Lucy Larcom (1824-1893) was born near the seashore in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, on 5 March 1824, the daughter of Lois Barrett Larcom and Captain Benjamin Larcom. She came from a sea-faring family: her grandfather Jonathan Larcom, a sea captain and probably a Revolutionary War privateer, had been lost at sea in 1777. Her father Benjamin, born in 1776, sought the sea early in life, and was well established as a sea captain by 1804, sailing for Israel Thorndike, a wealthy merchant and shipowner. Sometime after 1812, he gave up the sea, and opened a shop in Beverly Farms, from which he supported a large family: Charlotte [1806] and Adeline [1810] (from an earlier marriage), Benjamin [1814], Louisa [1815], Emeline [1817], Jonathan [1818], Abigail [1820], Lydia [1822], Lucy [1824], and Octavia [1827]. By the age of seven Lucy had begun to write stories and poems for her own amusement.

Early Life

Her father died when Lucy was seven years old, and Mrs. Larcom was not a good manager. To support her large family, Mrs. Larcom moved to Lowell to manage a factory boarding house associated with the Lawrence Corporation textile mill; she later returned to Beverly, leaving several of her daughters (including Lucy) in Lowell. After briefly attending school in Lowell, Lucy entered the mills as a doffer (changing bobbins on the spinning machines), later working as a spinner, then as a dresser. While working as a cotton-operative she contributed to the Lowell Offering, writing for the first volumes a series of parables that attracted the attention of John Greenleaf Whittier, who was then conducting a Free-soil paper in Lowell, and who encouraged her literary efforts. Later Whittier would become Larcom’s literary mentor, beginning a life-long friendship and literary collaboration between the two. Lucy wrote of her ten years in the Lowell mills in “Among Lowell Mill-Girls: A Reminiscence” (Atlantic Monthly, November 1881), the autobiographical A New England Girlhood (1889), and a long blank-verse narrative An Idyl of Work (1875).

At twenty-two, Lucy moved to the Looking Glass Prairie area of Illinois with the family of her married (and favorite) sister Emeline Larcom (Mrs. George) Spaulding, including Frank Spaulding, George’s brother. The family shared a general understanding that Frank and Lucy would marry at some future time. Lucy taught in district schools for three years, and beginning in 1849 was a pupil for three years at Monticello Female Seminary in Godfrey, Ill., where she studied botany, drawing, English composition, French, geology, history, Latin, mathematics, and philosophy, while forming a life-long friendship with its Principal, Philena Fobes. To finance her education, she taught the primary or preparatory students. During this period, Frank Spaulding moved to California to try his luck in the gold fields. He and Lucy corresponded for years, but would seldom see each other again; Lucy’s choice of a career and the freedom it gave her removed her from women’s traditional sphere of marriage and children.

Upon her return to Massachusetts in 1852, Larcom visited family; briefly opened her own small school; developed new friendships with John G. Whittier and his sister Elizabeth, Harriet Hanson and her husband William S. Robinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others; and renewed old friendships from Lowell. With Whittier’s help and encouragement, she began to enter the literary world, publishing her first book, Similitudes, from the Ocean and Prairie in 1853, and publishing poems and articles in numerous national magazines.

Work at Wheaton Female Seminary

Needing a steady income, Lucy took a position at Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, MA, where she taught English literature, history, moral philosophy, botany, logiccomposition and rhetoric from 1854 to 1863, and from 1865 to 1867. She was a visiting lecturer for many years thereafter. Larcom’s teaching style was revolutionary and influential at Wheaton: she taught by lecture, reading and discussion, rather than by memorization and recitation. In 1855, she initiated the student literary magazine Rushlight, still in publication, as well as Chrysalis, a literary magazine for younger students, and founded the intellectual discussion group "Psyche" in 1857. Lucy also compiled the Wheaton Library’s first catalogue in 1857. Miss Larcom remained a life-long friend of the Seminary’s founder, Eliza Baylies Chapin Wheaton, and wrote the Seminary’s 50th anniversary sketch in 1885. While at Wheaton she began to take advantage of Boston’s cultural opportunities, including attending concerts, visiting the Athenaeum and Old Corner Book Store, meeting socially with the literary giants of the era, and taking painting lessons.

