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Isaiah Thomas Reads the Declaration of Independence

Isaiah Thomas, America’s first great publisher, spent several years during the American Revolution just scraping to get by.

Isaiah Thomas

Thomas’s years of struggle were brightened by one glorious moment, when he read the Declaration of Independence on the steps of South Church in Worcester, Mass.

Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1749 (N.S. Jan. 30, 1750). He was apprenticed at age six to Zachariah Fowle. In 1770 he started the wildly radical Massachusetts Spy, a weekly newspaper described as “rabid, yellow and very successful.” His high-minded motto of “Open to all parties, but influenced by none,” described an impartiality he couldn’t sustain. Soon the Spy supported the cause of American liberty and it quickly got under Loyalist skin.

Front page of the Spy, July 7, 1774

He was hanged in effigy in North Carolina, wrote Marcus McCorison.

The British troops in Boston paraded before the Spy office and threatened Thomas with a tarring. By 1773 he was fully involved in the radical cause. In his autobiographical notes he stated that he secretly printed handbills at night for the Sons of Liberty. Thomas established a schedule of post riders to the south for the delivery of the Spy and other papers…

Thomas Hutchinson in 1750.

Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Hutchinson ordered the attorney general to prosecute Thomas. But the grand jury found no cause for indictment.

Flight

By April 1775, armed conflict seemed inevitable. Thomas learned British commander Gen. Thomas Gage planned to seize his press and arrest him for treason. On April 16, 1775, three days before war broke out, Isaiah Thomas fled Boston. He hurriedly packed his press, his fonts of type and his scarce paper and got ready to leave.

The next night, he smuggled his equipment out of Boston with the help of Gen. Joseph Warren and Col. Timothy Bigelow. They ferried him across the Charles River to Charlestown in the dead of night. He then packed his press and his supplies to Worcester. Two days later, he fought as a minuteman — “engages in the fight,” writes his grandson, without specifying. He at least watched the skirmishes and then published the first eyewitness account of them. Post riders rode throughout the colonies with his report to spread the word.

Put Him to the Sword

In September, a circular letter went to British officers telling them to execute Thomas and other patriots, including Sam Adams and John Hancock. Under the list of names, the instructions read “to put the above persons to the sword, destroy their houses and plunder their effects.”

But for Thomas, the American Revolution proved less drama and more a grind. He had little money. His two apprentices slept on printers’ rags in a garret. All three frequently dined on bread and milk in the printer’s office.

In the spring of 1776, Thomas leased his press and newspaper to two other printers. He went to Salem, Mass., to try to make a living. But Loyalists attached his press and type and he had to sell them to pay his debts. He moved his family to Londonderry, N.H.

“They must have been dark years,” wrote his grandson and biographer Benjamin Franklin Thomas. “Somehow he got through them and supported his family.”

The Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence

During those years, Isaiah Thomas had one bright day. On July 24, 1776, he read the Declaration of Independence, the first in Massachusetts to do so.

The stage from Philadelphia stopped in Worcester on its way to Boston with the news. Thomas stood on the steps of the South Church and read the declaration to the entire population of Worcester and adjoining towns.

“The declaration was received with every demonstration of joy and confidence,” wrote his grandson.

The King’s arms on the courthouse were burned to ashes. The sign was taken off the King’s Arms tavern, and the townsfolk celebrated inside with 21 patriotic toasts. They gave full vent to their patriotic feelings and were surprised to find the next morning that a dozen of them had joined the Continental Army – including Isaiah Thomas’s apprentice. Thomas got him excused on the grounds he was less than 16 years old.

In the spring of 1778, Isaiah Thomas resumed printing the Spy. He would remain in Worcester, printing until the end of his life. He would also found the American Antiquarian Society and achieve his life’s major goal: publish a history of the printing industry.

Isaiah Thomas died on April 4, 1831.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Spy Revere, P. (1774) Masthead and part of front page of The Massachusetts spy, or, Thomas’s Boston journal showing a female figure of Liberty in upper left and rattlesnake labeled “Join or Die” symbolizing the 13 colonies, challenging a griffin, across the top. United States, 1774. July 7. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2002712180/.

