Helen R. Deese

Notes & Documents

"My life ... reads to me like a Romance"
The Journals of Caroline Healey Dall

UTTERANCE IS CHARACTERISTIC of me," Caroline Healey Dall (1822–1912) once declared, and she never made a truer observation. The impulse to express herself in words (written or spoken) was a powerful one throughout her life. She began keeping a journal when she was nine years old, and the earliest original surviving journal dates to March of 1838, when she was fifteen. For the remainder of her life, or at least to within a year of her death at age ninety, with rare exceptions in times of illness or other extraordinary circumstances, she kept the journal, usually writing in it daily. Thus we have her record of some seventy-five years. The forty-five volumes of these journals, rich with detail both personal and public, fill nine reels of microfilm. In the 1890s Dall made arrangements to give her journals and other papers to the Massachusetts Historical Society, some before and some after her death, and there they have remained. The Society, which has for almost a century been the faithful guardian of these papers, is now at last publishing large portions of them. The first volume of selected Dall journals will shortly appear in the Society's ongoing Collections series.¹

What Samuel Pepys does for seventeenth-century London or George Templeton Strong for nineteenth-century New York, Dall does for nineteenth-century Boston. The city's celebrations, entertainments, mob scenes, poverty-ridden neighborhoods, rounds of social calls, and lectures, as well as the public academic exhibitions across the Charles River, form much of the stuff of these journals. The vitality of the city's life becomes more striking by contrast with the life Dall leads when she is outside Boston, in Georgetown or Portsmouth or rural Needham or Toronto. Later, living in Washington, D.C., Dall presents vividly the social scene there, centering on its communities of political and scientific luminaries. These sorts of portrayals make her journal a significant document of social history.

Caroline Wells Healey (later Dall)

A reproduction of this pencil sketch by Alvan Clarke, 1842, appears in the 1914 edition of The College, the Market, and the Court. Photograph courtesy of the author and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Dall's journal, in fact, gives us almost every sort of thing we can now imagine in a nineteenth-century woman's diary. First, the journals address a wide array of topics, including the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development of the writer; family and social rituals and interactions; the routines of "woman's work"; accounts of illnesses, both physical and mental, and their treatment; examples of cross-class and cross-race relations; and the larger world of business, politics, literature, reform, war, religion, and science. Second, the extraordinary talents of the writer enhance the journal's effectiveness. With a mind both informed and acute and a world view imbued with a strong gender consciousness, Dall provides intelligent reflections upon and keen analysis of her world.

The oldest of the eight children of Mark and Caroline Foster Healey, Caroline Wells Healey was born in 1822 to wealth and privilege in Boston. Her merchant father invested heavily in ships and served, when Caroline was a teenager, as president of the Merchants' Bank. A self-made man with little formal education, Mark Healey nevertheless valued education highly and provided his daughter an excellent private education through governesses, tutors, and private schools in Boston. He also demanded and expected great things of her; she was "bred and brought up," as she later warned her future husband, to be a literary woman. From an early age, she discussed with her father literary, political, religious, and philosophical questions; she sought to fulfill his expectations by writing novels and, by the age of thirteen, publishing short homilies in the Christian Register, Boston's preeminent Unitarian newspaper.

Throughout her life Dall traveled occasionally to Worcester, where she visited relatives and friends. She developed her most significant connection to the city at the age of nineteen, when she met Samuel Foster Haven (1806–1881), the longtime librarian at the American Antiquarian Society. Haven, who was thirty-five and widowed at the time, gave her the grand tour of the Antiquarian Society, and Healey wrote in her journal, "I could hardly say what interested me—most—here—there were many things—perhaps, the old pictures and engravings the Library and—the Librarian." Healey soon found that the librarian was no less interested in her, and for several months a spirited courtship developed. But Caroline's father faced bankruptcy during the severe depression of the 1840s, and in the fall of 1842 Caroline Healey left Boston for Georgetown, D.C. There she taught at an exclusive girls' school and sent her entire earnings home to pay for her siblings' education. At the same time Samuel Haven faded from the scene, leaving Healey heartbroken and vulnerable to the attentions of a young Unitarian minister whom she met in Washington, Charles Henry Appleton Dall.

Carrying on a ministry to the poor in Baltimore, Dall must have seen in Caroline Healey, who had been actively involved in Sunday School and other benevolent activities in Boston and Washington, the perfect partner. In almost no time they became engaged. The marriage was for several years a happy one, though marred by Charles Dall's inability to hold a pulpit and their resultant genteel poverty. From Baltimore they went to Boston, then to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then to Needham, Massachusetts, and then to Toronto, all in the space of seven years. They had two children, a son and a daughter.² In Toronto the marriage began to show signs of strain. Charles Dall seems to have suffered an emotional breakdown and again lost his pulpit, and in 1855 the Dalls moved back to the Boston area. For several months Charles "supplied" vacant Unitarian pulpits before finally announcing, greatly to the surprise of his wife, his intentions to become a missionary to Calcutta. There was never any question of his taking his family with him—he did not invite them, and in any case Caroline certainly would not have agreed to go. There was also no question of divorce; Caroline believed Charles to be mentally ill and felt toward him, she wrote, as she would toward a sick child. Part of Charles's salary from the American Unitarian Association came to Caroline, and she publicly promoted his mission. One might style this resolution, as opposed to so-called "Boston marriages," a Boston divorce.³ Respectable, it avoided outright scandal, but it achieved the purpose of keeping two incompatible people half a world away from each other. Charles remained in India for the rest of his life (thirty-one years), and during that time made only four trips home.

