Red Devils - 6 - Trip to New York

“Goodness, its past five o’clock. We must be going. Aunt Lillie will be very worried about us,” said Cora Sue.

“Well, I'll send you an invitation for coming to see us again here, as soon as I can make sure when Sam Clemens is available. But I am so pleased to have met you lovely girls, and I do wish you success on your trip to New York. I can’t wait for you to tell me all about it. But let me have my man, Edward Fletcher, drive you home. You can’t be out in the dark on a night like this.”

So we got our coats, and quickly said thank you and good bye and were taken off home in Mr. Barnum’s fine carriage, feeling that we could each write several books out of what we had learned, and how pleased we were that we would be able to see our new friend again soon.

 

21^stJanuary

I got a letter from New York today, but not from Mr. Bennett. It came from somebody called Mr. Fredrick Hudson. I tore open the envelope and took out a letter from him on New York Herald newspaper stationery. It read:

20 January, 1880

Miss M. Kellogg

7 Park Avenue

Bridgeport, Connecticut

Dear Miss Kellogg,

I am sorry to be so long in replying to your letter. I have to inform you that Mr. James Gordon Bennett is not in New York at present. He now lives on his yacht, the Lysistrata, on the Seine near Paris. However, he does maintain telegraphic contact with the office, and I was able to communicate with him regarding your request.

He said to tell you he was very sorry not be able to meet you at this time, but asked me to make available to you and clippings that we have on the Indian situation since The Battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana in June, 1876.

As he is not present, and it would not be possible for me to offer you accommodation in New York, Mr. Bennett has asked me to reserve rooms for you and your sister at the Washington Hotel which is on Greenwich Street, on Friday and Saturday nights the 30-31^stof January, at his expense.

I wish to offer you the following itinerary:

Friday night - Arrival at Grand Central Station (I will meet you and take you to your hotel where you can unpack at your leisure and have a meal at the hotel restaurant, at Mr. Bennett’s expense, of course.)

Saturday morning - 10 a.m. Meeting with me at the Herald offices (we will send a cab for you at 9.45) and you will be free to peruse the files which you indicated an interest in at our office here. I’m afraid that you cannot take any of the material away with you, however.

Saturday afternoon 1.30 my wife will pick you up and take you to lunch and then at 2.30 I have tickets for you and your sister to go with my wife, to the Fifth Avenue Theatre which is showing the Pirates of Penzance by Messr. Gilbert and Sullivan, whom I have no doubt you have heard of. After that, I will meet up with you and we will take you on a tour of downtown Manhattan and take you out to a restaurant nearby and provide you with a ride back to your hotel afterwards.

Sunday morning - Mr. Bennett indicated to me that you girls are Catholics, and you might like to attend Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. My wife and I will call for you, escort you there, and then take you afterwards to Grand Central Station for your train journey home.

Please RSVP if these ideas suit you. Again, apologies for this being not quite the meeting you might have anticipated, and Mr. Bennett hopes that he will meet up with you on another occasion.

Might I just add a personal note and say how much I enjoyed reading your father’s work when he was retained by us.

Yours sincerely,

Fredrick Hudson,

Manager of the New York Herald

“Cora Sue,” I couldn’t help shouting out, “we’re going to New York and we are going to see a play and going to St Patrick’s, and stay at a hotel. What do you think of that?”

“I’ve never been to a proper theater before, or out to eat in a fancy restaurant. I wonder if Aunt Lillian would let us spend some of our money on new clothes.”

“We’ll ask her after supper, and after we do the dishes, and hopefully, if she is in a good mood, she will be more agreeable.”

“We can stop by Lonergan and Downy tomorrow night on the way back from school.

“It isn’t on the way back.”

“Well, it isn’t that far out of the way. Just to look and see what they’ve got and then we can see how much a nice dress will cost before we ask Auntie Lillian. But there isn’t time for her to make us anything. Oh this is so exciting!”

Earlier at school we had been telling our friends all about our exciting interview with Mr. Barnum, and how we were going to meet with him again, and would also be meeting Mark Twain. Fredrick Burroughs was beside himself with excitement when we told him he could come too. He had intended going to Hartford to interview Samuel Clemens, but now he wouldn’t have to.

There was much information about Mr. Barnum that Cora Sue could get from the library - about how he was Mayor of Bridgeport one year, and how he donated the Hospital, and loads of other good works that he did. So we didn’t really think of our next visit as one to get specific information, but just to enjoy seeing him again, and meeting Mark Twain.

Aunt Lillie had been very patient with allowing us to go off to see Mr. Barnum on Saturday, and hopefully she won’t object to this trip to New York. We can do our chores early to make up for the days we will be gone. Once the baby is born we won’t be quite as free to take off when we want, but that won’t be for a few months yet.

22^ndJanuary

Aunt Lillian was agreeable to our spending some of our money from Mr. Bennett, especially as it appears as if we won’t have any other expenses, after we pay for our train tickets. She said however, that we must regard these as our graduation dresses as well, and not expect new clothing again in May.

