Marian “Clover” Hooper lived in Boston and, as a Sturgis on her mother’s side, circulated in the same genteel circles and urban spaces as the Adamses. She probably met Henry in the spring of 1866, when she and her father, Robert Hooper, began a tour of Europe. The Governor maintained something of an open-house policy for visiting Americans, and a number of Bostonians, including the Hoopers, showed up at the U.S. legation in London. It would be convenient to report on Henry and Clover’s immediate and mutual attraction, though on this day neither of the interested parties seemed particularly interested. Nearly five more years passed, rather, before their courtship commenced in the house of Henry’s Harvard colleague, Ephraim Whitman Gurney, the spouse, as noted earlier, of Clover’s sister, Ellen. At thirty-three the by all appearances celibate Henry gave every indication of entering the ranks of confirmed bachelorhood. He seemed unshakably wedded to his work, looked older than his age, and suffered from delicate nerves, a “weakness,” he later recalled, “exaggerated” as the years passed. Photographs of Clover (the very few that she allowed to be taken), accentuate a prominent nose, rounded chin, and heavy cheeks. Her refusal to sit for the camera suggests that she may have suffered the insecurity of many plain-looking girls born to pretty mothers. Clover and Henry were cerebral, self-conscious, and no doubt aware that their respective windows for marriage and children, if still open, were quietly closing. They developed a strong rapport based on mutual sympathy and respect; they were intelligent, occasionally caustic, and not a little snobbish.1
To many who knew them, however, Clover and Henry must have seemed a curious pairing. The Adamses were a “political family,” while the Hoopers, with connections to Concord’s fading Transcendentalist tradition, claimed a slender place among New England’s literary elite. Clover’s mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1848, when Clover was five, had won a reputation as a regional writer of some note. A friend of Emerson, she published her poetry in the Dial, the chief Transcendentalist publication; Margaret Fuller, author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and a Dial editor, said of Hooper, “I have seen no woman more gifted by nature than she,” while an impressed Henry David Thoreau quoted the final stanzas of her verse “The Wood-Fire” in Walden. The Adamses, by contrast, were habitual writers, fillers of diaries and daybooks, authors of numerous volumes of letters, memoirs, and public papers, but they lacked, and knew they lacked, and made no apologies for the lacking, a finer appreciation of words as the means to convey complex emotions. Henry’s engagement gift to Clover, a copy of novelist William Dean Howells’s Their Wedding Journey, which he had recently assayed for the North American Review, seems an oddly impersonal tribute. In such innocent if unclever gestures, he understood that to the old Concord circle, “all Adamses were minds of dust and emptiness, devoid of feeling, poetry or imagination; little higher than the common scourings of State Street; politicians of doubtful honesty; natures of narrow scope.”2
If equipped with differing sensibilities, the Adamses and Hoopers more assuredly shared the outlook of an ebbing New England gentry. The Sturgises were once an immensely wealthy clan whose original success their offspring might exploit, though never repeat. Clover’s maternal grandfather, William F. Sturgis, had made a fortune as a trader and sea captain; his ships plowed the Pacific from Alaska to Macau fending off Chinese pirates and trafficking in otter skins and other commodities. In 1810 the twenty-eight-year-old Sturgis returned to Boston a merchant prince, married Elizabeth Davis, and established a trading partnership, Bryant & Sturgis, that dominated America’s Pacific trade for a generation. But what were succeeding Sturgises to do except to manage the wealth they played no role in accruing? The philosopher George Santayana, author of The Last Puritan, which details the decline of the old Boston gentry and became the second-best-selling novel of 1936 behind only Gone with the Wind, observed this family from an unusually close perspective. His mother, Josefina Borrás y Carbonell, was first married to a second-generation Sturgis, George, who died in 1857 at the age of forty. The younger George, the product of Josefina’s second marriage, to Agustín Ruiz de Santayana, was brought to Boston at the age of nine to live with the Sturgises. He came to see his adopted family as a spent historical force. Their “type,” he insisted, “ha[d] since been replaced by that of great business men or millionaires, building up their fortunes at home.” Resolved to lives of “romance and tragedy,” these once “great merchants,” he continued, inevitably succumbed to the industrial age, making “their careers and virtues impossible for their children.”3 Henry, of course, felt a similar sense of displacement by the same men and by the same process. In deciding to marry, he and Clover produced a union of dynastic New England names—ancient, respected, but inescapably bleaching into the background.
