"MARY AND HER LAMB" OUT OF DATE
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sia,—The interesting article on " Real People in Books ". by Mr. Bassett Digby in the Spectator calls attention to one of the most noteworthy of a number of recent literary illusions, or delusions ; to wit, that concerning the writing of the familiar children's poem about Mary and her Little Lamb. Mr. Digby repeats the story of a venerable lady, Mrs. Mary Hughes, nee Thomas, at Southend-on-Sea, who claims to have been the Mary of the poem, and who relates with some circumstance the incident in her childhood which inspired Mrs. Sarah Josephs Hale to write the verses. Dispatches from London in American newspapers of a few days later tell of Mrs. Hughes's celebration of her eighty-seventh birthday anniversary, which occurred on May 18th last, and add, on her authority, that she was seven years old when the lamb " followed her to school " ; and they are illustrated with a picture of the schoolhouse in North Wales where the incident occurred, in the spring of 1848.
Now that is all quite circumstantial. Unfortunately, however, it conflicts very directly with another story which is not only equally circumstantial but also is substantiated by documentary evidence. The author of the poem was un- doubtedly Mrs. Sarah Josephs Hale, née Buell—not " Burl as in Mr. Digby's article—who was born at Newport, New Hampshire, in 1788, and died at Philadelphia, Penn., in 1879. So far the story related by Mrs. Hughes and reported by Mr. Digby is correct, save for the doubtless inadvertent mis- spelling of Mrs. Hale's maiden name. But now comes a quite irreconcilable contradiction in the fact that the poem was first published by Mrs. Hale in a volume entitled Poems for Our Children, at Boston, Massachusetts, in the year 1830, when she was a magazine editor in that city. That, it will be seen, was eighteen years before the date assigned by. Mrs. Hughes to the incident of the lamb at school, and eleven years before Mrs. Hughes was born !
• It may be added that Mrs. Hale, whom I had the privilege of knowing, was for many years one of the foremost women of letters in America. At the age of twenty-five she married David Hale, a brilliant lawyer, who died nine years later. ,For the support of herself and her five children she then began the career of an author and editor. In her childhood she had steeped herself in English poetry, and her first writings were in verse. In 1828 she became editor of the Ladies' Magazine, in Boston, and conducted it with much success until 1837, when it was merged with Godey's Lady's Book, at Philadelphia. She then became editor of the latter and filled that place until 1877, only two years before her death. She edited, also, a number of the annuals which were popular in the middle of the last century, such as Friendship's Garland, The Ladies' Wreath, &c., chiefly sentimental compilations, to which, how-, ever, some of the foremost writers of America and England contributed. She was the author of more than a score of Volumes of poetry, romance, drama, biography, criticism, &e., including her editions of Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Letters of Mme. De Sevigne, and an important Dictionary of Poetical Quotations.
She is remembered with gratitude as the founder of the
Seaman's Aid Society at Boston, which extended to the othei chief Atlantic ports of the United States, and of the Ladiete Medical Missionary Society, which led to the creation of the widespread system of medical missions in Asia and elsewhere. She was one of the pioneers of the movement for the highef education of women, and for their employment as school teachers ; she organized the women's campaign for funds for building the Bunker Hill Monument ; and for twenty years she advocated making Thanksgiving Day a national holiday before President Lincoln in 1864 finally adopted her'
Suggestion. One of her sons, Horatio Hale, was the ethnologist of Wilkes's Antarctic Exploring Expedition, but spent most of his subsequent life as a resident of Ontario, Canada. He may be remembered as having read a noteworthy paper on Blackfoot Indian Tribes, at the Aberdeen meeting of the British Association in 1885...4" It would be vain to speculate with any degree of confidence upon the origin 'of the strange delusion that Mrs. Hughes, then Mary Thothas, was the school-child heroine of a rioem which was written and published eleven years before her birth. But perhaps a pertinent suggestion concerning it may be found in a somewhat similar and equally flagrant delusion of recent date. A few weeks ago occurred the death of Thomas Tibbals, an old-time frontiersman, Abolitionist, and champion of the rights of the American Indians ; and in the detailed obituary sketches of him in the American Press it was stated that his second wife, Princess Bright Eyes of the Omaha-Iowa Indian tribe, was the original of Minnehaha in Longfellow's Indian epic of Hiawatha. Now the fact is that Princess Bright Eyes, *horn I had the pleasure of meeting on several occasions, was born a few months after the first publication of Longfellow's poem, and Longfellow did not so much as know of her existence until a quarter of a century later !
The quite impossible story of her having been the model of his Minnehaha doubtless had this origin : in the winter of 1879-80, Bright Eyes, then Mrs. Tibbals, visited' New York, Boston, and other cities to speak in public on behalf of the Ponca Indians, whom some dishonest Government Indian agents were trying to rob of their lands ; a campaign in which she was successful. In Boston she was the guest of honour at a public banquet and reception attended by many of the foremost men and women of that city. Among them was Longfellow, then a venerable septuagenarian of patriarchal aspect, and when he then and there for the first time saw Bright Eyes, who at the age of twenty-five was in the full bloom of her exceptional beauty and grace, he exclaimed in 'something akin to rapture, " Ah ! This is my Minnehaha ! "
I may add that the widely repeated story which Mr. Digby fnentions, to the effect that Whittier's " barefoot boy with cheeks of tan " was Francis Marston, now"" an old, bearded gardener on the Oak Knoll estate of the Whittier family," was completely discredited by Whittier himself some years before his death, when he declared that the poem was auto- biographical and had reference to himself and his own lost youth !
It is absurd to regard every character and incident in poetry as having been drawn from an actual model or precedent in real life ; for that would be to deny to poets the possession of imagination and invention, the very faculties which in fact they most exercise.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
