Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s early letters document the intellectual development of a prolific woman writer from her childhood in the early national period through the 1813 death of her father Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist member of Congress and Massachusetts supreme court judge. The youngest daughter in a family of seven siblings, Sedgwick practiced epistolary conventions in her early letters while introducing her lifelong theme of balancing personal and family expectations with the obligation to write. As Sedgwick reported in her later autobiography, she felt that she lacked a satisfactory formal education, but “these great deficiencies” were offset by the quality of her homelife. Her adolescent years were marked by her mother’s chronic ill health and death in 1807, her father’s remarriage in 1808, and her engagement with her siblings’ growing families throughout the period. By 1812, as a 22-year old republican woman reflecting on her social position, CMS felt the call of a “life dignified by usefulness” and compared her father’s contributions to her own potential: “You may benefit a Nation my dear Papa, & I may improve the condition of a fellow being” (1 Mar. 1812).
Letters from Sedgwick’s pre-publication adulthood demonstrate her intellectual and religious development as she grappled with events both personal and national. Her siblings became the central focus of her domestic life, and the Sedgwicks’ experiences with “the market of matrimony” (15 Aug. 1813) provide intriguing fodder for epistolary debate. Sedgwick rejected at least two marriage proposals in her twenties, one in 1812 and another in 1819. In the summer of 1821, she traveled to Niagara Falls and Montreal and began keeping a journal. As Sedgwick developed her authorial persona and worked on her first novel, her full-throated dedication to family, female relationships, and personal usefulness emerged as primary concerns. Sedgwick’s letters also become more philosophical, and her lifelong dedication to republican service and intellectual Unitarianism come into focus. Sedgwick explains her sense of vocation to her lifelong friend Eliza Cabot Follen: “my ministry must be one of watchfulness and steady devotion, and all those cares that love teaches, and can pay without being asked” (15 Nov 1822).
With her first novel A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick established herself as a professional writer, and she published four additional literary novels and more than 30 stories during this period. As a dedicated family woman, who also chose to be single and an author, she constructed domestic arrangements that complemented her writing career. She lived in the homes of her brothers and sisters-in-law in Stockbridge, Lenox, and New York City, deepening her relationships with her siblings as well as caring for the children and contributing to their education. Redwood, her second novel, received “much more praise and celebrity than [she] expected” (18 Oct. 1824). As her fame grew, she continued to find her spiritual home in Unitarianism, while her range of acquaintances expanded to include artists, politicians, reformers, educators, and intellectuals. Sedgwick began to travel more widely, visiting friends in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, and making extended trips to Washington DC and the South. As a measure of her celebrity, she was selected for inclusion in the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (1834), the only woman included other than Martha Washington. The period was also punctuated by “the real and bitter sorrows that cloud our life” (13 Mar. 1830), including the deaths of her sister Eliza, her childhood nurse Elizabeth Freeman, and her brother Harry.
As a member of the American literati, Sedgwick navigated transatlantic fame while experiencing personal loss at home. She pursued new avenues of benevolent activism in her life and writings. Letters from this period will be available soon.
Sedgwick’s engagement with mid-nineteenth-century reform movements informed her writings during this period. Her primary residences continued to be New York City and the Berkshires. She deepened her relationships with her niece Kate Minot and other members of the next generation of Sedgwicks. Letters from this era will be available at a future date.
During the Civil War period, Sedgwick grappled with issues of national importance alongside personal losses at home. She published her last book and final story and, after a medical crisis, resigned as Director of the New York Women’s Prison Association. In her final years, she resided with Kate Minot and her family near Boston. Letters from this era will be available at a future date.
Online version 1.
