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1846
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Stories published in 1846.
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VARIETIES OF SOCIAL LIFE IN NEW YORK
-----
BY MISS CATHARINE M. SEDGWICK
-----
[p. 13]
One might imagine from the political equality of our people, from the diffusion of education, from the general condition (from which few are excepted) of business occupation, that we should find uniformity in social life; that there would be a sort of community of character and intercourse—that it would be in New York as it is in some other cities of our Union where in a similar condition of life every body knows every body. But it is not so. The social circles are as distinct as if the walls of caste were built around them. Each system has its sun, moon, stars of the first magnitude, and its own horizon. There are occasional transits made from one little world to another, but not enough to break up their distinctness.
A friend of mine, on a visit to New York, whose position gave him the entreé of various circles, communicated to me the following particular account of one of his evenings:
“My visit in your city being short,” he said, “I was compelled to make the most of it. I therefore accepted four or five invitations for an evening, which I could well do, as (the evenings being then at their longest) my social chart covered seven or eight hours. My first invitation was to take tea with a Mr. Ruscit, a mechanic, at five o’clock! Five o’clock, as you know, is the dinner-hour with the fashionable up-town family with whom I staid; so I dispensed with my dinner and took a substantial lunch of oysters and rolls at one o’clock, my dinner-hour at home. This hour, according with my habits and my notions of health, put me into high good humor and appetite too. I met my charming hostess going to her dining-room with her young people as I was passing out to my carriage, which, by the way, Ruscit had sent to me, saying, with delicate courtesy, (nature sometimes teaches better than Chesterfield,) that he wished to save as much of my time to himself as possible. ‘So you are going off to the barbarians!’ said my hostess. ‘How can Mr.----- go to much places?’ I heard one of my young friends ask as I shut the door.
“Ruscit himself received me at the door of a modest, comfortable dwelling in East Second street, and introduced me to his wife, who, having been born among the ‘Friends,” still retains their costume—so fitting the sobriety of middle age. Once seen it would be difficult to forget this good matron’s face. Not that there was anything very remarkable in the pure, fair, health-speaking skin, or any thing beautiful in feature or coloring, but there was the record of an ever-dominant kindness of heart, of a sweetness of disposition that had smoothed roughness and plucked out thorns from every body’s path, and that had made that great gain of life, ‘contentment with godliness.’
“There were some dozen persons assembled, including my host’s small family. The sparkling gem among them was his very lovely daughter who, as Ruscit whispered to me, was engaged to a young man present—a rising star in the literary world. This accounted probably for the rather rare books and new publications that were lying on the table. The furniture was plain, but there were three or four beautiful engravings hanging about the rooms. I was pleased to remark the absence of the too common mantle-furniture (even in our mechanics’ houses) of bronzed and gilded lamps and other similar decorations.
Instead of these there were casts, and very good ones, of Canova’s lions, plaster casts of two lovely Greek heads, and an erra cotta vase and pitcher of exquisite forms. My host saw me examining them. ‘I like,’ he said to me in a low voice, ‘to make such objects familiar to my children—they insensibly educate the eye and give them a taste for refined pleasures.’
“These people are not quite the ‘barbarians’ my hostess fancied them, I thought.
“The tea-table was spread in the adjoining parlor after the pattern of old-fashioned New England meals, whose substantial and abundant viands fitly closed a day of industry and temperance. There were tongue and smoked beef, bread and biscuits, and various cakes and sweetmeats—all of home manufacture. One might see by half a look at my good hostess that she was thoroughbred in all those little womanly domestic arts which mould into healthful and hospitable forms the raw materials of sugar and flour. Mrs. Ruscit was bred before the progress of civilization had brought down education to the humble levels of
[p. 14]
society. The worlds of science and art were terra incognita to her; but she was learned, for she was heaven-taught in the humanities that are after all the life of social life. She saw that every body was comfortably established at table. She was politely attentive to me as, for the moment, the guest to be honored, but it was plain that she gave far more thought to the comfort of a little humpbacked child of a friend who was seated at a side-table with the lovers. Her instincts told her that he might chance to be overlooked by them; and when the poor little child dropped one of her best China cups and broke it, she forgot the dignity of her station to go and comfort him. ‘Poor Johnny!’ I overheard her say, ‘don’t cry—it’s not the least matter; I have more of these cups than I want, Johnny.’
“Mrs. Ruscit had no high-bred indifference to the entertainment of her guests. She looked out for each and all—was afraid an elderly lady at table was crowded—bid her younger girls sit closer (the buxom lasses were too solid to pack well)—saw that her delicate preparations were offered to every one, and had a pleasure, in seeing them relished even by those who order their refection from Thompson and Weller.
“My host being interested in schools led me after tea to describing those I had seen abroad, and I perceived it was the habit of his family circle to listen to whatever was new and might be instructive to them. They were all flatteringly attentive except the young lovers, who would fall into a little by-talk. This seemed to disturb my serene friend Ruscit, and once I saw him touch the toe of his future son-in-law, and I caught a word or two of his reply, half said to the young beauty and half in excuse to the father. I think he quoted,
‘In the presence of lovely young Jessie,
Unseen is the lily, unheeded the rose.’
