complete”: HA to CMG, November 25, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 326.
surprisingly “complete”: HA to CMG, November 25, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 326.
“City of Conversation”: Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907), 329.
“a lovely path” . . . “in summer”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1877, Adams Papers, MHS.
“Sundays wouldn’t come so fast”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1877, Adams.
“new possibilities for us”: MHA to RWH, December 23, 1877, Adams.

[>]   “I’ve been working” . . . “on opposite stools”: MHA to RWH, December 23, 1877, Adams. George Cruikshank illustrated several novels by Charles Dickens, including Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop.
“written on the backs” . . . “till now”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1877, Adams.
“a hieroglyphic world”: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, ed. Laura Dluzynski Quinn (New York: Penguin Group, 1996; originally published 1920), 36.
“Politeness is power”: As quoted in Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C., After the Civil War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 73.
“composed, in so great a degree”: Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, Etiquette of Social Life in Washington (Lancaster, PA: Inquirer Printing and Publishing Co., 1873), 3–4.
“In this social vortex”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1878, Adams.

[>]   “a discipline worthy”: MHA to RWH, March 3, 1878, Adams.
“I think I’d best announce”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams.
“The ‘calling’ nuisance”: MHA to RWH, February 27, 1881, LMHA, 271–72.
“sighed for his pines”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1877, Adams.
“It’s very cozy”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams.
“state secrets”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1877, Adams.
“charming old house” . . . “under her chin”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1877, Adams.

[>]   “quite nice looking”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1877, Adams.
“a late carouse” . . . “vegetation!”: MHA to RWH, December 10, 1878, Adams.
“more agreeable than most”: HA to Mary Dwight Parkman, February 20, 1879, Letters, vol. 2, 353.
“being the king of ‘Vulgaria’”: MHA to RWH, December 15, 1878, Adams.
“march to the sea”: MHA to RWH, December 10, 1882, LMHA, 406–7.
“uproarious laughter”: J. Laurence Laughlin, “Some Recollections of Henry Adams,” 582.
“so proud of her”: Margaret (Terry) Winthrop Chanler, Roman Spring (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1934), 303.

[>]   “Mr. Evarts” . . . “he orates too much”: MHA to RWH, December 29, 1878, Adams.
“For a middle aged”: MHA to RWH, February 2, 1879, Adams.
“wits for a week”: HA to CMG, February 9, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 247.
“So we came home” . . . “superb roses”: MHA to RWH, November 25, 1877, Adams.

[>]   “to report to duty”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1877, Adams.
“Hear me, my chiefs!”: Chief Joseph, as quoted in Kent Nerburn, Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 268; see also Elliot West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
“he saw the Indians” . . . “their bonnets behind”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1877, Adams.

[>]   “How long Oh!”: MHA to RWH, January 26, 1879, Adams.
“A propos to nothing”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1878, Adams.
“charming, most sympathetic” . . . “bearded face”: MHA to RWH, April 11, 1880, Adams.
“Mrs. Adams, didn’t your husband”: MHA to RWH, December 28, 1879, LMHA, 223.
“forty-three miles”: MHA to RWH, March 3, 1878, Adams.
“midnight cigars” . . . “left to do it”: MHA to RWH, July 11, 1880, Adams.
Dr. Hooper wrote back: The reasons why Dr. Hooper’s letters to Clover do not survive may have to do with Clover. She wrote to John Hay in 1882, “I do not keep letters.” MHA to JH, June 13, 1882, Adams.

[>]   “stood under” . . . “any feelings”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1877, Adams.
“like a gentleman”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams.
“annoying pin” . . . “too old to reform”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1878, Adams.
“Brooks [an] injustice”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1878, Adams.
“never quote” . . . “Burn this!”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1878, Adams.

[>]   “I feel as if”: CFA, Diary, October 17, 1877, Adams.
“I have no feelings”: CFA, Diary, May 20, 1879, Adams.
Mr. and Mrs. Adams thought: Tension between Clover and her in-laws also may have to do with the increasing misery in the elder Adamses’ marriage, which had escalated in the summer of 1876, when Mrs. Adams injured her foot. She went for a cure in the fall at a New York hotel, where her daily treatments included long conversations with her physicians, gentle exercise, and the administration of electricity. Mr. Adams traveled with her to New York but then quickly returned to Quincy and Boston, and in Mrs. Adams’s daily letters to him, the first one dated December 1, 1876, she alternately complains about her accommodations, her slow progress, and the horrible winter weather. At one point she wished the doctors would “let the walking alone,” declaring that “I don’t care one cent about walking—all I ask is freedom from pain.”
Lonely and discouraged, she begged her husband to come back, telling him how she longed for nothing but him, scolding him for putting her off, furious with how he announced he was coming to see her but then changed his mind. The more she harangued him, the more miserable she felt. On December 6 she admitted, “This is a horrid letter in all respects, but you won’t mind will you? For I love you dearly, even if [I] am old and ugly and lame and homesick.” But the next week she felt abandoned and unloved, writing that “I wish you loved me half as well as I do you, such unequal feelings make life an uneven piece of patchwork.” After she pulled for his sympathy, she lashed out, and the more she did so, the more Mr. Adams resisted. By December 13, Mrs. Adams wrote in a fury, “It is four weeks today since you left here and I can only say if I had been told that you would let that time pass with such a short distance between us and I here under such circumstances I could not have believed it . . . The weather had nothing to do with my depression for when I don’t walk I am better. It was my slow progress and disappointment to your constant delay in coming on.” Mr. Adams—patient and encouraging—was also passive and unyielding, admitting in his diary, “My defect is want of flexibility.” She could be resigned and realistic—“we are too old to change either your nature or mine.” But when they separated again the next April so she could have more treatments, she reacted with rage: “You can’t understand my feelings our natures are so entirely different and you are well at home and do not depend in the least on me. It shall never happen again.” Abigail Brooks Adams to CFA, December 1, 1876–April 6, 1877, Adams. The early years of the elder Adams marriage are particularly well described by Paul C. Nagel in his Adams Women: Abigail and Louisa Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 244–77.
“I am told on high authority”: MHA to RWH, March 31, 1878, Adams.
“Your postal card”: MHA to RWH, April 7, 1878, Adams.

[>]   “a laconic line”: MHA to RWH, February 23, 1879, Adams.
“icing ourselves”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, June 17, 1878, Letters, vol. 2, 340.
“winter quarters”: HA to CMG, November 28, 1878, Letters, vol. 2, 348.
“wild with joy”: MHA to RWH, November 3, 1878, Adams.
their “experiment”: HA to CMG, September 8, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 327.
“very much together”: HA to CMG, November 25, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 327.
“I have myself never cared”: HA to CMG, August 22, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 316.

[>]   “Of ourselves I can”: HA to CMG, May 30, 1878, Letters, vol. 2, 338.
“springing back to their normal”: MHA to RWH, May 11, 1879, Adams.
“prose masterpiece”: Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America, 8. Garry Wills argues that one aspect of the History that would set it apart is how Henry brought “many kinds of evidence, archival and cultural, that had not before been so deftly interwoven”(388).
“900,000,000 things”: MHA to APF, May 18, 1879, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.

 

CHAPTER 9. Wandering Americans

[>]   “‘He who is tired’”: MHA to RWH, June 15, 1879, LMHA, 140.
“vastness of this London society”: MHA to RWH, February 22, 1880, Adams.
“gardens and great trees”: HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, June 15, 1879, Letters, vol. 2, 362. Henry relayed what Clover said in his letter to Sir Robert Cunliffe.
“this English world”: MHA to RWH, June 22, 1879, LMHA, 145.

[>]   “young and not pretty”: MHA to RWH, July 13, 1879, LMHA, 154; “refuge”: MHA to RWH, June 15, 1879, LMHA, 141.
about the art on display: Charles E. Pascoe, “The Grosvenor Gallery Summer Exhibition,” The Art Journal (1875–1887), new series, vol. 5 (1879), 222–24.
“joke” . . . “face of the public”: MHA to RWH, June 15, 1879, LMHA, 144. When Clover met Whistler later that summer, she was even less impressed, telling her father that “his etchings are so charming; it is a pity he should leave that to woo a muse whom he can’t win.” MHA to RWH, July 27, 1879, LMHA, 159. In 1877, Whistler sued John Ruskin for libel, after the English critic disparaged the painting Nocturne in Black and Gold—The Falling Rocket, which was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, charging that the artist had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler won the suit but was awarded minimal damages.
“pegging away”: MHA to RWH, July 20, 1879, LMHA, 157.
“sparkle and glitter”: MHA to RWH, January 26, 1879, Adams Family Papers.
“whispering gallery”: MHA to RWH, January 23, 1881, LMHA, 259.

[>]   Anne felt close to her father and brother: The relationships in Anne’s family became clear when Anne had to cut short one of her visits with the Adamses because of a family emergency. “Her father and brother,” Clover confided to her father, “are the ones of all her family who are very dear to her.” MHA to RWH, February 4, 1883, LMHA, 421.
Whatever they did: MHA to APF, August, 9, 1879, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS. Starting in August 1879, Clover began addressing Anne Palmer by another name in her letters, opening some of them with the greeting “Dear Mrs. Philippa.” She and Anne must have shared an inside joke or a story that inspired this role-playing. But when Clover’s letters were archived at the MHS years later, those addressed to Anne and those to Mrs. Philippa were put in separate files. Reading the letters together in chronological order, along with Clover’s sly references to the ruse, as when she asks Anne if “that hybrid title still pleases you,” reveal that Anne and Mrs. Philippa are the same person. MHA to APF, August 6, 1880, Hooper Adams Papers, MHS. My citations make no distinction between those letters that open with “Dear Anne” and those that open with “Dear Mrs. Philippa.”
“launched very happily”: HJ to Alice Howe James, July 6, 1879, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 249.
“intellectual grace”: HJ to William James, March 8, 1870, HJ Letters, vol. 1, 208.
“become Henry James”: Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel and Quandary (New York: Vintage International, 2001; first published 2000), 142.
“banishes”: As quoted in Edel, The Conquest of London, 413.
“wine-and-water”: HJ to Mary Walsh James [mother], April 8, 1879, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 228.
“plenty of anecdotes”: HJ to MHA, November 6, 1881, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 361.
“a trifle dry”: HJ to Elizabeth Boott, June 28, 1879, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 246.

[>]   “the most complete compendium”: MHA to RWH, March 14, 1880, Adams.
“savage notices” . . . “literary reputation”: MHA to RWH, April 4, 1880, Adams. For a vivid description of James’s reaction to London, see Edel, The Conquest of London, esp. 273–75. For an explanation of the controversy surrounding the reception of James’s biography of Hawthorne, see 386–91.
“He comes in every day”: MHA to RWH, January 25, 1880, Adams.
After reading A Portrait of a Lady: Clover told her father that the novel arrived by mail, “which the author kindly set me.” She did not say whether he had signed the copy. MHA to RWH, December 4, 1881, LMHA, 306.
“It’s very nice”: MHA to RWH, December 4, 1881, LMHA, 306. Clover is quoting a quip made by Thomas G. Appleton, a wit and the brother-in-law of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, about Appleton’s spendthrift younger brother, Nathan Jr.
“half disposed to go”: MHA to RWH, August 24, 1879, LMHA, 169.
“The second act”: MHA to RWH, August 31, 1879, LMHA, 171.

[>]   “a huge shop and restaurant”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1879, LMHA, 221.
“better horses, better liveries”: MHA to RWH, September 21, 1879, LMHA, 179.
“We have quiet mornings” . . . “they seem better”: MHA to RWH, September 14, 1879, LMHA, 178.
“twenty minutes side by side”: MHA to RWH, July 27, 1879, LMHA, 159.
“one of the seven wonders”: As quoted in Hilliard T. Goldfarb, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Companion Guide and History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 8.
“gliding walk, like a proud”: Margaret (Terry) Winthrop Chanler, Autumn in the Valley (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1936), 35.

