Daughters of the Puritans: A Group of Brief Biographies

by Seth Curtis Beach

Letters from Miss Dix at this period show that she had a sensitive nature, easily wrought upon, now inflamed to action and now melted to tears. "You say that I weep easily. I was early taught to sorrow, to shed tears, and now, when sudden joy lights up or unexpected sorrow strikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swelling tide of feeling." She is reading a book of poems and weeping over it,—"paying my watery tribute to the genius" of the poet. She longs for similar talents that she "might revel in the luxury of those mental visions that must hourly entrance a spirit that partakes less of earth than heaven." It will be remembered that her father was religious even to folly. Here was his child, only by judicious training, the stream was turned into channels of wise beneficence.

With the management of two schools, the supervision of the household, the care of two younger brothers, and ministries to her grandmother already advanced in years, Miss Dix was sufficiently occupied, but she found time to prepare a text-book upon "Common Things," gathering the material as she wrote. This, her first attempt at book-making, issued in 1824, was kept in print forty-five years, and went to its sixtieth edition in 1869. It was followed the next year by "Hymns for Children" selected and altered, and by a book of devotions entitled, "Evening Hours." Lengthening the day at both ends, "rising before the sun and going to bed after midnight," working while others slept, gave time for these extra tasks. Nature exacted her usual penalties. In the third year of this arduous labor, threatenings of lung troubles appeared which, however, she defied even when "in conducting her classes she had to stand with one hand on a desk for support, and the other pressed hard to her side as though to repress a hard pain." Meanwhile she wrote a bosom friend: "There is in our nature a disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which unless hourly combated will overcome the best faculties of our minds and paralyse our most useful powers.... I have often entertained a dread lest I should fall a victim to my besieger, and that fear has saved me thus far."

Besides the terror of lapsing into self-indulgence, she was stimulated to activity by the care of her brothers, for one of whom she seems to have felt special anxiety: "Oh, Annie," she writes, "if that child is good, I care not how humble his pathway in life. It is for him my soul is filled with bitterness when sickness wastes me; it is because of him I dread to die." Was there no one to advise her that the best care of her brother would be to care for herself, and that if she would do more, she must first do less! Where was Dr. Channing who, more than any other, was responsible for her intemperate zeal! It appears that Dr. Channing, "not without solicitude," as he writes her, was watching over his eager disciple. "Your infirm health," he says, "seems to darken your prospect of usefulness. But I believe your constitution will yet be built up, if you will give it a fair chance. You must learn to give up your plans of usefulness as much as those of gratification, to the will of God."

Miss Dix abandoned her school apparently in 1827, after six years of service and at the age of twenty-five. The following spring and summer she spent as a governess in the family of Dr. Channing at his summer home in Rhode Island. Her duties were light and she lived much in the open air, devoting her leisure to botany in which she was already "no mean proficient," and to "the marine life of the beautiful region." Very pretty letters were exchanged between her and Dr. Channing at the termination of the engagement. "We will hear no more of thanks," he wrote her, "but your affection for us and our little ones we will treasure among our most precious blessings." He invites her to renew the relations another year, and so she did.

To avoid the rigors of a New England climate, Miss Dix, for some years, spent her winters, now in Philadelphia, now in Alexandria, Va., keeping herself busy with reading "of a very multifarious kind,—poetry, science, biography, and travels,—besides eking out the scanty means she had laid by from her teaching by writing stories and compiling floral albums and books of devotion." In 1827, she published a volume of "Ten Short Stories for Children" which went to a second edition in 1832; in 1828, "Meditations for Private Hours," which went through several editions; in 1829, two little books, "The Garland of Flora," and "The Pearl, a Christmas Gift." Occasional brief engagements in teaching are also recorded in this period.

The winter of 1830, she spent with the Channings on the Island of St. Croix, in the West Indies, in her old capacity as governess. A daughter of Dr. Channing gives an interesting account of the preceptress of whom, first and last, she had seen so much. She describes Miss Dix as tall and dignified, very shy in manner, strict and inflexible in discipline. "From her iron will, it was hopeless to appeal. I think she was a very accomplished teacher, active and diligent herself, very fond of natural history and botany. She enjoyed long rambles, always calling our attention to what was interesting in the world around us. I hear that some of her pupils speak of her as irascible. I have no such remembrance. Fixed as fate we considered her."

