Loom and spindle

by Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson

Riches have fallen to the lot of some of those young girls, and to others a degree of distinction in various situations and occupations; but have they not, from their better surroundings, ever looked back, as she does, to those dear old simple days, so full of health and endeavor, so free from care, as among the happiest of their lives? Then, ignorance of the world was bliss, and hope and aspiration reigned supreme.

My first recollection of Lucy Larcom is as a precocious writer of verses in The Lowell Casket, where the editor, Mr. George Brown, in his notice of them, said, “They were written by a young lady of thirteen, who was beyond a doubt inspired by the Nurses,”—a misprint, of course, for “Muses;” although the author was so young, that the mistake was not so far wrong.

This, however, was not her first attempt at verse-making, since she began to write while a child of seven or eight years, in the attic of her early home in Beverly. The title of these first verses was “A Thunder Storm,” and they were read with wonder by her admiring brothers and sisters.

Two pictures of her in that early factory-life remain in my memory. By the Merrimack River, whose romantic banks she loved to describe, on a bridge which crossed a narrow part of the stream, I once passed her, a tall and bonnie young girl, with her head in the clouds. After a little nod of recognition, as I looked up at her,—for, although she was only a year older than I, she was much larger and more mature,—she went on. But to me she seemed so grand, so full of thought, that, with girlish admiration for one who had written verses, I forgot my errand, turned, stood still, and thoughtfully watched her out of sight.

Miss Larcom’s first work as a Lowell operative was in a spinning-room on the Lawrence corporation where her mother lived. At first she was a “doffer,” with the other little girls; after that she tended a spinning-frame, and then worked in the dressing-room beside “pleasant windows looking towards the river.” After this she “graduated” into the cloth-room, and it was here that I saw my second picture of her. The cloth-room was considered by some of the mill-girls a rather aristocratic working-place because of its fewer hours of confinement, its cleanliness, and the absence of machinery. In this room the cloth, after it had been finished and cut into thirty or forty yard pieces in the weaving-room, was measured on hooks, one yard apart, until the length of each piece was told off. I used often to run in and see her at her work; and to my imaginative eyes she was like a Sibyl I had read of, as with waving arms she told off the yards of cloth in measured rhythm, and it seemed to be verses, and not cloth, that lay heaped up behind her.

The last two years of her Lowell life (which covered in all a period of about ten years), were spent in the same room; the latter part of the time she was the book-keeper, and recorded the number of pieces and bales. Here she pursued her studies, and in intervals of leisure some text-book usually lay open on her desk, awaiting a spare moment.

Lucy Larcom’s first contribution to The Lowell Offering, “My Burial Place” (written at sixteen), was published in No. 4 of the first series, and was sent to the editor by her sister Emmeline, while Lucy was on a visit to Beverly. With this exception, she was not a contributor to the magazine while it was under Mr. Thomas’s editorship. During that time she wrote for The Operatives’ Magazine, which was published under the supervision of her pastor, the Rev. Amos Blanchard, and which contained only articles written by the young ladies who were members of an Improvement Circle connected with his parish.

It may be said here that, whatever sectarian feeling there may have been between these rival publications, it was not shared by the girls themselves, at least not by Lucy Larcom. She simply and naturally followed the lead of her pastor. After the “orthodox” magazine stopped, and Miss Curtis and Miss Farley took charge of The Offering, Lucy became one of the corps of writers; and many of her verses and essays, both grave and gay, can be found in its bound volumes. Her first contribution to Volume Third, “The River,” a poem, appeared in October, 1843. She wrote letters from “Looking Glass Prairie,” Illinois; and many of her “prose poems,” published afterwards as “Similitudes,” with several early poems, including a different version of “The Lady Arabella,” first appeared in The Lowell Offering.

Our friendship began when we were little girls in “pantalets,” when we were “doffers” together in the cotton-mill, and was continued to the end of her life. She also became my husband’s friend; and during his lifetime she was our frequent guest, and was always “Aunt Lucy” to our children. Mr. Robinson had great faith in her possibilities as a writer, and he published her verses in his newspaper long before they found admittance into the magazines.

It was through him, while he was the reader (or “stopper”) for The Atlantic Monthly, during Mr. Lowell’s editorship, that “The Rose Enthroned” was brought to the notice of the poet, and afterwards admitted into the pages of the magazine. In a letter to Mr. Robinson, Miss Larcom says of this poem: “‘The Rose Enthroned’ was written in 1860, and published in June, 1861, through your mediation, you know.”