“I said my friend was interested in schools. He is by nature a friend of young people, and being a wise and reflecting man he feels the paramount importance of education in our country. He is a voluntary visitor of the public schools, is acquainted with their teachers, knows half the scholars by name, and all of them by heart. He gave me an account of his establishment. He has some twenty apprentices. ‘The years they are to pass with me,’ he said, ‘comprehend the sowing-season of their lives. They ought not to be devoted solely to the acquisition of their trades. It is not fitting that our young men should be bred like the mere automaton workmen of other countries; it is not fitting that any man should be so bred at this period of the world. I had small opportunity of school education myself. I cannot therefore be their instructor, but I pay them for extra work, and they thus acquire a little fund with which they pay their teachers. They have teachers of mathematics, chemistry, natural philosophy, drawing, music, and French and Spanish! I take upon myself the department of ethics. My boys have a court in which they are tried for offences against the lesser morals and manners. They appoint their own juries and make their own charges and defences, and quietly submit, with very rare exceptions, to the verdicts.*
“In the midst of my friend’s communication the carriage was announced, and I was obliged, most reluctantly, to break away and go off to my second party at half past seven. These are not quite ‘barbarians’ I thought, as the door of this hospitable and happy home closed upon me.
“My next engagement was at Mr. Mallark’s. This gentleman is in high standing in the legal profession. He is but recently a resident in your city, and having had rather a stormy life up to middle age, he seems now to love and seek tranquility. I found a few guests, and tea and coffee and their usual accompaniments, just being served. The lady of the house is like, alas! most of our women past the robustness of youth—an invalid; but her invalidism, instead of degenerating into fretfulness or inanity, is solaced and embellished by refined tastes. A few of the choicest, rarest plants—not neglected and never-blooming—but radiant with flowers, filled one of her windows. Some among them were brilliant tropical plants which she had brought from their West Indian homes, and which seemed not to miss their birthplace in our hot rooms, tended as they are by instructed, skillful and loving hands. Mrs. Mallark’s frequent visits to sea-shores and Southern climes had made her love whatever was native to them. She had cabinets filled with those exquisite shells which seem to have caught and retained in their polished prisons the sunbeams of the bright sea-shores whence they came. The drawing-rooms were enriched with curiosities from the farthest Indies, and furniture of the most curious workmanship from China. This I thought strange, as I knew my host had never been engaged in commerce and had no relations with commercial people. The riddle was solved as soon as I was made acquainted with my fellow guests. Some of them were missionaries, who had expended the strength of their days in the good service of God
[p.15]
and man at our antipodes. They were familiar with the spiritual wants of India and the celestial empire; their kind sympathies were as wide as the circle of humanity, but they knew little of the utilitarian activity about us. I doubt if they had ever heard the names of transcendentalism and Fourierism. They had nothing to do with the passing navigation between the Scylla and Charybdis of popular theorists—they had a holy land of their own, and one might be happier and wiser, and should be better for a glimpse at it.
“From Mallark’s, I passed to the drawing-room of Miss Evertson. It was her reception evening. I was admitted to a rather dimly lighted hall by a little portress, some ten or twelve years old, who led me to a small apartment to deposit my hat and cloak. There was no lighted staircase, no train attendant, none of the common flourish at city parties. “Up stairs, if you please, sir—front room for the ladies—back for the gentlemen;” no indication of an overturn or commotion in the domestic world; no cross father, worried mother, or scolded servants behind the scenes—not even a faint resemblance to the eating, worrying and tossing of ‘the house that Jack built.’ The locomotive was evidently not off the track; the spheres moved harmoniously. To my surprise, when I entered, I found two fair-sized drawing-rooms filled with guests, in a high state of social enjoyment. There was music, dancing, recitation and conversation. I met an intimate friend there, and availing myself of the common privilege of a stranger in town I inquired out the company. There were artists in every department—painting, poetry, sculpture and music. There I saw for the first time that impersonation of genius, Ole Bull. Even the histrionic art asserted its right to social equality there in the person of one of its honorable professors. You may think that my hostess, for one so young and so very fair, opened her doors too wide. Perhaps so, for though I detest the duenna system and believe that the unguarded freedom permitted to our young ladies far safer as well as more agreeable, yet I would rather have seen the mother of Miss Evertson present. Certainly no one ever needed an aegis less than my lovely hostess. She has that quiet delicacy and dignity of manners that is as a ‘glittering angel’ to exorcise every evil spirit that should venture to approach her. How without fortune or fashion she has achieved her position in your city, where every thing goes under favor of these divinities, I am sure I cannot tell. To be sure she has that aristocracy which supercedes all others—that to which prince and peasant instinctively bow—and though unknown in the fashionable world, you would as soon confound the exquisite work of a Greek sculptor with the wax figures of an itinerant showman as degrade her to the level of a conventional belle.
