>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [Pause] >> Elizabeth Peterson: Hello everyone. My name is Betsy Peterson. I'm the Director of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress. And on behalf of the staff and I want to welcome you all here today to the latest in our ongoing Benjamin Botkin lecture series. A word about the Botkin series, it's an opportunity to allow AFC to highlight the latest and best scholarship by leading scholars in the disciplines of folklore, oral history, ethnomusicology and cultural heritage while enhancing the collections here at the American Folklife Center. For the center and the library the Botkin lectures are an important facet of our acquisition activities. Each lecture is video tapped and becomes part of the permanent collections. In addition the lectures will be later posted as webcasts on the library's website. So with that said if I could ask you if you have a cell phone on or any other electronic device please turn it off at this point. One of the giant's in the field of folklore and especially British American folk music is Francis James Child. A legendary 19th century Bostonian scholar whose research and classification of 305 British Isle ballads was so seminole to the field that folklorists still refer to the narrative songs he included in his magnum opus the English and Scottish popular ballads as simply as Child ballads. If you have even the remotest interest in folk music I have a feeling you've probably heard about the Child ballads numerous times. His contributions as a public intellectual and scholar were deeply influential in the establishment and development of literature and folklore departments at universities throughout the United States. And also intertwined with the broader history and development of American intellectual history. He remains however kind of a remote figure which is a chain because his personal story is as complex and compelling as the plotlines of any of the ballads. So today's speaker, Michael J. Bell, will be discussing his recent research on Child's correspondence and other previously unexplored Child related materials that has allowed him to reconstruct Child's life, his personal and professional networks and his contributions to America's 19th century intellectual landscape. Michael Bell and I, I just as a parenthetical aside, there are few Michael Bell's in the field of folklore. And he is Michael J. Bell. Michael is a folklorist who received his doctorate in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He began his academic career as a professor at Detroit's Wayne State University and later moved to Grinnell College in Iowa. His early work includes the classic study, the World from Brown's Lounge, An Ethnology of Black Middle Class Play which was published by University of Illinois press in 1982. Bell's career took him down more administrative pathways. He recently retired as Vice President and Dean of the University at Transylvania University in Lexington. But we're delighted that he is returned back to the fold of folklore in history and the development of our discipline. So please join me in welcoming him for a Botkin lecture entitled My Secret Autobiography, Letters of Ballad Scholar Francis James Child to William Ellery Sedgwick. Dr. Michael J. Bell. [ Applause ] >> Michael Bell: I've recently had cataract surgery so I have to now learn after 65 years to put glasses on before I begin to read. I'll try not to make this too much of a paper presentation but I am going to be reading excerpts from letters. And since they were written they have to be read aloud and I'll be looking down more than I would like. Thanks to the Library of Congress and especially the American Folklife Center and especially, especially to Nancy Gross for this opportunity. I can get very excited about Child. I will try to stay mild mannered as long as I can. I will be and thank you Betsy for the introduction. I can skip a couple of features that I already, that I thought I had to put in. You all now know who Francis Child is and I can move on to the letters. Just a quick word however about William Ellery Sedgwick. He is, as you will hear in the paper, but I wanted to say he was Child's college roommate at Harvard. He is a member the, the Sedgwick family including Kyra Sedgwick, Edie Sedgwick, Theodore Sedgwick and a large passel of other Sedgwicks across the 19th and 20th century. They were for the longest time and probably still are, though we don't know it, one of the, if not the wealthiest family as family in the United States. And they've, he himself in later life turns into an Edith Wharton novel. You will all actually have read it but maybe not recognized it. His, that is Ellery Sedgwick's wife Charlotte left him, ran away with her lover to Europe and lived there in sin and then in marriage for many years. And then returned to the United States with the following condition put on her, by her, to the Sedgwick family. I will be received by all of my daughter's friends otherwise we will not return to the United States. That is an Edith Wharton novel. It's also a section of Princess Casimir by Henry James. So I won't be talking directly about Elliot. You are still connected to sort of