A literary Hill
Window boxes on cobblestoned Acorn Street on Beacon Hill.
— Photo by Ian Howard
(Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Guardian. He edited but did not write this article.)
The imagery of Boston’s charming gas-lit streets and brownstone and brick Federal-style buildings have provided inspiration and residence to some of the most celebrated writers in American literature.
Beacon Hill, in particular, has been an historic home for greats, such as Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter.
The neighborhood has been a source of vivid ink to others, such as Henry David Thoreau, who lived there in his childhood, and Robert Frost, who taught at Harvard University and other schools.
The loosely autobiographical Little Women, by Alcott, is a coming-of-age story about the overlap of childhood and young adulthood, a too swift liminal space where children want to be grown but are hesitant to grow up.
Alcott spent a considerable part of her early life in Boston from 1834 to 1840 before her family settled in Concord. However, she later returned to the city and lived on Beacon Hill in the early 1850s while working as a writer and a social reformer.
Her first published works, The Rival Painters: a Tale of Rome and Flower Fables were both published while she was living at 20 Pinckney Street. Her work as a women’s suffrage activist on Beacon Hill empowered her female characters with agency and self-determination.
Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote love letters to his future wife from his home at 54 Pinckney Street while working at the Boston Custom House in the 1840s. Before that, he paid for room and board to the poet Thomas Green Fessenden on Hancock Street. He would later say of this period of his life, “I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.”
The heroine of his well-known novel grows beyond her longheld ideals after her Puritan community shuns her into isolation. Through protagonists that develop strong, individualistic approaches to the world,
Hawthorne and Alcott reflected the development of thoughts and views throughout a young adulthood which was spent in large part on Beacon Hill.
Many other authors and poets would have their brushes with Beacon Hill and Boston’s literary influence as well.
Henry James, renowned for the psychological depth of his approach to social complexities, lived at 102 Mount Vernon Street in the 1860s before moving to Europe. His time in Boston exposed him to the evolving nature of American society, a theme that permeates many of his works.
In the 20th Century, Beacon Hill continued to attract literary minds, including Sylvia Plath.
The renowned poet and novelist lived at 9 Willow Street while attending classes at Boston University and working at Massachusetts General Hospital. During her time on Beacon Hill, Plath was mentored by poet Robert Lowell and befriended fellow poet Anne Sexton. The city’s atmosphere and her personal experiences deeply influenced her work, particularly her novel The Bell Jar, which captures the struggles of a young woman navigating mental illness and societal expectations. The history of Beacon Hill is a testament to Boston’s enduring influence as a center of American literature.
These writers, among others, found inspiration in the city’s history, its people and its intellectual climate. Walking through the streets of Beacon Hill today, one can still feel the echoes of these literary greats, their presence lingering in the historic architecture and timeless charm.
Robert Whitcomb: Beacon Hill — 19th Century theme park
Houses on Louisburg Square, the most exclusive part of Beacon Hill
Cobblestoned Acorn Street
Via The Boston Guardian
Now that the weather is mild, pick up a copy of Anthony M. Sammarco’s latest richly illustrated history book, Beacon Hill Through Time. The 96-page work, on high-quality paper, is available from Arcadia Publishing at a list price of $23.99.
The book, with a mix of Peter B. Kingman’s expertly composed photos and a multitude of archival pictures, may surprise a lot of people.
Consider, for instance, how relatively late much of Beacon Hill was developed, considering that Boston was founded in 1630. The hill’s South Slope didn’t become the famously upscale residential area that people think of now until well after 1800, as the new wealth from the China Trade and other shipping, followed by fortunes made in manufacturing and finance, paid for grand mansions, brick and stone row houses and private clubs and other institutions.
There were some teardowns on the South Slope of a few older houses, most notably John Hancock’s mansion, built in the 1730’s and destroyed in 1863 to make way for an addition to the glorious Charles Bullfinch-designed Massachusetts State House (completed in 1798) at the top of the hill. Bullfinch, as architect and developer, is the father of Beacon Hill.
It’s basically a creation of the 19th Century, when the American public began to associate the hill (and then also the Back Bay) with the mercantile aristocracy to be called the “Boston Brahmins’’.
I was surprised to learn that many buildings I had thought were built in the late 18th or early 19th Century are actually decades newer. Architects have heavily used Colonial Revival and Federalist and 18th and 19th Century London residential styles right up to the present to maintain Beacon Hill’s antique appearance. Consider West Hill Place, where, Mr. Sammarco notes: “The design of these houses – with their high-style neoclassical details…made it seem as if London had been transplanted in Boston.’’