[>]   “breeziest woman”: Town Topics, December 1, 1887, as quoted in Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: Congdon & Weed, Inc., 1965), 109.
“who were smiling and bowing”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1878, Adams.
Henry James treated Mrs. Jack: See Edel, The Conquest of London, esp. 379–82, for a description of this relationship.
“without exception”: HA to CMG, October 24, 1879, Letters, vol. 2, 379.
“The sun seems to drive out” . . . “soaked in sunshine”: MHA to RWH, October 26, 1879, LMHA, 192.
“nothing to wish for,” MHA to RWH, November 9, 1879, LMHA, 199.
“like enormous lighted candles” . . . Don Quixote: MHA to RWH, November 9, 1879, LMHA, 202.
“poked about for hours”: MHA to RWH, November 9, 1879, LMHA, 200.

[>]   “We are having”: MHA to RWH, November 15, 1879, LMHA, 206.
“ride was almost”: HA to Robert Cunliffe, November 21, 1879, Letters, vol. 2, 380.
“most enchanting road” . . . “did me no harm”: MHA to RWH, November 16, 1879, LMHA, 207.
“one lonely tooth” . . . “great satisfaction”: MHA to RWH, November 30, 1879, 212–13.
“Bitterly cold”: MHA to RWH, December 11, 1879, LMHA, 217. The journal Science reported that the 1879 winter was one of the most severe “in a century,” and the month of December had been the “coldest on record at Paris.” “The Winter of 1879–80 in Europe,” Science: An Illustrated Journal Published Weekly, no. 3 (April 1884): 485.
The newspapers told: “Cold Weather in Paris: Incidents of the Unwonted Experiences of the French Capital,” New York Times, January 8, 1880.

[>]   “like a white frost-bitten ball”: MHA to RWH, December 28, 1879, LMHA, 222.
“Manuscripts are clumsy”: HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, December 20, 1879, Letters, vol. 2, 387.
“hard all the evening” . . . “blessed archives”: MHA to RWH, January 25, 1880, Adams.
“I hate Paris more and more”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1879, LMHA, 221–22.
“a full feast” . . . “so much pleasure”: MHA to RWH, December 7, 1879, LMHA, 215.
“under a big”: MHA to RWH, January 25, 1880, Adams.
“the Adamses are here”: HJ to Isabella Stewart Gardner, January 29, 1880, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 265.
“every detail charming” . . . “peace and plenty”: MHA to RWH, February 1, 1880, Adams.
“mountain of papers”: HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, December 20, 1879, Letters, vol. 2, 387.

[>]   “no organized surface”: HJ to Mary Robertson Walsh James, January 18, 1879, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 210.
“gracious and agreeable”: MHA to RWH, February 22, 1880, Adams.
“lovely spring day” . . . “side to side”: MHA to RWH, February 8, 1880, Adams.
When a “Mrs. Houkey” . . . “show impatience”: MHA to RWH, February 15, 1880, Adams. Clover made no other reference to Mrs. Houkey in her letters, and no corroborating information about her could be found.
“social rapids” . . . “proportion of them”: MHA to RWH, March 14, 1880, Adams.

[>]   “intellectual apathy” . . . “belief in himself”: MHA to RWH, April 11, 1880, Adams.
“burst like a bomb shell” . . . “above criticism”: MHA to RWH, May 9, 1880, Adams.
“what a gentleman”: HA to JH, October 8, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 474.
“fields of wheat” . . . “stories”: MHA to RWH, July 11, 1880, Adams.
“one dinner in six” . . . “new impressions”: MHA to RWH, July 4, 1880, Adams.
“Of course” . . . “new impressions”: MHA to RWH, July 4, 1880, Adams.

[>]   “If it proves”: HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, July 9, 1880, Letters, vol. 2, 403.
“air like champagne” . . . “enchanting”: MHA to RWH, August 1, 1880, Adams.
“sunny blue day”: MHA to APF, August 6, 1880, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“crimson moors”: MHA to RWH, August 8, 1880, Adams.
“My wife is flourishing”: HA to CMG, August 12, 1880, Letters, vol. 2, 405.
“wandering Americans”: MHA to RWH, January 18, 1880, Adams.

[>]   “People who study Greek”: MHA to RWH, December 28, 1879, LMHA, 224.
“15, 361 gowns”: HA to CMG, September 11, 1880, Letters, vol. 2, 407.
“wee little early Turner”: MHA to RWH, June 29, 1879, LMHA, 149.
“a wide acquaintance”: MHA to RWH, August 20, 1880, Adams.
“more we travel”: MHA to RWH, November 2, 1879, LMHA, 197.
“Our land is gayer-lighter-quicker”: MHA to RWH, August 1, 1880, Adams.
“good American confidents”: HJ to Mary Walsh James, July 6, 1879, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 249.
“inveterate discussions” . . . “those of Europe”: HJ to Grace Norton, September 20, 1880, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 307.

[>]   “As I don’t expect”: MHA to RWH, February 8, 1880, Adams.
“pleasant story” . . . “still is new”: MHA to RWH, July 25, 1880, Adams.

 

CHAPTER 10. Intimates Gone

[>]   “too fashionable”: MHS to RWH, August 22, 1880, Adams. Jerome Napoleon, born in 1830, studied at West Point and served in the French Imperial Army until his resignation in 1871, when he returned to America to marry Caroline Appleton Edgar, the daughter of Samuel and Julia Webster Appleton. Caroline was the granddaughter of Daniel Webster.
“My wife is fairly weary”: HA to CMG, January 1, 1881, Letters, vol. 2, 416.

[>]   “didn’t realize when”: MHA to RWH, November 14, 1880, LMHA, 232.
“We are really in”: MHA to RWH, December 5, 1880, LMHA, 240.
“his house charming”: MHA to RWH, January 23, 1881, LMHA, 260; “Henry hard at work”: MHA to RWH, March 27, 1881, LMHA, 279.
“The town is filling”: MHA to RWH, November 21, 1880, LMHA, 234.
“nice old fellow”: MHA to RWH, February 13, 1881, LMHA, 266.
“air is full of rumours”: MHA to RWH, January 9, 1881, LMHA, 255.

[>]   “pretentious”: MHA to RWH, May 14, 1882, LMHA, 382.
“it’s a gross insult”: MHA to RWH, January 9, 1881, LMHA, 252.
a “thunder-clap”: HA to George William Curtis, February 3, 1881, Letters, vol. 2, 418.
“For us it will be most awkward”: MHA to RWH, January 9, 1881, LMHA, 252.
“one must always”: MHA to RWH, January 23, 1881, LMHA, 259.
origin of this group moniker: Patricia O’Toole speculates that the name may have been inspired by two other “playing card epithets”: Wordworth’s “the Five of Clubs” and Clarence King’s title of “King of Diamonds.” Five of Hearts, xvi.

[>]   Hay first met Henry Adams: William Roscoe Thayer, an early biographer of John Hay, writes that no other person “had so profound an influence on Hay; no other kindled in him such a strong and abiding devotion” as Henry Adams. Though “very dissimilar in temperament,” Thayer writes, “their tastes bound them together—their tastes, and their delight in each other’s differences.” Thayer, The Life and Letters of John Hay, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), 54.
“a handsome woman” . . . “for two”: MHA to RWH, February 3, 1878, Adams.
“frivolous and solemn”: HA to Mary Cadwalader Jones, January 25, 1909, Letters, vol. 6, 215.
“really did say things”: Theodore Roosevelt reviewed Thayer’s biography of Hay in the Atlantic Monthly in 1915. Roosevelt, “W. R. Thayer’s ‘Life of John Hay,’” The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, vol. 24, no. 94 (1915): 258.
“a touch of sadness”: John Russell Young, Men and Memories: Personal Reminiscences, vol. 2, 454.
“I am inclined”: Hay, as quoted in Michael Burlingame, At Lincoln’s Side (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), xiv.
“No matter how”: Thayer, John Hay, vol. 1, 330.
He later fathered: For a riveting excavation of Clarence King’s hidden married life with Ada Copeland, see Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (New York: Penguin Press, 2009).

[>]   “a miracle” . . . “better than anyone”: Education, 297–98.
“resembled no one” . . . “wherever he went”: John Hay, “Clarence King,” in Clarence King Memoirs: The Helmet of Mambrino, ed. the Century Association, the King Memorial Committee (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 131.
“like the sun”: MHA to RWH, March 30, 1884, Adams.
“a basket made”: MHA to RWH, February 17, 1878, Adams.
“our prop and stay”: MHA to RWH, March 6, 1881, LMHA, 274.
the “first heart”: HA to JH, April 30, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 455.

[>]   “a good deal of good talk”: MHA to RWH, March 27, 1881, LMHA, 278. At some point in 1885, King would give the Adamses a china tea service he’d had made, with cups and saucers in the shape of a heart and a likeness of a clock set at five o’clock sharp.
“Is there disease”: MHA to RWH, March 14, 1880, Adams.
“too much” for Fanny: MHA to RWH, May 30, 1880, Adams.
“It’s nice to hear”: MHA to RWH, August 15, 1880, Adams; “It’s nice to have”: MHA to RWH, August 22, 1880, Adams.
“increased suffering” . . . “do nothing”: MHA to RWH, February 23, 1881, LMHA, 269–70.

[>]   “I’ve been half expecting”: MHA to RWH, February 27, 1881, LMHA, 270.
“I want to go on”: MHA to RWH, February 27, 11:30 A.M., 1881, LMHA, 272.
“how Ned’s babies”: MHA to RWH, March 6, 1881, LMHA, 274–75.
“Unless I am really needed”: MHA to RWH, March 11, 1881, LMHA, 275.
“deep in history”: HA to CMG, February 10, 1881, Letters, vol. 2, 419.
“of all the experiences in life”: HA to CMG, June 14, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 276.

[>]   her garden, a “patch”: MHA to RWH, April 17, 1881, LMHA, 283.
“a bone which will take”: MHA to RWH, March 27, 1881, LMHA, 279.
telling her father: Clover reported on her voracious reading habits. For instance, she urges her father to get Anatole France’s new The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard because she thinks it “charming,” December 18, 1881, as is William Dean Howells’s recent Dr. Breen’s Practice, January 15, 1882, LMHA, 313 and 321.
“It’s read, read, read”: MHA to RWH, May 15, 1881, LMHA, 288.
The Five of Hearts stayed connected: On November 5, 1881, Hay wrote to Clover that he had “a few sheets of paper made for the official correspondence of The Club and send a sample by mail to you today for your approval. The New York and Cleveland branches will lunch in a few minutes at the Brunswick and will remember the Residency-Branch with affection tempered with due respect.” Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.

[>]   “In this ever-shifting”: MHA to RWH, March 6, 1881, LMHA, 273.
“One by one”: MHA to RWH, March 27, 1881, LMHA, 278–79.

 

CHAPTER 11. “Recesses of Her Own Heart”

[>]   “I am much amused” . . . “Clarence King and John Hay!”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1880, LMHA, 246–47. Though William Roscoe Thayer in his 1915 biography of John Hay would claim that only Henry “possessed the substance, and style” to have written Democracy, it would not be until 1920, two years after Henry’s death, that the publisher, Henry Holt, confirmed his authorship.
“except the authorship” . . . “thought of it before”: JH to HA, September 17, 1882, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.

