Margaret Fuller A New American Life

Megan Marshall
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 Table of Contents

Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Margaret Fuller, engraving
Prologue
I. YOUTH
Three Letters
Ellen Kilshaw
Theme: “Possunt quia posse videntur”
Mariana
II. CAMBRIDGE
The Young Lady’s Friends
Elective Affinities
III. GROTON AND PROVIDENCE
“My heart has no proper home”
“Returned into life”
“Bringing my opinions to the test”
IV. CONCORD, BOSTON, JAMAICA PLAIN
“What were we born to do?”
“The gospel of Transcendentalism”
Communities and Covenants
“The newest new world”
V. NEW YORK
“I stand in the sunny noon of life”
“Flying on the paper wings of every day”
“A human secret, like my own”
VI. EUROPE
Lost on Ben Lomond
“Rome has grown up in my soul”
“A being born wholly of my being”
VII. HOMEWARD
“I have lived in a much more full and true way”
“No favorable wind”
Epilogue: “After so dear a storm”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Sample Chapter from THE PEABODY SISTERS
Buy the Book
About the Author
 Copyright © 2013 by Megan Marshall

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this

book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Marshall, Megan.
Margaret Fuller : a new American life / Megan Marshall.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-547-19560-5 (hardback)
1. Fuller, Margaret, 1810–1850. 2. Authors, American—19th century
—Biography. 3. Feminists—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PS2506.M37 2013
818'.309—dc23
[B 2012042179

eISBN 978-0-547-52362-0
v2.0313
In memory of—
E.S.
E.S.M.
&
E.W.M.M.
Where I make an impression it must be by being most myself.
—Margaret Fuller to her editor John Wiley, 1846
 List of Illustrations

FRONTISPIECE([>])
Margaret Fuller, engraving by Henry Bryan Hall Jr. Graphics File,
Prints & Drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

PART I([>])
Timothy Fuller, portrait by Rufus Porter. Fruitlands Museum, Harvard,
Mass., F.1992.6.

Margarett Crane Fuller, daguerreotype, c. 1840s. Courtesy of Frances

Fuller Soto.

“The Old Hovey Tavern, Cambridgeport, Which Was Burned June

12th 1828,” lithograph, c. 1820s. Boston Athenaeum, Prints and
Photographs Dept., B B64C1 Hot.h.(no.1).

([>])
PART II
Margaret Fuller, sketch by James Freeman Clarke. Houghton Library,
Harvard University, MS Am 1569.3 (11).

James Freeman Clarke, sketch by his sister, Sarah Freeman Clarke.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1569.3 (10).

“Perspective View of the Seat of the Hon. Francis Dana,” watercolor

by Jacob Bigelow, 1806, for his Harvard College mathematical thesis.
Harvard University Archives, HUC 8782.514 (126).

PART III([>])
Photograph of 108 Pleasant Street, Farmer’s Row, Groton. Courtesy
of Groton Historical Society, Groton, Mass.

The Greene Street School, Providence, lithograph. Courtesy of the

Rhode Island Historical Society, RHi X17 371.
 PART IV([>])
Caroline Sturgis, portrait. Courtesy of the Sturgis Library, Barnstable,
Mass.

Samuel Gray Ward, salt print photograph. Boston Athenaeum, Prints

and Photographs Dept., AA 5.4 Ward.s.(no.1).

Anna Barker Ward, oil portrait by William Morris Hunt. Private

collection.

Margaret Fuller, photograph, Southworth and Hawes, 1850-55, after

a daguerreotype by John Plumbe, 1846. Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, Gift of Edward Southworth Hawes in memory of his father,
Josiah Johnson Hawes, 43.1412.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, daguerreotype. Courtesy of Concord Free

Public Library, Concord, Mass.

Ellery Channing, portrait. Courtesy of J. C. Marriner.

Ellen Kilshaw Fuller, daguerreotype. Courtesy of Frances Fuller Soto.

([>])
PART V
“New York City Hall, Park and Environs,” c. 1849, lithograph by John
Bachmann. From the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

([>])
PART VI
George Sand, sketch, oil on canvas, by Thomas Couture, c. 1848.
Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.

Adam Mickiewicz, drawing by Kazimierz Mordasewicz, 1898, after a

daguerreotype of 1839 by an unknown artist. Courtesy of Muzeum
Literatury Adama Mickiewicza, Warsaw.
Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, daguerreotype. Houghton Library, Harvard
University, MS AM 1086.1.

PART VII ([>])

“Tasso’s Oak, Rome,” engraving by J. G. Strutt belonging to Margaret
Fuller, inscribed “From the Wreck of the Elizabeth.” Courtesy of
Lucilla Fuller Marvel.
Margaret Fuller, engraving by Henry Bryan Hall Jr.
 Prologue