Then, as Mr. Sammarco explains, there were the waves of ethnic groups moving on and off the hill, along with various religious, political and other movements. For example, an African-American community developed early on the hill’s North Slope that created their own religious and other institutions, as did various Eastern European and other immigrants who followed. These flows led to such changes as, for example, a Black Baptist church being transformed into synagogue. Meanwhile, shops changed with neighborhood demographics as well as with the evolution of the broader consumer society.
You’ll see in the book how big, high-rise business buildings replaced lovely residential sections – sad but reflecting Boston’s wealth-creating capacity. Consider the elegant Pemberton Square before commerce took it over, late in the 19th Century.
Many direct most of their attention to the sights on the hill itself – e.g., Louisburg Square – rather than to the “Flat of the Hill’’ down by the Charles River and created by using fill from chopping off the tops of Beacon, Mt. Vernon and Pemberton hills (the “Tremonts’’). There are some gorgeous areas there, too, such as Charles River Square.
So you’ll probably want to plan several explorations with Mr. Sammarco’s book in hand. is
Robert Whitcomb is New England Diary’s editor and president of The Boston Guardian, where this piece first appeared.
View of John Hancock's house on Beacon Hill west of the summit from across the Common, 1768
Partly non-virus-related!
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
With many newspapers shrinking unto death, all they seem to have room for is COVID-19 stuff; there are many other important things happening around the world that aren’t being reported. As the late Bill Kreger, a news editor to whom I reported at The Wall Street Journal once observed: “Sometimes the most important story starts out at the bottom of Page 37.’’ What might we be missing?
Well, The Boston Guardian reports that property and violent crime is down in its circulation area (the Back Bay, Beacon Hill , downtown and Fenway) this year. But maybe that’s a virus-related story? As newly unemployed people run out of money will property crimes increase?
Then there’s an inspiring little item from the March 24 Wall Street Journal: Voters in Mexican border city of Mexicali have admirably told the U.S. company Constellation Brands not to complete a $1.4 billion brewery there because the facility would take so much water that it could jeopardize the irrigation-dependent agriculture in the region.
In other heartening, if mostly symbolic, news, the U.S. has indicted Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and some sidekicks for drug trafficking and is offering $15 million to those who aid his capture. Don’t expect Maduro to appear any time soon in a federal court, but the move is apt to make him nervous.
And there’s the important unhappy news that the world’s greatest coral reef, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, had just suffered another mass bleaching caused by global warming, whose associated increase in carbon dioxide makes sea water more acidic. For more information, please hit this link.
There's still plenty of life in newsprint: Welcome The Boston Guardian
The Boston Guardian, a new weekly newspaper that’s the successor to the recently closed Boston Courant, has come out with its first edition. The paper serves Boston’s downtown, Back Bay, Beacon Hill and Fenway neighborhoods and will soon expand circulation into the booming Seaport District.
The profitable Courant had a hefty circulation of 40,000 and The Guardian will probably do at least as well. While it has a somewhat different design than The Courant it will cover the same sort of topics, especially development and politics. I hope that they also do more profiles of the many curious characters who live and/or work in their circulation area, one of the world’s most stimulating urban centers.
David Jacobs is the editor and publisher and his wife and longtime business partner, Gen Tracy, is the associate editor of the new paper – the functions they had as The Courant’s owners. Jennifer Maiola is the managing editor of the new paper, as she was of The Courant.
Neither Mr. Jacobs nor his wife own The Guardian. Rather, a group of investors have capitalized it to let the couple and their colleagues continue to serve their community. {Disclosure: The duo are friends of mine, and I have long admired their commitment to community journalism, not to mention their ingenuity, good humor, civic courage and resilience.}
Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Tracy have gotten a lot of attention for deciding to push back against the idea that all print publications must have a Web site. They have come to see such sites as just sucking money, energy and attention from the profitable print product, which, in any event, their readership prefers over staring at screens for coverage of their neighborhoods. And of course Web sites, as wonderful as they can be, are also fertile ground for cut-and-paste plagiarism of copyrighted journalistic work.
The Courant was closed on Feb. 5. In what many legal and media observers saw as an outrage against justice, The Courant lost a wrongful-termination suit from an executive hired to help increase advertising sales.
Mr. Jacobs said that the judgment with interest grew to about $300,000, with $250,000 in legal fees, forcing the couple to shut The Courant and liquidate its assets.
But The Guardian will now take up where The Courant left off as a source of rigorous, useful and often entertaining reportage about the heart of Greater Boston.
-- Robert Whitcomb