LYDIA S. HALL.
This writer was the poet, par excellence, of the early volumes of The Offering; as Lucy Larcom said, “She was regarded as one of the best writers of verse while I was in Lowell.”
“The Tomb of Washington,” first printed in No. 1 of the first series of The Offering, was thought to be a wonderful production, and was widely copied. She also wrote for that publication “Old Ironsides,” a poem widely read and quoted. She left Lowell before 1848, and went as a missionary to the Choctaw Indians, travelling on horseback a greater part of the way, across the unsettled region.
From letters received from Mrs. Harvey Jones, of Compton, Cal., I am able to gather up a few scattered threads in the eventful life of this pioneer Indian missionary.
Mrs. Jones says:—
“My dear Mrs. Robinson,—I was associated in missionary work among the Choctaw Indians with Miss Lydia S. Hall. We were together five years, and I learned to regard her as a dear friend; but in some way I have lost all trace of her. Our relations in the missionary work were very pleasant. She was some years my senior, and her riper experience and judgment were invaluable to me. Her work in the Indian Seminary was thorough, and she was regarded as the Choctaw’s friend. Of her literary work I know but little. She wrote occasionally for different periodicals. Her contributions to Woodworth’s ‘Youth’s Cabinet’ I have specially in mind.... Since I lost trace of her, I came across a poem in the Christian Union, entitled ‘Our Elder Brother.’ It was very rich and tender. It was signed ‘L. S. H. G.’ I did not then know of her marriage; but I said to myself, ‘That sounds like Miss Hall.’... Her nature was intense and positive, she had high ideals, and she could not always be patient towards what she considered wrong. Hers was a checkered life, from infancy to age. She was born in 1818.”
In “border-ruffian” days Miss Hall lived in Kansas, and was an owner of considerable real estate. She lived on the line of emigration, was hostess of a sort of “Wayside Inn,” and was sometimes obliged to keep the peace among the lawless men who infested that part of the country. She would have no quarrelling, drinking, nor gambling on her premises. She was well able to enforce these regulations, being a woman of great courage and most commanding presence.
From a newspaper article some years ago, of which I did not preserve the date, I quote the following:—
“A LOWELL FACTORY-GIRL UNITED STATES TREASURER.
“Miss Lydia S. Hall, who is now acting U. S. Treasurer in the absence of the male chief, was once a Lowell factory-girl, and was a contributor to The Lowell Offering.... Meeting with some misfortune with regard to titles of property, she went to Washington, and has a clerkship in the Treasury Department since, being also engaged in studying law in order to enable her to secure her property rights in Kansas.... She is a lady of great versatility of talent, and would fill a higher position than the one she now occupies with credit.”
Miss Hall’s letters to Lucy Larcom would have thrown much light on her stirring and eventful life, but these were destroyed before I had thought to ask for them. Her married name was Graffam, but whether she is alive or dead, I do not know.
HARRIET JANE HANSON.
WRITTEN BY LUCY LARCOM.[3]
[3] Miss Larcom prepared this sketch for another purpose, two years before she died; and it is substantially the same, with the addition of a few details, which she suggested and permitted me to supply.
In these days, when woman’s place in the community, as well as in the family, is coming to be acknowledged; when her abilities in every direction find use and scope; when the labor of her hands, head, and heart is everywhere abundantly honored,—it is well for our younger toilers to see what has been accomplished by those who grew up under circumstances more difficult than those by which they are surrounded. Labor has always been honorable for everybody in our steady-going New England life, but it was not as easy for a young woman to put her mental machinery into working order forty years ago as it is now. Her ambition for the education of her higher faculties was, however, all the greater for the check that was put upon it by the necessities of a longer day’s toil and the smaller compensation of the older time. It is one of the wholesome laws of our nature that we value most that which we most persistently strive after through obstacles and hindrances.
The author of “The New Pandora” is an illustration of what has been done by one such woman, the development of whose mind began as a child in the Lowell cotton-mills. The book is commended by reviewers as an admirably written composition, a beautiful and successful dramatic poem of woman, the result of ripe years of thought.
Mrs. Robinson’s maiden name was Harriet Jane Hanson, and she is by “long descent” of good New England parentage. Her father, William Hanson, was descended from the ancestor who first settled in Dover, N.H.—one of a long line of English Quakers. He was a carpenter, and learned his trade of Peter Cudworth, on Merrimac Street in Boston.