THE ARCHIVIST PLACED THE SLIM VOLUME, AN ORDINARY composition book with
mottled green covers, in a protective foam cradle on the library desk
in front of me. When I opened it, I knew I would find pages filled
with a familiar looping script, a forward-slanting hand that often
seemed to rush from one line to the next as if racing to catch up
with the writer’s coursing thoughts.
But this notebook was different from any other I’d seen: it had
survived the wreck of the Elizabeth off Fire Island in July 1850,
packed safely in a trunk that floated to shore, where grieving friends
retrieved the soggy diary and dried it by the fire. The green
pasteboard cover had pulled away from its backing; the pages were
warped at the edges in even ripples. This was Margaret Fuller’s last
known journal. Its contents were all that remained to hint at what
she might have written in her famous lost manuscript on the rise
and fall of the 1849 Roman Republic, the revolution she had barely
survived. The manuscript itself—“what is most valuable to me if I
live of any thing”—had been swept away more than a century and a
half ago in a storm of near hurricane force, along with Margaret, her
young Italian husband, and their two-year-old son, all of them
passengers on the ill-fated Elizabeth.
I opened the cover and read what appeared to be a message
directed to me, or to anyone else who might choose to study this
singular document. The words, written on a white index card, had
not been penned in Margaret Fuller’s flowing longhand, but rather
penciled in a primly vertical script formed in a decade closer to mine
—by a descendant? an earlier biographer? a library cataloguer? Two
brief lines carried a judgment on the volume, and on Margaret
herself: “Nothing personal, public events merely.” The nameless
reader, like so many before and since, had been searching Margaret
Fuller’s private papers for clues to the mysteries in her personal life
—Had she really married the Italian marchese she called her
husband? Was their child conceived out of wedlock?—and found the
evidence lacking.
I turned the pages, reading at random. In the early passages,
Margaret recalled her arrival at Naples in the spring of 1847 at age
thirty-six, her “first acquaintance with the fig and olive,” and
sightseeing in Capri and Pompeii before traveling overland to Rome.
Having grown up a prodigy of classical learning in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Margaret had long wished to make this journey. Yet
perhaps it was for the best that a reversal in family fortune kept her
in New England through her early thirties. She had made a name for
herself among the Transcendentalists, becoming Emerson’s friend
and Thoreau’s editor before moving to New York City for an
eighteen-month stint as front-page columnist for Horace Greeley’s
New-York Tribune, which led to this belated European tour in a
triumphal role as foreign correspondent, witness to the revolutions
that spread across the Continent beginning in 1848.
Flipping ahead to January 1849, I read of the exiled soldier-
politicians Garibaldi and Mazzini greeted in Rome as returning heroes
and of a circular posted by the deposed Pope Pius IX,
excommunicating any citizen who had aided in the assassination of
his highest deputy the previous November: “The people received it
with jeers, tore it at once from the walls.” Then—“Monstrous are the
treacheries of our time”!—French troops, dispatched to restore the
pope to power, had landed just fifty miles away on the
Mediterranean coast, at Civitavecchia. Finally, on April 28: “Rome is
barricaded, the foe daily hourly expected.” These vivid entries, brief
as they were, would anchor my narrative of Margaret’s Roman years.
Public events “merely”?
How extraordinary it was to find a woman’s private journal filled
with such accounts. Yet the inscriber of the index card had found the
contents disappointing. Would any reader fault a man—especially an
internationally known writer and activist, as Margaret Fuller was—for
keeping a journal confined to public events through a springtime of
revolution? Margaret well understood this limited view of women and
the consequences for those who overstepped its bounds. She herself
had scorned those who censured her personal heroines, Mary
Wollstonecraft and George Sand, for flouting the institution of
marriage; Margaret had been appalled that critics “will not take off
the brand” once it had been “set upon” these unconventional
women, even after they found “their way to purer air”—in death.
Margaret’s own legacy had been clouded by the same prurient
attention, often leading to condemnation, always distracting
attention from her achievements.
For a time I believed I must write a biography of Margaret Fuller
that turned away from the intrigues in her private life, that spoke of
public events solely, and that would affirm her eminence as
America’s originating and most consequential theorist of woman’s
role in history, culture, and society. Margaret Fuller was, to borrow a
phrase coined by one of her friends, a “fore-sayer.” No other writer,
until Simone de Beauvoir took up similar themes in the 1940s, had
so skillfully critiqued what Margaret Fuller termed in 1843 “the great
radical dualism” of gender. “There is no wholly masculine man, no
purely feminine woman,” she had written, anticipating Virginia
Woolf’s explorations of male and female character in fiction.
Margaret Fuller’s haunting allegories personifying flowers presaged
Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual flower paintings; her untimely midcareer
death set off a persistent public longing to refuse the facts and grant
her a different fate, similar to the reaction following the midflight
disappearance of Amelia Earhart nearly one hundred years later.
Although she had titled her most influential book Woman in the
Nineteenth Century, heralding an era in which she expected great
advances for women, Margaret Fuller fit more readily among these
heroines of the twentieth century. She deserved a place in this
international sisterhood whose achievements her own pioneering
writings helped to make possible.
But while I never gave up the aim of representing Margaret
Fuller’s many accomplishments, as I read more of her letters,
journals, and works in print, I began to recognize the personal in the
political. Margaret Fuller’s critique of marriage was formulated during
a period of tussling with the unhappily married Ralph Waldo
Emerson over the nature of their emotional involvement; her
pronouncements on the emerging power of single women evolved
from her own struggle with the role; even her brave stand for the
Roman Republic could not be separated from her love affair with one
particular Roman republican. It was not true, as she had written of
Mary Wollstonecraft, that Margaret Fuller was “a woman whose
existence better proved the need of some new interpretation of
woman’s rights, than anything she wrote.” Her writing was eloquent,
assured, and uncannily prescient. But her writing also confirmed my
hunch. Margaret Fuller’s published books were hybrids of personal
observation, extracts from letters and diaries, confessional poetry;
her private journals were filled with cultural commentary and
reportage on public events. Margaret did not experience her life as
divided into public and private; rather, she sought “fulness of being.”
She maintained important correspondences with many of the
significant thinkers and politicians of her day—from Emerson to
Harriet Martineau to the Polish poet and revolutionary Adam
Mickiewicz—but she valued the letters she received above all for the
“history of feeling” they contained. She, like so many of her
comrades, both male and female, valued feeling as an inspiration to
action in both the private and public spheres. I would write the full
story—operatic in its emotional pitch, global in its dimensions.

