The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew

202 Pages·2002·20.46 MB·English

by  Susan K. Harris (auth.)

THE CULTURAL WORK OF
THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
HosTEss
THE CuLTURAL WoRK oF
THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
HosTEss
ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS AND
MARY GLADSTONE DREW
SusAN K. HARRIS
* THE CULTURAL WORK Of THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY HOSTESS
© Susan K. Harris, 2002
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-312-29529-5
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2002 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-63563-4 ISBN 978-1-137-11639-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-11639-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harris, Susan K., 1945-
The cultural work of the late nineteenth-century hostess:
Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew/
by Susan K. Harris.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Fields, Annie, 1834-1915-Books and reading. 2. Drew, Mary
Gladstone, 1847-1927-Books and reading. 3. Books and reading
United States-History-19th century. 4. Drew, Mary Gladstone,
1847-1927-Friends and associates. 5. Books and reading
England-History-19th century. 6. Fields, Annie Adams,
1834-1915-Friends and associates. 7. Boston (Mass.)-lntellectual
life-19th century. 8. England-Intellectual life-19th century.
9. Group reading-History-19th century. 10. Entertaining
History-19th century. 11. Hospitality-History-19th century.
I. Title.
PS1669.F5 Z66 2002
305.48'9621'09034-dc21 2002068410
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October, 2002
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
List ofI llustrations VI
Preface Vll
Acknowledgments
IX
Note on the Text
XI
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Late Nineteenth-Century
Hostess
Chapter 2 The Hostess as a Diarist 27
Chapter 3 The Hostess as a Correspondent 51
Chapter 4 Moral Landscapes: Mary Gladstone's
Reading Community 73
Chapter 5 The Hostess as a Literary Historian:
Annie Adams Fields 97
Chapter 6 Balancing Acts: The Hostess and the
New Bureaucratic Order 121
Notes 155
Bibliography 181
Index 187
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Cover: Detail from "The Dinner Party," by Jules Grun (1913)
Courtesy of Felix Rosenstiel's Widow & Son Ltd., London
Annie Adams Fields Illustrations
1. Portrait of Annie Adams Fields by Lucia Fairchild Fuller
(1872-1924). Watercolor on ivory, c. 1890, based on a daguerreo
type taken by Southworth & Hawes, Boston, c. 1855. Courtesy of
Boston Athenaeum
2. Annie Adams Fields (seated at the window) and Sarah Orne Jewett
(seated by the fireplace), The Long Library, 148 Charles Street,
Boston, by anonymous photographer. Undated photograph.
Courtesy of Boston Athenaeum
Mary Gladstone (Drew) Illustrations
1. Mary Gladstone, c. 1880. Reproduced from Mary Gladstone
(Mrs. Drew), Her Diaries and Letters, Ed., Lucy Masterman, London:
Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1930
2. Mrs. Drew and King Edward VII at Hawarden, 1908 by anonymous
photographer. Reproduced from Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew), Her
Diaries and Letters, Ed., Lucy Masterman, London: Methuen & Co.,
Ltd., 1930
3. Mary Gladstone Drew and her eldest grandchild Patrick, 1914,
by anonymous photographer. Reproduced from Mary Gladstone
(Mrs. Drew), Her Diaries and Letters, Ed., Lucy Masterman, London:
Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1930
PREFACE
The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams
Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew originated in my interest in nineteenth
century reading communities-groups of people, usually friends, who
read the same books and actively discussed them, usually by way of
letters. I discovered Mary Gladstone and her reading circle first: I was
fascinated by her epistolary exchanges with Lord Acton and her diary
entries about John Ruskin, and by her reports of her friends' arguments
about Progress and Poverty or Tess oft he d'Urbervilles. Later, I discovered
Annie Fields, who filled her diaries with comments about Emerson,
Lowell, and the other New England literati, and whose epistolary
exchanges with Sarah Orne Jewett are a window into late nineteenth
century literary values. Initially, I envisioned writing about Fields's and
Gladstone's roles as the coordinators of very sophisticated, intellectually
stimulating, reading communities.
The project grew into a study of late nineteenth-century hostesses
when I realized that coordinating their friends' literary discussions was
only one facet of the complex roles that Annie Fields and Mary
Gladstone played. Ostensibly their husband's, father's, or companion's
loyal helpmates, in fact women who performed as hostesses were central
to the evolution of late nineteenth-century literary and political culture,
figures whom "everyone" recognized as important people even though
that same "everyone" formally acknowledged their subordinate status.
Studying the role of the hostess, I realized, was one way to re-examine
public narratives about incidents in the lives of great men-for instance
John Ruskin's relationship with the Gladstone family, or the production
of Longfellow's translation of Dante. I found most of the information
for these historical revisions in Fields's and Gladstone's diaries and
letters, but in the process I saw how much the women's status as women
inflected their writing. I added a section on private writings in order to
illustrate how insistently nineteenth-century cultural forces combined
with generic constraints to shape both what women could say in their
I
VIII PREFACE
diaries and letters and how they could say it. Finally, the project became