Cautiously keeping his nearly yearlong courtship with Clover a secret, Henry apprised Brooks, the youngest Adams, of his impending wedding in a March 1872 letter, waiting until the fourth paragraph to announce the news: “And now prepare yourself for a shock. I am engaged to be married. There!.… I have had the design ever since last May and… threw myself head over heels into the pursuit, and succeeded in conducting the affair so quietly that this last week we became engaged without a single soul outside her immediate family suspecting it.” Henry closed by warning Brooks to refrain from adopting a judgmental (that is to say, Adams-like) attitude: “I shall expect you to be very kind to Clover, and not rough, for that is not her style.”4 He had yet to tell his older brothers and pointedly communicated this fact to Brooks.
Some three weeks later Henry acquainted Gaskell of his decision. In describing Clover he seemed almost eager to reduce her that others not. “She is certainly not handsome; nor would she be quite called plain.… She dresses badly.” His facetious candor then lit upon those qualities in Clover that he admired most—and that he knew Gaskell would also respect: “She knows her own mind uncommon well. She does not talk very American. Her manners are quiet. She reads German—also Latin—also, I fear, a little Greek, but very little. She talks garrulously, but on the whole pretty sensibly. She is very open to instruction. We shall improve her.… She decidedly has humor and will appreciate our wit.” There is embedded in this prescription for improvement the suggestion that her husband and his friends could aid Clover in more than intellectual ways. Henry likely entered their marriage with some slight concern for his fiancée’s mental health (“I know better than anyone the risks I run,” he confessed to Brooks), perhaps imagining that an active social regimen might ward off any neurotic tendencies and provide stability. The Sturgises were rumored to suffer from depression; in 1853, when Clover was nearly ten, her aunt Susan Sturgis Bigelow ended her life and that of her unborn child by taking arsenic. Upon learning of Henry’s engagement his brother Charles unmindfully chimed in, “Heavens!—no!—they’re all crazy as coots. She’ll kill herself, just like her Aunt!”5 Henry’s mother, by contrast, welcomed news of the engagement, while the Governor restrained whatever trepidation he may have held and, from the uncritical distance of Geneva, approved of the union.
The intimate wedding (numbering, including the minister, an auspicious baker’s dozen) took place at the Hoopers’ North Shore summer cottage on June 27. A fussy Charles made light of the occasion when describing the day for his absent father:
The only persons present were the bride’s father and fair brothers and sisters, by nature and in law, the groom’s two brothers and their wifes, a clergyman and an old family servant,—thirteen human beings in all, including the unfortunate victims themselves. The ceremony lasted in the neighborhood of two minutes, after which we all trundled into luncheon and sat down anywhere and the bride, at the head of the table, proceeded to calm her agitation by carving a pair of cold roast chickens. John and I dished out the bread and labored hard [to] stimulate an aspect of gaiety, but the champagne wasn’t cool and made its appearance only in very inadequate quantities, and the aspect of affairs tended toward the commonplace.6
More generously, Clover trusted that the “wedding lunch went off charmingly,” while a day after the ceremony Henry offered a gallant promise to his father-in-law: “I wish it were in my power to make the loss of Clover less trying to you, but I know of no way of doing it than by making her as happy as I can.” After several quiet days at Cotuit Port on the Cape, followed by a quick respite at Quincy, the couple embarked on an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt. Sailing on the gravely named Siberia they were joined by a host of Brahmins—including the James Russell Lowells, Francis Parkman, and John Holmes, a brother of the poet Oliver Wendell—all heading toward various summer sanctuaries. It proved to be an awful voyage. Only three days after departure Henry confided in an anxious letter to Clover’s father back in Beverly of her longing to be with the Hoopers. “Wishes she had staid at home,” he wrote. “Much sleep. An hour or two walk on bridge. Wretchedness aggravated by the idea of a week more of it. Can’t read. Can’t talk. Homesick for Cotuit. For Beverly.” Three days later Clover offered her own sullen perspective of their journey, reporting the deck to be “nasty damp” and relating her unwelcome discovery in steerage of a coffin under construction for a fellow passenger just passed. She declared herself eager to see all that the Continent had to offer on what she vowed would be the couple’s “last trip to Europe.”7