[>]   “Much as I disapprove”: HA to John Hay, October 8, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 474.
“bent upon getting”: Democracy, 7. Ernest Samuels rightly states that Madeleine’s investigation “in its imaginative way” was a “very modest forerunner of The Education, a kind of interim report preceding by a quarter of a century the definitive one.” Middle Years, 70.
“witty, cynical” banter: Democracy, 23.
“babbled like the winds”: Democracy, 55.
“horrid, nasty, vulgar”: MHA to RWH, January 31, 1882, LMHA, 339.

[>]   “good enough to make it”: HJ as quoted in Edel, The Conquest of London, 376. The 1880 review in The Nation said that the “main difficulty is that it attempts too much.” Review reprinted in LMHA, 484. R. P. Blackmur argues that the frame of action in Democracy is half “Grimm fairy-tale” and half “Oscar Wilde Comedy,” with neither frame completely convincing. Blackmur, “The Novels of Henry Adams,” The Sewanee Review, vol. 51, no. 2 (1943): 288.
“superficial and rotten”: Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, September 2, 1905, Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), vol. 2, 189.
“a favorite haunt”: Democracy, 5.
“to the tips of her fingers”: Democracy, 164.
“gave her unchristian feelings”: Democracy, 11.
like something Clover would say: Clover’s Aunt Caroline Sturgis Tappan also suspected her niece was the author. MHA to RWH, February 14, 1882, LMHA, 339.
“religious sentiment” . . . “self-abnegation”: Democracy, 99.
“not known the recesses” . . . “outside the household?”: Democracy, 182.

[>]   “A weekly instalment”: HA to Justin Winsor, June 6, 1881, Letters, vol. 2, 428.
“the social and economical”: HA to Justin Winsor, September 27, 1881, Letters, vol. 2, 438. The letter enumerates Henry’s key interests: “I want to find out how much banking capital there was in the U.S. in 1800, and how it was managed. I want a strictly accurate account of the state of education, and of the practice of medicine. I want a good sermon of that date, if such a thing existed, for I cannot find one which seems to me even tolerable, from a literary or logical point of view.”
“my eyes ache”: HA to CMG, July 9, 1881, Letters, vol. 2, 429. HA published John Randolph in 1882 and immediately wrote a draft biography of Aaron Burr that, for whatever reason, was never published.
“to their doll cemetery”: MHA to APF, May 30, 1881, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.

[>]   “We found the house”: MHA to APF, October 28, 1881, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“road to Damascus”: MHA to RWH, December 18, 1881, LMHA, 312.
“make all one can”: MHA to RWH, January 1, 1882, LMHA, 319.
“life is like a prolonged circus” . . . “Medicus”: MHA to RWH, January 26, 1882, LMHA, 334.
“I really was so driven”: MHA to RWH, January 30, 1882, LMHA, 334.
“beware of ‘partisan’ politics”: MHA to RWH, February 12, 1882, LMHA, 345.

[>]   “a fatuous fool” . . . “wild toot”: MHA to RWH, January 31, 1882, LMHA, 338.
“we shall at this rate”: MHA to RWH, January 15, 1882, LMHA, 321.
“a lady’s handwriting”: MHA to RWH, January 31, 1882, LMHA, 339–40.
“Sir Joshua’s pretty”: MHA to RWH, June 18, 1873, LMHA, 120.
“They are not first-rate” . . . “very large”: MHA to RWH, January 31, 1882, LMHA, 339–41. Paysages is French for “landscapes.”

[>]   Mr. and Mrs. Groves: Thomas Woolner to MHA, April 9, 1882, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“genuine Sir Joshuas” . . . “look the other way”: MHA to RWH, February 14, 1882, LMHA, 348–49. The provenance information in a 1999 catalogue for a Christie’s auction reads: “According to Galloway family tradition, [Samuel] Galloway and [Sylvanus] Groves agreed to exchange portraits of themselves and their wives; by descent to Mrs. Anne Sarah Hughes, great-granddaughter of Samuel Galloway, 1877, who took them to Washington and sold them in 1882 to Mrs. Henry Adams . . . Exhibited: Philadelphia, 1876 (Mr. Groves 1093, Mrs. Groves 1094, both lent by Mrs. A. S. Hughes).” Christie’s Important Old Master Paintings, Auction 29 January 1999, New York, New York (London: Christie, Mason, and Wood, 1999). See also David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Text, and Plates (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 171, 229–30.
she found herself feeling drained: In one letter that Clover wrote to her father that spring, she said, “I’m as sleepy as a cat this Sunday morning and as stupid as an owl, so you’ll have a sorry letter.” MHA to RWH, March 5, 1882, LMHA, 358. She concluded another by apologizing that “my mind is as dry as a biscuit today.” MHA to RWH, April 2, 1882, LMHA, 370.
“an unwise appointment”: MHA to RWH, March 12, 1882, LMHA, 364.
“had nearly died”: HA to CMG, May 2, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 454.
“in these ‘bare ruined choirs’”: MHA to APF, March 12, 1882, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“Every fool becomes”: MHA to RWH, May 14, 1882, LMHA, 382.
“during the months when colic”: MHA to APF, June 19, 1882, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“nightly toothache”: MHA to RWH, October 29, 1882, LMHA, 394.
“It’s quieter here”: MHA to APF, July 11, 1882, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.

[>]   “nothing . . . disturbs history”: HA to CMG, June 25, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 461.
“bored by our summer”: HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, November 12, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 478.
(“like Boston”) . . . “tooth finished”: MHA to RWH, November 26, 1882, LMHA, 403.
“an explicit account”: Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (London: Macmillan and Co., 1884), 154.
“glad you’re reading”: MHA to RWH, December 24, 1882, LMHA, 410.
“How are you getting on”: MHA to RWH, December 31, 1882, LMHA, 412.
“bravely acted out”: Margaret Fuller wrote of George Sand that she needed “no defense, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature.” Margaret Fuller, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, vol. 2 (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1852), 197.

[>]   “open to all experiences”: James, French Poets and Novelists, 173.
“left out on the whole”: James, as quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962), 169.
As much as she found tending: See Anna Howard Shaw and Elizabeth Garver Jordan, The Story of a Pioneer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915), 154, who write: “Of Abby May and Edna[h] Cheney I retain a general impression of ‘bagginess’—of loose jackets over loose waistbands, of escaping locks of hair, of bodies seemingly one size from the neck down. Both women were utterly indifferent to the details of their appearance, but they were splendid workers and leading spirits in the New England Woman’s Club.”
“Porcupinus Angelicus”: John Hay to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, April 12, 1905, as quoted in Thayer, The Life of John Hay, vol. 2, 60–61.

[>]   He said one should treat: Abigail Adams Homans, Henry’s niece, remembered that Henry used to express this sentiment. HA-CK Papers.

 

CHAPTER 12. The Sixth Heart

[>]   “I make it a rule”: HA to CMG, December 3, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 484.
“Birds of Paradise”: HA to CMG, May 18, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 540.

[>]   “Then hate me when thou wilt”: Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 79.
“interlined with purple hills” . . . “nicest men in town”: MHA to APF, February 21, 1883, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS. On Langtry, see HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, November 12, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 478.

[>]   “a strong face” . . . “35 cents”: From Harold Dean Cater’s notes taken on March 15 and 16, 1945, for his book Henry Adams and His Friends, published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1947. HA-CK Papers. Cater interviewed Lady Elizabeth Lindsay, the second wife of Sir Ronald Lindsay, who had first married Elizabeth Cameron’s only daughter, Martha, in 1909.
Photographs taken of her: There are five portrait photographs of Elizabeth Cameron taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston archived at the Library of Congress; none are dated. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC–USZ62–124320–124322, LC–USZ62–1891, LC–USZ62–88494.
“a dangerously fascinating”: As quoted in Arline Boucher Tehan, Henry Adams in Love: The Pursuit of Elizabeth Sherman Cameron (New York: Universe Books, 1983), 10. Tehan does not name this source.
“as fresh and beautiful as ever”: Sherman, quoted in Tehan, Henry Adams in Love, 19.
“Beauty and the Beast”: As quoted in Tehan, Henry Adams in Love, 29.

[>]   They’d rap their umbrellas: MHA to RWH, October 30, 1881, LMHA, 294.
“Miss Beale and Mrs. Don Cameron”: MHA to RWH, November 6, 1881, LMHA, 296.
“If it were not”: HA to JH, March 4, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 494.
“I adore her”. . . “show her kindness”: HA to JH, April 8, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 497.
“my dear little friend”: HA to CMG, June 10, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 505; “She is still very young” . . . “as I have”: HA to James Russell Lowell, May 15, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 500–501.

[>]   “Our feelings overcame us”: HA to EC, May 18, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 501.
“tea every day”: MHA to RWH, November 6, 1881, LMHA, 296.
“a somewhat ghastly tea”: MHA to RWH, March 18, 1883, LMHA, 430.
“We’ve had no gaiety”: MHA to RWH, April 1, 1883, LMHA, 435.
“a greater grief”: Eleanor Shattuck Whiteside to Mrs. George C. Shattuck, October 26, 1886, George Cheyne Shattuck Papers, MHS.

[>]   “So give me a marriage”: MHA to RWH, May 6, 1883, LMHA, 447.
“not laughed since you went”: MHA to APF, February 8, 1883, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“and so on & so on” . . . “test his affection”: MHA to APF, April 6, 1883, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“various artists”: MHA to RWH, April 8, 1883, LMHA, 437.
“very poor” . . . “Philadelphia artist”: MHA to RWH, April 15, 1883, LMHA, 438.

[>]   “five pretty” . . . “of attention”: “The Society of Artists: Some of the Features of Its Sixth Annual Exhibit,” April 8, 1883, New York Times.
“pretty and nice” . . . “costume”: MHA to RWH, April 15, 1883, LMHA, 440.
“The dogs are well”: HA to MHA, April 10, 1883, Homans Collection, MHS.
“Henry says he’s glad”: MHA to RWH, April 15, 1883, LMHA, 441.
“my husband”: MHA to APF, April 21, 1882, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“A blessed rain”: MHA to RWH, April 22, 1883, LMHA, 441.
“It has taken me one week”: MHA to APF, April 21, 1883, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“I long to see”: MHA to APF, September 8, 1882, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.

[>]   “nothing but photography”: HA to EC, June 26, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 507.

 

Part III: Clover’s Camera

[>]   “Isn’t it odd”: Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, December 25, 1935, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1932–1935, vol. 5, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 455.

 

CHAPTER 13. Something New

[>]   “We’ve been riding”: MHA to RWH, May 6, 1883, LMHA, 446.
“How I wish”: MHA to RWH, May 6, 1883, LMHA, 446.
“great success” . . . “distance”: MHA to RWH, May 13, 1883, LMHA, 448–49.

[>]   “Mr. Pumpelly to tea”: MHA to RWH, April 22, 1883, LMHA, 442.
The two prints she saved: MHA, May 6, 1883, album #8, 50.50 and 50.51. Marion Langdon was the daughter of Harriett Lowndes Langdon, whose second husband, Philip Schuyler, was a friend to the Adamses. Clover thought her a “perfect beauty.” MHA to RWH, March 18, 1883, LMHA, 432.
“politics is at the bottom”: MHA to RWH, April 1, 1883, LMHA, 436.
“as a ‘dude’” . . . “not print”: MHA to RWH, May 27, 1883, LMHA, 451–52.

