| The first children’s book written by Plymouthean
Abby Morton Diaz was a fairy tale. The Entertaining Story of King
Bronde : His Lily and His Rosebud, published by Ticknor & Fields in 1869, is
an elaborate and contrived tale involving a myriad of plot elements not often found
combined into a single short book : giants, fairies who grant wishes to newborn
princesses, a woodcutter’s son and stolen royal children and secret identities,
enchantments and perils and eventual happily-ever-afters. Although the plot is
overcomplicated and ineffective, the story is notable for Diaz’s vivid descriptions
and her technique of speaking directly to her reader : |
And could you have entered the palace itself, and have kept your eyes
from being blinded by the bright colors, the sparkling ornaments, and all the splendor of
this wonderful place, and have wandered on and on, through the spacious apartments, you
would at last have come to an ivory door, over which was perched a red-and-green parrot.
This parrot was fed upon flowers made from crystals of white sugar; and had you given him
one of these he would have told you a riddle. But this, of course, you could not know.
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| After this one unsuccessful foray into the make-believe world of palaces and parrots,
Diaz turned her descriptive powers to the New England world in which she lived. For the
rest of her very productive literary life, she wrote about the people and places she knew
and loved with an increasingly assured and imaginative voice that made her one of the most
popular children’s authors of her time. |
Abby Morton, born in 1821, grew up
in the Wellingsley area of Plymouth, in the "Hobs Hole House" that still stands
on Sandwich Street. She described it in a 1900 article in the New England Magazine
as a "low gambrel-roofed house a mile south from the town centre - the family of our
Pilgrim ancestor, George Morton, having taken their land in that locality. Our homestead
grounds reached to the shore, where were my father’s wharf and shipyard."
Abby’s father Ichabod Morton was
temperance, abolitionist and an educational reformer of note. By Abby’s description,
he was "tall, erect, earnest in bearing, usually of serious aspect and much given to
planning for the kingdom of heaven to come on earth…" His life was a continual
balancing act between his reforming inclinations and his strong business sense. According
to Plymouth historian William T. Davis, "For a short time his [Ichabod Morton’s]
business was interrupted by his association with the Brook Farm enterprise, but the dreams
of that social experiment soon gave way to the practical pursuits of business life."
Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized Ichabod Morton as "a plain man formerly engaged
through many years in the fisheries with success, eccentric, with a persevering interest
in education, and of a very democratic religion, came and built a house on the farm [Brook
Farm]."
Brook Farm was one of the idealistic and utopian
Transcendentalist communities of the mid-19th century. Located in central
Massachusetts, it survived for only 6 years, from 1841-1847. Ichabod Morton was one of the
original Trustees. He built a home, known as "Pilgrim House," at Brook Farm but
left there and returned to Plymouth after only two weeks. Brook Farm, organized as a
commune, combined a farm and a school. The farm was never a great success - the soil was
poor and its communalist approach did not encourage productivity. The school, however, was
a success. It had three levels: a nursery for the youngest, a primary division for those
up to 10 years old, and an advanced section for those heading for college (6 additional
years of school) or farming (3 additional years of school). The curriculum was
progressive; students and teachers engaged in discussion, discipline was informal. While
the Brook Farm community never numbered more than 200, thousands visited to share in its
intellectual stimulation.
| Abby Morton shared her father’s crusading
instincts, joining a juvenile antislavery society while a Plymouth
teenager. In early 1843, having just turned 21, she joined the Brook Farm community as a
teacher in the "Infant School" for children under the age of 6. John Van
Der Zee Sears, in My Friends at Brook Farm remembered that |
The one person best qualified to take care of these toddlers was a charming young
lady, Miss Abby Morton, whose sincere interest in children invariably gained their young
affections … Her first object was to make them happy and contented, and to this end
she invented and arranged games and songs and stories, contrived little incidents and
managed little surprises with never failing ingenuity. Learning as well as teaching, she
gradually gave a purposeful bent to her song-and-dance diversions, making them effective
lessons as well as pleasant pastimes…
It was no wonder that she [Abby Morton Diaz] could write letters and stories appealing to
children. Her understanding and her sympathies brought her in close touch with them. She
knew their minds and their hearts, their likes and their dislikes and what she wrote of
them and for them they accepted, knowing that every word was true to nature.