Margaret Fuller’s mind and life were so exceptional that it can be

easy to miss the ways in which she was emblematic of her time, an
embodiment of her era’s “go-ahead” spirit. Her parents grew up in
country towns in Massachusetts, their families eking out a tenuous
subsistence in the early years of the republic; both were drawn to
city life, and they met by chance, crossing in opposite directions on
the new West Bridge, the first to connect Cambridge and Boston.
Their life together through Margaret’s childhood was urban,
following a national trend: the population of the United States tripled
during Margaret’s lifetime, transforming American cities. The advent
of railroads and a massive influx of immigrants from overseas
stimulated urban growth.
By the late 1830s and ’40s, when Margaret was a young single
woman living in Providence, Boston, and Cambridge, New England
had become the first region in the country with a shortage of men.
The overcrowded job market and economic volatility that drove her
lawyer father back to farming and her younger brothers to seek
employment in the South and West created this imbalance, leaving
one third of Boston’s female population unmarried. Little wonder
that Margaret toyed for a while with the notion that only an
unmarried woman could “represent the female world.” Her argument
was theoretical: American wives belonged by law to their husbands
and could not act independently. Yet she also spoke for a surging
population of women, many of them single, who sought usefulness
outside the home and who readily joined the political life of the
nation by advocating causes from temperance to abolition long
before they gained the right to vote.
Despite her allegiance to women’s rights and her important
alliances with reform-minded women, Margaret Fuller was never a
joiner. She took to heart the example of the French novelist George
Sand, whom she met in Paris, a woman who effectively articulated
her ideas through both conversation and published writing and who
chose an independent path in life. She was impressed by the way
Sand “takes rank in society like a man, for the weight of her
thoughts.” In a time when “self-reliance” was the watchword—one
she helped to coin and circulate—Margaret had, by her own account,
a “mind that insisted on utterance.” She too insisted that her ideas
be valued as highly as those of the brilliant men who were her
comrades. She refused to be pigeonholed as a woman writer or
trivialized as sentimental, and her interests were as far-ranging as
the country itself, where, as she wrote in a farewell column for the
Tribune when she sailed for Europe, “life rushes wide and free.” In
England, France, and Italy, Margaret found, as the stay-at-home
Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted, even more members of her
“expansive fellowship”: radical thinkers, revolutionaries, and artists
of the new age. Yet even in this journey to the Old World she was
marking out a new American life—a route traced in the future by the
likes of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Cassatt, John Reed,
Ernest Hemingway, and countless other seekers of inspiration and
new theaters of action abroad.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who
followed her path to the Continent several years after her death,
undertook an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing
stories in favor of longer narratives. He preferred to call his books
“Romances,” not novels. “When a writer calls his work a Romance,”
Hawthorne explained in his preface to The House of the Seven
Gables, “he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion
and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to
assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.” The novelist, in
Hawthorne’s terms, aims to achieve “a very minute fidelity” to
experience, whereas the author of a romance may “bring out or
mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture”
while still maintaining strict allegiance to “the truth of the human
heart.”
My book is not a work of fiction, but I have kept in mind
Hawthorne’s notion of the “Romance” as a guiding principle in my
factual narrative. Or, to borrow from Margaret Fuller herself, “we
propose some liberating measures.” I have brought out lights and
deepened shadows, intensifying focus, for example, on Margaret’s
friendships in a circle of young “lovers” who were drawn to the flame
of her intelligence during the years of her closest friendship with
Emerson, and on her experience as a mother separated from her
infant son during wartime. My account lingers on such points to
render the complexity of her lived experience and to make full use of
the rich documentation of these key episodes. At other times the
narrative takes a more rapid pace to chart the swift trajectory of this
“ardent and onward-looking spirit” whose life spanned only forty
years.
Margaret Fuller maintained that all human beings are capable of
great accomplishment, that “genius” would be “common as light, if
men trusted their higher selves.” Still, she was always mindful of her
own extraordinary capabilities. “From a very early age I have felt
that I was not born to the common womanly lot,” Margaret wrote to
a friend as her thirtieth birthday approached. This awareness was a
source of frequent inner turmoil as she strove to realize her talents
in an era unfriendly to openly ambitious women. Yet she achieved
almost inconceivable success, with remarkable poise. After talking
her way into the library at Harvard to complete research on her first
book, Margaret did not allow the gawking undergraduates, who had
never before seen a woman at work in their midst, to break her
concentration. A few years later she occupied a desk in another all-
male setting, the newsroom at Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune,
where she turned out editorials and cultural commentary aimed at
shaping the opinions of her fifty thousand readers on subjects from
literature and music to Negro voting rights and prison reform. In
Rome, offering her views in a Tribune column on the U.S.
government’s need to appoint an ambassador to the new Roman
Republic, Margaret conjectured, “Another century, and I might ask to
be made Ambassador myself.” But in this case, she was forced to
admit, “woman’s day has not come yet.”
In the twenty-first century, woman’s day may almost have arrived.
American women vote and hold high office as elected
representatives, judges, diplomats, even secretaries of state, if not
as president. Yet Margaret Fuller’s journalistic descendants still risk
their lives, not just because they work in dangerous places, but
because they are female, objects of scorn and worse, in many parts
of the world, for daring to serve in the public arena. What was it like
to be such a woman—the only such woman, the first female war
correspondent—a half-century after America’s own revolution?
I have written Margaret Fuller’s story from the inside, using the
most direct evidence—her words, and those of her family and
friends, recorded in the moment, preserved in archives, and in many
cases carefully annotated and published by scholars of the period. A
close reading of this now well-established manuscript record yielded
many perceptions that I hope will strike readers familiar with
Margaret Fuller’s life as fresh and true. I have also relied on a
number of previously unknown documents that emerged during my
years of research on the Peabody sisters and later as I tracked my
current subject in archives across the country: two newly discovered
letters by Margaret Fuller, a record in Mary Peabody’s hand of
Margaret Fuller’s first series of Conversations for women held in
Boston in 1839, the Peabody sisters’ correspondence during the
months following the wreck of the Elizabeth, and a letter written by
Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Collector of the Port of New York,
itemizing the trunks and valuables lost in the fatal storm.
“The scrolls of the past burn my fingers,” Margaret Fuller wrote to
her great friend Ralph Waldo Emerson concerning some particularly
painful letters the two had exchanged; “they have not yet passed
into literature.” So impassioned are her words, they burn our fingers
yet, two centuries later. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is my
attempt to transport those letters into literature, to give her
magnificent life “a little space,” as she asked from Emerson, so that
“the sympathetic hues would show again before the fire, renovated
and lively.” As for Margaret herself—if she reached a heaven, we
may hope it is like the one she once imagined, “empowering me to
incessant acts of vigorous beauty.”
• I •