[>]   “new machine”: MHA to RWH, May 20, 1883, LMHA, 451.
Photography itself: The Philadelphia Photographer noted in 1882 the rapid growth of amateur photography in this country. The process has been going on for a number of years, but not to any very great extent until, say, within the last year. A great impetus was given to it, of course, by the ability on the part of manufacturers to produce a first-class emulsion plate; and when it was made known by manufacturers of apparatus that such a plate existed, and that apparatus could be had at a reasonable price, the thing took amazingly.” The Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 19, no. 228 (December 1882): 371. Clover may have used wet plates at first. Of the seven glass negatives at the MHS, three are clearly made by Clover—one of a woman at the beach, which Clover made a print of and put in her album, and two of Henry, one of which she included in her album. The other four glass-plate negatives, three of landscapes and one of a figure in the doorway of a small house, may have been taken by Clover. On four a thumbprint is clearly visible in the upper left-hand corner of the plate, where it had been gripped while being doused with light-sensitive chemicals. Marian Hooper Adams Glass-Plate Negatives, Photo collection 6.2M, MHS.
“have always been employed in”: Margaret Bisland, “Women and Their Cameras,” Outing: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recreation, vol. 17 (October 1890): 38.

[>]   “amateur photography”: Henry Clay Price, How to Make Pictures: Easy Lessons for the Amateur Photographer (New York: Scovill Manufacturing Co., 1882), 66. The distinction between amateur and professional photographers has a complicated history that involves economic class, roles of men and women, debates about science, and changing art markets. See especially Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Paul Spencer Sternberger, Between Amateur and Aesthete: The Legitimization of Photography as Art in America, 1880–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); Melissa Banta, A Curious and Ingenious Art: Reflections on Daguerreotypes at Harvard (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). For a history of photography and women after 1885, see Suzanne L. Flynt, The Allen Sisters: Pictorial Photographers, 1885–1920 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002); and Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native Americans, 1880–1940, ed. Susan Bernardin, Melody Graulich, Lisa MacFarlane, and Nicole Tonkovich (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
“those whom we love”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture; with a Stereoscopic Trip Across the Atlantic,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 8, no. 45 (July 1861): 13–29.
“absent loved ones”: Mrs. Henry Mackarness, The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Amusements, Exercises, Studies, and Pursuits, 4th ed. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1888), 214. An earlier edition was published in 1876.
“assist in the ordering”: John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (New York: Wiley, 1886), 137. Kirsten Swinth argues that the link between the arts, refinement, and a woman’s social duty intensified in America after the Civil War, as an increasingly industrialized economy seemed to coarsen an earlier vision of American life. “Women began to include the protection and cultivation of art and culture among their duties.” Swinth, Painting Professionals, 17. See also Erin L. Pipkin, “‘Striking in Its Promise’: The Artistic Career of Sarah Gooll Putnam,” The Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 3 (2001); Erica E. Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001); Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in the Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). For a history of the aesthetic movement, popular during the 1870s and 1880s, see Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); and Roger B. Stein, “Artifact as Ideology: The Aesthetic Movement in Its American Cultural Context,” in In the Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rizzoli, 1986).

[>]   It would take Alfred Stieglitz: For a discussion of Camera Work and the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession located at 291 Fifth Avenue, better known simply as 291, see Katherine Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 213–32.
“There has been some discussion”: The Photographic Times and American Photographer, vol. 13, no. 149 (May 1883): 207. A photography equipment salesman went further, observing that “the mechanical part of Photography, with modern Dry Plates, is very easily acquired, and presents no serious difficulties to any. It is practiced by very many ladies all over the country . . . It promotes digestion, gives one a taste for healthy exercise.” A Classified and Illustrated Price-List of Photographic Cameras, Lenses, and Other Apparatus and Materials for the Use of Amateur Photographers (Philadelphia: W. H. Walmsley & Co., 1884), 4.
“a new and small machine”: MHA to APF, June 2, 1883, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
The photography manual: Captain W. De Wiveleslie Abney, A Treatise on Photography (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1878).

[>]   “as soon as the self”: Edward Mendelson, The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 219.

 

CHAPTER 14. At Sea

[>]   “No society this week”: MHA to RWH, May 27, 1883, LMHA, 452.
“beautiful and swift”: MHA to EC, July 26, 1883, Adams.
Henry, four years into: See Edel, Middle Years, 221.
“You can never tell what you want”: HA to Daniel C. Gilman, March 2, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 493.
“the thermometer”: HA to CMG, June 10, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 504.

[>]   beloved English watercolors: Henry listed this catalogue of artists, writing that they took the art “with us from town every summer.” HA to Robert Cunliffe, August 31, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 234.
“On Friday” . . . “tea at 8”: MHA to APF, July 23, 1883, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“husband is working”: MHA to EC, July 26, 1883, Adams.
“I’ve gone in for photography”: MHA to Clara Hay, September 7, 1883, Adams.
photographed Pitch Pine Hill: MHA, n.d., album #8, 50.56.

[>]   three of her older nieces: MHA, August 19, 1883, album #8, 50.75.
The image links: See Erica E. Hirshler, Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting (Boston: MFA Publications, 2009).
Francis Parkman, the American historian: MHA, July 29, 1883, album #8, 50.58 and 50.59. Parkman was in the midst of writing his multivolume work France and England in North America, which confirmed his reputation as a leading American historian.

[>]   “disbelieves in democracy”: MHA to RWH, February 24, 1878, Adams.
“ideal woman” in America: MHA to RWH, November 30, 1879, LMHA, 213.
photographed Henry’s youngest brother: MHA, July 30, 1883, album #8, 50.61.
portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Adams: MHA, July 30, 1883, album #8, 50.60.

[>]   Mrs. James Scott at Manchester Beach: MHA, August 8, 1883, album #8, 50.63 and 50.64. The beach got its current name—not in wide circulation until the 1890s—because walking across its white sand produces a singing sound. Sarah Cash, “Singing Beach, Manchester: Four Newly Identified Paintings of the North Shore of Massachusetts by Martin Johnson Heade,” American Art Journal, vol. 27, no. ½ (1995–96): 95.

[>]   This view of the beach: This view was painted by Homer in his 1870 work Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide) as well as by the American luminist painters Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett. Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, “John F. Kensett at Beverly, Massachusetts,” American Art Journal, vol. 21, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 46–65; Cash, “Singing Beach, Manchester: Four Newly Identified Paintings of the North Shore of Massachusetts by Martin Johnson Heade,” 84–98.
Helen Choate Bell: MHA, August 8, 1883, album #8, 50.66.
“infinite longing”: E.T.A. Hoffman wrote in 1813 that Beethoven’s music “sets in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and awakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of romanticism.” Hoffman, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” in Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 775.

[>]   “turned-away figures”: The Rückenfigur, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, is a figure in the landscape that is turned away from the viewer but which locates the viewer within the landscape, and “functions to infuse Friedrich’s art with a heightened subjectivity, and to characterize what we see as already the consequence of a prior experience.” The viewer sees what the turned-away figure sees, but always from a distance behind, as if arriving late to the scene. This is part of how Friedrich’s paintings produce both identification of the viewer with the scene and a simultaneous estrangement from it, and thus the experience of a terrible Romantic longing. Koerner lists key elements of Romanticism, including “a heightened sensitivity to the natural world . . . ; a passion for the equivocal, the indeterminate, the obscure and faraway . . . ; a nebulous but all-pervading mysticism; and a melancholy, sentimental longing.” Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 23, 28.
Though Clover never stated: On her honeymoon, Clover had written to her father that they’d visited Dresden’s famed picture gallery. She remarked that “one-tenth part [of the museum] would be enough to try and take in.” MHA to Robert Hooper, September 8, 1872, LMHA, 36. The gallery catalog published in 1873 lists two paintings by Friedrich, one of which is the well-known 1819 painting of two travelers, with their backs positioned to the viewer, entitled Two Men Contemplating the Crescent. His paintings hung in the “modern” gallery. Complete Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery at Dresden (R. v. Zahn: G. Schonfeld’s Buchhandlung, 1873). Clover was conversant in the history of art, having used Horace Walpole’s four-volume Anecdotes of Painting in England as a reference while she and Henry amassed their own art collection; she also owned copies of Richard Redgrave’s Century of Painters in the English School (1866) and Taine’s Philosophy of Art (1865) and On the Ideal in Art (1867). She requested a copy of Walpole’s book from Theodore Dwight, Henry’s private secretary. MHA to Theodore Dwight, February 3, 1882, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
beautifully composed photograph: MHA, August 8, 1883, album #8, 50.65.
“It was charming”: MHA to RWH, February 27, 1881, LMHA, 272.

 

CHAPTER 15. Esther

[>]   She photographed Betsey: MHA, August 10, 1883, album #8, 50.67.
She paired a print: MHA, August 10, 1883, album #8, 50.68.
In this second image: MHA, August 10, 1883, album #8, 50.69.
Later in the summer: Clover also took four exposures of Henry in his study at Pitch Pine Hill on August 13, but judged these either “over-timed” or “too dim” to make prints from the negatives.

[>]   seated Henry at his desk: MHA, August 19, 1883, album #8, 50.71.
The neatly stacked papers: Henry told Lizzie Cameron in late July that he had to correct proof sheets. He was privately printing the first three books of his History, both for comments from readers and for safekeeping.
in the next exposure: MHA, August 19, 1883, album #8, 50.52.
Instead, Clover chose: MHA, August 26, 1883, album #8, 50.53 and 50.72. The portrait of Henry, in his light coat, followed by a picture of the umbrella tree, comes first in album #8. Sixteen photographs later, the portrait of Henry in his dark coat is paired in the album with another picture of the same umbrella tree. Clover’s August 26 entry in her notebook reads: “August 26 ‘Umbrella’ tree Smith’s Pt—large stop—1 second—good—same tree other side 2 sec.”
“You judge me”: Abigail B. Adams to CFA, December 13, 1876, Adams; “You can’t understand”: Abigail B. Adams to CFA, April 6, 1877, Adams.

[>]   “was audacious only”: Esther, 38.
Part of what Henry did: Ernest Samuels cautions readers to “be wary of treating Esther too exclusively as a symbol of his marriage,” contending that the “extraordinary emotional fetish that he attached to the book” should not be confused with his state of mind and feeling while writing. Middle Years, 225–26. O’Toole, by contrast, sees the novel as Henry’s commentary on his marriage, concluding that “in spite of the Adamses’ closeness and compatibility, there remained a gap they longed to close.” The Five of Hearts, 139. But neither of these authors makes explicit note of the connection between Henry writing Esther and Clover taking photographs.
“She has a bad figure”: Esther, 17. Lisa MacFarlane compares Henry’s description of Clover during his engagement to his description of Esther in her excellent introduction to the novel.
“hold my tongue or pretend”: Esther, 128.
“regret at having exposed”: CK to JH, July 4, 1886, Clarence King Papers, MHS.

[>]   But Clover knew: Samuels cites a conversation with Louisa Hooper Thoron, Clover’s niece, who “was confident her aunt read the novel.” Middle Years, 460.
“Poor Esther!”: Esther, 25.
“You were and are”: Esther, 7.
“fresh as a summer’s morning”: Esther, 27.
Wharton’s battles: See Lisa MacFarlane, Esther, xviii, and Middle Years, 242–43.

[>]   “embodied doctrines”: William Roscoe Thayer, quoted in Middle Years, 237. Patricia O’Toole argues that “the novel reveals less of the author’s concern for the relation of man and God than his lifelong perplexity over the relation of man and woman.” Five of Hearts, 137.
“languid, weary, listless”: Esther, 89–90.
“saturated with the elixir”: Esther, 96.
“Some people are made”: Esther, 159.
“are one” and she is honest: Esther, 161.
“in mid-ocean”: Esther, 17.

[>]   “a little depressed” . . . “women can’t”: Esther, 67.
“she is only a second-rate”: Esther, 17.
“I am going home”: Esther, 70.
“I am almost the last”: Esther, 131.
“The sea is capricious”: Esther, 143–44.

[>]   “Women must take their chance”: Esther, 25.
“Do you know how”: Esther, 132.
“in mid-ocean”: Esther, 17.
“we being chilly folks”: MHA to Clara Hay, September 7, 1883, Adams.
“remotest of existences” . . . “droll couple”: HA to CMG, September 9, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 510.