“Yet she does not open her house as a temple to worshipers of whom she is the divinity, but apparently simply to afford her acquaintances the hospitality of a place of social meeting. She retires behind her guests, and seems to desire to be the least observed of all observers. Though I belong, as you know, to the dullest category, and am an ‘old married man’—am not an artist, author or lion of any sort, but only ‘an innocent beast with a good conscience,’ my hostess was particularly kind to me, and I was so charmed with her and with the animated social life about her that I found myself outstaying all her guests, and at half past ten reluctantly took my leave—noting for the first time that the hours had passed away without the usual appliances of an evening party. I had supposed that war might as well be carried on without its munitions, officers as well live without their salaries, children as well go to bed without their suppers, as a party to go off without its material entertainment. But here was the song without the supper, not even those poor shadows of refreshments cakes and lemonade. Here was a young woman without ‘position’—to use the cant phrase—without any relations to the fashionable world, filling her rooms weekly with choice spirits, who came without any extraordinary expense of dress, who enjoyed high rational pleasures for two or three hours, and retired so early as to make no drafts on the health or spirits of the next day. I communicated my perplexity to a foreign acquaintance whom I met at Mrs. Booth’s.
“’Why,’ said he, ‘your fair friend has hit upon a favorite form of society common in the highest civilization. Miss Evertson’s soirees are Parisian—only not in Paris. Not in the world, with the exception of the United States, could a beautiful young woman take the responsibility unmatronized of such a ‘reception.’’
“My evening’s dissipation concluded at Mrs. Booth’s. The pulse of the beau monde had beaten high for a week with the expectation of Mrs. Booth’s party. This was partly owing to the splendor of her new house and her new furniture, and partly to the fashion and accomplishments of the lady, to whose modes of being and doing long foreign travel has given authority. Unfortunately, though three thousand miles from the Old World, we cannot have our independent customs, and in certain things we certainly favor the distasteful theories of the author of ‘the Vestiges of Creation,’ who develops the monkey into the man. There would be something remaining of our imitative progenitors to account for, some of our senseless imitations; such, for example, as going to parties at eleven o’clock, when, in our working-
[16]
day world we must rise and be at our business at nine. But this, en passant, I had plenty of leisure to moralize on the spectacle while my carriage awaited others that preceded it. When at last my coach door was opened, I found a covered and carpeted way was made from the front door to the curb-stone so that the daintiest dame had no shock from the cold pavement or the rough visitation of the Winter’s wind. The chieftain of your city police, a Magnus Koil in figure, guarded the passage and used his brief authority so well that he seemed more like the herald of a feudal castle than the orderly of a citizen.
“Gas and wax candles did their best to imitate ‘heaven’s own blessed light.’ The whole house was sweet with the perfume of flowers of all seasons and from the four quarters of the globe. The two splendid drawing-rooms, communicating after the stereotyped fashion by folding doors, were filled with the highest fashion of the city, with a sprinkling of strangers of distinction—and, that crowning grace to our republican parties—a prince and his attachés! Collinet’s band gave such eclat to the drawing-room and threw some of the guests, who had recently heard him in Paris, into such extacies that one might fancy he breathed the very air of that ‘divine capital’ from his little flageolet.
“You may not take my word for it, but it struck me the ladies were marked by that air of taste and elegance which is said to distinguish your New York women, and why should it not be so? for their dress is Parisian, and the Paris toilet gives law to the world. Still I must confess there seemed to me less beauty under all their exquisite coffures than I had seen among Miss Evertson’s unadorned guests. Perhaps the gas-light was too strong for dress to achieve its greatest miracle—making ‘age seem youth’—for there were world-worn faces where the couleur de rose had passed from every thing but the flowers and feathers.
“A buffet in an apartment in the rear of the drawing-room was embellished with costly silver, glass and china, and supplied throughout the evening with every species of ‘refreshment,’ substantial viands and delicacies, wrought up to such pitch of refinement that they seemed almost to be sublimated out of their materiality. In short nothing was wanting that expense, labor, and fashion could compass; but—the rooms were crowded, the air was loaded; few could hope to enjoy the primary hospitality of a seat; there was no conversation beyond the exchange of half a dozen conventional phrases; and while some twenty fortunate young ladies, who enjoyed the sweet security of parties, monopolized the dancing floor, others, novices in society, or from some other cause (certainly not because they were less pretty or less charming) remained pinioned to the wall silent observers. There were worn men of business dragged into this vortex by parental kindness, while their thoughts still lingered in the warehouse or in Wall street. A few husbands had come forth with reluctant conjugal courtesy; and mamas in plenty were there mere attachées to their daughters. There was no room for ease, no opportunity, were they ever so enriched for it, for conversation. These are the necessary conditions of a party in fashionable life, and its imitations. Mrs. Booth did all that could be done to relieve them. She manifested no ultra modish unconciousness of her guests, but, with the benevolence that has illustrated other places of durance, she ‘remembered the forgotten and attended to the neglected,’ applying, whenever she could, the balm of her sweet smile and opportune word. The desert has its diamond—she was something quite as precious in her drawing-room. Her husband too, with his frank and cordial manners, did all that could be done to preserve the geniality of his home in this ungenial crowd. No power can achieve impossibilities.