YOUTH
Timothy Fuller, portrait by Rufus Porter
Margarett Crane Fuller, daguerreotype, c. 1840s
Street scene in Cambridgeport, early 1820s, with soap factory at center
 1

Three Letters

“DEAR FATHER IT IS A HEAVY STORM I HOPE YOU WILL NOT have to come home
in it.” So begins the record of a life that will end on a homeward
journey in another heavy storm, a life unusually full of words, both
spoken and written.
Sarah Margaret Fuller is six years old when she writes this brief
letter on a half-sheet of paper saved by the devoted and exacting
father who receives it, next by his widow, then by their descendants.
Which one of them thinks to label it “First letter”? All of her survivors
understand that there are, or will be, biographers, historians,
students of literature who care to know.
But first it is the father who treasures his daughter’s message of
concern, this lurching unpunctuated parade of runes, from the
moment he unfolds the page—a father nearing forty and eager to
set his young daughter, already an apt pupil, to a “severe though
kind” education. And the mother, just twenty-one at her daughter’s
birth, only twenty-seven now: she is known to find any words her
firstborn child scribbles on bits of paper “original,” worthy of
preservation.

At seven, the little girl—a tall little girl with plain looks and auburn
hair, whose height and imperious manner set her apart from her age
mates—writes again to her father, Timothy Fuller, a brash and for the
moment successful lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a U.S.
congressman whose career in politics takes him away to Washington
half the year, in winter and spring. It is January of 1818. In the new
year, the girl’s concern for her father has transmuted into the desire
to earn his good opinion—and so into more words, into the wish to
show off her inquiring mind.
“I have learned all the rules of Musick but one,” she writes now in
a fine spidery script, and “I have been reviewing Valpy’s Chronology”
(a verse narrative of ancient and English history). And: “I should
have liked to have been with you to have seen the pictures gallery at
NYork.”
Sarah Margaret’s claims of accomplishment, her carefully worded
wish to join Timothy in New York, are meant to forestall what she
has already come to expect from her overbearing father: the torrent
of criticism—of her penmanship, of her rate of progress through his
curriculum, of her “stile” of expression, as he prefers to spell the
word—all intended to bring his precocious daughter “as near
perfection as possible.” Timothy, proud to have been a “high scholar”
at Harvard, has been her only teacher, starting her on Latin at age
six, requiring that she recite her lessons only to him during his
months at home, insisting she be kept awake until his return from
work to stand before him on his study carpet late at night, her
nerves “on the stretch” until she has finished repeating to him what
she had learned that day. Already she has experienced more severity
than kindness in her father’s pedagogy.
And so the anxious, eager-to-please seven-year-old Sarah
Margaret Fuller apologizes to her father, a man with “absolutely no
patience” for mistakes, as she will to no one else in the voluminous
correspondence that follows after this second letter: “I do not write
well at all,” and “I have written every day a little but have made but
little improvement.” And: “I hope to make greater proficiency in my
Studies.”
But the verbs tell all—she has learned and reviewed, she would
like to see and to make improvement. These verbs are hers. The
nouns also: music, art, chronology (the unfolding of world events,
the progress of society). These are her concerns, her aims, her
occupations at age seven. And they will remain so for the girl who,
to her father’s and her own dismay, struggles through years of
singing lessons, unable to shine at this one accomplishment. “To
excel in all things should be your constant aim; mediocrity is
obscurity,” Timothy will prod when he offers to buy her a piano. But
she continues to write every day that she has paper and pen to
hand, except in times of sickness, until she becomes a woman. And
then too, when she will write of music, art, literature, politics, and
travel for a nation of readers. She takes her father’s cue, embraces
the discipline: she refuses to be mediocre, to be obscure.
The seven-year-old girl must stop writing this second letter,
however, a letter that announces her intellect to her father even by
way of apology, because her mother—Margarett Crane Fuller—has
asked her to “hold the baby,” a new little brother, William Henry, the
second after brother Eugene. Three-year-old Eugene “speaks of you
sometimes,” the girl tells her father, but he is not old enough to write
—or to hold the baby, which he would not have been asked to do
anyway, as a boy. Sarah Margaret must hold the baby while her
mother, Margarett—a head taller than her bluff, domineering
husband, with a slender, elfin beauty; sweet-tempered, but not a
woman of letters—writes her own letter to Timothy.
Baby, little brother, elder sister, mother, all crowd around a writing
desk with the absent Timothy foremost in their minds—his
demanding presence felt across the miles. Missing from this tableau
is Julia Adelaide, the “soft, graceful and lively” much-adored second-
born daughter who died four years ago, just past her first birthday,
when Sarah Margaret was three years old. The abrupt loss, the
never-forgotten moment when the baby’s nurse, tears streaming,
pulled Sarah Margaret into the nursery to view her sister’s tiny
corpse in all its “severe sweetness,” shocked the older girl into
consciousness. “My first experience of life was one of death,” she will
write years later—so that even now, as she takes her infant brother
in her arms and cedes the pen to her mother, she feels alone.
“She who would have been the companion of my life” was
“severed from me”: Julia Adelaide might have been Sarah Margaret’s
ally in their father’s more “severe” than “kind” school. Julia
Adelaide’s death too was far more “severe” than “sweet,” for in the
following months Margarett was also severed—or withdrew—from
Sarah Margaret, growing “delicate” in health as her grief turned to
depression. The sorrowing mother spent hours in her garden,
working the flower beds or simply sitting among the fragrant roses,
fruit trees, and clematis vines, turned away from her living daughter.
And then the brothers came, first Eugene and then William Henry. In
dreams, Sarah Margaret sees herself joining a procession of
mourners “in their black clothes and dreary faces,” following her
mother to her grave as she already has her sister. She has been told,
but does not remember, that she begged “with loud cries” that Julia
Adelaide not be put into the ground. She wakes to find her pillow
wet with tears.