Charles H. Dall (1816–1886)

Manuscripts and Archives Department of the Andover-Harvard Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

Charles's absence was the occasion of both difficulties and opportunities for Caroline Dall. Suddenly, at age thirty-two and with children aged five and nine, she found herself adrift in a sea with few markers. She faced an economic and vocational crisis, to say nothing of the devastating personal implications of Charles's leaving. She was married, but in a real sense no longer a wife. She lacked the moral and emotional support of a husband. Though her sense of duty and loyalty prevented her from seeking a divorce and though she and Charles corresponded regularly while he was in India, she never outlived her sense of having been abandoned by her husband. Her unconventional marriage, combined with her advanced position on the woman question and with her public role (a flagrant breaching of the traditional woman's sphere), made vulnerable her equally prized roles as mother, church member, and lady. The portion of Charles's salary directed to her proved insufficient. Though a woman of superior gifts, Caroline Dall could only with the greatest difficulty translate her talents into economic rewards. Over the next twenty-one years (until the death of her father, when her financial situation substantially improved) she supplemented her income by taking in boarders, teaching private classes, giving public lectures, and writing. She published literary criticism, children's fiction, biography, personal reminiscence, and religious and reform works. These strategies generally did more to help Dall establish a new identity than they did to meet the financial needs of her family. Their relative poverty forced Dall to periodic and often humiliating recourse to her father's sometimes generous, sometimes grudging help. Yet difficult as her life was, it would in all likelihood have been much more frustrating if Charles Dall had stayed at home. In his absence Caroline Dall managed to find meaningful work, some fame, and a clearer sense of her own identity. Thus she gained a measure of freedom from this arrangement, albeit a freedom fraught with perils.

In Dall's working out of her role in society, she fell back on her youthful exposure to the ideas of the New England Transcendentalists. These thinkers and reformers, in their heyday in Caroline Healey's youth, had been a major force in her intellectual and moral development. Her life course had been set on a track of idealism and independence by her participation at age eighteen in Margaret Fuller's "conversations," her early close connection with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody,⁴ and her frequent attendance at lectures and sermons by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Unitarian-Transcendentalist ministers Theodore Parker and James Freeman Clarke. These figures provided her with nontraditional role models and introduced her to the world of organized reform of the Boston abolitionists. After Charles's departure as she struggled to make financial ends meet, she at the same time attempted to work out and embody the ideals that were the legacy of her Unitarian-Transcendentalist education. Since the late 1840s she had been associated with the abolitionists, much to the dismay of her father (by that time once again prosperous). So strongly did he disapprove of this association that he several times made his financial assistance conditional on Caroline's forgoing all association with the movement. She refused to accede to this condition, though out of respect for him she kept a relatively low profile in abolitionist circles. Nonetheless, Dall soon became prominent in another reform movement. Her plea for women's rights, first articulated in "Women in the Present" in the Liberator of June 1, 1849, then delivered in the form of lectures in the 1850s and 1860s and published in numerous articles and books thereafter, articulated a basic theoretical foundation for the women's movement in America, and urged specific applications of the theory for contemporary society. Her fundamental work The College, the Market, and the Court; or, Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (1867) placed her in the front ranks of the women's movement. Dall argued the justice of suffrage for women and highlighted other legal disabilities of women; at the same time she delineated the crucial battles impending in the areas of equal education and equal opportunities for work (with equal pay) in all fields. Most twentieth-century historians of the women's movement have overlooked Dall's critical role in the women's movement, at least in part because she was not associated with any major organized group.

Later in the century Dall turned her energies to the American Social Science Association, a more generalized reform organization that she helped found. As a member of countless committees she traveled widely to examine and report upon conditions in prisons, hospitals, factories, and women's colleges. Beginning in 1878, largely retired from active reform work, Dall lived her last thirty-four years in Washington, D.C., where she was the friend of political and scientific luminaries, the intimate of First Lady Frances Cleveland, and a well-known hostess and leader of a reading group for young women.

Through all of this varied and fascinating and extremely busy life Dall kept her journal. What would make a person keep an almost daily account of her life from age nine to ninety? What purpose does the diary serve for Caroline Dall? And who is the intended reader? Because her journal is so huge and covers such a long span of time when her circumstances varied widely, there is no single answer to such questions. She tells us that her earliest (now destroyed) journal was one "strictly of self-examination"—an element that persists throughout the surviving journals, although it occurs most frequently and at greater length in the earlier years. In 1838, for example, she wrote,

I am sixteen years old today,—! and have these sixteen years been wasted? ... Am I all that my parents wish me to be—do I—or shall I—realize my fathers ambitious wishes, for me— Alas! two years ago—he told me—that I had not accomplished all which he had a right to expect— Is it so now—am I deficient in industrious exertion ...? (June 22, 1838)

At another time she gives an entirely different explanation for keeping her journal: "My Journal—I have kept chiefly to establish my connections with the outward world—as a sort of link between me, & what I was afraid of forgetting" (July 1, 1848). On certain occasions it appears that Dall is consciously acting as historian, recording events to save them from the ravages of time and the unreliability of memory. The care with which she chronicles the details of certain public events—an antislavery meeting broken up by a mob, for example—suggests such a motive, as does her careful recording of private encounters with public figures, such as her conversations with the aging and mentally impaired Emerson. But much of the journal certainly lies outside the scope of this explanation. In fact, Dall does a lot of what an unfriendly reader might call whining in her journal. In one sense, the journal is at its richest in terms of emotional appeal when Dall is at her most miserable, that is, when there is no one to whom she can confide her troubles, and the journal substitutes for the missing sympathetic ear of an intimate. Dall recognized this function when at age seventeen she wrote, "This Journal is my safety valve—and it is well, that I can thus rid myself of my superfluous steam" (November 12, 1839). The journal also serves as the vehicle for a good bit of self-justification. In it Dall takes up her failures, the challenges to her sense of selfhood, and works through them, casting them in a form that she can live with. In one terrible moment, at the culmination of a legion of painful and frustrating events, including the New England Woman's Club's blackballing of her, Dall is told by fellow reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "I can't help it, Mrs Dall, ... [that] you're such an intensely unpopular person!" This unkind cut clearly staggered Dall (and whom wouldn't it stagger?), but several lines later in the journal she comes back to it and asserts her worth: "I do not believe I am an unpopular person. I believe I have had one or two bitter enemies say Towne & Eliz. Peabody—& Mrs Severance, who have done their best to prejudice people against me. I deserved Towne's enmity for my folly & indiscretion. I did not deserve that of Peabody or Severance" (Oct. 12, 1870). We see here the extent to which the journal functioned as a kind of self-administered therapy.⁵