I checked on train times, and we can board a train here at 12.30 which will arrive in Grand Central Station at 6.30 p.m. And coming home on Sunday it will be much the same - leaving there at 1 and getting home at 7.

We traveled by train when we moved here with Auntie Lillian and Uncle William and Grandma two years ago, but we didn’t go through New York at all, and came here from Pennsylvania. I am so excited about all of this, that I can hardly concentrate on anything else.

All of the English class managed to get their outlines and Introductions into Miss Marble for Monday’s class. It was rather funny, when she asked Nelson to read out his introduction about Lincoln.

She said, “That sounds very cut and dried, Nelson. Did you copy that out of a book?”

He replied, “Oh, yes Miss, every word copied out exactly from the Encyclopedia Americana.”

“Nelson, have you ever heard of plagiarism?”

“Is that when everybody gets very sick, Miss?” he said knowing full well that he was pretending to be stupider than he is.

“No, Nelson, it is not the plague. It is a term which refers to using others' words and making out that they are your own.”

“But I needed to use their words, Miss. I didn’t know the dates and places and things for myself.”

“But if you use other people’s work you need to reference it. You should put a small number above where you are copying work, and then at the end of the chapter, put down where you got the information - the book, the edition, the publishing date, and the page.”

“But Miss, I might be doing that for every paragraph I write. I don’t know anything about him at all, except he was president and freed the slaves.”

“This is supposed to be an essay, Nelson. So it doesn’t want to be just facts - which you might well have to ascertain   through a book - but an essay in which I am specifically asking you to give your opinion on why this person is someone you might like to meet. That won’t be listed in any book, will it? Now why is it that you chose Lincoln?”

“Because I thought it would be easy and there would be a lot written about him. And I do admire what he did, and feel sorry that he had such an awful death when he was still so young.”

“Well, I will leave you to decide how you are going to put those ideas into words. I do appreciate class, that much of what you are going to be writing will be gleaned from books. But you should read the information, absorb it, and rewrite it again in your own words.”

We only had time for the one Introduction to be read out in class, so the rest of us handed ours in and we will have to wait until next Monday to see what she thinks of them. We were just told to get on with the body of our essays now, but I am thinking I will wait to write any more until after our trip to New York, when I will have a better idea of how I want to bring in the Indians’ point of view.

January 26

Cora Sue and I bought our dresses, which Grandma thought were very good value once she had looked at the workmanship in them. It would have taken an enormous effort to make a similar dress, so it was well worth the money, we thought. We had already decided what to pack for our big trip which would begin in only four days' time, but we still had to go to school and live in the real world until then.

I was nervous going into the English class, as no doubt we would be getting our Introductions back, with comments on them. But when the class finally came at the end of the day, I found that mine had only a tick on it, no comments at all. I was both relieved and disappointed. But the one that Miss Marble thought was the very best she wanted read out in class, and that was Albertina’s one on Harriet Beecher Stowe. I couldn’t see what was so good about it, as she read it out to us.

 

Introduction

For my essay I have chosen to write about Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (pictured above) who was born on June 14^th, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut and later, in 1832, lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. She brought to the attention of the general public, especially of the North where there were no slaves, the cruelty of slavery. Equally her work angered the people in the South who felt she had not presented the situation fairly. The impact of the book widened the breech between the two sections. In fact, Mr. Abraham Lincoln said of her, “So you’re the little woman who started this great war.”

But going back to her childhood, she was the seventh child of the Protestant minister, Lyman Beecher, who was very anti-slavery in his sermons. Harriet worked as a student, and later a teacher, with her older sister, Catharine, at Hartford Female Seminary. In 1836, she married Calvin Stowe, a clergyman and widower. Later, she and her husband moved to Brunswick, Maine, when he obtained an academic position at Bowdoin College. Harriet and Calvin had seven children, but some died in early childhood. Her first children, twin girls Hattie and Eliza, were born on September 29, 1836. Four years later, in 1840, her son Frederick William was born. In 1848, the birth of Samuel Charles occurred, but in the following year, he died from a cholera epidemic. She helped to support her family financially by writing for local and religious periodicals. During her life, she wrote poems, travel books, biographical sketches, and children's books, as well as adult novels.

While she wrote at least ten adult novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe is predominantly known for her first, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Begun as a serial for the Washington anti-slavery weekly, the National Era, it focused public interest on the issue of slavery, and was deeply controversial. In writing the book, she drew on her personal experience: she was familiar with slavery, the antislavery movement, and the underground railroad because Kentucky, which was across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio, where Mrs. Stowe had lived, was a slave state. Following publication of the book, she became a celebrity, speaking against slavery both in America and Europe. She wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) extensively documenting the realities on which the book was based, to refute critics who tried to argue that it was inauthentic; and published a second anti-slavery novel, Dred in 1856. Campaigners for other social changes, such as Caroline Norton, respected and drew upon her work. Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred, a Tale of the Dismal Swamp were made into plays.