September 22, 1876.—At four came Miss Phelps, at six came Mrs. Livermore. Ah! She is indeed a great woman—a strong arm to those who are weak, a new faith in time of trouble. She came to tea as fresh as if she had been calmly sunning herself all the week instead of speaking at a great meeting at Faneuil Hall the previous evening and taking cold in the process. She talked most wittily and brilliantly, beside laughing most heartily and merrily over all dear J.’s absurd stories and illustrations. He told her of a woman who came to speak to him after one of his lectures, to thank him for what he was trying to do for the education of women. She said, “I was educated at home with my brothers and taught all they were taught, learning my lessons by their side and reciting with them until the time came for them to go to college. Nobody ever told me I was not to go to college! And when the moment arrived and it dawned upon me that I was to be left behind to do nothing, to learn nothing more, I was terribly unhappy.”
“I know just how she felt,” said Mrs. Livermore; “there was a party of six of us girls, sisters and cousins, who had studied with our brothers up to the time for going to college. We were all ready, but what was to be done? We were told that no girls had entered Harvard thus far. We said to each other, we six girls will go to Cambridge and call upon President Quincy, show him where we stand in our lessons, and ask him to admit us. I was the youngest of the party. I was noted for being rather hot and intemperate in speech in those days, and the girls made me promise before we left the house [not to speak]—‘For as sure as you do,’ they said, ‘you will spoil all.’ So I promised, and we went to Cambridge and found Mr. Quincy. The girls laid their proposition before him as clearly as they dared, by showing him what they had done in their lessons. ‘Very smart girls, unusually capable girls,’ he said encouragingly; ‘but can you cook?’ ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ said one, ‘we have kept house for some time.’ ‘Highly important,’ he said; and so on during the space of an hour.”
Mrs. Livermore said she found he was toying with them and they were as far away from the subject in their minds as the moment they arrived, and, forgetting her promise of silence, she said: “‘But, Mr. Quincy, what we came to ask is, will you allow us to come to college when our brothers do? You say we are sufficiently prepared; is there anything to prevent our admission?’ ‘Oh, yes, my dear, we never allow girls at Harvard; you know, the place for girls is at home.’ ‘Yes, but, Mr. Quincy, if we are prepared, we would not ask to recite, but may we not attend the recitations and sit silent in the classes?’ ‘No, my dear, you may not.’ ‘Then I wish—’ ‘What do you wish?’ he said. ‘I wish I were God for one instant, that I might kill every woman from Eve down and let you have a masculine world all to yourselves and see how you would like that.’ Up to this point the girls had been kept up by excitement, but there we broke down. I tried the best I could not to cry, but I found my eyes were getting full, and the only thing for us to do was to leave as soon as we could for home. We lived in the vicinity of Copp’s Hill and I can see, as distinctly as if it were yesterday, the room looking out on the burial-ground in which we all sat down together and cried ourselves half-blind. ‘I wish I was dead,’ said one. ‘I wish I had never been born,’ said another. ‘Martha, get up from that stone seat,’ said a third; ‘you’ll get cold.’ ‘I don’t care if I do,’ said Martha; ‘I shall perhaps die the sooner.’ We were all terribly indignant.”
I was deeply interested in this history. I was standing over the cradle of woman’s emancipation and seeing it rocked by the hand of sorrow and indignation.
Other passages might be cited merely to illustrate the skill and industry of Mrs. Fields in reducing to narrative form the mass of reported talk of one sort or another which her husband brought home to her. A striking instance of this is found in the full rendering of a story told by R. H. Dana, Jr., to Fields, at a time when they were discussing a new edition of “Two Years before the Mast.” It is a long dramatic account of Dana’s experience on a burning ship in the Pacific, which he told Fields he had “never yet found time to write down.” In Charles Francis Adams’s biography of Dana, the bare bones of the story are preserved in a diary Dana was keeping during the voyage in which this calamity occurred. If Adams could but have turned to the diary of Mrs. Fields for 1868, he would have found a detailed description of an episode in Dana’s life which might well have been included in his biography.
From a letter of Edward Lear’s to Fields
But the if’s of bookmaking are hardly less abundant than those of history. If, for a single instance, this were in any real sense a biography of Mrs. Fields, it would be necessary for the reader to explore with the compiler the journals and letters written during two visits the Fieldses made to Europe in 1859 and 1869. But this would be foreign to the present purpose, which has not been either to produce a biography, or to evoke all the interesting persons known to Mrs. Fields, at home and abroad, but rather to present them and her against her own intimate and distinctive background. She herself has written, in her “Authors and Friends,” of Tennyson and Lady Tennyson, and to the pictures she has drawn of them it would be easily possible to add fresh lines from the unprinted records—as it would be, also, to bring forth passages touching upon many another familiar figure of Victorian England. The roving lover who justified himself by singing that
They were my visits, but thou art my home,
stated, in essence, the principle to which these pages have adhered. The frequenters of the house in Charles Street well knew that something of its color and flavor was derived from the excursions its hostess made into other scenes. Yet her own color and flavor were not those of the visitor, but of the visited. It is a pity that many who would have been welcome visitors—none more than Edward Lear—never came. Even as it is, there is ample ground for laying the emphasis of this book upon the panorama of a picturesque social life chiefly as seen from within the hospitable walls of Mr. and Mrs. Fields. When he died in 1881, a long and happy chapter in her long and happy life came to its close.