Abolition

Larcom was an ardent abolitionist, and submitted a poem to an 1855 contest organized by the New England Emigrant Aid Company for the best poem written to encourage anti-slavery emigrants to settle Kansas. To her surprise, her entry, “Call to Kansas,” won the prize, a fifty dollar gold piece. Set to the music of Nellie Bly, a popular song of the period, her poem was printed in many newspapers, and on handkerchiefs to be handed out at Free-Soil rallies.

Constraints of Teaching

Despite her growing literary success, Larcom was not fond of the restrictions of teaching, at Wheaton or the other schools at which she taught, because the rules and requirements interfered with her writing. Along with Wheaton’s other teachers, principal and staff, she lived in the one dormitory with all the students. Life could be hectic, frustrating and noisy. Yet Lucy was loved by her students, some of whom called her “Mother Larcom.” She was too popular, in fact, to have much privacy for writing or reflection. Lucy’s health suffered from confinement, overwork, scrofula (a form of tuberculosis which may have been contracted while in the confines of the textile mills), and hay fever. In 1865-66 and again in 1866-67, she taught only Senior Composition during the fall term. She gave up her position at Wheaton in 1867, although she returned frequently as a lecturer.

Writing Career and Editorship

After leaving Wheaton in 1867, she pursued her writing career, publishing poems and “newsletters” in newspapers; compiling anthologies of her own, Whittier’s, and others’ works; co-editing journals; lecturing; and occasionally teaching classes in Boston area schools, including a year at Bradford Academy (1872-73). During the Civil War she wrote many patriotic poems. When Our Young Folks, a notable children’s periodical published by Ticknor & Fields, was established in Boston in 1865, she became an assistant and in the following year chief editor, conducting the magazine till 1874. She contributed regularly to St. Nicholas Magazine. By the 1870s, Larcom’s relationship with Whittier had changed from pupil/mentor to comfortable friendship, and she had developed a close religious and philosophical friendship with the Rev. Phillips Brooks, rector of Trinity Church in Boston.

Larcom wrote of friendship and domestic incidents, nature and its evidence of divinity, her love of God and her intense Christian faith. Her spiritually uplifting work contained many typical 19th Century expressions of sentiment; she always considered her poetry as an extension of her faith. The work for which Lucy is chiefly remembered was her autobiographical sketch, A New England Girlhood, which described her life until 1852, and captures her small-town upbringing and values.

Although Larcom became part of Boston’s literary circle, the steady but modest sale of her works required her to live in only the simplest manner. Never owning a home of her own, Miss Larcom followed an annual routine of renting rooms in Boston during the winter, when she wrote and edited intensively while participating in cultural and social events; visiting family and friends in Beverly and elsewhere during the spring; and summering in the mountains of New Hampshire or Maine with the Whittier group and on her own. Her independent life-style was hard-won; she was never wealthy, and although she would never admit to having a “career,” her ability to support herself through writing was still unusual for an unmarried woman of her era. Throughout her life she struggled with loneliness and self-doubt, overcoming them through work and faith.

Health

Beginning in 1891, Larcom suffered increasingly frequent bouts of illness from a heart ailment, heightened by severe personal losses: her beloved sister Emeline died in July 1892, and Whittier died in August 1892. In November 1892, she sorted her papers and letters and burned most of her personal papers. She took to her bed in mid-January 1893, only to learn that Phillips Brooks had died of diptheria on 23 January. Whenever she felt strong enough, Lucy continued to review her letters and journals, destroying everything that seemed too private, including her journals from the 1860s and 1870s with their references to Frank Spaulding. Lucy even burned her letters from Emeline, and made her niece promise to burn Lucy’s to her mother. Murmering the word “freedom,” Lucy died on 17 April 1893. She was buried in Hale Street Cemetery in Beverly, Mass.; the simple marker is in the shape of a writing desk with a sheet of paper, on which is engraved a quill pen and “Lucy Larcom 1824—1893.”

Wheaton College Legacy

A Wheaton dormitory, built in 1908, is named in honor of Lucy Larcom, as is a room in Mary Lyon Hall, made possible through a 1983 gift from her great grand niece Lois Larcom Horn W1928 and her class.