“I laid my head on my pillow between one and two o’clock and repassed in my mind the scenes of the evening. I wondered a little at the ‘social ambition’ I had often witnessed in your city—at the limitations of fashionable life, and more than all I marveled at the eager aspirations to attain its dazzling heights. I doubted even if the elevation were not rather apparent than real, and when I compared the social meetings at Miss Evertson’s, Mallark’s, and the ‘barbarian’ Ruscit’s, to the splendid fete at Mrs. Booth’s, it seemed to me that in present and after comfort, in actual enjoyment, and in what most marks the advancement of man and society, they had the superiority.
“You may smile at my rustic taste, but I confess that my thoughts finally settled down on my philanthropic friend Ruscit, his large-hearted wife, and their generous and modest hospitality.
“All conditions have their good and beauty. To my thinking, the flowers that grow in the shade are the sweetest.”
___________
* During the prevalence of the Asiatic cholera in New York, it became a question whether Mr. Ruscit and others seized with the panic should close their workshops. He decided to keep his open. The young men were busy in their working hours, and amusements were provided for their leisure. One among them wrote a drama—others painted and arranged scenery and costumes, and all had a part to perform. Not a case of cholera occurred—not a premonitory symptom—not even the usual Summer illness.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Varieties of Social Life in New York
Subject
The topic of the resource
Entertaining and social manners in New York City.
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator, a self-described "old married man," compares and contrasts the entertainment offered in a single evening by a range of New Yorkers of different classes and ages.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1846, pp. 13-16.
Publisher
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Edited by John Inman and Robert A. West
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1846
Contributor
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L. Damon-Bach, Shawn Riggins, D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Collected in The Gem of the Season for 1849, 105-118. New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co., 1849 [pub. 1848]. The Gem of the Season was reprinted as The Gallery of Mezzotints . . . for 1850. New York, 1850.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
"Lovely Young Jessie"
1846
Antonio Canova
China
class
Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
domestic arts
education
fashion
hospsitality
hostess
India
Joseph Fourier
Lord Chesterfield
manners
missionaries
New York City
Ole Bull
Paris
Quakers
Robert Burns
Robert Chambers
sculpture
Scylla and Charybdis
Society of Friends
soirees
The Gem of the Season
transcendentalism
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Wall Street
West Indies
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/d2ad7d6c90a01bae227a30feb1825b5e.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=Aps0RijM2-8nC4mWqa4HOxuXOlThAGmnWBrp7epI6mefBnHTGfOtYEqSajtDOZLkz6nuUbD87d4M0Y9TG7dtHS7iKFvtLhABjcnRR3wYj74M3JG9PTM1xJ853c-4Ov%7EKPOhGPxtalEYdiy0Z33ocvX2ceBVElr%7Esuzoy4%7EoIPayJ8nz7ORH731HLT-cfUePissH6evXqlauX52vWGhSzRcrA9j%7EPudLsdCkDtNYpjuWpmCQ-wjjQzm9yDBKh1ssz%7E7OlgSZqP5Uf9TpuTxUlTRkstBouQJSBU1WRBgVtoIUaP3t89Xt2QTr4uY3M2QSahICfW0KkB53NPy-JwvlWzA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
30ee78c748a67e4b47d0bf76bc9de689
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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1835
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document.
THE UNPRESUMING MR. HUDSON.
BY MISS SEDGWICK.
[p. 17]
It chanced to me, during the last travelling season, to fall in with a party who, like myself, were destined for a fashionable watering-place. The most conspicuous members of this party were Mrs. Campbell, (a widow,) and her only and very pretty daughter, Louisa, whose name, according to modern usage, was gallicised into Louise. The mother was educated in the old school, or, to speak more accurately, in no school at all; but, if she were ignorant, she was unpretending; and it is, perhaps, as well to have the mind vacant, as to have it filled with foreign, ill-assorted, and undigested materials, that encumber it without increasing its riches or productiveness.
All Mrs. Campbell's pride, of every kind and degree, was concentrated in Louise. She had been,
[p. 18]
till this summer of her seventeenth year, at a fashionable boarding-school in one of our large cities. She had had approved masters, and, as her doting mother said, and reiterated, neither time nor expense had been spared in her education; and accordingly, in her mother's acceptation of the word, she was educated. She played and sang so well, that Mrs. Campbell averred she had rather listen to her than to Pedrotti or Mrs. Wood. She drew very prettily—she had learned by heart two entire plays of Goldoni—she made wax flowers, which her mother assured us were quite as natural as real ones —and she spoke French—like other young ladies. If the circumstances, relations, and issues of this brief life require anything more, the balance, (as our mercantile friends have it,) had not been thought of by the mother, or prepared for by the daughter. To do Miss Louise justice, however, she had not been spoiled. She was gay and good-humoured; she had the most good-natured self-complacency— no uncomfortable awe of her superiors—(I rather think she did not believe in their existence)—no jealousy of her equals, and to her inferiors she was kind-hearted.