For whom was she writing? To a large extent Dall wrote to and for herself. But not entirely, and not always. At times she addressed her children, imagining their reading the journals after her death. Of course, the fact that she left the journals to the Massachusetts Historical Society also suggests that she knew that she was writing for us. This consciousness of and desire for a potentially wider audience was in her mind even as a very young woman: "Who will care for these many papers—," she wrote, at age twenty,

who will ever read—or at my request, take pains to preserve that I have written? ... If I were likely to die wealthy and could pay an institution for taking care of papers so precious to me—I would do it—for to a psychologist, this journal would be worth the pains. (Aug. 7, 1842)

In her vision of a future public that would find the journals valuable, we read the unspoken motive of most authors who seek a kind of earthly immortality.

Just how self-consciously was Dall writing, then, and how factually reliable are the journals? While it is clear that she sometimes wrote with future generations in mind, there are other times when she appears to have been unselfconscious, baring her soul utterly. When Dall read through the journals with a view to giving them to the Massachusetts Historical Society, she attempted to cancel a number of passages, and in some instances she actually cut out one or more pages.⁶ Such actions highlight the tension between the private uses that the journal from its beginnings served for Dall—its function as an outlet for her heart's innermost feelings—and the public audience that, perhaps almost as early, she envisioned. As for reliability, I have found no reason whatever to doubt the factualness of anything that Dall reports in her contemporary journal.⁷ But at the same time the reader must recognize that the facts and events are filtered through Dall's own perspective and undoubtedly colored by her own self-interest. We can never know precisely what she has suppressed from her journals, but we do know that she at least at times willingly depicted herself in embarrassing or even humiliating situations. Although her journals are hardly risqué, she takes up in them, at least obliquely, a number of taboo subjects—birth control, abortion, childbirth, prostitution, and sexual harassment.

In the 1890s, when Dall was in her seventies, she began rereading her old journals. Almost every day for weeks she engaged in the same intense and engrossing activity—reading her account of events of thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years earlier. She wrote in her current journal her reactions to her own earlier journal, reactions that often paralleled my own; of how painful it was to read over such and such a period, perhaps. In the midst of this rereading, on February 22, 1896, she commented in her journal on her own journal, "My life half forgotten—now reads to me like a Romance." What did Dall mean by this statement, and what was her understanding of the word "romance"? Not, certainly, the old medieval sense of a tale of fantastic and heroic adventure; neither, I think, the more modern sense of strictly a love story. Dall's contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne famously opposed romance to novel, but I think that Dall had in mind another nineteenth-century usage of the term, as more or less a synonym for fiction, as in the French cognate term roman, novel. Dall thus suggested that her journal seemed to her to have the elements of a fictional narrative: plot, dialogue, recurring themes, character revelation, the growth and development of a heroine. Dall perhaps meant, in part, that she had forgotten much of what she had written in the journal, and it fascinated her as would a fresh story that she had not read before. I shared this experience with her. Engaged in this project off and on for more than a decade now, I can also testify to the phenomenon of the gripping power of the journal even for one who knows, in rough outline, its story. As I reread the early portions that in some cases I had not read for years, this fact came home to me: though my purpose was to read analytically, over and over I found myself reading compulsively for dozens of pages, losing sight entirely of my aim in my complete absorption in the story.

But in what sense can a diary be said to have a story, a plot? From the perspective of its author, at least, she cannot know where it is going, only what has happened or what she has thought on a given day that she finds worthy of recording. But again Dall's statement, "[It] reads to me like a Romance," suggests almost a sense of awe and wonder on her part. The journal has taken on some sort of life of its own, and in reading it Dall can now see what she could not see at the time of the events, that her own life had fulfilled some perhaps foreordained plot. In rereading her journals I have had something of the same sense, the sense of a sort of God-like perspective. Having read through all the journals, I know the end of the story, yet I see the protagonist struggling against personality flaws that I know she will never be able to overcome; and I see her driven in her old age by the same needs that drove her as an adolescent: the need for approval, and especially the need for love.

Caroline Healey Dall, c. 1872

Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Because the moments when either of these needs was satisfied were rare, we might well consider Dall's life tragic. In many senses, however, Dall's journal depicts a successful life, successful both in terms of influence that can be more or less objectively measured and in the sense that she never deviated from her devotion to a high moral imperative. In another sense, however, "success" did not matter: having imbibed from her youth the Unitarian-Transcendentalist ideal of self-culture, Dall saw the end of life not as happiness but as development, and for development, unhappiness and failure were often more valuable than success. She constantly strove to make sense of her troubles and failures, to learn the lessons they must have been sent to teach. It is part of the great appeal of the journals that this learning, this making sense of her life, this attempt to identify the themes and second-guess the plot, if you will, is almost never easy, and Dall's emotionally vivid representations of these cruxes draw us irresistibly into her struggle.