[>]   “cannot deal with”: HA to JH, September 24, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 513.
But though Henry Adams: Lisa MacFarlane argues that Esther is a hodge-podge of narrative conventions, combining a “roman à clef with a romance, a failed Bildungsroman with a short course in the classics of Western tradition, a novelized debate with an autobiographical confession.” Esther, vii.
Not surprisingly, the book sold: For a publishing history of the novel, see MacFarlane, Esther, viii–x.
“of course” . . . “I could not suggest it”: CK to John Hay, July 4, 1886, Clarence King Papers, MHS.
his own “heart’s blood”: HA to John Hay, August 22, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 34.

 

CHAPTER 16. Iron Bars

[>]   “most cordial”: MHA to RWH, October 23, 1883, Adams.
photograph of the dining room: MHA, October 24, 1883, album #8, 50.89.
the youngest, Alice Hay: MHA, October 24, 1883, album #8, 50.90.

[>]   To take their portrait: MHA, October 24, 1883, album #8, 50.91 and 50.92.
could take “views”: The Photographic Times and American Photographer, vol. 13, no. 145 (January 1883): 658. Meetings were held “on the first Monday of each month,” when an essay was read or “a demonstration made relating to and illustrative of photographic art.” In addition, “each member contributes monthly a specimen of his work by him exposed, developed, toned, and printed.”
“Mrs. Henry Adams is also”: Washington Post, November 11, 1883.
“two good morning hours”: MHA to RWH, November 11, 1883, Adams.
“The children are puffed up”: JH to HA, December 7, 1883, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“came to dine Monday”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1883, Adams.
he sits in a chair: MHA, November 27, 1883, album #7, 50.5.
In the second exposure: MHA, November 27, 1883, album #7, 50.6.

[>]   “I sit all day after”: JH to HA, December 26, 1883, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
revered American historian: MHA, November 28, 1883, album #7, 50.7.
“Mr. Bancroft is very good”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1883, Adams.
“Mrs. Henry Adams has made”: JH to Richard Gilder, December 29, 1883, in Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: printed not published, copyright Clara Hay), 86–87.
“Please give this”: JH to HA, January 3, 1884, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“was amused” . . . “to go with it”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1884, Adams.

[>]   “Mutual Admiration” . . . “shaping and directing”: Howells, as quoted in Rob Davidson, The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 49. Henry James felt flattered when he first read William Dean Howells’s approbation of his fiction in the November 1882 issue of Century magazine. But the response of the press, first by London papers and then by other publications, discomfited James, who called it a “truly idiotic commotion.” HJ to G. W. Smalley, February 21, 1883, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 406.
“I’ve just written”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1884, Adams.
“We have declined”: HA to JH, January 6, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 527.
In rejecting Gilder’s offer: Barry Maine argues that Henry abhorred publicity in all its forms in his “Portraits & Privacy: Henry Adams and John Singer Sargent,” Henry Adams and the Need to Know, ed. William Merrill Decker and Earl N. Harbert (Boston: published by the Massachusetts Historical Society; distributed by the University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 2005), 185–86.
“a vile gang”: HA to CMG, August 18, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 204. Henry had on his bookshelf Horace Bushnell’s Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1869), which argued that men and women were “unlike in kind” (49). In Bushnell’s paternalistic view, women were spiritually superior to men, but grossly unfit for political equality. Suffrage was an “abyss” where a woman “ceases so far to be woman at all” (161).
His only public lecture: The lecture Henry gave at the Lowell Institute on December 9, 1876, was titled “Women’s Rights in Primitive History,” which he changed to “Primitive Rights of Women” for publication in his book Historical Essays (New York: Scribner’s, 1891); David Partenheimer notes that the essay “is an elaborate weave of Adams’s studies in and engagement with legal history, ethnology, and literary studies.” Partenheimer, “Henry Adams’s ‘Primitive Rights of Women’: An Offense Against Church, the Patriarchal State, Progressive Evolution, and the Women’s Liberation Movement,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 4 (1998): 635.

[>]   Equality was based: Ernest Samuels praised Henry for realizing that the “degradation of women grew out of convenient myth . . . As a descendant of Abigail Adams,” he knew “woman’s capacity for greatness within her sphere.” Samuels, The Young Henry Adams, 261.
Henry failed to recognize: John C. Orr cites certain polarities in Western thinking as a key to Henry’s patterns of thought: “Unity and multiplicity, female and male, body and mind, intuition and reason.” According to Orr, Henry’s thinking “rotated around these oppositions, and while as with any thinker, he occasionally contradicted himself, on the whole he remained remarkably true to this severe split.” Orr, “‘I Measured Her as They Did with Pigs’: Henry Adams as Other,” in Henry Adams and the Need to Know, 281.
“The woman’s difficulty”: HA to Mabel Hooper, May 28, 1898, Letters, vol. 4, 596. In this letter to Mabel Hooper, who had embarked on a serious artistic career, Henry tried once more to sort out his thoughts about women. His earlier pessimism, as expressed in Esther, had by this time settled into an even starker view: “Women go shipwreck, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, from two causes: one is that they cannot hold their tongues; the other is that they cannot run in harness with each other.” Instead, he determined that “the woman is made to go with the man,” but that “the better [women] are, the purer in character and higher in tone, the more domestic in tastes, and the more irreproachable in life, the more impossible they are with each other.” Then he made his diagnosis: “It is the feminine instinct which lies at the bottom of the tangle, and a woman, before thirty, has so little experience of her own instincts that she may be regarded as a child. When she loves, when she hates, when she is jealous, she does not know it until someone tells her,—and then she is furiously angry at being told, and won’t believe it. Of course in that respect we are all fools, more or less. The woman’s difficulty is that she is fooled by her instincts and her sentiments which are at the same time her only advantages over the man.”
“send me photos”: MHA to APF, December 24, 1884, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
She also learned about: William Willis, an Englishman, invented the platinum printing process in 1873. The prints “were made on paper impregnated, rather than coated, with light-sensitive chemicals—in this case compounds of iron rather than silver . . . The intense black colour of platinum formed in this way gave the shadows a very rich tone, while the lighter greys had an almost silvery tone.” The process also gained a reputation for how little the image deteriorated over time—Clover’s platinum prints remain pristine, as if taken yesterday. Brian Coe and Mark Haworth-Booth, A Guide to Early Photographic Processes (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, in association with Hurtwood Press, 1983), 80.
“photograph rooms” . . . “only woman”: MHA to RWH, December 31, 1883, Adams.

[>]   “science pure and simple”: MHA to RWH, December 31, 1883, Adams.
“My facts are facts”: MHA to RWH, November 13, 1881, LMHA, 301.
“thin, wiry, one-stringed”: HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, August 31, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 235.
“What is the use”: Esther, 70.

 

CHAPTER 17. A New Home

[>]   “unmanageable” . . .“wag their tails”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1883, Adams.

[>]   “[John] Hay has bought”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1883, Adams.
“⅓ the price” . . . “73,800”: Marc Friedlander, “Henry Hobson Richardson, Henry Adams, and John Hay,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 29, no. 3 (October 1970): 235.
“put up a modest”: MHA to APF, December 24, 1883, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“dark and untenable” . . .  $27,000 in her trust: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1883, Adams.
“no more jewelry”: MHA to RWH, December 23, 1883, Adams.
“one definite part” . . . “improvements”: MHA to RWH, December 26, 1883, Adams.
No other architect: For a discussion of Richardson’s career as an architect, see H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, ed. Maureen Meister (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

[>]   “Richardson was the grand”: Frank Lloyd Wright, as quoted by Kathleen A. Curran in “Architect: Henry Hobson Richardson (Gambrill & Richardson),” in The Makers of Trinity Church in the City of Boston, ed. James F. O’Gorman (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 61.
“quiet and monumental”: James O’Gorman, quoted in Thomas C. Hubka, “H. H. Richardson’s Glessner House: A Garden in the Machine,” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 218.
“How I wish I could”: MHA to RWH, April 13, 1883, Adams.
“Tomorrow your lamp”: H. H. Richardson to HA, February 17, 1883, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“He would charm”: Charles A. Coolidge, “Henry Hobson Richardson,” in Later Years of the Saturday Club, 193.
whom he “valued”: Education, 65.

[>]   “can say truly”: MHA to RWH, May 7, 1882, LMHA, 379. Richardson’s outsized personality proved at times a trial for his clients. In late January 1883, eight months before his brick mansion was completed, General Anderson complained to his son Larz that Richardson, who had stayed with them several days at their temporary Lafayette Square address, had been “a great deal of trouble. He bullies and nags everybody; makes great demands upon our time and service; must ride, even if he has to go but a square; gets up at noon; has to have his meals sent to his room. He is a mournful object for size, but he never ought to stay at a private house, because he requires so much attention.” Letters and Journals of General Nicholas Longworth Anderson, 1854–1892, ed. Isabel Anderson (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1942), 207.
“great slabs of Mexican”: MHA to EC, July 26, 1883, Adams.
“Nick Anderson’s new house”: HA to JH, August 10, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 508.
who forwarded one: Anderson wrote his son, “I send you by the same mail a picture of our house, taken by Mrs. Adams.” Anderson, Nicholas Longworth Anderson, 217.
“excessively” . . . “charming”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1883, Adams.
“Spartan little box”: HA to MHA, March 15, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 581.
“sit all day in the library”: MHA to RWH, January 11, 1884, Adams.
Henry’s study would be: MHA to EC, January 11, 1884, Adams.
a New England coziness: In 1888 Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer described the Adams house this way: “The chief rooms were to be upstairs, and the ground floor was to be divided longitudinally by a wall—the hall and staircase lying to the right, the kitchen apartments to the left of it, and communication between them being effected only at the back of the house. Richardson clearly marked this division on the exterior by designing his ground-story with two low, somewhat depressed arches with a pier between them. Within one arch is the beautifully treated main doorway, and behind the other, masked by a rich iron grille, are the windows of the servants’ apartments, while the door which leads to these lies beyond the arch to the left. Inside, the hall with its great fire-place and its stairway forming broad platforms is as charming as it is individual, and the living-rooms up-stairs are well proportioned, and simple but complete in detail.” Van Rensselaer, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1888), 107.

[>]   “hurry him up”: HA to John Hay, February 20, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 537.
“no stained glass—no carving”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1883, Adams; “fine house” . . . “unusual one”: MHA to RWH, March 23, 1884, Adams.
“These I shall put back”: Henry Hobson Richardson Drawings (MS Typ 1096), AHW E3j, Houghton.
“worked up” . . . “like a master”: HA to MHA, March 23, 1884, Adams.
“I am glad you are pleased”: H. H. Richardson to Henry Adams, June 2, 1884, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
The first photograph: MHA, January 18, 1884, album #7, 50.11.
a dying lion: Richardson died of Bright’s disease on April 27, 1886. He was forty-eight years old. Oudry’s drawing was donated to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1920.

 

CHAPTER 18. Portraits

[>]   “expect some very lively tariff” . . . “every day”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1884, Adams.
“add much to us”: MHA to RWH, February 17, 1884, Adams. In the same letter, she registered her horror at the tragedy that had befallen Theodore Roosevelt, then a New York assemblyman. He had lost his mother to typhoid fever and his wife, Alice, to kidney failure, both on Valentine’s Day. His only daughter was just two days old. Clover recalled to her father how she and Henry had met young Teddy on the Nile twelve years before, remarking that in later years he and his beautiful wife had been “overwhelmingly hospitable” whenever she and Henry had met them in New York.

