Big old Sister Emmeline.
LUCY LARCOM.
A part of this sketch of Miss Larcom was written by me not long before her death, and submitted to her for her approval. The additions made are extracts from her letters, with my own personal reminiscences.
In response to my letter asking her approval of what I had prepared, Miss Larcom wrote:—
“I approve the sketch, and appreciate your way of writing it, though I dont often encourage living obituary notices of myself. What they call ‘fame’ amounts to so little. But some things about us in it may help others to know.... I am not ambitious to appear in any book; but if I am to be ‘written up,’ would much rather it would be done by a friend.... I told in ‘A New England Girlhood’ all I care to tell about my early life. You know something more of me, and you are at liberty to say what you choose. I have tried to make my life count for good to others, and to make my verses an expression of what I am trying to live. You once wrote something about me in The Independent that was fresh and natural. Why not utilize that? I have done nothing worth speaking of in a literary sense, but I love to write, and I suppose I shall go on trying to express myself in this way always, The material fact that I have never earned more than enough with my pen than to meet, with difficulty, the necessary expenses of living, does not in the least discourage me, or make me willing to write the trash that ‘pays.’ That is where I am now on the literary question, and that is where I am content to remain.”
It was in that early poetic atmosphere when our American bards first began to teach the young people of the time to love poetry for poetry’s sake, that Lucy Larcom received the first incentive to her life-work.
Lucy Larcom was born in one of the earliest settled coast towns in the state, Beverly, Mass., March 5, 1824. Her father, Benjamin Larcom, was a sea-captain; he died when she was a child, and her widowed mother, taking with her Lucy and two or three others of her younger children, then removed to Lowell. The year 1835 found her in one of the Lowell grammar schools, where her education went on until it became necessary for her to earn her living, which she began to do very early as an operative in a cotton-factory.
In her “Idyl of Work” the mill-life is truthfully portrayed, with the scenery, characteristics, style of life, thought, and aspirations peculiar to New England womanhood of that period.
In writing to me of this book, in 1875, she says, “What do you think of that name for a reminiscence of Lowell life? Of course you won’t like it as poetry; and there is not so very much truth in it, except in general outlines of the way of living. I had to write my remembered impressions, and everybody had different ones. The story, such as it is, is manufactured, of course; for I didn’t want any personalities, so I haven’t even got myself in, that I know of.”...
But it is very easy to detect, in her loving descriptions, many of her young companions, who shared with her the simplicity of those days of toil; and in following with her the career of some of those bright spirits, and watching their success in their varied pathways through life, it is very pleasant for me to be able to corroborate what she has said.