Dall's is a remarkable journal in large part because of its fortuitously proportionate mixture of the public and the private. Here we find extended portraits and notable vignettes of many of the extraordinary people of the time; a brief and incomplete list would include Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, Dorothea Dix, Harriet Hosmer, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster, William H. Herndon, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Anne Whitney, Frances (Mrs. Grover) Cleveland, George Frisbie Hoar, the Alexander Graham Bells, and eminent Canadians such as Paul Kane, the father of Canadian painting, novelist Susanna Moodie, and ethnologist and president of the University of Toronto Daniel Wilson, who invented the term prehistory. But we also become acquainted with the lives of people whose names have not made it into the history texts—wives and mothers, fugitives, servants, children, starving ministers, single women looking for outlets for their ambitions, and working people of all sorts. Dall reports on the lectures, conversations, and sermons that characterized the circles of Boston's intelligentsia; she describes antislavery meetings and reform conventions of all kinds, including some that turn rowdy. She depicts the mood and activities of Civil War Boston; the split in the abolitionist ranks after the war; Unitarian conventions and politics and the formation of the radical wing of the Unitarians into the Free Religious Association; the social scene in late century Washington, peopled by senators, Supreme Court justices, and their wives; the scientific community in Washington centered around the Smithsonian; a major cholera epidemic; and the beginnings of an intellectual and artistic elite in the Toronto of the 1850s.

At the same time that she reports on high-profile people and public events, Dall comments on the routines and annoyances of daily life—her comment "Came home & found the plumber had upset the whole house & gone away as plumbers will" strikes a resonant note with most of us. She mentions often her sewing: it is staggering to contemplate the amount of Dall's life, especially the first half of her life, that she spent sewing. She describes illnesses and their treatment, with plasters and blisters and blue pills and leeches on the one hand and high-tech electric shock treatments for a strange malady in her hands on the other. In the last decade of her life, when she suffered severely from arthritis, she noted with great hope the advent of a new miracle drug—aspirin. She relates her frustrations with servants, and she must have run through hundreds in her lifetime. One morning she arose to face almost all these frustrations at once: not only were she and both children sick, requiring "two mustard plasters on the children, last night, one on myself this morning, before I could speak a loud word"; but then she "found the water & drain pipes frozen when I got up"; and to crown the occasion, her servant "informed me this morng that she would rather I would get another girl, for she would like to live with a pleasanter-looking lady—at which," Dall further commented, "I did not wonder" (Jan. 23, 1856). But the chief topic of the diary is yet less public than even the trivial frustrations of everyday life; it is Caroline Dall herself, her mind and heart. For a diary is, along with autobiography, the ultimate egotistical text.

But it is not just the what, the subject, but the how, the style, that sets this diary apart. Though her accounts of public persons and events would generate interest no matter how poorly she expressed them, that would hardly be the case when she writes of purely personal matters. Even the young Dall, however, captured her experience with an expertise and eloquence that seemed to come naturally to her with very little need for revision. She commanded the resources of language, creating from them a journal that is, more often than not, polished, pithy and acute, and sprinkled with searing judgments of friend and foe.

Since only Dall's journals themselves can adequately illustrate their character and style, a few selected passages will exemplify their nature and power. The first of these may remind diary buffs of one of the most famous of all diaries, that of the seventeenth-century Englishman Samuel Pepys. One of the highlights of Pepys' diary is his description of London in the time of the Great Plague; Caroline Dall lived in Toronto in 1854 during the outbreak of a deadly cholera epidemic. She vividly renders this frightful time:

Toronto C.W.

Tuesday Aug 1. 1854— Went to visit my round of patients, and sewed quietly afterward. I do not feel well this week. So sick and exhausted that I wholly forgot it was the first of Aug. till I saw the colored men, parading. Still I have no fear. There were 219 deaths last week—but the vital power seems strong in me—and the dear children keep uncommonly well. Nothing speaks such volumes of misery to my mind as the draggled white plumes of the hearse. Heavy with dust and drippled with rain, they look as if they had been used for centuries.

A week later she continued:

Toronto C.W.

Wednesday. Aug 9. 1854—
A journal of one day in these dreadful times, may answer for many— Truly, I never felt the terrors of death so hem me in on every side— First, there is the hospital cart, which sadder to look at than the hearse, goes creeping about the town to garner in it's victim. Then there is the hearse with white feathers, and the hearse with black—and the hospital hearse which has no feathers at all— Thus every morning is ushered in, and so it was today, while I sat as long as possible at my needle. I felt as if I must give up at noon—and I lay down upon the sofa Index Rerum in hand. As I lay, Annie came in to tell me how ill they were at Mr Brown's. Champion and both the servants are down with fever and ague, Ida was so ill with it all last night that they feared hydrocephalous, and old Mrs Simpson has had a paralytic stroke. Poor Maria with an infant not five weeks old, is the only person well enough to wait on all these sick ones. Of course, I felt that I must go out—but not till I had seen if I could not put off an expected visit of the Sisley children tomorrow so as to give Maria the whole day. I went directly after dinner to Mrs Walton, to see about the baby for whom I have been prescribing for a day or two. To my surprise I found Mrs W. very ill with cholera— I was alarmed at the symptoms. When I left her, I went to Sisley's to tell him the children had better not come over. He met me, with the intelligence that the baby was very ill, and as I listened, Lucy—came running down to say, that if the Dr. did not soon come, the nurse wd be afraid to stay with it alone. Of course, I went back with her— I gave the child camphor and ipecac as soon as I got inside the door, which revived it wonderfully. I staid till after Dr Primrose came, put warm flannels to it's feet, and cold linen to it's head, and gave it a dose of oil, much against my homeopathic will. But for the Browns, I could not have left them tonight. I went down to the store, & told S. how they were, & that he ought to go home. As soon as I had taken a hurried cup of tea, I hastened to the Browns, John went with me. It was a deplorable sight— I promised to give them the whole of Friday—and after a short pleasant call for refreshment at the Wilsons—hurried into town—and to bed.⁸

This passage, with its crowding in and piling up of crisis upon crisis, conveys the frenzied spirit of the time. Although the text depicts a terrible season, the scene is less terrible than it might have been, for at the center of it all is Dall herself, the point of relief and refuge to whom all those in distress turn, self-depicted as somehow impervious to both the disease and the panic, completely self-possessed and almost serene, as fully in control of the crisis as she is in control of the prose that describes the crisis.