[>]   “generosity knew no bounds”: Harold Dean Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947), xlvii–xlviii. Rebecca Dodge vividly recalled meeting the Adamses for the first time: “I passed by the house frequently, for I lived in that neighborhood, and Mrs. Adams, liking my appearance, asked a friend who I was. It happened that this person was a good friend of mine, so we called together one day to see Mrs. Adams . . . I suppose I became an intimate at 1607 H Street.”
“always been utterly opposed”: MHA to EC, January 11, 1884, Adams.
“a long account” . . . “extremely”: MHA to RWH, February 24, 1884, Adams.
“society rabble” . . . “come at all”: MHA to RWH, February 3, 1884, Adams.
“a small part”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1884, Adams.
“quiet evenings” . . . “keep out of it”: MHA to RWH, February 3, 1884, Adams.
She had opened her first album: The first two albums of Clover’s photographs were originally archived at the MHS in the wrong order, so that the album numbered #7 in the archive is actually the second album that Clover put together, and album #8 is the first. This is important to know, particularly when trying to consider the images in sequence. Laura Saltz somewhat misreads the photograph collection by basing her otherwise provocative argument in part on the original but incorrect archived order of the albums. Saltz, “Clover Adams’s Dark Room: Photography and Writing, Exposure and Erasure,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, ed. Jack Salzman, vol. 24, 449–90.

[>]   a notable success: MHA, September 16, 1883, album #8, 50.81, 50.82, and 50.83.
Hegermann-Lindencrone’s daughter: The third sitter was Lettita Sargent, the Civil War widow of Lucius Sargent. Clover captured something of a widow’s sorrow in the woman’s expression, with her head tilted ever so slightly back and her face directed to the light. MHA, September 16, 1883, album # 8.50.84.
Dallmeyer wide-angle lens: MHA, December 28, 1883, album #7, 50.9.

[>]   “enchanted with it”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1884, Adams.
The Millets, whom Clover had met: See H. Barbara Weinberg, “The Career of Francis Davis Millet,” Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1977): 2–18.
“different poses as statuary”: MHA to RWH, February 10, 1884, Adams.
like a classical: MHA, [February] 1884, album #7, 50.10, 50.21, 50.22, and 50.23.

[>]   “which one I want” . . . “work”: MHA to RWH, February 10, 1884, Adams.
Madame Bonaparte: MHA, March 16, 1884, album #7, 50.20.
“astride a chair” . . . “worth keeping”: MHA to RWH, March 16, 1884, Adams.
“photos for nearly two hours” . . . “rumpled it all up”: MHA to RWH, February 24, 1884, Adams.
Senator’s notable geniality: MHA, February 23, 1884, album #7, 50.18.

[>]   Clover positioned Gordon: MHA, February 23, 1884, album #7, 50.19.
“It is dim”: MHA to RWH, February 24, 1884, Adams.
hung a white sheet: MHA, January 20, 1884, album #7, 50.12 and 50.13.
“funny, dark-haired copy”: MHA to RWH, November 25, 1883, Adams.
“a rare chance”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1883, Adams.

[>]   Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: MHA, February 1884, album #7, 50.14 and 50.15.
Clover places Mrs. Field: MHA, 1884, album #7, 50.26.

[>]   “by long odds”: HA to MHA, April 11, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 605.
“Mrs. Bancroft looks” . . . “one eye open”: MHA to RWH, May 25, 1884, Adams.
Mrs. Bancroft’s portrait: MHA, 1884, album #7, 50.40.
an ancient pine tree: MHA, n.d., album #7, 50.39; Arlington National Cemetery, November 5, 1883, album #7, 50.41.
“how any man or woman dares”: MHA to EC, January 11, 1884, Adams.
“a mob almost as un interesting” . . . “rather more solitary”: HA to CMG, February 3, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 535.

[>]   “spelled solitude”: MHA to APF, May 1, 1884, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“Poor little” . . . “not wanted above”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1884, Adams.
“Perdita, perdita” . . . “when you’re around”: MHA to EC, January 11, 1884, Adams.
“chatter” and “smile”: HA to CMG, May 18, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 540.

[>]   “all in white muslin”: MHA to RWH, May 25, 1884, Adams.
“Mrs. Don” . . . “to the sea-side”: HA to JH, May 18, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 542.
“or sends for her”: Esther, 50.
“shipwreck”: HA to Mabel Hooper, May 28, 1898, Letters, vol. 4, 596.
young woman, Grace Minot: MHA, October 8, 1883, album #8, 50.88.

[>]   “My wife and I are becoming”: HA to JH, August 3, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 547.
“I never feel a wish to wander”: HA to Sir John Clark, December 13, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 560.
“the worst part”: Esther, 117.
“I shall dedicate”: HA to EC, December 7, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 559.

 

Part IV: Mysteries of the Heart

 

CHAPTER 19. Turning Away

[>]   The past five years: See Middle Years, 262–64.
“In you I detect”: HA to George Bancroft, January 10, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 568.
which “is disappointing”: HA to Henry Holt, January 6, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 567. Henry made arrangements with Holt to have Esther published in England together with another American novel, Among the Chosen, by Mary S. Emerson. But this idea was dropped by the publisher, Richard Bentley and Son. Esther received mixed reviews in the English press.

[>]   “the only portrait”: HA to Royal Cortissoz, May 12, 1911, Letters, vol. 6, 443. In one of her old sketchbooks, above a small jewel-toned watercolor painting of a goldfish bowl, Clover jotted down this identification: “February 22, 1885, J. La Farge.” MHA sketchbook, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS. That same day Henry wrote a letter to John Hay, noting that La Farge “is with us again,” which indicates that the watercolor may have been painted by the artist while he stayed with the Adamses. HA to JH, February 22, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 575.
“Excuse so much politics”: MHA to RWH, June 8, 1884, Adams.
“free-trade Democrat”: HA to CMG, September 21, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 551.
there had been “no alternative”: MHA to RWH, April 13, 1884, Adams; “tattooed with corruption”: MHA to RWH, June 1, 1884, Adams.
“rotten old soulless party”: MHA to RWH, April 13, 1884, Adams.
“Grover Cleveland is safely” . . . “windows as from there”: MHA to RWH, March 5, 1885, Adams.

[>]   “‘extra’ on Thursday” . . . “North Carolina once”: MHA to RWH, March 8, 1885, Adams.
“Take care of yourself”: MHA to RWH, March 8, 1885, Adams.

[>]   “Bunged up by the nastiest cold”: HA to JH, March 7, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 578.
“nobody wants me”: HA to Rebecca Gilman Dodge, April 8, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 600.
“So methinks do”: ESH, folio of poems, privately printed by EWH, author’s copy.

[>]   “in despair because Don”: HA to MHA, March 30, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 596. The Camerons’ travel plans were revised a week later. Don Cameron hoped to go to California for his health, and Lizzie planned to spend the summer in Harrisburg; see HA to MHA, April 9, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 602.
“seated by the library fire”: HA to MHA, March 28, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 592.
“low in mind” . . . “glad to see him”: HA to MHA, March 21, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 587.
“The day is gloomy”: HA to MHA, March 15, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 581.
unspeakably “weary”: Esther, 89–90.
“for his wife again”: HA to MHA, April 12, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 608.
in the third person: Ernest Samuels rightly observes that the tone of the letters is “astonishingly devoid of tenderness, filled with the surface concerns of household and society, visits to the dentist, dinners with Hay and other friends, queries about library fixtures and bells for the new house—all the small talk of a busy household.” Middle Years, 265.
“unselfish and brave”: MHA to APF, April 26, 1885, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.

[>]   “kind heart”: As quoted in Mrs. Henry Adams, 33.
“You must take good care”: EWH to RWH, September 15, 1863, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (6), Houghton.
“It seems to me more”: MHA to RWH, June 28, 1872, as quoted in Mrs. Henry Adams, 115.
“of an anxious make”: MHA to RWH, January 15, 1879, Adams.
“as little in his children’s”: HA to CMG, June 23, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 140.
“No one fills any part”: MHA to APF, April 26, 1884, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.

 

CHAPTER 20. “Lost in the Woods”

[>]   “tired out in mind”: MHA to APF, April 26, 1885, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
She was curious: “I’ve no desire to go abroad again, but should like to go in the director’s car over that line to the Pacific when the country is a little more settled up.” MHA to RWH, April 22, 1883, LMHA, 442.

[>]   they hoped to “camp out”: MHA to APF, April 26, 1885, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“in better condition”: HA to JH, April 20, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 609.
In the early spring: Edward Nelson Fell was a British mining engineer and had been born in New Zealand. He and Anne married on May 25, 1885, and they would live in Narcoossee, Florida.
“very glad” . . . “marry only heiresses”: MHA to APF, April 26, 1885, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS. This is the last letter in the long correspondence between Clover and Anne.

[>]   “on account of the flies”: HA to CMG, June 18, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 617.
“a country less known”: HA to CMG, June 18, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 617.

[>]   “flaming yellow” . . . “Appenines”: HA to CMG, June 18, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 617. See also Robert S. Conte, The History of the Greenbrier, America’s Resort (Charleston, WV: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., 1989).
“so ideally bad”: HA to CMG, June 18, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 617.
Clover and Henry had company: Rebecca Dodge would remember the trip many years later, noting she had an “adorable picture of that cottage with Mr. Adams leaning against a post.” Rebecca (Dodge) Rae to Louisa Hooper Thoron, June 7 (no year), Unprocessed Thoron papers, *93M–35 (b), Houghton.
The first three photographs: MHA, n.d., album #9, 50.106, 50.107, 50.108.

[>]   “the ruins of a stone house”: MHA to RWH, May 13, 1883, LMHA, 448.
She took her first image: MHA, n.d., album #9, 50.111 and 50.112.

[>]   Henry carefully wrote captions: Lousia Hooper Thoron, MHA’s niece, also identified several photographs at some point. Henry kept the photograph albums in his library, and when his library books were donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society, the albums were donated alongside his books.
not with the trip: MHA, n.d., album #9, 50.96 and 50.97.

[>]   four photographs: MHA, n.d., album #9, 50.98, 50.99, 50.100, and 50.101.
liked to ride there: General John G. Parke had sent the Adamses the Union army map in 1881. MHA to RWH, November 20, 1881, LMHA, 301.
Rebecca Dodge: MHA, n.d., album #9, 50.109 and 50.110.
“we got a long way”: HA to CMG, June 18, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 617.

 

CHAPTER 21. A Dark Room

[>]   “Whither have you”: JH to HA, July 12, 1885, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“a month of rambling”: HA to JH, July 17, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 619.
“private opinion” . . . “without fail”: Sturgis Bigelow to MHA, July 4, 1885, Unprocessed Thoron papers, *93M–35 (b), Houghton. The letter was dated July 4 and sent to 1607 H Street and forwarded to Beverly Farms on July 25, 1880.
“a gloomy spot”: HA to CMG, June 18, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 617.

[>]   McLean Asylum: The McLean Asylum is now McLean Hospital in Belmont.
“own lips her horror” . . . “take your advice”: MHA to RWH, May 9, 1882, transcripts of MHA letters omitted from publication, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“I cannot bear”: MHA to RWH, May 14, 1882, transcripts of MHA letters omitted from publication, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“taste for horrors”: MHA to RWH, December 25, 1881, LMHA, 315. When Dr. Hooper warned his daughter, he was trying to protect her. But Clover was defensive about her father’s accusation, writing back that wanting to know the social gossip of the Boston circle from her father was motivated “only to save time, otherwise in June I must visit Somerville and ask to see the patients’ book, and then explore Mt. Auburn for new-laid graves.”
“The insane asylum”: MHA to RWH, January 26, 1879, Adams. When Clover’s Aunt Anne (who’d been married to Congressman Samuel Hooper) struggled with chronic health complaints, which only got more complicated after the deaths of her son, husband, and daughter, Clover empathized with her father about her horrible fate. “I’m sorry for poor Aunt Anne. You say she ‘feels deserted and justly so.’” But she also defended her cousin Annie, Aunt Anne’s only surviving daughter, who evidently had been steering clear of her mother. “Annie must have very strong motives for staying away,” Clover reasoned. But when Aunt Anne’s caretaker and companion, Miss Folsom, apparently quit, and the family was at loose ends about who might be able to take care of her, Clover made it clear she was no candidate. “I decline all responsibility in the matter, especially if Aunt Anne is to be in Beverly Farms,” she warned, recommending instead an acquaintance who had served as a companion for another “semi-insane” woman. MHA to RWH, June 11 and May 20, 1882, transcripts of MHA letters omitted from publication, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
She tried to keep up: Clover’s niece, Louisa Hooper, remembered that Clover “kept up her riding during the summer and a semblance of her daily round with her family in and out of the house.” As quoted in Chalfant, Better in Darkness, 497.