Her mother, Harriet Browne, was of Scotch and English descent, her paternal ancestor, in this country, being Nicholas Browne,—always spelled with an e,—who was a member of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts from Lynn in 1641, and afterwards from Reading, in 1655-1656, and 1661.
Her great-grandfather, William Browne, of Cambridge, in 1705 sold sixty acres of upland and swamp to Thomas Brattle, Esq., of Boston, Treasurer of the society known as “The President and Fellows of Harvard University;” and on this land many of the Harvard College buildings now stand. He was a soldier in the French and Indian war in Canada.
Miss Hanson’s grandfather, Seth Ingersoll Browne, was a non-commissioned captain at the battle of Bunker Hill; and the old “King’s arm” he carried on that decisive day is still in the possession of one of his grandsons. He was one of the “Mohawks” who helped to throw the tea into Boston Harbor; and his name is written in marble, among his companions of “The Boston Tea Party,” in Hope Cemetery, Worcester, Mass. He is buried in the Granary Burying-ground, in Boston.
Harriet Hanson was born in Boston, Mass., Feb. 8, 1825, and in 1832 removed with her widowed mother and her three brothers to Lowell, where they lived for some years on one of the manufacturing “corporations.” Her first attempt at writing for the press was made while she was yet an operative in the Lowell mills, in the “annuals” and newspapers of the time. She was also a contributor to The Lowell Offering, and was on intimate terms with its editors and contributors.
In 1848 she was married to William S. Robinson, journalist and parliamentarian, who, as “Warrington,” became well known as the war correspondent in the Springfield Republican, the New York Tribune, the New York Evening Post, and in other newspapers. He was also the author of “Warrington’s Manual of Parliamentary Law.” Mr. Robinson died March 11, 1876. Their children are Harriette Lucy (married Sidney D. Shattuck of Malden, Mass.), Elizabeth Osborne (married George S. Abbott of Waterbury, Conn.), William Elbridge (died young), and Edward Warrington (married Mary E. Robinson of Denver, Col.).
Harriet H. Robinson at 28.
Mrs. Robinson is deeply interested in all the movements which tend to the advancement of women, and uses her pen and her voice freely in their behalf. She was the first woman to speak before the Select Committee on Woman Suffrage in Congress, and has spoken for the cause before the legislature of her own State, where she is not only a citizen, but a voter as far as the law allows.
The woman’s club movement has always had her firm support; she assisted at the formation of The General Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1890, and was a member of its first advisory board; she is a Daughter of the American Revolution, and a member of the N. E. Historic Genealogical Society.
Mrs. Robinson’s first published book was “Warrington Pen Portraits,” a memoir of her husband, with selections from his writings. She has also written “Massachusetts in the Woman-Suffrage Movement,” and “Captain Mary Miller,” a drama.
But her best literary achievement in book form is her latest, “The New Pandora,” a poem of which any writer might well be proud. There are passages of exquisitely clear-cut poetry in the drama, and gleams of true poetic aspiration lighting up the homely toil of the woman who knows herself not of earthly lineage.
The “Chorus of Ills” beginning their flight is a strong chant, as classical in its strain as some of Shelley’s in his imaginative dramas. Indeed, the whole poem is so classically thought out and shaped as to be lifted quite above what is popular in style, and is for that reason less likely to attract the attention it deserves.
Pandora naturally has at first no love for the rude mate to whom she has been assigned, and it is the death of their little child that brings their hearts together in a real human affection. The loss of this little first-born woman child makes a moan of tenderest pathos through the whole poem, and is a most motherly touch, rarely found in poetry; and the feeling colors the whole book. The poem is pervaded with the sacredness of the domestic affections. The style is strong and clear, and one feels, in reading it, a subtle spiritual fragrance, the beauty, the holiness, the immortality, of human love.
Perhaps her “Pandora” breathes the very truest aspiration of many a heart among that far-away throng of industrious, onward-looking maidens:—
“But this I ask, that I may be allowed by thee
To do one single thing to make my kind more good,
More happy, for that I have lived.”
All working-women have reason for strengthening themselves by study and thought, seeing that such a poem as “The New Pandora” is the heart-and-brain product of one who grew up as a working-girl.
Harriet H. Robinson, at 68.
To the writer of this brief notice it is pleasant to recall the time when the author of this beautiful poem and herself were children together, school companions and workmates; when an atmosphere of poetry hung over the busy city by the Merrimack, and when its green borders burst into bloom with girlish dreams and aspirations.
Mrs. Robinson celebrated her seventieth anniversary Feb. 8, 1895, at her home in Malden, Massachusetts.