In early 2017, when she was considering writing a book on Lydia Maria Child, Lydia Moland was working in the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, about to look at a file containing letters and newspaper articles from the 19th century abolitionist and writer from Massachusetts.
Moland, a professor of philosophy at Colby College in Maine, says she was still on the fence about her project. But the first letter from Child that she read began with three words — “My dear Lydia,” addressed to a friend with the same name — and that, says Moland, seemed as good a sign as any that she should go forward with the book.
Five years later, Moland has delivered “Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life,” an engaging biography of a woman who threw away a successful literary career as a younger woman when she became an ardent abolitionist and social reformer, prompting readers, publishers and even friends to desert her.
Child, born in 1802 in a modest home in Medford, would continue to write and publish — novels, poems, essays, journalism and history — through much of her life, winning many admirers for her probity, her criticisms of slavery and its connections to northern businesses, and her calls for greater equality for women. But she also spent much of that time living “in grinding poverty,” as Moland puts it, because she was unwilling to compromise her beliefs.
In her book, published by The University of Chicago Press, Moland also covers the time in the late 1830s and early 1840s when Child and her husband, David Lee Child, lived in Florence and grew beets, hoping to turn the crop into sugar and sell it commercially as an alternative to sugar produced by enslaved people on plantations.
In a recent phone interview, Moland said she particularly enjoyed writing about that chapter of Child’s life and visiting the Valley to do research; she cites local historians Steve Strimer, Tom Goldscheider (from the David Ruggles Center) and staff at Historic Northampton as especially helpful.
“They were all great, just a biographer’s dream in the way they were able to give me a sense of the community and steer me to all these details about her life here,” she said.
Moland says she wasn’t even sure what kind of book she wanted to write when she first thought of the project, in part because she knew very little about Child.
“I kind of backed into this,” she said. “I thought I might do something about the philosophical origins of abolitionism. But the more I examined (Child’s) life, the more I realized how much drama there was — a rocky marriage, early success and then poverty, political battles, depression. I got interested in engaging in these bigger stories … I thought of it like a movie.”
Even more important, Moland said, was the uniqueness of Child’s beliefs. She was appalled not just by slavery but by the genocidal treatment of Native Americans, something few whites in that era had any concern about. Child also came to believe there was something fundamentally flawed about a government and society that would permit these evils to exist.
In the 19th century, that was radical thinking indeed, though it would also govern the actions of the members of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI), the communal and abolitionist group that formed in Florence in the 1840s. David Child had some interaction with the association before leaving the area.
Moland says it’s hard to say exactly how Lydia Child came to lead such a maverick life: becoming an independently successful female writer when marriage was seen as the only option for a proper young lady, turning away from organized religion after being raised a Calvinist, remonstrating against slavery to her own financial disadvantage. (Her 1833 book “An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans” was one of the first to call for ending slavery.)
“I think she had profound empathy for people who were suffering and a need in her own life to live up to certain principles, and to urge others to fight injustice,” said Moland. “She had a deep and abiding need to do the right thing.”
Breaking taboos
As Moland’s biography outlines, Child’s very first book, the 1824 novel “Hobomok,” a tale set in colonial New England, plumbed all kinds of controversial themes, including an affair between a Native American man and a white woman.
The novel “included an insubordinate daughter, an indictment of a Puritan patriarch, interracial sex, a mixed-race child, and a kind of divorce,” Moland writes. “How many taboos could one book break?”
Child’s success as a writer in the 1820s gave her entry to Boston’s upper social circles (her father was a baker), and she gained widespread popularity as the founder and editor of a children’s periodical, “The Juvenile Miscellany,” and as the author of one of the country’s first self-help books, “The Frugal Housewife.” She also met and married her husband.
But things began going south financially in the mid 1830s when Child became involved in the abolitionist cause and published her anti-slavery “Appeal.” Yet a big part of the couple’s money woes, Moland observes, was due to David Child’s failure to find any success in a variety of fields: journalism, law, business, farming.
“He just couldn’t get traction in anything,” said Moland, who describes him in her book as “a walking financial disaster.”
David Child was unusual for his time, she notes, in that he fully supported his wife’s writing and shared her political beliefs. But it wasn’t until Lydia insisted that she manage the couple’s finances that they were able to break out of the worst of their poverty, Moland adds.
They also lived apart at times, such as when Lydia moved to New York in 1841 to edit an anti-slavery publication, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, while David remained in Florence. His sugar beet farm, though showing some initial promise, eventually failed, and he became severely debilitated for a time from lack of food.
Yet the couple ultimately came back together, living much of their later life in Wayland.
“They genuinely loved each other,” said Moland. “She loved his mind, a combination of intelligence and sense of irreverence, and he was immensely proud of her work.”
“A Radical American Life” does an excellent job of framing Lydia Child’s life in the context of the times, showing the fierce and sometimes violent opposition to abolitionism in the North as well as the South, the disagreements within the movement itself, and then the coming of the Civil War.
One funny note concerns Child’s letters to friends about her fury that Abraham Lincoln did not immediately call for emancipating slaves after the war began: She wrote that she’d be “gratified by having a bomb-shell burst in the White House.” (Child later came to view Lincoln as a good man and savvy president.)
For all her admiration for her, Moland says Child also exhibited a certain paternalism toward Blacks, something not uncommon among even the most fervent abolitionists; Child, she says, believed Blacks should and could be equal to whites but that they first needed to “be educated and assimilated into white society.”
But given all that’s transpired in the U.S. over the last several years — widespread anti-immigrant sentiment, the rise of white nationalism, the backlash against teaching our country’s history of racism — Moland believes Child’s story is as relevant and valuable as ever.
She wonders, in the introduction to her biography, what Child might think about “the parallels between her America and mine … It might be true that none of this would have surprised her. But none of it would have stopped her either.”
Lydia Moland will discuss her book Nov. 30 at 7 p.m. in a Zoom presentation hosted by Historic Northampton. You can register at historicnorthampton.org/lydia-maria-child.html; sliding-scale admission is $5 to $25.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.