Two years later, Sarah Margaret starts again: “My dear father.” By
now, January 16, 1820, she has written many more letters to
Timothy, signed them “Your affectionate daughter, Sarah M Fuller” or
“S M Fuller” or “Sarah-Margaret Fuller.” She has sent him
compositions in which “I assure you I . . . made almost as many
corrections as your critical self would were you at home.” Obedient
to Timothy alone (her mother finds her difficult, “opinionative”), she
has let him know she is translating Oliver Goldsmith’s long poem of
rural decline, The Deserted Village, into Latin, as he has asked; she
is pushing herself through the Aeneid in answer to his challenge—
wasn’t she yet “profoundly into” the work? Within six months she
will have puzzled out the entire savage-heroic tale in the original
Latin.
It is a greater pleasure, almost easy, for the girl to accomplish
such intellectual feats during the half-year her father is away. Even
though she quarrels with Margarett, is unable to feel her love, she
will at times, whether to imitate her mother or to seek her mother’s
distilled essence or simply to please herself, sit alone in the garden,
at ease among the violets, lilies, and roses: “my mother’s hand had
planted them, and they bloomed for me.” Like Persephone, she is
free above ground during the two seasons her father is away, when
her mother’s “flower-like nature” prevails, when she need answer
only to Timothy’s exhorting letters.
In this third letter she begins to test Timothy’s strictures. Twice
before she has written asking his permission to read an Italian
thriller, Zeluco, and twice she has recommended for his own reading
a novel—“Do not let the name novel make you think it is either
trifling or silly,” she urges—called Hesitation: or, To Marry, or Not to
Marry? In the pages of Hesitation she has encountered, along with
the novel’s pair of indecisive lovers, the extraordinary comtesse de
Pologne, a witty conversationalist, happily single, with the “power to
disengage herself from the shackles of custom, without losing one
attribute of modesty”: a woman whose personal magnetism draws
both men and women to her circle. Does she hope Timothy will find
the comtesse too and approve?
Sarah Margaret is writing fiction herself, “a new tale called The
young satirist,” she tells her father, in the loose rolling hand she has
acquired only recently, which will be recognizably hers from now on.
Despite Timothy’s criticisms, she is beginning to feel how bright she
is, even brilliant, a commanding presence in her mind’s eye, if not in
daily life—the tall girl will soon reach five feet two inches and stop
growing, becoming short, plump, and awkward as an adolescent.
She too can play the critic, the provocateur, the “young satirist,”
when she wishes. She is nine years old. Her mother, Margarett, just
thirty, is newly pregnant with a fifth child. She closes her letter:

P S I do not like Sarah, call me Margaret alone, pray do!

 2

Ellen Kilshaw

THE FIRST LETTER SHE WROTE AND SIGNED “MARGARET,” even before she asked
her father to “call me Margaret alone” (which he refused to do), was
sent to Ellen Kilshaw, “first friend.” Ellen was older, a grown woman
in her early twenties, “an English lady, who, by a singular chance,
was cast upon this region for a few months,” Margaret would write
years later, unconsciously adopting the language of the romantic
novels she loved as a girl. And why not? She had fallen in love with
Ellen Kilshaw: “Elegant and captivating, her every look and gesture
tuned to a different pitch from anything I had ever known.”
This “region” upon which Ellen Kilshaw was cast, where Margaret
Fuller lived, was not the Cambridge of Harvard College, of elegant
mansions on Brattle Street’s “Tory Row” or gently sloping Mount
Auburn. It could have been a world away. Margaret’s “region” was
the upstart community at Cambridgeport, two miles east of Old
Cambridge through marshes and pastureland, where squat frame
houses like her own “comfortable” yet “very ugly” three-story house
on Cherry Street clustered near the new West Bridge. Spanning the
Charles River where it emptied into Boston Harbor, and leading
directly to fashionable Beacon Hill, the West Bridge, when it was
completed in 1793, had inspired Cambridgeport’s founders to drain
riverside swamps, dredge canals, and construct wharves in hopes of
luring trade ships away from Boston’s waterfront. But the financial
failure, early in the new century, of the Middlesex Turnpike, an
inland toll road intended to bring farm goods to market in
Cambridgeport, followed by Jefferson’s devastating foreign trade
embargo, then the War of 1812, turned the bustling district into a
virtual ghost town of vacant house lots and unused warehouses
during the years of Margaret’s childhood.
Ambitious Timothy Fuller, thirty-one, the fourth of ten children and
the oldest of five brothers, bought the house at 71 Cherry Street for
$6,000 in the summer of 1809, a few months after marrying twenty-
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Title: History of the United Co-operative Baking Society Ltd

A fifty years' record 1869–1919

Author: William Reid

Release date: September 28, 2023 [eBook #71749]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: United Co-operative Baking

Society Limited, 1920

Credits: Richard Tonsing, MFR, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF

THE UNITED CO-OPERATIVE BAKING SOCIETY LTD ***
Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.