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Benjamin Franklin Has A Teachable Moment With Cotton Mather

When Benjamin Franklin first returned to Boston in 1724 after a year in Philadelphia, he went to visit Cotton Mather.

What is remarkable about the visit was that Franklin, the libertine and rebel, had mocked the Puritan clergyman as a 16-year-old anonymous writer for his brother James’s newspaper, The New England Courant.

Benjamin Franklin

The story of how Franklin got published in the Courant is well known. Apprenticed to his brother, he feared James wouldn’t print his writing in the newspaper. So he wrote an essay in disguised handwriting under the nom de plume Silence Dogood. The name was probably an allusion to two of Mather’s books, Essays to Do Good and Silentiarius: A Brief Essay on the Holy Silence and Godly Patience, that Sad Things are to be Entertained withal.

Maybe he was suggesting Mather should be silent.

Hell-Fire Club

Benjamin Franklin slipped the first essay under the door of his brother’s printing shop at night. The essay was well received by James’ customers and literary friends, who called themselves ‘The Couranteers.’ Cotton Mather , the subject of the Courant’s barbs, called them ‘The Hell-Fire Club.’

The 16-year-old wrote 13 more essays in the persona of Silence Dogood, ostensibly a middle-aged minister’s widow. When she suggested she didn’t like being single, several men wrote in with marriage offers.

In the essays, young Benjamin Franklin mocked the Puritan establishment. Harvard was a special target in Essay Four.

I reflected in my Mind on the extream Folly of those Parents, who, blind to their Childrens Dulness, and insensible of the Solidity of their Skulls, because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send them to the Temple of Learning, where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquir’d at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.

The State Hypocrite

As Silence, he mocked religious hypocrisy in Essay Nine. Silence asked herself which was worse, hypocritical pretenders to religion or the openly profane? She concluded the hypocrite is more dangerous — especially if he has a government post.

The first artifice of a State Hypocrite is, by a few savoury Expressions which cost him Nothing, to betray the best Men in his Country into an Opinion of his Goodness; and if the Country wherein he lives is noted for the Purity of Religion, he the more easily gains his End.

‘The public hypocrite every day deceives his betters,” she wrote, “and makes them the Ignorant Trumpeters of his supposed Godliness.” They take him for a saint, without considering they are “the Instrument of Publick Mischief our of Conscience, and ruin their country for God’s sake.’

Cotton Mather

Mather might well have taken umbrage at Franklin’s attack on the Puritan ruling class. He belonged to it — in a big way. Mather wielded influence as pastor of the North Church, as a prolific writer and as a political leader. In 1689 he had led a revolt against the governor of the short-lived Dominion of New England, Edmund Andros.

Some historians believe Benjamin Franklin aimed the essay directly at Cotton and his father Increase Mather, both of whom played a role in the Salem witch trials. Others say it could have been Samuel Sewell, another Salem witch trial judge. Still others think Franklin aimed the essay at Joseph Dudley, a former governor of Massachusetts. Or it could have been all of them.

Stoop!

When Benjamin Franklin visited Mather at his house, the old minister could not have forgotten the Courant’s attacks on him, especially over the inoculation controversy. During a smallpox epidemic ravaging Boston, Mather advocated inoculation against the disease, something he learned from his African slave. The Courant savaged Mather for his evil plot to spread smallpox, not prevent it.

And yet Franklin respected the Mathers. He read Essays to Do Good at the age of 11, which, he said, had influenced him profoundly. He had also gone to hear both Increase and Cotton preach.

Benjamin Franklin recounted the visit in a letter to his son, Samuel Mather. Cotton Mather said nothing about James’ attack. Both men loved books, and they visited in Mather’s library. As they were leaving, Mather suddenly said, “Stoop! Stoop!”

Franklin didn’t understand and hit his head on the low beam. Mather, who never missed a chance to give instruction, said, “You are young, and have the world before you; stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps.”

Benjamin Franklin wrote to his son, “I often think of it when I see pride mortified, and misfortunes brought upon people by their carrying their heads too high.”

This story about Benjamin Franklin was updated in 2022.

