[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.).