CENTRAL PREMISES
 HISTORY
OF THE

UNITED CO-OPERATIVE BAKING SOCIETY

LTD.
A FIFTY YEARS’ RECORD
1869–1919

BY WILLIAM REID

Published by United Co-operative Baking Society Limited

M‘Neil Street, Glasgow
1920
 PREFACE.

The chief advantage of prefaces is the opportunities they give

authors for making apologies and for returning thanks. In the
present instance the hurry with which the book has had to be written
did not allow time enough to do many things which the writer would
have liked to do. He would have liked to linger with the old-time
enthusiasts who laid the foundations of the Society, to have made
himself as familiar as possible with the times in which they lived and
with the thoughts in their minds, so that he might be able to present
to his readers a picture of their times as they saw them, and of their
difficulties as they had to encounter them. For this there was no
time, and so he has had to content himself with telling a plain,
unvarnished tale of difficulties met and overcome, of a faith which
refused to be dismayed, and of a triumph which is visible to all.
Unfortunately, there is no one alive to-day who had any active part
in the inception of the Society. This increased the difficulty of
presenting a true picture of the beginnings of the Society, but some
help in this direction was got from the “Year Book,” which had been
written by Mr Lochrie in 1896. The writer is also very much indebted
to Mr David Brown, of the office staff of the Society, who prepared
synopses of the various minutes of the Society. These synopses, by
indicating the salient points in the minutes, greatly lightened the
labour of selection; but, in addition, every minute has been carefully
read at least once, and many of them much oftener, so that complete
accuracy might be secured.
Great assistance in dealing with the history of the last thirty years
has also been given by Mr James H. Forsyth, cashier of the Society,
whose knowledge of the transactions of that period is unparalleled.

W. R.
 CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE
I. Scotland in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries 1
II. The Dawn of Co-operation 7
III. The First Year 17
IV. St James Street Bakery 29
V. The Branch Controversy 43
VI. St James Street: Developments 56
VII. St James Street: Congestion 69
VIII. M‘Neil Street 82
IX. M‘Neil Street: Rapid Developments 97
X. Further Developments 110
XI. Further Extensions 123
XII. Continuous Development 144
XIII. Clydebank Branch 158
XIV. Belfast Branch 166
XV. A New President 184
XVI. From Strength to Strength 197
XVII. Progress Continues Steady 210
XVIII. Baking under War Conditions 224
XIX. Bread Baking under Control 238
XX. Educational Work 253
XXI. Men Who Wrought 262
Statistics 273
 ILLUSTRATIONS.

Central Premises Frontispiece

Coburg Street and St James Street Premises Facing page 16
M‘Neil Street Premises „ 17
M‘Neil Street Premises „ 32
Clydebank Bakery „ 33
Past Presidents (1) „ 64
Past Presidents (2) „ 65
President and Secretary „ 80
Auditors „ 81
Directors (1) „ 112
Directors (2) „ 113
Belfast Advisory Committee „ 128
Manager and Cashier „ 129
Educational Committee „ 160
Prize Silver Band „ 161
Belfast Bakery „ 176
St Mungo Halls „ 177
Departmental Managers (1) „ 208
Departmental Managers (2) „ 209
Deputations to England (1) „ 224
Deputations to England (2) „ 225
Roll of Honour „ 277
 CHAPTER I.
SCOTLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND
EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES.

GENERAL SOCIAL CONDITIONS—EARLY FARMING

METHODS—POVERTY OF THE PEOPLE—MINERS AS
SERFS—“THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE”—IMPROVING
CONDITIONS: THE ACT OF UNION AND ITS EFFECTS—
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION—THE FACTORY SYSTEM:
ITS EFFECT ON THE STATUS OF MEN.