[p. 19] It was in a stage-coach on a warm day in June that the day broke on our acquaintance. Mrs. Campbell was a lady of facilities, and we had not travelled a half-day together, before, by means of half a dozen ingenious, wayfaring questions, she had ascertained all she cared to know of us, and had liberally repaid us with what she thought we must care to know of her. Besides us there were two persons in the coach not so easily perused. The one a Colonel Smith, (Smith, happily called the anonymous name, and certainly that most tormenting and baffling to an inquirer,) and the other a Mr. Charles Hudson. Col. Smith's demeanour was very unlike his name, marked, high-bred, and a little aristocratic. "A gentleman, he certainly was," Mrs. Campbell said, as soon as we had an opportunity of holding a caucus on our fellow- travellers, but whether he were of the Smiths of New York, Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Carolina, and so on, through the States, she could not ascertain. However, the cardinal point was settled. He was a gentleman, by all our suffrages; and this most important matter established,
[p. 20]
we were at liberty to interchange with him the common civilities of life!
Mr. Hudson was a more puzzling case for our inquest. Mrs. Campbell remembered to have met a very respectable family of Hudsons at Saratoga, who were from Boston—at least she was almost sure they were, but our Mr. Charles Hudson, in reply to certain leading remarks of hers, had said he had never been in Boston. She remembered, too, when she was in Baltimore, some twenty years before, to have seen a family of Hudsons who were very intimate with the Carrolls—this was equivalent to a patent of gentility—but Mr. Hudson affirmed he did not know the Baltimore Hudsons. One of us remembered a certain Mr. Hudson who once had unquestioned circulation in the beau monde of New York, but whence he came, was either not known or forgotten. Miss Louise had heard a young friend say she had danced with a Mr. Hudson in Washington—this could hardly be admitted as a credential, and we were at last compelled to wait till we could adjust the gentleman's claims by his merits! The disquieting anxieties of
[p. 21]
some good people in our country, on the head of family or rank, is very like a satire on the fancied equality resulting from republican institutions.
Mrs. Campbell was not inclined to be over-fastidious, but she gave it in charge to her daughter to be "rather reserved," while we remained on the level arena of a stage-coach. Miss Louise paid as much deference to her mother as could be expected, reserve not being the quality par excellence of American young ladies. In the course of the morning, an accident to the coach compelled the passengers to walk for some distance down a steep and winding descent. The morning was beautiful. The air deliciously tempered. The majestic oaks and maples of Virginia, like its inhabitants (to borrow a rustic phrase from one of their mountaineers), “stout of their country,” threw their broad dense shadows over our path—the rhododendron, then in its glory, was in profusion around us, and wild roses, with other unknown and unnumbered flowers on every side.
Our party was not of the most romantic materials, but as we descended the gorge, and looked below us on a sea of the topmost branches of lofty trees,
[p. 22]
and long before us to a narrow and winding ravine, sunk between the mountains, and affording just space enough for a road beside a brawling stream, we were, though, as I have confessed, not of the most susceptible materials, all excited by this fresh and beautiful aspect of nature. The pretty Louise, with the elastic step and joyous spirit of youth, leaped down the rocks and over the runs, singing, laughing, and exclaiming at every step. Her mother toiled after her, calling out, “Louise, my dear, you'll fall. Put on your bonnet, my child, you'll be one freckle—Louise! Louise! your gloves off! how absurd!” But Louise heard not, or heeded not. She ran on like another Atalanta, defying the gentlemen to overtake her, and, like her prototype, giving them a fair chance, by often stepping aside to crop a flower too inviting to be resisted. They all followed her lead—all but Mr. Hudson, who coolly walked beside the elder ladies—pointed out the best stepping-places—gave them his arm when necessary— and gave them the flowers he gathered, reserving only a few of the choicest. Mrs. Campbell touched my arm, and whispered, “We need no ghost to tell
[p. 23]
us for whom those are destined.” The lumbering coach came on, and one after another the pedestrians were picked up. Louise's colour was heightened by exercise, and her eyes were sparkling with excited spirits. She was something like a flower in the desert—the only one among us, young or pretty, and she was flattered and petted on all sides. She sat between her mother and myself, on the back seat, and was continually putting her pretty face forward on one side and on the other, to answer the compliments and sallies directed to her from the gentlemen who occupied the middle and front seats. As, with the exception of Mr. Hudson, they were all of the trustworthy, elderly, papa and uncle order, this did not imply any undue forwardness in our young friend. At any rate, Mr. Hudson, the only member of the party not hors du combat, did not profit by the vantage-ground she offered, to advance his acquaintance with her. He, now and then, glanced his eye at her, and a strikingly open, gentlemanly eye had Mr. Hudson, (so said the mo- ther,) and sometimes smiled at the jeux d'esprit that might have derived a portion of their brilliancy from the bright lips through which they passed, as water
[p. 24]
takes a hue from the precious ore through which it sometimes issues. “Mr. Hudson appears quite to appreciate Louise,” whispered Mrs. Campbell, “and yet did you ever see any one so unpresuming? He has not even ventured to offer her the bouquet he gathered for her!”
“For me, mamma, are you sure he gathered it for me?”