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| A younger "Brook Farmer," Ora Gannett Sedgwick remembered Abby
Morton as "very dear to me, and whose peculiar combination of liveliness and dignity,
together with her beautiful singing, made her a favorite with all the members, old and
new." |
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| By the autumn of 1845, Abby had returned to Plymouth
for her marriage to Manuel A. Diaz of Havana, whom she had probably met at Brook Farm
(among the residents of Brooke Farm were young men, students from Manila, Havana and
Florida who were "prepping" for Harvard College). The Plymouth Vital
Records record that |
Manuel A. Diaz of Havana, age 22, son of Manual A & Isabel B. Diaz, mar[ried].
Oct. 6, 1845, by Rev. James Kendall of Plymouth, Abby Morton, single of Plymouth, age 23,
dau. of Ichabod & Martha Morton.
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| Two children were born, Roberto in 1847 and Manuel in 1849. The marriage did not last,
however, and Abby was left to raise her boys on her own. |
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| For some time she taught singing and dancing
and did practical nursing in Plymouth. Harriet A. Townsend, writing in Reminiscences
of Famous Women, remembered the stories her friend Abby Morton Diaz told about
this time in her life |
The story of her village dancing classes is very amusing; the music was usually
provided by an old, blind fiddler, to whom Mrs. Diaz sang the directions; if for any
reason the musician failed to appear, she sang all the music for the dances, and such rare
rollicking roundelays as she could sing all her life, to the delight of the children she
met on the way. Mrs. Diaz was a born teacher, and her inventive faculties were marvelous.
No picnic, festival or good time in her native town was complete unless she was there to
plan and direct.
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| Abby Morton Diaz’s career as a professional writer
began when the Atlantic Monthly published a short story in 1861. A number of
other children’s short stories followed. Her first full book, the unsuccessful
fairy-tale, appeared in 1869. |
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With her next book, published the following year (although
it had been introduced to the public slightly earlier as a serial in a juvenile
publication), she abandoned the mannered European model of fantasy and instead wrote a
simple story of a young New England boy and his extended loving family. The William
Henry Letters was to prove her most enduringly popular book.
The book is introduced by an "editor," in the character of a
family friend who presents a series of letters featuring William Henry, a motherless
10-year-old boy whose father has sent him to boarding school because "Grandmother was
spoiling him." These literary techniques - the "editor" who functions as
narrator and the use of letters which naturally include realistic dialogue and
conversation - play brilliantly to Diaz’s strengths, allowing her in a natural and
unforced manner to speak directly to the reader and to freely use her vivid descriptive
powers. |
| In the letters, William Henry comes to life - a good, but not saintly, boy as
described by his best school friend Dorry |
He’s got a furious head of hair, and freckles. But we don’t think at all
about his looks now. If anything, we like his looks. He’s just as pleasant and
gen’rous, and not a mean thing about him. I don’t believe he would tell a lie to
save his life. I know he wouldn’t. He’s always willing to help everybody. And
had just as lief give anyting away as not. And when he plays, he plays fair.
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The reader also comes to know and love William
Henry’s family and friends: Grandmother who worries (is William Henry warm, is he
eating right, does he have the measles, has he drowned?), Aunt Phebe who knits the
family’s stories into the colored stripes of her comforter - dark stripes for
quarrels and domestic mishaps and bright stripes for successes and cheerful happenings,
little sister Georgianna who is so very proud of the light blue and totally impractical
boots her fond Uncle Jacob has bought, William Henry’s friend Dorry whose wealthy
mother "was not particularly fond of boys," the school bully that ran away to
sea and eventually reformed, fat and cheerful Bubby Short. The readers share in picnics
and clambakes, visits to the village and to classmates’ homes, schoolboy scrapes and
the misadventures of growing up.
The William Henry Letters combines the best
techniques of America’s late 19th century children’s authors.
The setting is middle class in values, serving as a catalyst for moral improvement;
Diaz’s characters are strong and believable. The virtues she promotes are simple -
laughter, hard work, honesty and kindness; and the moral lessons to be learned are
leavened by a merry wit, naturalistic dialogue and a deep affection for the characters. The
William Henry Letters was among the first of the American "real boy"
stories. Its mischievous and good-hearted young hero, who grows as he ages, paved the way
for a series of other notable boy characters, culminating in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn. The William Henry Letters was one of the three books declared by
Theodore Roosevelt to be the favorite stories of his boyhood, "because," he
said, "they were first-class, good, healthy stories, interesting in the first place,
and in the next place teaching manliness, decency, and good conduct."