Among the more remarkable passages in the journals depicting public events are those that describe the often rousing and sometimes turbulent antislavery meetings that Dall attended. At the meeting described below (a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society), one of the first such that she ever attended, she heard Frederick Douglass:

[May 30, 1849]

I found it raining heavily, and under the shelter of Aunt Ann's umbrella I went down to the meeting of the Anti Slavery Society where I staid all the morning, through the heavy storm. I was glad I went, for I heard fine speaking from Wendell Phillips—Foster & his wife, Frederick Douglass, and Remond.⁹ In this speaking, there was nothing fanatical, nothing severe— It was creditable to the Christianity of the speakers. Douglass in eloquence—argument, and force of will, a much neglected but very important part of public speaking far surpassed them all....

Obviously, Dall used the entry to reassure herself, perhaps with her father's strictures in mind, of the rationality and the Christianity of the participants. When the meeting took up again the next day, Dall had to come to terms with the radically anticlerical (and to her, offensive) views of abolitionist Stephen Foster:

Thursday, May 31. 1849.

I sewed and taught Willie until it was time to attend the Anti Slavery meeting. It was intensely exciting and chiefly because after Stephen Foster had made one of his most disagreable and repulsive speeches, Douglass rose, and vindicated his own Christianity, and that of true reform, in one of the finest that ever fell from the lips of man. God bless Frederick Douglass! God bless him—and his cause, so prayed I while he spoke so pray I now. During the violent address of Foster, too weak in soul & body, to rise myself—I was inwardly praying that God would raise up an apostle to speak against such folly. He was followed by Charles Burleigh in a noble speech—but one of those quite likely to be misinterpreted. I prayed again with a broken spirit—for I felt that this was not what was needed but after Douglass had risen I sang—and my song was an anthem of praise. I could not restrain my enthusiasm, he seemed to me while he spoke, greater than any man to whom I had ever listened, and the moment the meeting had closed, I went upon the stage and thanked him in person. What would father have said, had he seen me then? No matter—. God knows I was in the way of my duty, and with an undivided heart, I asked no questions then. May I never in the future.¹⁰

In this passage the interweaving of the public and the personal becomes apparent. Dall reports on and preserves a public event at a certain place and time, but she at the same time and more centrally depicts a watershed moment in her own consciousness—a moment when she is not only completely overwhelmed, by way of Douglass's eloquence, with the righteousness of the cause and the greatness of the man Frederick Douglass, but when she consciously rejects her father's dominion and opts for duty instead. It is a defining and characteristic moment.

A passage that appears to be a more obvious attempt to preserve a moment of history describes the reaction in Boston and in Medford, where Dall is living at the time, to the Second Battle of Bull Run. She enters the description shortly after initial reports reaching Boston make clear that a devastating Union defeat, with a terrific toll of casualties, is in the making (there would turn out to be in all some 15,000 Union casualties). Dall gets the news of the battle almost simultaneously with the news that her husband Charles has, after many misadventures, arrived in Boston on the ship the Panther for his first visit home since his departure for India nearly seven years earlier. This is a Sunday, and Dall goes early into Boston from Medford.

Aug. 31. 1862... The first thing I heard when I reached town was, that the Panther was in the bay. I heard Mr. Clarke¹¹ preach, yet hardly heard him, for I longed for the service to be over, that I might hurry home to help prepare lint & bandages....
    No one who was in Boston today—will ever forget it. No one but will be proud to own it as a birth place. The car which I took from Dover St. to Court—was crowded to a crush with women & bundles. Most of them were weeping. "Give way," said rough men to each other, "those bundles are sacred." When we got to the Tremont House—a dense crowd had pressed between it & the Hall.¹² All were eagerly gaping for rumors. About the Tremont Temple a semi-circular rope was stretched enclosing several hundreds of cubic feet. At Three Tables—placed in the center & at each end, men took down subscriptions for the freight fund. Within on the side walk immense boxes were being packed. In the building 1800 women sewed all day. Through each of the three passages stretched lines of men standing 6 ft apart. When we drew near, women with bundles—were crowding all the avenues and the streets as far as one could see. Delicate women in Sunday attire, followed by one two or three servants carrying bundles as large as themselves—pressed among the ruder sort. The bundles were passed over the barrier, tossed from hand to hand along the lines, till they reached the inner work-room— I got out, & going up to the Clerks got all the information I needed for Medford. The impression seemed to be, that Pope¹³ reinforced, was fighting again.
    In the car that went to Medford every body was bitterly depressed. The women thought that if we conquered in the end, the life of the Camp would ruin our young men, that they would come home worse, licentious cruel. I could not stand this, and the end was, that I appealed aloud to the women, in a plea lasting partly in a conversational way, nearly the whole time we were coming out, as to the moral end of the war. How moved the whole population were we can judge from the fact that one could hear a pin drop in that rattling car—& there was not a smile at me on man's or woman's face.
    Across the square, as we came in to Medford, a perfect crowd were hurrying with bundles.... The Selectmen sent round in Medford & stopt all the services, ordering the citizens & such relief as they could spare to the town Hall...
    Willie came out at dusk to tell me, that his father would not get up [to Medford] till tomorrow.¹⁴ I was surprised to find that in the general distress I had forgotten my private pain, not having thought of the Panther, after thinking of nothing else for months, since I heard she was in the bay.