a study of gender and class when I understood how both Fields and
Gladstone used the skills they developed as hostesses to take advantage
of women's new opportunities for public action in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess thus uses
the lives of Annie Fields and Mary Gladstone to illustrate the transitions
that extremely privileged, upper-class women could make from the
private to the public sphere at the turn into the twentieth century. There
had always been women from powerful classes, and there had always
been women who had influenced powerful men despite the women's
ostensibly limited sphere of activity. But in this historical moment, a
small group of Anglo-American women evolved who first learned how
to create and manage a domestic environment in which the business of
influencing others was the major occupation, and who subsequently
took their skills into the realms of public philanthropy and the building
of cultural institutions. At the moment that it became possible for
women to move into administrative work beyond the home, this small
but powerful cadre of women stood ready to head the new institutions.
The woman whose public image was rooted in her domestic, and
secondary, relations suddenly became the woman who could control
other lives and public values.
The Cultural Work oft he Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess begins with
a discussion of the hostess's role and with sketches of Fields's and
Gladstone's lives. Two subsequent chapters treat their private writings
both specifically and generally, foregrounding diaries and letters as
culturally inflected artifacts and showing how the writing of both may
be understood as part of their writers' participation in larger social and
cultural contexts. Chapters 4 and 5 return to my original intention,
treating first Gladstone's, then Fields's, reading communities, and in the
process examining the dynamics of reading and the formation of social
values among Fields's and Gladstone's inner circles. The final chapter
examines each woman's artistic ambition (Fields was a poet and
Gladstone a pianist), and shows how both engaged in the professional
ization of charity and philanthropy. In this way, using biography and
primary documents, I trace the interaction of social ideas and women's
lives, as these late Victorians transformed themselves into pre-moderns,
and women born to the domestic sphere became central figures in the
new bureaucratic order of the twentieth century.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like all books, The Cultural Work oft he Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess:
Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew could not have come into
existence without the help of many friends and colleagues. I am espe
cially grateful to Marjorie Pryse, Donald D. Stone, Evan Watkins, and
Palgrave's anonymous reader, all of whom read the penultimate draft of
the manuscript and gave me valuable advice. Any remaining faults or
errors are entirely my responsibility. Among the other friends who
helped me along the way Judith Fetterley, Paula Bennett, Richard
Kopley, Josephine Carubia, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Marjorie
Coleman deserve special mention. The Northeast Nineteenth-Century
American Women Writers Group, founded in 1990 by Joanne Dobson
and Judith Fetterley, has been one of my primary intellectual backdrops
for many years; I thank all the members for the support and interest they
have shown in this project. Closer to home, the American Women
Writers Workshop at Penn State (lyun Osagie, Sandra Spanier, Robin
Schulze, Linda Selzer, and especially Deb Clarke) have also provided
intellectual and emotional support.
This book is built from primary sources, especially diaries and letters.
Not least among my debts are those to the librarians in special collec
tions across the United States and Great Britain, all of whom helped me
find unpublished materials, decipher gnarled handwriting, and, more
recently, gain permission to publish excerpts from those materials. My
deepest thanks and respect to the librarians and wardens at the British
Library, St. Deiniol's Library, the Flintshire Record Office, the Fawcett
Library Archives of the London Guildhall University, the Massachusetts
Historical Society, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the
Huntington Library, The Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Penn
State (especially its Associate Curator, Sandra Steltz), the Schlesinger
Library at Radcliffe College, the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Albert
and Shirley Small Special Collections, at the University of Virginia;
and the Watkinson Library at Trinity College. My gratitude also to
X / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sir William Gladstone and to his son, C. A. Gladstone, for permission
to publish from the diaries and letters of Mary Gladstone Drew.
For time to write I thank the Penn State College of Liberal Arts for
a sabbatical leave in the academic year 1999-2000. For cash to support
research trips I am grateful to Penn State's Research and Graduate
Studies Office of the College of Liberal Arts, the Institute for the Arts
and Humanities, and the Department of English.
As always, my family is the mainstay of my life. For unqualified love
at all times, I thank William J. Harris; I could not continue my pro
fessional life without his support. During that sabbatical year when
I drafted this book, our daughter Kate and her friend Emily Keiser, then
seniors in high school, would come home, watch Rosie or Oprah, and
bake chocolate chip cookies. Their cheerfulness (and cookies) helped me
through the long late winter afternoons. For these loved ones, and for all
good friends, I am truly grateful.