“Certainly, my love, for whom else could it be?”
Louise was determined the flowers should not fail of their destination, through the youth's over-modesty.
“How sweetly pretty your flowers are, Mr. Hudson!” she began.
“They are both sweet and pretty, Miss Campbell.”
“Fragrant, you mean?” Mr. Hudson bowed assentingly; “that is delightful, where could you have found them? I never can find a sweet wildflower. I am passionately fond of fragrant flowers; indeed, I think flowers without fragrance are quite an imposition. Look at these," she held up the bunch with which she had seemed, a few moments before, quite satisfied; “a French flower-girl could
[p. 25]
make quite as good!” she threw them with a pretty toss of her head, out of the window; and still on this hint, Mr. Hudson spake not—to the point.
He very coolly smelt his flowers, and said, he wished a certain Englishman were in the coach, whom he had heard assert that American flowers had no fragrance—that the climate, like the satyr, blew hot and cold on them; melted and froze the odour out of them. He thought he would he satisfied that his opinion, like some other foreign opinions, was rather the result of his own ignorance, than of a just appreciation of the products of the country.
Mrs. Campbell heard his long speech out—begged leave to smell his flowers—then passed them to her daughter, and she, after some eloquent “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” returned them to Mr. Hudson, who received them with a very polite inclination of his head, but without anything like the anticipated, “pray keep them!” I looked at the mother, expecting to see her a little crest-fallen, but no! her face was the very picture of confidingness and good-humour, with a slight touch of pity for the self-denying modesty of her new acquaintance. “I do not
[p. 26]
doubt,” she said to me at the first opportunity, “that Mr. Hudson has been to France, where, they tell me, it is reckoned very improper to offer attentions of any sort to a young unmarried lady. He is uncommonly unpresuming! but do you not think he is a little too particular?”
“He may be so—but particularity is a good fault in a stage-coach, Mrs. Campbell.”
“Certainly, that is a very just remark, and it will be quite time enough to encourage him when we arrive at the Springs.”
At “the Springs” we arrived in the course of the following day, and were received and had our places assigned us as one party, of which the “unpresuming” Mr. Hudson made, so to speak, an integral part. No mode of ripening an acquaintance is so rapid as that of travelling two or three days, more or less, in a stage-coach. In a steamboat, if you are reserved, sullen—Anglois—(we quote a French synonyme)—you may go apart, upon the upper, or the lower deck—fore or aft—you may drop your veil and look down into the water, or turn your back upon the company, and gaze upon the shore— or you may creep into a berth, and draw a curtain
[p. 27]
between yourself and the world; but what art— what device—what panoply, can resist the social system of a stage-coach! Scott somewhere says, I believe in his chapter upon equality, that it exists only among the Hottentots; he overlooked the temporary but perfect democracy of a stage-coach, where each is reduced to a unit, and feels, whatever his rank, fortune, or distinctions may be, as he is packed, crowded, and pinioned in, that his next neighbours virtually address to him what a surly fellow in a “Jackson Meeting” yesterday, said to a poor man who remonstrated against being jostled and squeezed, “What are you, sir? you are nothing, sir, but an individual!”
But with the good-humoured and kind-hearted, instead of hostility, there is a neighbourly fellow- feeling, nurtured by the intimate relations of a stage-coach. Our fellow-passengers seem to us like cotemporaries,—we have set out with the same purposes and hopes—met with the same disappointments and mischances—“we have had our losses together;” in short, in a stage-coach, as in every mode and condition of human life, sympathy—the electric chain of social being—may be developed,
[p. 28]
and, instead of gall and vinegar, we may enjoy the sweetest of all draughts—the milk of human kindness.
Franklin wrote an essay upon the morals of chess. A chapter on the morals of travelling might not be unprofitable in a country like ours, where half the population is afloat three months of every year.
But my short story must be finished without (I fear!) a moral of any kind.
The Springs, or rather the Spring, which we had selected for our poste restante for some days, was the celebrated Sweet Spring in Union County in Virginia. We chanced to have arrived there before the fashionable season. Our pretty Louise was very near the sad predicament of a belle without a beau. She had, however, plenty of admirers and attendants. Bachelors of some forty or fifty years' standing; widowers from the south, who had come up to the springs to get rid of their bile and their sad memories, and young married men there were who were permitted by their good-natured wives to ride and dance with Louise.
Louise was of the happy disposition that takes “the goods the gods provide,” and enjoys them; that
[p. 29]
never, to use a vulgar simile, throws down the actual bread and butter for the possible cake. The Virginia Springs have few artificial contrivances for pleasure, and it was delightful to see in the pretty Louise the inexhaustible resources of a youthful and cheerful spirit. She would talk by the half-hour with the old Frenchman who obtains a little pécule by keeping the bath and furnishing fire and towels for the ladies, “for what it pleases them to give him.” She would listen to his stories of the French revolution, and his assurances in Anglo-French, (forty years of his threescore and ten had been passed in America,) that she spoke French like a Parisienne. She was, like a butterfly, perpetually on the wing over that beautiful lawn, (how profanely marred by the ugly little cabins that dot it!) which swells up from the deep dell in which the Spring is embosomed, and where, like some sylvan divinity it is sheltered and hidden by a guard of magnificent oaks and elms.