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- Authorship
- Domestic Life and Duties
- Urban Life
- Childcare
- Village Life
- Health and Illness
- Self-reflection
- Death
- Religion
- Natural World
- Manners
- Work
- Social Life and Networks
- Family Relations (Sedgwick Family)
- Politics
- Legal Issues
- Literature and History
- Romanticism
- Friendship
y1827 -- 1
I must write you a few lines if it is but to set you right in your notions of the elegant mode in which my winter is passing -- I thank God most heartily and humbly for all the mercies of my condition but they certainly are not of the nature your brilliant imagination has depicted -- At the risk of your laughing at the contrast and laughing at my expense, I will give you just the state of the case -- Unlike all heroines, in this as in every other particular -- all heroines I mean of the present exemplary times, I rise very late, and have scarcely time to perform my toilette duties according to Noah Webster’s definition of grammar 2 ‘with propriety and dispatch’ when I am summoned to breakfast -- I then sometimes wash the breakfast things, sometimes rig the children for school, & sometimes read the morning paper and then if I have no special business to call me out I retire to my room in the third story which overlooks some dozen of NewYork yards, ten-twelve or twenty the eye of my soul -- the eye that has lived upon mountain and stream -- moonlight and twilight _____ 2
Sunday Eve’g 19. --
My dear Miss Francis the strange chances of life happen to the little as well as the great, and my letter scarcely worth r Gannett will now be taken to you by a nephew of mine Mr George Pomeroy who I trust will have the pleasure of seeing you, and if he does he willnot do us or himself justice if he does not add to the pleasure of your anticipations of that far off visit to NYork -- you must think him both clever and pleasing or I shall think your taste as you set it forth in books a mere fiction -- --
You enquire with kind interest about my brother -- his enthusiasm about the Greeks 3 has been abated by necessity -- An operation on his eye has compelled him to entire abstinence from all exciting occupations or even thoughts -- His surgeon preferred, in his case, to remove the cataract by the slow process -- Of course the result is not yet certain but every thing appears favorable to our hopes -- -- As his best eye is fast obscuring you may imagine with what trembling anxiety we await the result --
I began this letter with the intention of giving you a ludicrous contrast to your bright imaginings concerning my present life -- nothing truly can be less diversified than it has been this winter -- I have scarcely been out of our own sober parlor, excepting to church and to my Brother Robert’s where we have lately had the sad experience of the sickness and death of his youngest child -- -- We cannot mourn over a brief existence that has known neither sin nor temptation nor the fear of death -- and that 3 is the introduction to immortal life -- --
I am delighted with the success of your miscellany 4, which with a fortunate singularity improves at every new appearance -- -- My dear Miss Francis I feel very grateful for your generous estimation of me -- and am willing to owe a great portion of it to that richness of feeling that can bestow without diminution
-- -- I was a little ashamed of myself for replying to you as I did when you asked me at Mrs Minot’s what I was writing -- or something to that effect -- I did not reply with perfect sincerity -- but the simple truth is that I have so little confidence in doing any thing, or in any thing I may do that so far from exciting expectations in my friends -- I have none myself -- To you it seems to be no trouble to write -- Your's is the harvest that wants nothing but the reaper’s sickle -- but I cannot tell you what I think of you for I am afraid you would not give me credit for simplicity and godly sincerity, which I should not violate --
Bryant has been passing the Eve’g with us and I wished from my heart that you had been here -- I should like to witness the overflowing of your enthusiasm --
My best regards to your Brother and Sister and beleive me
I scarcely need tell you that I have written in haste
Letter
Massachusetts Historical Society
Catharine Maria Sedgwick III
Wax blot and tears; the PS is cross-written in the left margin of page 3.
Miss L. M. Francis/Care of Revd Mr Francis/Watertown/Massa/Mr George W. Pomeroy
While for dating purposes, we retain the date on which Sedgwick began this letter, there is a second internal dateline of February 19, 1827. Child likely received it in early March. In a letter to her brother Charles, dated February 28, Sedgwick states that their nephew George Pomeroy is about to leave for Boston via New London. As noted in the address of this letter, one of his mail deliveries enroute was to Lydia Maria Francis Child.
Likely a reference to Noah Webster's A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806); his American Dictionary of the English Language did not appear until 1828. https://noahwebsterhouse.org/noahwebsterhistory/
For a brief description of the "Greek Frigate Affair" and Henry Dwight Sedgwick's role in it, see https://www.greekrevolution.org/exhibition/greek-fever/frigate-affair
Child founded a bimonthly children's magazine, The Juvenile Miscellany, published from 1826 to 1836.