In this passage Dall frames the dominant public scene with references to her private anticipated reunion with her husband. The public event is of such moment that it seems to crowd out what would otherwise have been a significant private point in time, and indeed that is the spin that Dall deliberately gives the episode at the end: these events were so great, she says, that I forgot my private concerns. What the passage also may reveal, however, is an unconscious subtext: for Dall the return of her husband was not the focus of unmitigated pleasurable anticipation that we may imagine it would have been for many wives, some of whom at least would not have allowed even a Union defeat at Bull Run to push it out of their minds. Though she says she has thought of little else for weeks, many if not most of her thoughts about Charles's return centered on the emotional upheaval that was likely to attend it. From the uneasy pondering of this problematic reunion, acting to relieve the distress of Union soldiers must have been a welcome respite. It is telling but not surprising, then, that Dall's thoughts and feelings and care-giving are centered on these anonymous soldiers rather than on the homecoming of her own husband.

Sometimes, as here, Dall reveals more about herself than she intends, and in some cases the result is comic. The report of a visit to New York City by Dall's friend Bronson Alcott, the Concord philosopher and friend of Emerson, is one such passage:

Boston Mass.

Thursday. Mar. 26. 1857. We were sitting quietly this morning, for John felt weary, with yesterday's exertions when Mr Alcott was announced— He staid more than an hour to give me an account of his recent visit to New York— I cannot write down what he said, for it makes me, thrill to my fingers ends, and I am sick and ashamed of life— The whole City is corrupt, marriage has no longer any sanctity, its holy uses—are scoffed at— ... Mr A. talked with Stephen Pearl Andrews—with that vulgar untamed brute Walt Whitman—the author of Leaves of Grass, the only man, he says, he ever met who was a fit mate physically for Fannie Kemble a very low creature one must think if one may judge from that side of his experiences which he chooses to remember. He [Alcott] had a conversation at Lucy Stone's, and among the ladies whom she invited to meet him was a Mrs DeGrove at whose house the next conversation was appointed. He went to see this lady—and if I understood aright was as cordially invited to her bed, as if it had been her parlor. At all events—she assured him it was open to whoever pleased her, and set forth her doctrine with so much intellectual acumen, so much power and seductive grace, that he was almost bewildered. The second meeting was held at Mrs DeGrove's house—but Providence preserved him—he did not hear of it, and they waited for him in vain. He told her—"Madam, I do not think I am good enough to hear these things you are saying—" She apologised for the freedom of her remarks and said her practice and her theory were different— Afterward Mr Alcott ascertained from reliable sources that her practice and her theory sustained each other. He went to Dr Wellington's,¹⁵ a water cure establishment and this man—once, God shield us, a clergyman—now says—I am a whole pharmacopeia in myself—and treats his patients by conjugal embraces instead of physics— In his hospital were women who seemed respectable, who quietly told Mr Alcott that they fulfilled the same office toward the men. At the door was a carriage—the Dr sent for by a lady! He was wasted to a shadow—human nature could not stand it long—of course— Oh God! to what abyss of social degradation are we coming when these things are so.... sank ever Athens lower—! What wonder that slavery reigns in a land so tenanted.

To us, reading this today, Dall is unwittingly funny. In our sophistication we laugh at her hysteria, at her primness and prudery, really at her innocence (and, of course, her reaction is interesting for what it tells us about the prevailing proprieties for a woman of Dall's class and religion).

The times that we laugh at Dall, however, are more than balanced by the times that we empathize with her. For the last example I have chosen a selection that, I believe, would engage the sympathies even of Dall's bitterest enemy. The passage recounts a purely private event, almost as private as it is possible to imagine—childbirth.

Friday. April 21. 1848.

    It is five weeks tomorrow since my confinement; and I take up my pen—with a heavy heart, and retrace my painful steps.
    On Saturday morning March. 18. 1848. I was seized with pains slight at first but rapidly becoming more severe, at the breakfast table. I washed up my silver, however & made some blancmange, and prepared my basket—while Mr. Dall went for Mrs Parker, and to ask Dr Noyes to remain at home through the day. I was just on the point of preparing my bed, when I felt a sudden relief—from the breaking of the water. I undressed & threw myself hastily on the bed, from which I was not destined to rise again, till all was over. Meanwhile my girl ran for the Doctor and Mrs Revere my nearest neighbor.¹⁶ They staid with me—until my husband returned which was at half past nine A.M. At one P.M. we had dinner—and as my husband left the room, he stopped and held me, through my first severe pain. Our Irish cook came up to stay with me—while they ate— Two pains rending—sp[l]itting—tearing me asunder—with inconceivable rapidity, followed quick upon the first, and while my girl went to the head of the stairs, to call Mrs P. I fell back exhausted by agony and my child was born. My child! why should I call it so—! but after one has borne a second life about with her, for eight months—it is impossible not to love it, though it should prove an abortion. The babe was a boy—& had a hair lip— Its hands & feet were bent in, and enlarged at the wrists & ancles It had no thumb on the right hand—but instead five fingers—the fifth growing out of the first. The smaller intestines were formed on the outside and the scrotum was deficient. It had been dead at least a fortnight the cuticle slipping at the touch. On Friday March. 3d. I was attacked with ague fits and nausea—and it was probably at that time the child died. It's feebleness will be readily understood, when I say that I felt as much motion on the 17th of March, as I have ever done.
    My mother¹⁷—and attendants referred all my trials, to previous mental impressions—but I could not yield to this— I still believed in the benevolence of God.... I did not gain very fast—for Charles in his love of truth—after having buried his little one, with his own trembling hands—was altogether too communicative to those who enquired, and the consequence was that the town rung with the peculiarities of the case—and constant aggravations of them, coming from the neighbors to my bedside, worried me. My husband would not understand my earnest entreaties, that I might—be spared this bitter trial—and his want of sympathy, finished my misery. I was already bent beneath the hand of God—quite low enough—but the hours have past—and may the Father of Mercies grant—never to return.... As I did not gain, as was desired—on Wednesday April 12 I left my husband my child—and my home to stay in Lynn¹⁸—a few days—...
    ... [On April 15] We were just at breakfast when father¹⁹ returned from the West— I caught his first embrace in the entry, and the Question "where is your baby?" brought the ready tears to my eyes. He held me—with a father's pressure—to his bosom as I sobbed—forth my reply. I laid my head upon his shoulder and wept there—for our mutual suffering brought back the hour of Charlie's death.²⁰ Long as I may live it will be impossible for me ever to forget his tender fatherly pressure....
    ... [On April 18] I went to see Dr. Warren²¹ at half past twelve o'clock. After a long interview he told me to dismiss the subject of my confinement entirely from my mind, that I was in no wise responsible for it's results—that he did not believe in the effect of mental impressions on the child—that children deformed like mine were the common result of a great weakness—either in the mother or the child.