| In addition to two sequels to The William
Henry Letters aimed at slightly older audiences, Diaz also continued
to create memorable characters in books aimed at even younger
children. In 1878, The
Jimmyjohns and Other Stories were published. "The Jimmyjohns" are active
little boys, twin brothers Jimmy Plummer and Johnny Plummer, aged four years and ten
months. We join them as they explore their small world of ponds and fields and ocean
shore. |
| We meet their family, and their family’s family in the form of sister
Annetta’s baby dolls: Joey Moonbeam, Dorothy Beeswax, Betsey Ginger and Polly
Cologne, "the smallest, the prettiest, and the cunningest," who several years
later became the heroine of her own book. Polly Cologne relates the
adventures of a lost doll, carried off into the fields by the family dog Rover, discovered
by a botanist and brought to the city where she enjoys gentle and unexpected adventures,
is lost and found and loved by a poor crippled child, and finally returned to her owner. |
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| Diaz also continued to experiment with fantasy stories
for children. After her first unfortunate experiment, however, she generally avoided
giants and robbers, writing instead gentle tales of dreaming flowers awakening after a
long winter and cats at tea parties. |
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Diaz’s whimsical side flourished in 1881 with a domestic fantasy book for young
children, King Grimalkum and Pussyanita; or the Cats’ Arabian Nights,
in which the heroine, "a beautiful creature just out of kittenhood" enthralls
the stern and hard-hearted jet black king whose eyes were "of the true royal
yellow" with tales of her twenty-seven times great grandmother Pinky-white who
couldn’t "catch," Black Velvet who was blown off a tree in a whirlwind and
went to sea in a baby’s crib, and Tabby Furpurr who found a way of not liking
(to eat) birds. |
| Also published in 1881, was Diaz’s Chronicles of the Stimpcett Family,
cataloguing the humorous disasters of a crazily accident-prone family who somehow
always found their way home safely. |
In addition to her children’s stories, Abby
Morton Diaz wrote extensively on woman’s role in family and society. Titles include The
Schoolmaster's Trunk: Containing Papers on Home-life in Tweenit (1874), The
Domestic Problem : Work and Culture in the Household (1875), and Bybury to
Beacon Street (1887). The strength of these books, as with her writings for
children, lay in their grounding in Diaz’s New England roots. Not only are the
characters and situations drawn from Plymouth life, often so is the geography
("Tweenit" is Plymouth between South Street and Bayview Avenue). Serious in
intent yet domestic in tone, they showcase Diaz’s ear for natural dialogue and her
irrepressible sense of humor.
Abby Morton Diaz left Plymouth during the
mid 1870’s, after her sons were grown. Moving to Boston (and later still to Belmont),
she continued her writing and became a leader in educational and philanthropic
organizations for women. She was one of the founders of the Women’s Educational and
Industrial Union, serving as an officer from 1877-1902.
| Abby Morton Diaz died in Belmont, Massachusetts,
on April 1, 1904. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Her friend Harriet Townsend
remembered her as |
Unselfish to a fault, her modesty as to attainments was unusual. Mrs. Diaz was the
soul and heart of every good object which she originated or espoused, and she fairly
radiated life and sunshine… The kindly brown eyes, the strong hand extended to greet
a new friend, the simple and neat attire so in accord with her principles, all helped to
make a rare personality. This busy earnest life went on giving joy and courage wherever it
touched, for a period of four score years and more.
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Sources for Abby Morton Diaz include :
Davis, William T. Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian. Plymouth
: Bittinger Brothers, 1906.
Diaz, Abby Morton. "Antislavery times in Plymouth." New England Magazine,
Vol. XX, No. 2, April 1900.
Sams, Henry W., editor. Autobiography of Brook Farm. Gloucester, Mass. :
Peter Smith, 1974.
Sears, John Van Der Zee. My Friends at Brook Farm. New York : Desmond
FitzGerald, 1912.
Townsend, Harriet A. Reminiscences of famous women. Buffalo : Evans-Penfold
Co., 1916.
Sources for the history of children’s literature include :
Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child : American Children and Their Books 1621-1922.
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Calvert, Karin. Children in the House. Boston : Northeastern University
Press, 1992.
Earle, Alice Morse. Child Life in Colonial Days. New York : The Macmillan
Company, 1904.
Murray, Gail S. American Children’s Literature and the Construction of
Childhood. New York : Twayne Publishers, 1998.
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