Following a brief stay at Wenlock Abbey with Gaskell, the couple proceeded to the Mediterranean by way of several weeks’ sightseeing in Bonn, Berlin, Dresden, Nuremberg, Bern, and Geneva. Moving on to Italy they briefly decamped in Cadenabbia, a charming resort town on the west shore of Lake Como, before proceeding to Florence. In late November they sailed to Alexandria, commencing on the long-planned centerpiece of their trip: a Nile excursion aboard the comfortable Isis, a rented houseboat. While wending down the river Clover appears to have suffered some sort of ailment, perhaps even a brief collapse. The historiography is mixed, though most scholars believe that depression had set in. What we know is that she missed her father intensely and seemed nervous and slightly disoriented upon reaching Egypt after nearly five months abroad. Writing to Dr. Hooper in early December from Cairo, she offered a cryptic account of visiting a local mosque: “In one part of the immense building a dozen or more dervishes dressed in long stuff gowns and high white hats spun round and round for more than half an hour… the motion growing faster every minute; it was the most extraordinary spectacle and by no means a pleasant one. It gave one the feeling of being surrounded by maniacs.”8
We know further that while on the Nile Clover remained unusually silent, going more than two weeks without attending to her correspondence. One biographer has conjectured that “she felt overwhelmed by all she was experiencing: the sights, smells, and sounds of the Nile, heightened by the heat, by confinement on the boat, and by the physical intimacy of married life.” Accustomed to being in control of her actions, Clover, suddenly uprooted, may have grown distrustful and despondent. The easy affection she had for her father—who led a bachelor’s existence after his wife’s death—now found its tense complement in the careful politeness of a new husband. But Henry’s attentiveness could not disguise the fact that most of their travels lacked the spontaneity of a shared experience. Their movements in Europe, rather, had retraced many of his previous transits, brought them into contact with his friends, and might even be said to have had the functional effect of enhancing his teaching of medieval history at Harvard. Clover could see nothing of herself aboard the Isis. Her experiences in Egypt seem to have been filtered through homesickness, fatigue, and the not yet negotiated circumstances of being a spousal adjunct to an Adams. Shortly before idling down the Nile she had described Alexandria, a city of some 220,000, as “the dirtiest and most hideous place I ever imagined.”9
In March 1873, their Egyptian journey now over, Henry and Clover devoted some four months to a slow trek north, taking in Naples and Rome before brief stays in Paris and London prefaced the inevitable return home. Upon docking that summer back in America, Henry went straight to Quincy to visit his parents while Clover traveled alone to Beverly Farms to be with her father. United in Boston, they took as their residence a fashionable home at 91 Marlborough Street in the new Back Bay, just around the corner from Dr. Hooper’s Beacon Street quarters. Though “very small,” it held the couple’s trove of books and the twenty-five packing crates filled with fashionable bric-à-brac brought back from Europe. Not long after, the Adamses purchased some twenty acres at Beverly Farms, erecting a summer retreat next to Hooper’s. They prized this seasonal dwelling (“our log-hut in the woods” where Henry played the rustic), until Clover’s death. For a few years, before Adams’s 1877 resignation from Harvard, they fashioned a shared social life, part Brahmin, part Cambridge scholar, and, so they liked to think, part bohemian. Henry James, an acquaintance of Clover’s since their childhood, captured the couple’s particular bonhomie when he described them as “very pleasant, friendly, conversational, critical, [and] ironical.” In another communication he allowed that the sharpness of their gossipy judgments threatened to become “rather too critical and invidious.”10
The Adamses’ choice of residences suggests the state of their respective obligations and emotional commitments. Clover clearly required the nearby presence of her father, while Henry sought a polite distance from his own people. His favorite relations, sister Loo and grandmother Louisa, had made similar escapes. And perhaps he saw elements of these women in Clover, recognizing in her “invidious” opinions of Boston a certain echo. Rarely did Henry suffer convention lightly and, in taking a wife, this wife, he reached for something both familiar and elusive.