The passage describing the childbirth itself constitutes a magnificent piece of prose. After announcing the onset of her labor pains, Dall builds suspense, making us wait for the conclusion as she washes the dishes, makes blancmange, and gets things in readiness. Her severe pains are juxtaposed to the mundane, to the necessity of everyone else's eating dinner, and thus made more stark. The restrained description of the stillborn child, detailing flatly and in neutral language one by one its unspeakable deformities, produces a chilling effect. Who are the villains here? Her husband, who has violated her wishes and spread abroad the details of the child's deformities; he has loved truth more than he has loved her. Likewise, her mother and her attendants, the female world that should function as her support; instead they have attempted to place responsibility for the tragedy on the anguished mother herself. Who is vindicated? She is vindicated, for she will accept no guilt; her father, who holds her once again as if she were a child; the paternal doctor, who absolves her from fault; and God, whom she simply refuses to blame. This passage in particular emotionally binds us to Dall and demonstrates the power of the journals. Once we have not only witnessed her agony but, by the power of language and imagination, participated in it, it is almost impossible to withhold sympathy from the diarist.

Readers will come to Dall's journals for many reasons: for historical detail, for insights into major figures, and for information on domestic routine, nineteenth-century medicine, women's reading, the inner dynamics of reform groups, and the dozens of other yet unanticipated interests that will motivate scholars and readers of the future. Although the journals can fulfill all of these uses, their ultimate interest and appeal will derive from their subjectivity. The true subject of the journals, in other words, is not so much the incidents and facts Dall records as her response to them. Events are filtered through her consciousness, judged by her light, "spun" according to her agenda. Above everything, the journals convey a cumulative sense of Dall herself. Hers is the fascinating human story of a woman both ordinary in her needs, flaws, frustrations, and failures, and extraordinary in her intelligence, her vision of new models for women's lives, and her commitment to her ideals. Her journals are ultimately a great text because Caroline Healey Dall herself is a great subject and because she is remarkably articulate in presenting her world, her vision, and her story.

Dall once struggled in her journals to understand why God, who in her words "having gifted me so strangely," had not yet made clear to her her vocation. She could not quite see that her greatest legacy was not to be what she would have called her "work." But we are in a position to see that the perfect and inevitable expression of her peculiar talents, of this strange giftedness, was to be her life story itself—this romance-like story, preserved in the form of the journals that both resulted from the life and helped to shape it.

HELEN R. DEESE is Caroline Dall editor for the Massachusetts Historical Society and Professor of English Emerita at Tennessee Technological University. She is the editor of Jones Very: The Complete Poems and the author of various articles on New England Transcendentalism.

NOTES

^1. This essay was presented in a slightly different form on March 31, 1999, as a lecture at the American Antiquarian Society, where I was a Mellon Research Fellow. I wish to thank the staffs of both the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society for their support of this project. Quotations from the Dall Papers are used by permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
The first significant treatment of Dall in the last half-century was Barbara Welter's largely unsympathetic "The Merchant's Daughter: A Tale from Life," New England Quarterly 42 (1969): 3–22. Though Dall has generally received short shrift from women's historians, three recent articles may signify her emergence from obscurity as a reformer: Howard M. Wach, "A Boston Reformer in the Victorian Public Sphere: The Social Criticism of Caroline Healey Dall," New England Quarterly 68 (1995): 429–450; Nancy Bowman, "Caroline Healey Dall: Her Creation and Reform Career," in Women of the Commonwealth, ed. Susan L. Porter (Amherst, Mass., 1996), 121–146; Jean V. Matthews, Women's Struggle for Equality: The First Phase, 1828–1876 (Chicago, 1997). Other studies have treated Dall largely in relationship to the Transcendentalists: Joel Myerson, "Caroline Dall's Reminiscences of Margaret Fuller," Harvard Library Bulletin 22 (Oct. 1974): 414–428; Myerson, "Mrs. Dall Edits Miss Fuller: The Story of Margaret and Her Friends," Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 72 (1978): 187-200; Helen R. Deese, "Transcendentalism from the Margins: The Experience of Caroline Healey Dall," in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston, 1999), 527–547; Deese, "Caroline Healey Dall," Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism, ed. Wesley T. Mott (Westport, Conn., 1996), 60–62; Deese, "'A Liberal Education': Caroline Healey Dall and Emerson," in Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert Burkholder (Rochester, New York, 1996), 237–260; Deese, "Tending the 'Sacred Fires': Theodore Parker and Caroline Healey Dall," Proceedings of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society 33 (1995): 22–38; Deese, "A New England Women's Network: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Healey Dall, and Delia S. Bacon," Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 8 (Fall 1991): 77–91; Deese, "Alcott's Conversations on the Transcendentalists: The Record of Caroline Dall," American Literature 60 (Mar. 1988): 17–25; Judith Mattson Bean, "'A Presence Among Us': Fuller's Place in Nineteenth-Century Oral Culture," ESQ 44 (1998): 79–123; and Phyllis Cole, "The Nineteenth-Century Women's Rights Movement and the Canonization of Margaret Fuller," ESQ 44 (1998): 1–33. A more general look at Dall's life and work is Deese, "Caroline Healey Dall: Transcendentalist Activist," in Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in American History, ed. Kriste Lindenmeyer (Wilmington, Del., 2000), 59–71. Rose Norman has dealt with Dall's autobiographical writing in "'Sorella di Dante': Caroline Dall and the Paternal Discourse," A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 5 (1990): 124–139. The only dissertation to date focusing entirely on Dall is Gary Sue Goodman, "'All about Me Forgotten': The Education of Caroline Healey Dall, 1822–1912" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1987).