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Jaws, Or The Tale of an Unfairly Maligned Shark

The 1974 bestseller Jaws and the blockbuster movie that followed created such animosity toward sharks that the book’s author became an ardent shark advocate.

Twenty-five years after Jaws was published in early 1974, Peter Benchley said he couldn’t have written it again in good conscience. The tale of a great white shark that terrorized a town stoked unjustified fears of sharks and popularized shark hunting tournaments.

Peter Benchley

“[T]he shark in an updated Jaws could not be the villain,” Benchley said. “It would have to be written as the victim; for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors.”

Peter Benchley

Benchley was the grandson of Algonquin Round Table wit Robert Benchley and the son of writer Nathaniel Benchley. He was not, however, a fiction writer by trade. To his editor, it showed.

Peter Benchley, born on May 8, 1940 in New York City, graduated from Harvard and worked as a reporter for The Washington Post , then Newsweek. He worked for a time as a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson. In 1971, an editor at Doubleday, Tom Congdon, saw some of Benchley’s work and invited him to lunch to talk about a book.

Benchley suggested a book about pirates. Congdon said no. Benchley then suggested a story about a great white shark menacing a resort community. Congdon liked the idea and offered him a $1,000 advance for the first 100 pages.

Benchley holed up in a room above the Pennington Furnace Co., in Pennington, N.J., to write the book during the winter. He found an old turkey coop in Stonington, Conn., to work in during the summer. He didn’t just write; he looked up everything he could find about sharks.

Benchley continued to research sharks after the book’s publication. He was disturbed to learn sharks only eat people by accident when they mistake them for their normal prey.

When Benchley submitted the first 100 pages of Jaws, Congdon liked the first five. He called them ‘wonderful.’

Those first five pages went into the final version unchanged. The next 95 pages, not so much. They were funny, and Congdon didn’t think funny worked for a thriller.

OK, Call It Jaws

Benchley revised and rewrote the book. For a year’s work, he received only $7,500 in sporadic payments. He had come up with titles for the book such as Leviathan Rising and The Jaws of Death, but rejected them.

Shortly before the book went to print, Benchley told Congdon he couldn’t come up with a title. “The only word that means anything is ‘jaws’,” Benchley said. It was short, he said, and it might work.

“Okay, we’ll call the thing Jaws,” Congdon said.

The book sold 9.5 million copies in the U.S. alone, a surprise bestseller for 44 weeks. It eventually sold 20 million copies.

Film producer David Brown saw Doubleday’s promotion for Jaws, which suggested, ‘it might make a good movie.’

The Film

Stephen Spielberg, then 26, directed Jaws, filming it on Martha’s Vineyard despite legendary production problems.

Actors joined the cast at the last minute and the script was rewritten just before shooting.

The mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce for Spielberg’s lawyer, didn’t work in saltwater. The sound crew almost drowned. Lead actor Robert Shaw went on drinking binges and he and co-star Richard Dreyfuss developed a healthy hatred for each other.

In the end, Jaws took 159 days to shoot, three times as long as scheduled, and it cost $9 million, nearly three times as much as budgeted. Spielberg heard rumors he’d never direct another movie.

Jaws came out in June 1975 in 450 theaters, the first film so widely distributed. The strategy worked; Jaws became the highest grossing film in history until Star Wars. Some critics called it the greatest movie ever.

Jaws, filmed in Menemsha (pictured here), belongs to the pantheon of classic movies shot in New England.

Aftermath

Though the odds of being eaten by a shark are infinitesimally small, Jaws instilled a widespread fear of the ocean. After seeing the movie, beachgoers refused to go into the water and thousands of fishermen tried to catch trophy sharks. At least one shark biologist partly blames Jaws for a precipitous decline in the shark population.

Guadalupe Island Biosphere Reserve, Mexico

Benchley embarked on his own film career, accompanying scientists and film producers on expeditions to learn more about sharks. He became the spokesman for the Oceans program of the National Council of Environmental Defense.

In 2000, Benchley penned an op-ed in The Guardian in defense of sharks:

When I wrote the book and film a quarter of a century ago, knowledge of sharks was in its infancy,” he wrote. “We believed that sharks actually attacked boats; we believed that they actively sought out human prey…

“Over the years, we have come to know otherwise. Over those same years, unfortunately, the demand worldwide for shark products has soared, and improved technology has given man the tools to slaughter sharks wholesale to meet that demand.

