Mr. Thomas, in response to a letter from her asking advice with regard to the business affairs of the magazine, replies:—
“Make your terms cash. You will do well to keep constantly in remembrance that your prosperity almost entirely depends on your individual exertions. Puffing, advertising, scolding, will do little or nothing. Male agents will do little or nothing; but if you go as females, with suitable brief papers signed by eminent men, to show that you are not impostors, you will do well.... Be careful to guard against the possibility of suspicion. This you can readily accomplish by certificates from Saml. Lawrence, John Clark, and a few other Lowellites, countersigned (if convenient) by the governor, Daniel Webster, etc.”
In her valedictory at the close of Volume V., Miss Curtis announces that she severs her connection with The Offering for reasons “entirely of a personal nature,” and as a parting benison adds: “Friends, Patrons, and Foes (if we have any), may God bless you all with every perfect gift!”
Although her connection with The Offering was severed at this date, Miss Curtis remained in Lowell until called away by the illness of her mother. She continued her literary labors for a time, and was a correspondent of several newspapers. Harriot was the friend and correspondent of such men as John Neal, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel P. Willis, and others well known in literary and public life.
She had a taste for politics and wrote intelligently on questions that women were not supposed to understand. She contributed to the New York Tribune articles so clear and so caustic, that readers who did not share the common delusion that “H. G.” wrote everything in Horace Greeley’s paper, thought they must have been written by a man!
She was the friend and correspondent of “Warrington” (William S. Robinson), and when he was editor of the Boston Daily Republican, she made a prediction worthy of a male political prophet. In a letter dated May 4, 1848, she writes:—
Friend R.,—Probably no doubt exists but some self-sacrificing patriot may be found to accept the office of Chief Magistrate.... But who shall be the Whig candidate for this self-sacrifice, seems the most prominent question. A few days since I met Horace Greeley, and, as in duty bound, pronounced to him my prophecy of who could not be a successful candidate, although, out of the numerous aspirants for the Whig nomination, I could not prophecy who would be successful.... Will you give the public my assurance that Henry Clay cannot be President of the United States. I don’t care who the Democratic nominee may be; I don’t care how divided that party may be in action, nor how great may be the unanimity and enthusiasm of the Whigs; but I repeat, Henry Clay cannot be President....
I now enter upon the most painful part of her story, and I do it with a heavy heart; but I feel obliged to tell it, because it illustrates so well the lives which so many “solitary” women were then forced to lead,—lives of poverty, of self-abnegation, and of unselfishness. And in reading, in her letters to me, the sad record of her struggles, I can truly say, that never in all my life of over seventy years have I known of one so cruelly compelled by circumstances to hide the talent which “God had given her,” that she might become the angel of mercy to her suffering and needy relatives.
In the heyday of her literary career, she left the work for which she was the best fitted, to take the sole charge of her blind and aged mother, who lived until 1858, “having suffered all that mortal could suffer.” Harriot was her constant attendant day and night, vainly trying, in the mean while, to get some literary work to do at her home to help eke out the narrow income of the family.
Extracts from her letters written to my husband and myself will give some idea of her struggles to obtain remunerative employment.