^2. William Healey Dall and Sarah Keen Dall (later Munro).

^3. This term was suggested to me by Laura Wasowicz, American Antiquarian Society staff member.

^4. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894), educator and businesswoman, member of the Transcendentalist circle, whom Caroline Healey met at her West Street bookshop when Healey was 18 and Peabody 36, served as mentor to Healey and introduced her into the Transcendentalist circle.

^5. Edward C. Towne (1834–1911), a Unitarian minister who had boarded in Dall's home in the early 1860s; and Caroline Severance (1820–1914), woman's rights reformer and first president of the New England Woman's Club, who was a friend and ally of Dall in the 1850s and 1860s. Dall's relationship with each of these friends had since turned sour.

^6. Many of the canceled passaged I have recovered.

^7. Dall destroyed her earliest journals and replaced them with "reconstructed" journals. Likewise, on at least one occasion she elaborated notes and journal entries that she had made on a trip, constructing a new journal and destroying the original. These documents bear some marks of revisionism and obviously do not carry the same weight as contemporary accounts.

^8. The Brown family included Champion Brown (1822–1892) and his wife Lucy Maria Brown (1826–1898), both natives of Massachusetts; her mother Eunice T. Simpson (b. 1784?); and their children Ida (b. 1851) and the infant Annie C. (b. 1854). Mary Walton (b. 1831?) was the wife of Samuel (b. 1825?); the children of John R. Sisley had lost their mother a few days earlier to the cholera; Dr. Francis S. Primrose was a Toronto physician; "John" was John Patton (1827?–1870), a close friend and boarder in the Dall household; and the Wilsons were Daniel Wilson (1816–1892), eminent ethnologist and professor at University College, and his wife Margaret M. Wilson (1816–1885).

^9. "Aunt Ann" was Ann Kuhn (1797–1880), Dall's former Sabbath School teacher at the West Church, but no relation. The speakers Dall mentions were Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), prominent Boston abolitionist; Stephen Foster (1809–1881) and Abigail Kelley Foster (1810–1887), both abolitionist lecturers; Frederick Douglass (1811?–1895), former slave, now an abolitionist journalist and orator; and Charles Lenox Remond (1810–1873), a free black and an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, lecturing in England and in New England.

^10. "Willie" was William Healey Dall (1845–1927), the three-year-old son of Charles and Caroline Dall; Charles C. Burleigh (1810–1878) was another prominent Massachusetts abolitionist.

^11. James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888), Unitarian minister to the Church of the Disciples, where Dall attended.

^12. The Tremont House was a hotel on Tremont Street in Boston; the "Hall" was the nearby Tremont Temple.

^13. Gen. John Pope (1822–1892), in command of the Union forces. Pope was relieved of his command following this defeat.

^14. That is, her son Willie told her that Charles Dall would not come from Boston to Medford until the next day.

^15. John Patton, visiting Dall from Canada; Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–1886), reformer and eccentric philosopher, associated in the popular mind with free love; the poet Walt Whitman (1819–1891), whose Leaves of Grass appeared two years earlier; English-born actress Fanny Kemble Butler (1809–1893); Lucy Stone (1818–1893), the first Massachusetts woman to hold a college degree (from Oberlin, 1847), lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent woman's rights advocate, later a founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association and editor of the Woman's Journal; and Oliver H. Wellington, M.D., who ran the New York City Water-Cure (Harry B. Weiss and Howard R. Kemble, The Great American Water-Cure Craze [Trenton, N.J., 1967], 69, 142). "Mrs DeGrove" is unidentified.

^16. Dr. Josiah Noyes (1801–1871), who had studied medicine at Dartmouth and was Needham's first licensed physician (George Kuhn Clarke, History of Needham Massachusetts, 1711–1911 [Cambridge, Mass., 1912], 573–575); and Mary C. Smith Revere (1800–1869), wife of Needham merchant George Revere (NEHGR 145 [Oct. 1991]: 307–308). "Mrs Parker" is unidentified.

^17. Caroline Foster Healey (1800–1871).

^18. That is, at the home of her parents in Lynn, Massachusetts.

^19. Mark Healey (1791–1876).

^20. Dall's brother Charles Wells Healey died in 1841 at the age of five.

^21. Boston physician John C. Warren (1778–1856) was the Healey family doctor during Caroline's childhood.

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Notes & Documents

"My life ... reads to me like a Romance"The Journals of Caroline Healey Dall

HELEN R. DEESE

"My life ... reads to me like a Romance"
The Journals of Caroline Healey Dall