“Around the world every year, approximately a dozen people are killed by sharks, while 100m sharks are killed by man.”

Peter Benchley died on Feb. 11, 2006, of pulmonary fibrosis.

This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Menemsha By User:Elkman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Menemsha.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1350749. Scavenging shark By Fallows C, Gallagher AJ, Hammerschlag N (2013) – Fallows C, Gallagher AJ, Hammerschlag N (2013) White Sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) Scavenging on Whales and Its Potential Role in Further Shaping the Ecology of an Apex Predator. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60797. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060797, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25544665

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Horatio Alger and the 100-Year-Old Guilty Secret

Horatio Alger wrote rags-to-riches stories about poor boys who succeed through hard work, often helped by a wealthy benefactor with a guilty secret. He had his own guilty secret.

Horatio Alger in 1852

Alger is often believed to have patterned his earnest young characters after himself.

Actually, it was the wealthy benefactors he was writing about.

Horatio Alger’ s guilty secret stayed secret for more than a century. The First Unitarian Parish of Brewster, Mass., kicked him out of his job as a minister for sexual misconduct with boys.

The Eligible Parson

Horatio Alger was born on Jan. 13, 1832, in Chelsea (now Revere), Mass. Both his parents came from old New England families, but he was hardly aristocratic and certainly not rich. His father, Horatio Alger, Sr., was a minister who wanted his son to pursue the same career.

Horatio Alger, Jr., entered Harvard at 16 and graduated eighth in a class of 88. He tried to make a living at writing, but he couldn’t support himself and reluctantly entered Harvard Divinity School. In 1864 he was installed as pastor at the Brewster church. He threw himself into his work, delivering vigorous sermons and involving himself in all aspects of parish life. He was especially passionate about organizing games and excursions for the boys’ groups.

Parishioners noticed he was ‘always with the boys.’ They also wondered why he didn’t court the parish’s eligible young woman. He was 32, single, and something of a catch.

Ragged Dick

They began to ask why, and finally investigated him through a committee made up of the church’s male lay officers. Parish records made public in the 1970s revealed Horatio Alger and the boys had engaged in acts ‘too revolting to relate.’ The report named two young boys and hinted at others.

The committee called Alger on the carpet, and he denied nothing. He admitted to ‘imprudence.’ Then he left Brewster that evening, never to return. The parish notified other Massachusetts parishes about his dismissal without disclosing the reason. But it did report to the church hierarchy his crime: ‘the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys.’

First Parish Church of Brewster

Atonement

Alger moved to New York City and wrote Ragged Dick, his all-time best seller. Published serially in 1867, it told of an honest 14-year-old bootblack who rescues a drowning child.. The boy receives a reward for his good deed: a new suit and a job.

He won lasting fame with stories about honest poor boys outwitting evil.

At the same time, it seems, he tried to atone for his sin and repress his sexual urges. He supported the Newsboys’ Lodging House, which fed and sheltered poor newsboys.

Horatio Alger later in life

But he also informally “adopted” two street boys who lived with him in his apartment.

During his lifetime he published about a hundred volumes of fiction and poetry. His books faded in popularity toward the end of his life, but enjoyed a resurgence after his death.

Horatio Alger died on July 18, 1899 in Natick, Mass.

With thanks to The New Encyclopedia of American Scandal by George C. Kohn. This story was updated in 2024. Image of First Parish Church in Brewster By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10568077

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Was Fannie Farmer a Good Cook?

When Fannie Farmer approached Little, Brown & Co., to publish her cookbook in 1896, the company made her pay for printing the first 3,000 copies. They didn’t think the cookbook would sell.

Little, Brown’s skepticism about the enormously popular Boston Cooking-School Cookbook made Fannie Farmer rich, because she kept the copyright.

Fannie Farmer, ca. 1900. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook succeeded because its recipes were easy to follow with standard, precise measurements – ‘half cups’ and ‘teaspoons’ instead of ‘handfuls’ and ‘pinches.’ It also covered a lot of ground with more than 1,200 clearly written, dependable recipes. Good old Yankee favorites like Boston Brown Bread and Fish Chowder were included, along with exotic-sounding continental dishes like Turkish Pilaf and Halibut a la Poulette.