Mrs. Campbell, though the essence of good-nature, was not just then in so satisfied a frame of mind. It was her daughter's debut as a young lady, and she had seen visions, and dreamed dreams of lovers
[p. 30]
and their accompaniments, offers, refusals, and an acceptance! No wonder that the scarcity of the raw material, the warp and woof of which the good mother expected to have woven the matrimonial fabric, should have proved trying to her. Its natural effect was to enhance Mr. Hudson's value; and while Mrs. Campbell unceasingly commended his unpresumingness, she gave him the kindest encouragement to dispense with it, and sometimes appeared a little nettled at his obstinate modesty. Walks were often proposed, but Mr. Hudson, instead of taking a tempting and accessible position beside the young lady, would attend her mamma, or modestly leave them both to the elderly gentlemen, and stray along alone. Once, I remember, a stroll was proposed to a romantic waterfall. The gentlemen whose services we had a right to command were playing billiards. “I am sure,” said Mrs. Campbell, “we may venture to ask Mr. Hudson— he is so unpresuming!”
Accordingly he was asked, and politely joined us —Mrs. Campbell (albeit still ignorant of Mr. Hudson's parentage, fortune, &c.) was all affability— Miss Louise was all gaiety and frankness—so pretty,
[p. 31]
so attractive, so aided by the sylvan influences that in “love-breathing June” dispose the young and susceptible to the sentiment par excellence, that I confess I marvelled that our young friend remained the unpresuming Mr. Hudson.
One evening, at Mrs. Campbell's suggestion, a dance was got up. It was a difficult enterprise, but by the aid of one or two married pairs, and a philanthropic elderly single lady, we mustered a sufficient number for a cotillion. “You and Louise will have hard duty this evening. It is to be hoped she may prove an agreeable partner,” said Mrs. Campbell to Mr. Hudson, as he led off her daughter; “of course,” she added, in a whisper, to her next neighbour, “they must dance together, but I should not have hinted it to him if he were not so very unpresuming!”
But Mr. Hudson did not find the necessity strong enough to overcome that quality of his disposition, which now began to appear to us all, as potent as a ruling passion. He evidently enjoyed the dance with his graceful partner, then modestly resigned her hand, and filled up the measure of his virtue by
[p. 32]
dancing with the unattractive married ladies, and finally crowned it by leading off a Virginia reel with the above-mentioned single lady.
When I parted with Louise for the night, “what a gentlemanly, agreeable man is Mr. Hudson!” said she, “and as mamma says, so very unpresuming!”
The next day was fixed for Mrs. Campbell's departure. She was going to the Natural Bridge. I went to her room to pass the last half-hour with her, and while she was expressing her sincere regret at leaving us all, including Mr. Hudson, on whom she bestowed her usual encomium, we saw a servant bring his baggage from his cabin, and place it with that destined for the Natural Bridge. “Well! well!” exclaimed Mrs. Campbell, who could not, and indeed did not attempt to conceal her satisfaction, “still waters run deep! I suspected all the while----”
“Pshaw! Mamma—do hush!” said Miss Louise, whose smiles, in spite of her, betrayed that her mind had, simultaneously with her mother's, seized on the solution of Mr. Hudson's mysterious unpresumingness.
“La! Louise, my darling, we need not mind
[p. 33]
Miss-----; I am sure she is so discerning, she must have seen, as I did long ago, that Mr. Hudson was like young Edwin in “Edwin and Angelina.’”
“Then he has not yet talked of love,” I asked, rather mischievously.
“Bless me! no! This, however, is a pretty bold step, going to the Natural Bridge with us—but—n’importe, as Louise says, he will do nothing hasty--I am sure of it—he is so unpresuming!”