The conditions under which the people of Scotland lived during

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were rude and uncouth,
and, when judged by modern standards, could scarcely be described
as other than appalling. In the few towns of any size, stone buildings
were the rule; but in the rural districts the majority of the people
lived in huts, the walls of which were built of sods and stones, and
which were roofed with wattles and thatched with rushes. These huts
were windowless save for a hole in the wall which admitted some air
but very little light during the summer, and which was stuffed with
rags and rushes during winter in order to keep out the snell North
wind. The floor was but earth, hardened with the trampling of
countless feet; and fireplace or chimney there was none, unless a few
stones set in the middle of the floor or against one of the gables can
be called a fireplace, and a hole in the roof, through which the smoke
found its way after it had explored every nook and cranny of the
house, a chimney.
Famine was an almost annual visitor. The majority of the people
lived by agriculture, but the land was cold and undrained, and the
methods of tilling were ineffective. The motive power was sometimes
provided by oxen, but often the people harnessed themselves to the
primitive implements. The result was that the grain grown was poor
in quality and scanty in quantity, while often it failed to ripen
because of the wetness of the soil, and because, also, of lateness in
sowing. The cattle were poor and underfed. Roots for feeding
purposes were unknown until near the end of the period; there was
no grain to spare, and little straw or hay for winter feeding, so that
the poor brutes had to forage for themselves as best they could.
In the hall of the laird the position was a little better, but few of the
lairds of that day could aspire to the standard of living of a
moderately well-to-do farmer of to-day. Of food there was always
enough in the hall, but it was coarse and unsavoury. Throughout the
winter fresh meat was unknown. The cattle were killed in the
autumn; the meat was stored in brine barrels, and this brine-soaked
meat, or swine flesh preserved in the same manner, was the only
meat which found a place on the table of the laird during the winter
months, except on the few occasions of great importance when one
or two fowls were killed.
The farming class, if it be not a misnomer to call them farmers,
usually lived in groups of such huts as are described above, and tilled
their land more or less in common. The system chiefly in vogue was
the “run rig” system, under which exchange of ground took place
every year. The more important of their crude implements were also
held in common, and as these could only be used by one person at a
time—as, also, it was often well on in the spring before any thought
of tillage occurred to them or the condition of their water-logged soil
would permit of it, and as much time was often lost in deciding the
rotation in the use of the implements—the return in the good years
was only just sufficient for their wants. As the bad years were
generally twice as numerous as the good years, the conditions of the
rural workers were generally most miserable. Ill-treated Nature,
receiving no encouragement from man save the “tickling of her face
with a stick,” refused to give of her bounty, and the people who
depended on her for life suffered accordingly.
A condition of continual hunger was the lot of the labourers who
had no land to till. They were often forced to depend for food on the
roots and berries they could gather in the woods; the scraps which
went to feed the laird’s pigs were luxuries which only came their way
at long intervals. Work was intermittent; it was poorly paid, for
money was even scarcer than food. The only landless men who had
what might be termed a decent living wage for the period were the
miners. They received about a shilling a day; but, in return, they sold
themselves into serfdom, for, from the beginning of the seventeenth
century until the closing year of the eighteenth, no man, woman, or
child who once entered a mine to work in it could leave it again. If
the mine was sold the sale carried with it the right to their labour;
they were bondslaves until death, the great emancipator, burst their
shackles and set them free for ever.
On the large farms, which became more numerous during the
eighteenth century, ploughmen received the truly magnificent salary
of 35/ a year, with one or two perquisites, of which one was a pair of
boots. The ploughman’s daughter, if she went to the farm to assist
the farmer’s wife and daughters with the cows, received, as a reward
for her labour, 13/4 a year, a piece of coarse cloth for an apron, and a
pair of shoes.
In the towns the conditions were little better. In the early years of
the eighteenth century a succession of bad years brought distress to
all sections of the populace. There was much unrest, which was
fanned into flame by the passing of the Act of Union in 1707, when a
considerable amount of rioting took place in various parts of the
country. In addition, the foreign trade of the country had been
ruined by the English Navigation Act of 1660, which provided that all
trade with the English Colonies should be carried in English ships
alone.
In the closing years of the seventeenth century Paterson, the
founder of the Bank of England, launched his Darien scheme,
famous in history as “The South Sea Bubble,” for the purpose of
inaugurating a great world exchange and mart at the Isthmus of
Panama. Scotsmen became responsible for £400,000 of the capital,
and actually paid in £220,000. The jealousy of the English
merchants, however, together with the fact that it had been proposed
to establish a depot on land which was claimed by Spain, without
having gone through the formality of consulting that country
beforehand, handicapped the scheme from the outset. Nevertheless,
although opposed by the English, and cold-shouldered by the Dutch,
whose help they had hoped to enlist, the Scotsmen persevered with
their project. A company, numbering 1,200, set out for their
destination, landed, and erected a fort. Difficulties came fast,
however. The King had not given his consent to the scheme, and the
American colonists refused to have anything to do with them.
Supplies gave out before the new crops were ready, and none were
forthcoming from home, so that at the end of eight months the
colony was broken up. Out of a total of 2,500 persons who had left
Scotland, not more than thirty ever reached home again. The failure
of the scheme caused untold misery and ruin in Scotland, and did
much to engender the bitter feelings toward the English which
showed themselves when the union of the two Parliaments was being
discussed; but, worst of all, it bled the country white; so much so that
when, a few years later, the British Government called in the Scottish
coinage in order to replace it with coinage of the United Kingdom,
only coinage to the value of £400,000 was returned to Scotland.
 IMPROVING CONDITIONS.
The Act of Union was exceedingly unpopular, but, as it turned out,
it was not an unmixed evil, for it placed Scottish traders on the same
footing as the English in respect to trading with the Colonies, from
which they had been debarred for fifty years. It also gave Scottish
ships free entry to English ports and Scottish goods free entry to
English markets, and so marked the beginning of the increasing
prosperity which has come to Scotland since then.
In particular the opening up of trade with the Southern Colonies
had much to do with laying the foundation of the proud commercial
position which Glasgow holds to-day. Merchants from the little town
on the banks of the Clyde began to trade with these Colonies,
bringing back in exchange for their wares tobacco and other
products, including cotton. During the same period there was
introduced from Holland the art of fine spinning, and on these two
articles of Colonial produce—tobacco and cotton—were built up
many fortunes. Later in the century the invention of the spinning
jenny, the carding frame, and the power-loom, and the discovery by
Watt of how to harness the power of steam to production all gave an
impetus to the commercial growth of Scotland. With the application
of the power of steam the foundation of Scotland’s pre-eminent
position in the manufacture of iron and steel and in the building of
ships was laid, for by the application of steam-power to pumping
machinery and to haulage it was found possible to keep her coal pits
free from water and to dig vertical shafts to the coal seams.
Thus the eighteenth century, which had begun with the Scottish
people in the direst poverty, ended with many of them in
comparative comfort and with the standard of living for all definitely
raised. Never since then, not even in the period of deep poverty
which followed the close of the Napoleonic war nor in the “hungry
’forties,” have the whole people fallen back into the depths of misery
in which they were sunk at the beginning and all through the
seventeenth century and well into the “’twenties” of the eighteenth.
At times since then progress seemed to be at a standstill; at times it
seemed even to be on the down grade; but the impetus has always
been recovered; the standard of living has been rising gradually, and
although we are still far removed from the rude profusion which has
caused the century in English history which followed the “Black
Death” to be spoken of as “the golden age of labour,” the trend of our
march is in the direction of a condition which, measured by the
different standards of to-day, will approximate to that long past
happy period.
 THE FACTORY SYSTEM.
While it is admitted that the inventions and discoveries of Sir
Joseph Arkwright (partner of David Dale at Lanark), Hargreaves,
Crompton, and Cartwright revolutionised industry, and in the long
run brought a higher standard of living to the people, yet the first
results of their application were not wholly good. For centuries
spinning and weaving had been carried on in the homes of the
people, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the carding
frame, and the power-loom the weaving industry was removed to
larger buildings. At first these were merely makeshifts. A disused
stable or cowshed, any building, in fact, which would house a
number of looms was good enough for the new industry. The hand-
loom weavers soon found that they were unable to compete with the
new methods. To make matters worse, where they did not
themselves give up and take service under the new regime, their
wives and their children did, and became competitors in driving the
husbands and fathers out of the industry.
Soon the millowners discovered that in the new methods with the
new cheap labour there was a mine of wealth and, their greed
growing by what it fed on, they sought for even cheaper labour than
that of the poorly paid wage-slave women and children. This cheaper
labour they found in the thousands of pauper children under the care
of the supervisors of the poor. The story of the cruel treatment of
these poor little mites, who were often chained to the frames of the
looms and whipped to keep them awake, is one of the blackest pages
in the whole history of the growth of the capitalist system in Great
Britain.
In the weaving trades the entry of women and children changed
the whole economy of the weavers’ homes. Formerly the work had
been done by the male members of the families, assisted to some
extent by the women, but under the new system the factory owner
found that he could get as much work done by the mother at a
considerable reduction on the wages paid to her husband, and so the
husband found himself workless. Then it was found that the children
soon became as expert as their elders, and so a further reduction in
wages took place.
The net result was that it became a case of equal pay for equal
work, but the standard of pay was that of the women and not of the
men, and soon the whole family had to work to provide the
necessaries of life for the home which should have been provided by
the wages of the husband alone. Even to-day, while the women of the
cotton mills who are members of their unions are probably the best
paid female workers in the country, the standard for men is much
below that for male workers in other trades; so that, in the case of the
factory workers, “equal pay for equal work” has meant a general
lowering of the standard of pay.
 CHAPTER II.
THE DAWN OF CO-OPERATION.