During Fannie Farmer’s lifetime, 21 editions and 360,000 copies of the book were sold. By 1990, four million copies sold, making The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook one of the best-selling cookbooks ever.

What made Fannie Farmer’s achievement extraordinary was that she had contracted polio at 16, dropped out of high school and struggled for years to learn to walk again. She never lost her limp. Later in life, she suffered a stroke. Ten days before her death, she gave a lecture from a wheelchair.

But could she cook?

Fannie Farmer

Fannie Farmer was born on March 23, 1857 in Boston. Her father, a printer whose business didn’t do too well, moved the family to Medford, Mass. Fannie was attending Medford High School when she contracted polio. She spent years in bed. While she slowly recovered, she took up cooking and turned her family’s home into a boardinghouse.

At 31, she entered the Boston Cooking School. After graduating a year later she stayed on as assistant principal. Five years later she was running the school and publishing the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook

By her own admission, she was more of a promoter and a businesswoman than a great cook.

She transformed the Boston Cooking School from a struggling philanthropic venture teaching poor women to cook into a popular cooking school for middle- and upper-class housewives.

Fannie Farmer also became a popular lecturer. She developed a program of diet and nutrition for convalescents, and the Harvard Medical School invited her to speak to medical students. In 1902, she left the Boston Cooking School to start Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, which would operate until the 1940s.

A Prim Girl

Marjorie Mills, the Boston Herald’s longtime food editor, described Fannie Farmer as ‘limping briskly about her platform kitchen, teaching some 200 students. She was a prim girl with vibrant enthusiasm who arrived early at school laden with market supplies and was the last to leave at night.’

“Her bright blue eyes, red hair and vivacious personality made people overlook her plain face and the pince-nez she always wore,” said Elizabeth Schlesinger. “She was plump and had no interest in dress, but a maid who accompanied her on lecture trips saw that she always looked well. “

It was the maid who did much of the cooking. Fannie herself was ‘a great executive food detective, and gourmet, rather than a great cook herself,’ said her niece, Wilma Lord Perkins.

Christopher Kimball, of ‘America’s Test Kitchen’ Fame, told the Chicago Tribune that Fannie Farmer admitted she wasn’t the best cook. “She was a promoter, a businesswoman, a force of nature,” he said.

Or as one critic said ‘She was too apt to let the pots burn as she ran enthusiastically from one recipe to another.’

The Cookbook

Another little secret about Fannie Farmer: Her cookbook wasn’t entirely her own. Kimball writes that she certainly updated and rewrote a cookbook by her predecessor at the Boston Cooking School, Mary Lincoln, called Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking.

But there’s no doubt the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook was an important book – reliable, comprehensive and easy to follow. Michael Field, in the New York Review of Books in 1965, wrote that ‘her procedures and recipes, tested over and over again in her classes and demonstrations, really worked.’

19th-century cooking class in Boston, courtesy Boston Public Library

After her death in 1915, though, some of the newer editions strayed from Fannie’s original formula — and even included questionable recipes.

H.L. Mencken reviewed a later edition and called it, ‘middle-class British notions of cookery.’ He was horrified by her recipe for soft-shell crabs, calling it ‘an obscenity almost beyond belief.’

Fiasco

Michael Field gave a scathing review of the 1965 edition, calling out recipes that wouldn’t work. The crabmeat Mornay recipe would end up a doughy mass, the cheese fondue inedible and the coquilles St. Jacques didn’t even include scallops!

Marion Cunningham revised the 1979 and 1990 editions of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and received much praise for her efforts.

Fannie Farmer herself described her goals for her cookbook on Jan. 7, 1896, the day the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook was published. In the preface, she wrote,

It is my wish that it may not only be looked upon as a compilation of tried and tested recipes, but that it may awaken an interest through its condensed scientific knowledge which will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat.

At that, she most certainly succeeded.