[>]   “Dearest Rebecca”: MHA to Rebecca Dodge, September 22, 1885, Unprocessed Thoron papers, *93M–35 (b), Houghton.
“in the gloomiest state of mind” . . . “towards us”: Ephraim Whitman Gurney to E. L. Godkin, October 16, 1885, Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, MS Am 1083 (350), Houghton. The letter is dated October 16, 1886, in Gurney’s handwriting. But it was clearly written the year before, in 1885, when Clover was still alive.
“every reckless” . . . “all of you real!”: EHG to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, envelope dated January 1, 1886, Swann.
“all the dilapidated Bostonians”: Brooks, as quoted in Alexander V. G. Allen, Phillips Brooks: Memories of His Life with Extracts from His Letters and Note-Books (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1907), 331.
“very bright and full of talk”: MHA to RWH, March 11, 1883, LMHA, 428.

[>]   For those surrounding Clover: Clover’s sister, Ellen, would later write to a friend, “We did the best we knew how and we know no better now.” EHG to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, January 1, 1886, Swann.
Rebecca remembered: Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, ii.
“It is a common event” . . . “describe adequately”: Henry Maudsley, M.D., Body and Will, Being an Essay Concerning Will in Its Metaphysical, Physiological, and Pathological Aspects (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1884), 307. The copy with Henry’s marginalia is in the Henry Adams Library at the MHS.

[>]   “I am peculiarly anxious”: HA to Henry Holt, November 13, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 636.
“goes nowhere”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, November 4, Letters, vol. 2, 633; “my wife”: HA to CMG, November 8, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 635.
“best love”: HA to JH, November 4, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 634.
“very low” . . . “before long”: John Field to Theodore F. Dwight, November 7, 1885, Field Family Letters, MHS.
“I saw the Adamses”: John Field to Theodore F. Dwight, November 12, 1885, Field Family Letters, MHS.

[>]   “much improved”: H. H. Richardson to JH, December 8, 1885, as quoted in Chalfant, Better in Darkness, 499.
Maréchal Niel roses: Lizzie Cameron’s mother, Eliza Sherman, wrote to her sister, Mary Sherman Miles, on December 21, 1885: “Mrs. Adams called here to see Lizzie on Friday evening, and sent her a gorgeous boquet [sic] of Marchineil roses.” Quoted in Letters, vol. 2, 641–42, n. 1.
The next morning: Chicago Daily Tribune, December 6, 1885.
“more patient” . . . “back to life”: This retelling of Clover’s death is based on her sister’s long letter to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot. EHG to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, envelope dated January 1, 1886, Swann. Some biographers, such as Ernest Samuels, cite the next day’s edition of Washington Critic, which contended that Henry had met a visitor at the door who wanted to see Clover, and that when he returned to her rooms to see if she was receiving visitors, he found her dead. But Ellen did not include this detail in her letter, and there is no information about the source for the newspaper account. See Middle Years, 272.

[>]   When Henry returned: The exact room in which Henry found Clover is not known.
“Wait till I have recovered”: HA to Rebecca Dodge Gilman, December 6, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 640.
Neighbors reported seeing him: General Anderson wrote his son, “Until his family arrived he saw, as far as I can learn, no one whatever, and I can imagine nothing more ghastly than that lonely vigil in the house with his dead wife. Poor fellow! I do not know what he can do.” Nicholas Anderson to Larz Anderson, December 9, 1885, in Letters and Journals of General Nicholas Longworth Anderson, ed. Isabel Anderson (New York: F. H. Revell, 1942), 252. See also Middle Years, 281.
“God only knows”: EHG to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, envelope dated January 1, 1886, Swann.
Rock Creek Cemetery: The vestry of Saint Paul’s Church, Rock Creek Parish of the Episcopal Church, owns and operates Rock Creek Cemetery. It is the oldest religious institution in the District of Columbia, established as a mission in 1712. It is a nonsectarian cemetery.
“spring comes early”: EHG to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, envelope dated January 1, 1886, Swann. The internment is listed as December 12, 1885, in the records of the church; copy in Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“a terminal inner loneliness”: A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 121. Alvarez cautions that suicides present a “profound ambiguity of motives even when they seem clear-cut” (132). If one can often identify the “local and immediate causes” of suicide, he observes, these “say nothing at all of the long, slow, hidden processes that lead up to it” (121). The real motives and reasons belong, instead, to “the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly, out of sight” (123).

[>]   Creativity can be compensatory: The biographer Hermione Lee argues that Virginia Woolf’s art grew out of her sense of loss, the shocks of her childhood, and the early deaths of her parents. While Lee is careful not to narrow Woolf’s accomplishments to this, even so, Woolf found deep consolation in her writing, a means of healing, and a way for her to find the “pattern hidden behind the ‘cotton-wool’ of daily life.” Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage Books, 1999; originally published 1996), 170. The trope of art’s debt to suffering is as old as Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the Greek warrior whose festering wound empowered the speed and accuracy of his bow. Philoctetes, for Edmund Wilson, dramatizes how Sophocles thought “a superior strength” was always “inseparable from disability.” See Wilson, “The Wound and the Bow,” in Literary Essays and Reviews 1930s & 40s, ed. Lewis M. Dabney (New York: Library of America, 2007), 271–473.
Things can sometimes go: “For the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic,” Alvarez warns. “By some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expression may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available” to the artist so that in dealing with dark themes—sadness, grief, isolation—the artist may discover she is “living it out.” Alvarez, The Savage God, 53–54.
“go to the Louvre”: MHA to EC, July 26, 1883, Adams.

 

CHAPTER 22. “That Bright, Intrepid Spirit”

207    “I think of you all the time”: CK to HA, December 10, 1885, Clarence King Papers, MHS. King went on to tell Henry of his plans to go to Mexico and generously asked if he’d like to come along, to recover and to “hear the waves of the Pacific,” promising that he’d “try to bear you cheerful company.”
“I can neither talk”: John Hay to HA, December 9, 1885, in Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, vol. 2, 98–99.

208    “peace that you have reached” . . . “extremity of suffering”: HA to Anna Barker Ward, December 22, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 644.
“sympathy has been a relief”: HA to Thomas F. Bayard, January 20, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 3.
“What a vast fraternity”: HA to Henry Holt, March 8, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 5.
“come out all right”: HA to John Hay, December 9, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 641.
“more sorry for poor Henry”: Quoted in The Middle Years, 166.
“we are anxious” . . . “better than you”: JH to HA, December 9, 1885, Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, vol. 2, 99.
“You are never out of my mind”: JH to HA, December 15, 1885, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“his face steadily”: Ephraim Whitman Gurney to E. L. Godkin, December 11, 1885, Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, MS Am 1083 (348), Houghton.

209    live “henceforward”: HA to EC, December 10, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 641.
“I should have written” . . . “have them still.” HA to APF, January 8, 1886, Henry Adams letters to Anne (Palmer) Fell, MHS.

210    “impossible subject”: Andrew Soloman, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001), 246.
“succumbed to hereditary”: HJ to Elizabeth Boott, January 7, 1886, HJ Letters, vol. 3, 107.
“dangerous impression” . . . “Sturgis blood”: CFA Memorabilia, May 3, 1891, Charles Francis Adams Papers, MHS. Charles Francis Adams Jr. had recently visited Clover’s grave to see the Saint-Gaudens statue for the first time. He wrote that Clover was “a mere child at the time” of Susan’s suicide, that she had been with Susan when she took a “fatal dose of arsenic,” and that this “made a dangerous impression on her mind; for she was old enough to have some idea of what it all meant.” But this is the only direct account of Clover’s presence at the Bigelow house at the time of Susan’s death. It was entirely possible Clover was there—she often spent considerable time with extended family during the summer months. Subsequent biographers cite this remembrance in the diary but mention no other corroborating evidence, and nowhere did Charles Francis Adams Jr. indicate how he knew the story.
“had been suffering”: Washington Critic, December 9, 1885; “general depression”: Whitman Gurney to E. L. Godkin, October 16, 1886 [misdated year; letter was written in 1885], Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, MS Am 1083 (350), Houghton.
Current modes of analysis and treatment save many lives and provide a means of understanding experiences that defy reason, but they were not available to Clover. Using them to interpret her condition may be helpful only up to a point. Perhaps interventions of talk therapy and pharmacology would have given her a fighting chance to recover. Perhaps not. Researchers have found that children who lose a parent or a parental figure before the age of eight face a much higher risk for suicide. One study of fifty suicides found in an overwhelming majority of the cases that “‘the death or loss under dramatic and often tragic circumstances of individuals closely related to the patient, generally parents, siblings, and mates.’” Alvarez, The Savage God, 130.
Mourning can be exceedingly complicated for children. Rage, guilt, and (in the words of William Styron) a “dammed-up sorrow” overflow later as self-destruction. Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Vintage Books, 1992, first published 1990), 80. Styron ties his catastrophic depression in Darkness Visible to “the concept of loss. Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin. At a later date I would gradually be persuaded that devastating loss in childhood figured as a probable genesis of my own disorder; meanwhile, as I monitored my retrograde condition, I felt loss at every hand” (56).
“a bad nervous break-down”: Trinity Church Sermon, dated February 7, 1965, Unprocessed Thoron papers, *93M–35 (b), Houghton.

211    “curious impregnability” . . . “unrecognized centre”: Alvarez, The Savage God, 131–32.
“stoic aspect” . . . “hates to be alone”: EHG to E. L. Godkin, June 9, 1886, Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, MS Am 1083 (319), Houghton. In an earlier letter to Godkin, Ellen had copied out for him a portion of Clover’s last note to her, the same passage she also sent to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot.
“being smashed about”: HA to CMG, April 25, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 8.
“a glorious success”: HA to JH, June 11, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 12; “who never complains”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, June 28, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 14.
“one of the sights”: HA to JH, July 24, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 24.
“as ready to come home”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, September 16, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 41.
“stood in the full centre”: HA to CMG, December 12, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 48.

212    “I hope you have all”: EWG to Ellen, Louisa, Polly, Fanny, and Mary Hooper, July 24, 1883, Unprocessed Thoron papers, *93M–35 (b), Houghton.
“When I married”: HA to CMG, December 12, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 48.
“harvest of thorns”: HA to EC, November 19, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 46.
“If the moon were to wander”: HA to CMG, December 12, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 48.
“During the last eighteen” . . . “whole relation”: HA to APF, December 5, 1885, Henry Adams letters to Anne Palmer Fell, MHS.

213 “I have been sad, sad, sad”: HA diary entry, May 20, 1888, reprinted in Letters, vol. 3, 114.

 

CHAPTER 23. “Let Fate Have Its Way”

[>]   “This little trinket”: HA to EC, December 25, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 645.
She would even try: On April 9, 1891, from Washington, Lizzie wrote to Henry, who was then traveling in the Polynesian islands, that she’d been “much to your house lately, using the darkroom . . . Everything looks as if you ought to be there. It is so clean and neat.” Henry Adams Papers, microfilm edition of the Adams Family Papers, MHS.