CO-OPERATION IN PREHISTORIC TIMES—EARLY TEUTONIC

CO-OPERATION—THE SCOTTISH CLAN SYSTEM—THE
PRESENT CO-OPERATIVE SYSTEM—FENWICK AND
OTHER CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES—EARLY CO-
OPERATIVE BAKERIES—THE GLASGOW BAKING
SOCIETIES—EARLY METHODS OF CONTROLLING PRICES
—STIRLINGSHIRE AND THE HILLFOOTS—BAKING
SOCIETIES IN FIFE AND THE NORTH—CO-OPERATIVE
BAKING IN THE BORDERLAND—GLASGOW SOCIETY—CO-
OPERATIVE BAKING IN 1866—THE FIRST FEDERATED
BAKERY.

The Co-operative principle is as old as human intelligence. As soon

as man became possessed of the first faint glimmerings of reason he
began to seek communion with his fellows, and began, also, to take
concerted action with them for mutual protection. It was natural that
this should be so. The world must have been a terrible place for the
human race in those early days. On land, in the sea, and in the air it
was peopled with monsters, against whose attacks the unaided
strength and skill of a solitary human were of no avail. Only by
combination could he hope to survive. Results have proven that
combination—Co-operation—is the law of life; that the men, the
animals, the insects even which have learned to combine, have
progressed in the scale of evolution; while the solitary monsters of
past ages have disappeared, and are known only from a bone found
here and a partially complete skeleton there.
 That the human race gathered together in communities very early
in its history there is abundance of evidence. In some of our cliffs
there are caves which bear traces of human habitation; while
scattered here and there over the world are immense mounds of
shells, extending sometimes to a depth of many feet and acres in
width, on what is believed to have been the seashore of prehistoric
times, which show that, for a long period, these places were
frequented by communities.
This community living has continued all down the ages. The
“commune” system in vogue amongst the Teutonic races was an
imperfect system of Co-operative farming by an agricultural
community, which finally ceased in Germany during the nineteenth
century. It was introduced into this country by the invading Teuton
races in the early centuries of the Christian era; and, with various
modifications and adaptations, was still in being at the time of the
Norman conquest. From that date it gradually declined, until, by the
end of the sixteenth century, it had all but died out in England, but
was still alive in parts of Scotland in the clan system. There the old
community spirit continued to prevail until after the rebellion of
1745, when the common lands of the clans were given to the chiefs.
In the lowlands, also, some trace of this principle continued to be
visible amongst the farming community.