Biscuits

Here is a comfort-food recipe from an early edition of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook:

Baking Powder Biscuits, adapted from The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (1896)

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lard
3/4 cup milk and water in equal parts
1 tablespoon butter

Directions:

Mix dry ingredients and sift twice.

Work in butter and lard with tips of fingers; add the liquid gradually, mixing with a knife to a soft dough. It is impossible to determine the exact amount of liquid, owing to differences in flour. Toss on a floured board, pat, and roll lightly to one-half inch in thickness. Shape with a biscuit cutter. Place on a buttered pan, and bake in a hot oven (425 degrees) 12 to 15 minutes. If baked in too slow an oven, the gas will escape before it has done its work.

Mac and Cheese

This Baked Macaroni and Cheese recipe is adapted from the 1946 edition of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking -School Cook Book.

Ingredients:

1 (8 ounce) package macaroni
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
1 cup milk
1 cup cream
1/2 teaspoon salt
fresh ground black pepper, to taste
2 cups cheddar cheese, shredded good quality
1/2 cup buttered breadcrumbs

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400°F. Cook and drain macaroni according to package directions; set aside. In a large saucepan melt butter. Add flour mixed with salt and pepper, using a whisk to stir until well blended. Pour milk and cream in gradually; stirring constantly. Bring to boiling point and boil 2 minutes (stirring constantly). Reduce heat and cook, stirring constantly, 10 minutes. Add shredded cheddar little by little and simmer another 5 minutes, or until cheese melts. Take off heat. Add macaroni to the saucepan and toss to coat with the cheese sauce. Transfer macaroni to a buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Bake 20 minutes until the top is golden brown.

With thanks to Fannie’s Last Supper: Re-creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook by Christopher Kimball. This story about Fannie Farmer was updated in 2024.

Image: Macaroni and cheese with breadcrumbs By Luigi Novi, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20984140. Macaroni and cheese plain By Pink Sherbet Photography from USA – Childhood Favorite Boxed Mac & Cheese, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37312383.

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Will the Real Annie Adams Fields Please Stand Up?

Publisher and poet James Fields saw his career take off after he married Annie Adams Fields. It was not a coincidence.

Annie Adams Fields, 1890, by John Singer Sargent

Fields’ reputation as a publisher rested on his ability to spot promising authors, but his wife had the eagle eye for talent.

Annie Adams Fields

She was born to a genteel Boston family on June 6, 1834. At 20, she married the 37-year-old Fields. He had just been made a partner at the publishing house Ticknor & Fields. She helped him discover such writers as Horatio Alger, Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter and Emma Lazarus.

James Fields

She presented herself as the perfect hostess and society wife. Charles Dickens called her,‘ “one of the dearest little women in the world.”

Annie and her husband kept a literary salon at their home on Beacon Hill in Boston. The most famous writers of the day congregated at the Fields’ home. They included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, John Greenleaf Whittier, Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. When their friend Nathaniel Hawthorne died, James Fields served as a pallbearer at his funeral.

Ticknor & Fields bought The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, and James Fields took over as editor in 1861. With his wife’s help, he turned it into the most influential magazine of its day.

The Atlantic Monthly offices on Tremont Street in Boston, around 1868

Throughout Annie’s life, she stayed out of her husband’s spotlight. In 1902 an anonymous writer described her as “gentle, quiet and reserved.” That writer also sensed something behind her facade, noting, ‘there is no power in Boston to-day like that of Mrs. Fields.’

Behind that facade, Annie Adams Fields was a writer in her own right. She published poetry and biographies and edited collections of letters.

Helping Women and the Poor

She was an ardent, if quiet, supporter of women authors and women’s rights. After her husband died, she lived the rest of her life with her best friend, Sarah Orne Jewett, in a Boston marriage.

Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett in Fields’ Charles Street library.

Annie Fields was a social reformer and a quiet activist who founded the Holly Tree Inns, non-profit restaurants that served inexpensive food (but no liquor) to working women. She also started the Lincoln Street Home, a residence hotel for unmarried working women. She supported local charities, and her book How to Help the Poor served as an unofficial guide to the Associated Charities of Boston.

Annie Adams Fields died on Jan. 5, 1915.

With thanks to Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters by Rita K. Gollin. This story last updated in 2022.

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