Miss Dix returned from the West Indies in the spring, very much improved in health, and in the autumn, she reopened her school in the Dix Mansion, with the same high ideals as before and with such improved methods as experience had suggested. Pupils came to her again as of old and she soon had as many attendants as her space permitted. A feature of the school was a letter-box through which passed a daily mail between teacher and pupils and "large bundles of child-letters of this period" are still extant, preserved by Miss Dix with scrupulous care to the end of life. It was a bright child who wrote as follows: "I thought I was doing well until I read your letter, but when you said that you were rousing to greater energy, all my satisfaction vanished. For if you are not satisfied in some measure with yourself and are going to do more than you have done, I don't know what I shall do. You do not go to rest until midnight and then you rise very early." The physician had administered too strong a tonic for the little patient's health.

A lady who, at the age of sixteen, attended this school in 1833, writes of her eminent teacher as follows: "She fascinated me from the first, as she had done many of my class before me. Next to my mother, I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was in the prime of her years, tall and of dignified carriage, head finely shaped and set, with an abundance of soft, wavy, brown hair." The school continued in the full tide of success for five years, during which time, by hard labor and close economies, Miss Dix had saved enough to secure her "the independence of a modest competence." This seems a great achievement, but if one spends nothing for superfluities and does most of his labor himself, he can lay by his income, much or little. The appointments of the school are said to have been very simple, a long table serving as a desk for study, when it was not in use for dinner. Only one assistant is mentioned, who gave instruction in French and, perhaps, elementary Latin. Surely Miss Dix could handle the rest herself. The merit of the school was not in its elaborate appointments, but in the personal supervision of its accomplished mistress. So the miracle was wrought and at the age of thirty-three, Miss Dix had achieved a modest competence.

The undertaking had cost her her health once before, and now it cost her her health again. The old symptoms, a troublesome cough, pain in the side, and slight hemorrhages, returned and, having dragged her frail body through the winter of 1836, Miss Dix reluctantly closed her school in the spring and, in obedience to her physician, went to Europe for rest, with the intention of spending the summer in England, the autumn in France, and the winter in Italy. Prostrated by the voyage, she was carried to a hotel in Liverpool where she was put to bed with the forlorn prospect of being confined to her solitary room for an indefinite period of convalescence. But again Dr. Channing befriended her. From him she had received letters of introduction, one of which brought to her side Mr. William Rathbone, a wealthy merchant of Liverpool and a prominent English Unitarian. Mr. and Mrs. Rathbone insisted upon taking her to their home, a charming residence a few miles out of the city. Thither she consented to go for a visit of a few weeks, and there she remained, as an honored guest tenderly cared for, for eighteen months. "To the end of her days," says her biographer, "this period of eighteen months stood out in her memory as the jubilee of her life, the sunniest, the most restful, and the tenderest to her affections of her whole earthly experience." She wrote a Boston friend, "You must imagine me surrounded by every comfort, sustained by every tenderness that can cheer, blest in the continual kindness of the family in which Providence has placed me,—I with no claim but those of a common nature." And again, "So completely am I adopted into the circle of loving spirits that I sometimes forget I really am not to consider the bonds transient in their binding."

She very much needed these friends and their tender care. Nine months after her arrival, we hear of occasional hemorrhages from which she has been exempt for ten days, the pain in her side less acute, and her physician has given her permission to walk about her room. One would think that her career was practically ended, but, strange to say, the career which was to make her famous had not yet begun. From this date, her convalescence proceeded steadily, and she was able to enjoy much in the delightful home and refined social circle in which she found herself. "Your remark," she writes a friend, "that I probably enjoy more now in social intercourse than I have ever before done is quite true. Certainly if I do not improve, it will be through wilful self-neglect." Apparently, she was having a glimpse of a less prosaic existence than the grinding routine of a boarding school. Madam Dix died at the age of ninety-one, leaving her granddaughter, still in Europe, a substantial legacy, which sensibly increased her limited resources and, when the time came for action, left her free to carry out her great schemes of benevolence without hampering personal anxieties. It ought to preserve the memory of Madam Dix that she endowed a great philanthropist.