The Universe of Discourse

The Wrong Alcott
I went to the library yesterday, and as usual I was wandering in the stacks hoping for a lucky find. This time I got "The Young Husband" (subtitle: "Duties of Man in the Marriage Relation") by "Alcott".

This book was written in 1846 by William Andrus Alcott, as a sequel to his 1844 (presumably successful) book "The Young Wife". It is a book of domestic advice for recently-married men. Like many advice books, it is a curious mix of good advice, bad advice, and totally bizarre advice that apparently came from the planet Zorkulon. For example, Alcott advises the young husband to forbid his family all fictional literature. He thinks it's all trash, and time spent reading it is time wasted that could have been spent reading something moral and improving, such as (presumably) Alcott's own series of moral and improving advice books. He says that arguments in favor of any particular novel are akin to arguments in favor of champagne: this particular liquor may seem tasty and harmless, but it's still the demon alcohol in a pretty disguise, sure to lead the imbiber to ruin and despair.

I took the book off the shelf not because I have a specific interest in moral advice for Victorian-age Americans, but because I knew a bit about Louisa May Alcott's family life. Louisa May Alcott, as I am sure you recall, was the author several extremely popular books for children, including, most notably, Little Women, which has been continuously in print since its publication in 1868. I settled down to read her father's advice book intending to savor the delicious irony, because Alcott's father was an amazingly bad husband, and this is visible throughout all of her fiction.

Little Women, for example, concerns the life of the four March sisters and their mother. Where is Mr. March? He's off fighting in the Civil War, not because he was drafted, and not because his family doesn't need him, but as a matter of principle. He barely appears, while the female Marches struggle along without him.

I'm more familiar with Eight Cousins, which is even weirder. The story concerns Rose and her extended family, twenty-one people in all, and among those twenty-one people there is no example of a wholly and happily married couple. Rose, the protagonist, has been orphaned shortly before the story opens. She is sent away into the care of her aunts. The aunts include Aunt Plenty, who is a widow; Aunts Clara and Jessie, whose husbands are away on a trading voyages for the entire book; Aunt Myra, also a widow, and Aunt Peace, whose fiancé died the day of their wedding.

Aunt Jane does have a husband, who is a busy, industrious merchant—except when Jane is around; then he is always asleep. Rose's guardian is Uncle Alex, who is a bachelor.

This theme of the absent or ineffective husband and father runs all through Louisa May Alcott's fiction, and it's easy to guess why: her own father was often absent, and when he was around he was still useless. He made little money, and spent what money he did make on utopian schemes. Lorrie told me a story about how he got the idea that they should eat nothing but apples, and so they did. The only thing that stood between the Alcotts and starvation was the income from Louisa May's writing.

So I was really interested to see what advice Alcott's dad would have to offer on the subject of being a good husband and father, and chuckled whenever he talked insistently about the duties that the husband owes to his family. I quite enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, it was all in vain, because the author, William Andrus Alcott, was not the father of Louisa May Alcott. He was a cousin. Louisa May's father was Amos Bronson Alcott. Whoops.

All of which is presented as a partial explanation of why I have not posted any blog items this week. Sometimes the stuff I'm reading and thinking about is suitable for the blog, sometimes not. I was all excited at the prospect of writing about William Andrus Alcott's advice book, but the humor and irony vanished in a case of mistaken identity.

I could post about what I had for breakfast, but I foreswore such stuff when I decided to start the blog in the first place. If you want that kind of blog, you can't do better than to visit the always engaging blog of Eric Brill.

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