[>]   Henry’s biographer: Samuels, Middle Years, 326; Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 221.
“liked to flirt”: Elisina Tyler, quoted in Tehane, Henry Adams in Love, 74.

[>]   “I read your letters”: HA to EC, January 2, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 382; “I need not tell you”: HA to EC, February 6, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 406; “My only source”: HA to EC, June 3, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 482.
“I shall see you”: EC, quoted in Tehan, Henry Adams in Love, 124.
“In another week or ten days”: HA to EC, September 6, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 538.
“wait only to know”: HA to EC, October, 11, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 555.
“A long, lowering, melancholy”: HA to EC, November 5, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 556.
“Mrs. Cameron and Martha”: HA to Rebecca Dodge Rae, December 5, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 582.

[>]   “over sodden fields” . . . “Let fate have its way”: HA to EC, November 5–November 12, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 556–61. Henry included lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a favorite poet from his days in college: “Know you what it is when Anguish, with apocalyptic Never / To a Pythian height dilates you, and Despair sublimes to Power?” Then he referred to Bret Harte’s vernacular Gold Rush poem, “The Society upon the Stanislaus,” wherein a miner gets kicked in the stomach by another miner and, Henry said, “curls up . . . and for a time does not even squirm.” The critic Newton Arvin observed that when writing letters “the discomfort that so often afflicted him elsewhere quite fell away and he became simply a man with a pen—a man for whom, moreover, the pen was a predestined implement. Now he was wholly at one with himself and with his perfect audience of a single person, and all his powers as a writer—powers of sharp attention to people and things, of responsiveness to impressions, of insight and judgment, and above all of expression in language—found themselves in free and unembarrassed play.” Arvin, introduction to The Selected Letters of Henry Adams, ed. Newton Arvin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1951), xiv.
“Marry I will not”: HA to EC, November 14–28, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 565.

[>]   “without forgiveness”: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), 34. Henry’s relationship with Lizzie Cameron resembled in intensity and chastity the love story at the center of Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920). In the “hieroglyphic world” of Old New York in the 1870s, Newland Archer (newly engaged to another woman) and Madame Ellen Olenska renounce their passion for each other, knowing all too well they inhabit a social world that would not forgive impropriety. In fact, the similarities between Newland Archer’s passion for Ellen and Henry’s attraction to Lizzie are striking enough to raise the question as to whether Wharton was in any way inspired by Henry and Lizzie’s relationship when writing her novel. Wharton knew Henry, though the two had never been close friends. She attended social engagements and dinner parties with Henry and Lizzie when they were all in Paris in the early 1910s. Henry wrote to Charles Milnes Gaskell in 1910 that Edith Wharton was “almost the centre” of the “little American family-group” in Paris, which was “more closely intimate, and more agreeably intelligent, than any now left to me in America.” HA to CMG, December 14, 1910, Letters, vol. 6, 394. Wharton was later a close companion with Lizzie Cameron in Paris during World War I. She would have fathomed the subtext of Henry and Lizzie’s relationship, even if Lizzie never laid out its details. See Viola Winner, “The Paris Circle of Edith Wharton and Henry Adams,” Edith Wharton Review, vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 1992), 2–4.
his “final approval”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, March 10, 1892, Letters, vol. 4, 4.
“Budha [sic]—Mental repose”: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. and amplified by Homer Saint-Gaudens, vol. 1 (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 361. See also Cynthia Mills, “Casting Shadows: The Adams Memorial and Its Doubles,” American Art, vol. 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 2–25.
“philosophic calm”: Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences, 356. Homer Saint-Gaudens, in his interpolations in his father’s memoirs, wrote that his father “first sought to embody a philosophic calm, a peaceful acceptance of death and whatever lay in the future”; “beyond pain”: Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences, 361. Edith Greenough Wendell, wife of the Harvard literature professor Barrett Wendell, recalled standing before Clover’s grave in 1904, when Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John Hay walked up beside her. She asked Saint-Gaudens what he called the bronze figure. “He hesitated and then said, ‘I call it the Mystery of the Hereafter.’ Then I said, ‘It is not happiness?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is beyond pain, and beyond joy.’” Quoted in Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, vol. 1, 362.

[>]   “The work is indescribably noble”: John Hay to HA, March 25, 1891, Thayer, The Life of John Hay, vol. 2, 60–61.
placed no identifying plaque: The fifth point of HA’s last will, drafted in 1908, stipulates that “no inscription, date, letters or other attempt at memorial, except the monument I have already constructed, shall be placed over or near our grave.” Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“is his own artist”: HA to Edgar Dwight Shaw, December 20, 1904, Letters, vol. 5, 619. Shaw, managing editor of the Washington Times, had written to Henry, asking for the meaning of the bronze statue; “The interest of the figure”: Education, 314.
“intellectual grace”: HJ to William James, March 8, 1870, HJ Letters, vol. 1, 208.
When he finally arrived: Chanler, Roman Spring, 302. Chanler does not specify the exact date when Henry James visited Clover’s grave. But James wrote a letter to Edith Wharton, listing Henry’s H Street address above his salutation, which briefly mentioned his visit to Clover’s grave. HJ to Edith Wharton, January 16, 1905, HJ Letters, vol. 4, 340–42. Henry Adams also mentions James’s visit in a letter to Louisa Hooper on January 8, 1905, saying, “La Farge and Henry James have engaged rooms with me.” HA to Louisa Hooper, January 8, 1905, Letters, vol. 5, 625.

[>]   “very unhappy and sorry”: Roosevelt, quoted in Lorena A. Hickock, Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company), 92. Blanche Wiesen Cook speculates that in the cemetery’s “unmarked holly grove, [Eleanor] forged a healing bond with a stranger that helped to strengthen her to live the kind of life she wished to lead.” Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884–1933 (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 248.
      In 1906, Mark Twain visited Clover’s grave. There is no record that Twain ever met the Adamses, though they would have known of Twain’s writing. After spending time sitting in front of the bronze statue, the author said it was a figure “in deep meditation on sorrowful things.” Twain would always keep a small framed photograph of the monument on his mantelpiece. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, vol. 3 (1912; reprint, New York: Chelsea House, 1980), 1351.

 

EPILOGUE

[>]   In the spring of 1901: Ned was attended to first by his private physician for his injuries from the fall, including lacerations, a broken rib, and a punctured lung. But his condition deteriorated. His doctor admitted him to McLean Asylum a month later, where he stayed in a large suite of rooms in the Upham House until his death. The description of what happened in Ned Hooper’s last months is based on a family memo shown to the author by a Hooper family descendant.
“I find it hard to express” . . . “nightmares of the past”: William James to Ellen Hooper, May 10, 1901, Swann. James wrote this letter from his brother Henry’s home, Lamb House, in Rye, England. James was responding to the news of Ned Hooper’s hospitalization, but he had not yet heard about Ned’s death on June 25. Never before published, the letter reads in its entirety as follows: “In a letter from Mrs. Gibbens which arrived yesterday she says that she has heard that your father has gone to the McLean Asylum. I find it hard to express the sorrow I feel, both for him and for you, for I suppose his condition to have been akin to melancholia, and think it not improbable there may be suicidal impulses. He was such a model of soundness and balance, that this was the last thing I ever dreamed of as possible in his life. But anything and everything is possible for every mother’s child of us—we are all in the same box, and not only death but all forms of decay knock at our gate and summon us to go out into their wilderness, and yet every ideal we dream of is realized in the same life of which these things are part, and we must house it and suffer it and take whatever it brings for the sake of the ends that are certainly being fulfilled by its means, behind the screen. The abruptness of your father’s case shows well how purely extraneous and disconnected with the patient’s general character these cerebral troubles may be. Probably an internally generated poison in the blood which ‘science’ any day may learn how to eliminate or neutralize, and so make of all these afflictions so many nightmares of the past. I wish that I could see you all and hear about it and talk it over. I hope that before we get home it will be happily ended, and he as well as he was before the fall, though I don’t know what effects that may leave on his bodily condition. Dear Ellen, these experiences bring people close to their friends, and I hope that you and all of you are gaining this alleviation. I have known all the branches of your family so long, and have such an altogether peculiar fondness and admiration for them, and owe so much of what has been best in my life to them, that any disaster happening to any of them feels as if it came close to home. Let us all be nearer together after this—I wish I could be nearer still to your dear father—it is only to say this that I have taken up the pen. Alice joins me in a tenderest message of sympathy and so does H. J. Junior who is with us at last. We are doing well, and I so much better that I begin my Edinburgh lecture course next Thursday with a very stout heart indeed. It is cloudy in one place and sunny elsewhere, everlastingly. Love to all of you! Wm James”

[>]   “For thirty years”: HA to CMG, July 3, 1901, Letters, vol. 5, 260.
“trinity of fathers”: Mabel Hooper La Farge to Wilbur L. Cross, January 1941, as quoted in Tehan, Henry Adams in Love, 287.
Lizzie Cameron held a higher rank: From notes taken by Harold Dean Cater, HA-CK Papers.

[>]   Henry liked to read aloud: Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres was privately printed in 1904 and published commercially by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1913.
“I kept every scrap”: EC to HA, December 7, 1915, Letters, vol. 6, 704, n1.
“you’re not dead”: EC to HA, January 27, 1891, Henry Adams Papers, Microfilm edition of the Adams family papers, MHS.
“life is grim”: HA to Thomas F. Bayard, January 20, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 3.
bracingly honest: For an account of Henry’s great-grandfather, John Adams, and his reputation for honesty, see David McCullough’s John Adams, esp. 17–20.

[>]   “I often wonder”: EC to Louisa Hooper Thoron, February 18, 1934, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“I think that now you and I”: HA to Rebecca Dodge Rae, December 7, 1896, HA-CK Papers.
“wisdom is silence”: HA to APF, December 8, 1889, Henry Adams letters to Anne (Palmer) Fell, MHS. Andrew Delbanco asserts that “irony is the fire of the Education. It burns away the personal memories and leaves a floating consciousness trying to slip into phase with the flow of history.” Henry left out the years of his marriage and the circumstances of Clover’s death because “he could not bear to write about this event in the ironic voice of the rest of the ‘autobiography,’ as if it had happened at a distance, to be recorded by the bemused observer along with everything else.” Delbanco, Required Reading (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 99.
“to go back” . . . “to Beverly”: Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, civ.
“I wander every morning”: HA to EC, June 2, 1917, Letters, vol. 6, 754.

[>]   Later in the summer: HA to EC, August 3, 1917, Letters, vol. 6, 763.
“My child” . . . “your Aunt Clover”: Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, cii.
half-empty vial: According to Cater, after Henry died, Aileen Tone “looked in his desk for possible written instructions as to what he would like to have done in such an event. In the top drawer was the bottle, containing the remainder of the cyanide potassium, as it had been found after Mrs. Adams’s suicide.” HA-CK Papers. Aileen had been asked by Louisa Hooper to take up the role of secretary and companion to Henry, starting in late 1912. The two women had been friends while in Paris. In Aileen’s copy of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry had inscribed “to niece Aileen Tone from Uncle Henry.”
“Silent while years” . . . “till the end”: HA commonplace book, Homans Collection, MHS. Ernest Samuels suggests that Henry thought the “highest wisdom must be the wisdom of silence, the silence of perfected knowledge and being,” a value he expressed in his narrative poem “Buddha and Brahma,” composed in blank verse in 1891 and published much later in the Yale Review. Samuels, The Major Phase, 64. See also “Buddha and Brahma,” Yale Review, vol. 5 (1915): 82–89.
“The thorns he spares”: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: Second Series, 3rd ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1882).