Whilst we were talking, the Fincastle coach arrived, and it was announced to Mrs. Campbell that there must be a delay of an hour or two before it would proceed, as it required some repair, and (as every body knows who has travelled in Virginia) there was no other carriage to take its place en route. The servant who communicated this to Mrs. Campbell, told us that a very nice-looking gentleman, and his lady, and daughter, had arrived in the coach, who were to remain at the Sweet Springs. “Who were they? and what were their names?” She did not know, “but she reckoned they were somebody, for they had a heap of baggage.” It was immediately proposed that we should abandon the cabin, and reconnoitre the drawing-room and
[p. 34]
piazza, in quest of the new-comers. In those strongholds of ennui—watering-places—the perusal of new faces is as exciting as the covers of a fresh novel to the fair patronesses of a circulating library. We were disappointed in our purpose. We met no one but Mr. Hudson. He seemed, since we parted, a changed man; and instead of the listlessness, abstraction, and indifference—to all which it pleased Mrs. Campbell to apply the term unpresumingness—he was all expression and animation. Once only the flow of his spirits was checked for an instant, when Mrs. Campbell said with a complacent smile, “I was very glad to see your baggage brought out for the Fincastle coach.” He stammered and blushed, and she changed the conversation. Louise was touched by the consciousness of having produced a sensation, and was quiet and retiring, and Mr. Hudson so much more attentive and interested than I had ever seen him before, that I began to think the mother was not at fault, and that our Mr. Hudson was as like the unpresuming hermit lover, as a whiskered, well-dressed, Springs’ lounger could be. I was confirmed in this belief, and convinced that he would soon “talk of
[p. 35]
love,” when, on going with Louise to her cabin in search of something she had left behind, we saw, on her table, a book neatly enveloped in white paper, on which was written in pencil, “To L. C. from C. H.,” and under it the trite quotation from the text-book of lovers, “The world is divided into two parts—that where she is, and that where she is not.” “How very odd !” exclaimed Louise, blushing, and smiling, and untying, with a fluttering hand, the blue ribbon wound around the envelope. She opened the book. It was a blank album, with flowers pressed between its leaves, the very flowers that the “unpresuming Mr. Hudson” had not the courage to offer to Louise on the first day of their acquaintance. Here they were embalmed by love and poetry; for on each page was pencilled a quoted stanza from some popular amorous poet. We had hardly time to glance our eyes over them, when the horn of the Fincastle coach sounded its note of preparation. “What am I to do?” said Louise; “why did not that stupid chambermaid give me the book before; he thought I had seen it, and that explains his being in such spirits, and mamma telling him, too, she was glad he was going on with us! he
[p. 36]
must think it as good as settled! What am I to do? I can't leave it—can I?”
“Not if you choose to take it,” I replied, implying the advice she wished.
“Then do, dear Miss, just wrap it up in that shawl of yours, and while I am getting into the coach, you can just tuck it into my carpet-hag. I can show it to mamma, and if I return it, there is no harm done, for he is so unpresuming! but is it not droll, his flaming forth so all of a sudden?”
Very “droll!” and inexplicable, certainly, did appear to me this new phase of the Proteus passion, and marvelling, I followed my young friend, scrupulously concealing the album in the folds of my shawl. As we left the door of the cabin Louise had occupied, we saw, in the walk just before us, the two ladies of whose arrival we had been apprized.
“Oh!” exclaimed Louise, “how much that young lady's walk is like Laura Clay's!”
At the sound of her name the stranger turned, and proved to be an old schoolmate of Louise's. I took advantage of the moment when the young ladies were exchanging their affectionate greetings,
[p. 37]
to perform my delicate commission, and having ordered in the carpet-bag, I had drawn it into one corner of the room, and was just unlacing it, when the two girls came in.
“How very provoking,” said Louise, “that we are going just as you have arrived.”
“And only think,” returned her friend, “of the chambermaid telling me I was to have the room of a young lady going in the Fincastle coach, and my never dreaming of that young lady being you, and we could have had such nice times in that room together, I have so much to tell you!”
“And I have the drollest thing to tell you!” said Louise; “but, by the way, I heard you were engaged,”—the young lady smiled—“is it true?”— she nodded assent—“Oh, tell me to whom? I am dying to know—the deuce take that horn!—just tell his name.”
“Charles Hudson.”
“Charles Hudson!!”
“Yes, my dear—Charles Hudson—is it not too curious you should have been a week here with him, and not found it out?”
Louise was too much astonished to reply. She
[p. 38]
cast an imploring glance towards me, and I, while I relaced the bag, returned a look that assured her the album should be secretly restored to its right place. Mr. Hudson's unnatural coldness to the charms of my pretty little friend, the mystery of the book—Miss Clay's initials being the same as Miss Campbell's—all was explained. Louise concealed her blushes in a hasty parting embrace, and as she stepped into the carriage, I heard her mother saying to Mr. Hudson,
“Not going with us! why did you change your mind?”
“Some friends have arrived here, Madam, whom I expected to have met at the Natural Bridge.”
Mrs. Campbell bowed for the last time to the unpresuming Mr. Hudson. The coach drove off, and left me meditating upon the trials of a pretty young girl who is chaperoned to watering-places by a silly, expecting, and credulous mother.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Unpresuming Mr. Hudson
Subject
The topic of the resource
Travel, fashionable-watering places, marriage market.
Description
An account of the resource
A mother and daughter meet an eligible bachelor at a fashionable resort, and are confused by his disinterested behavior.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Gift, edited by Eliza Leslie, pp. 17-38.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1836 [published in 1835]
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Reprinted in The Boston Weekly Magazine, vol. 1, no. 43, June 29, 1839, p. 337-338.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
"Edwin and Angelina"
1835
1836
Andrew Jackson
Atalanta
bachelors
Benjamin Franklin
Carlo Goldoni
Carlo Pedrotti
dancing
daughters
Eliza Leslie
Female education
Fincastle coach
gentlemen
gift book
Hottentots
individualism
Jackson meetings
love poems
manners
marriage market
Mary Ann Paton (Mrs. Wood)
modesty
Mothers
Natural Bridge
Oliver Goldsmith
single life
Sir Walter Scott
stage-coach
Sweet Spring
The Gift
Virginia
watering-places