the world we're going to be entering in a second. My Secret Autobiography, The Early Letters of Francis James Child to William Ellery Sedgwick. If in your wanderings in the library shelves you were to come upon this series, The British Poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth, published by Little, Brown and edited by Francis James Child. And if you were to take down from that collection, the first of its eight volumes of English and Scottish ballads, selected and edited by that selfsame Child. And if you were to turn to its dedication page you would read the following: to William Ellery Sedgwick of New York, this collection is affectionately dedicated. If you were a general reader you might idle for a moment, wonder who this Sedgwick person was and then page on. If you were a folklorist or a ballad scholar or an English professor or perhaps an interested anthropologist you might pause for a minute longer and wonder not only who was this Sedgwick person but why he of all people was the object of Child's affection. Was he somehow connected to Child's lifelong study of the ballad, perhaps an unknown ballad scholar, a hither to unrecognized intimate with whom Child exchanged his early opinions and ideas on balladry? In part you would wonder because for all of his fame Child is scholarly mystery. Despite the fact that he is one of the founders of the discipline of English studies and one of the founders of American folklore studies that he remains the longest serving Harvard English professor, 45 years, and that his later magnum opus, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, is debatably the greatest work ever published by any American folklorist. We simply do not know enough about Child to allow us either to take the measure of the scholar or the measure of the man. Child never wrote an introduction to his English and Scottish Popular Ballads. And that absence meant that his work remains unfinished and we its readers cannot parse either his intentions or its full meaning. Our knowledge of Child the man offers us no substitute for our ignorance of Child the scholar, feel personal anecdote exist and most of his known or published correspondence does not contain much in the way of personal history or private sentiment. The first problem cannot be solved. Child will not write his introduction. And we cannot write it for him. We can guess at what he would have written. We can argue over the arguments he might have made. We might even assert that his work was a failure deserving neither attention nor our praise. But no matter our approach we are left fighting against a silence that cannot be overcome. However solving the second problem offers, holds greater hope. Recent discoveries of personal letters such as those of his wife, Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick Child, held at the Clements Library of the University of Michigan, the Child family papers held by the Cambridge Historical Society and most importantly the Frances James Child William Ellery Sedgwick correspondence held at the Massachusetts Historical Society give us an opportunity to meet the young man who would eventually become the great collector. Consider this presentation then as an beginning exercise in psychological deduction. My goal today is to try to allow you to meet Francis James Child before he became Francis James Child, before in a sense he became the name of a kind of traditional ballad. The full collection of letters is a truly revealing catalogue of Child's private sentiments written from 1846 to, from 1846 to 1863 and consisting of over 400 letters from Child to his closest friend, college roommate and eventual brother-in-law, William Ellery Sedgwick. The letters as Child described them chapters from his secret autobiography constitute a powerful epistolary narration of Child's passage from recent college graduate to beginning Harvard professor. Because there is not enough time today to explicate the entire correspondence, I will concentrate on several of the 127 letters written by him from his graduation in 1846 to his first fulltime appointment at Harvard as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric in 1851. Unfortunately the story will be a monologue. Inexplicably for the age none of Ellery Sedgwick's responses to Child were preserved by Child or his family. Not surprisingly the letters from these years express iconic themes for a young single recent college graduate moving from age 21 to age 27. Like many of us at that age Child is concerned with all the ordinary traumas that arise from college graduation, his renewed relations with his family, his college loans, his need to find a job and love. Eventually all four concerns will converge in a wrenching series of letters written from early 1848 to just months before his return from Europe in 1851. But more on that later. First let me introduce Child as he sets the rules in late 1846 for his epistolary monologue. Dear Ell [Phonetic], he writes, may I fearlessly confess that I often want to speak out feelings that would be snubbed as unbecoming or rejected as pretentious. How seldom have I been able to unfold myself completely even half an hour of myself, a few minutes, and how false and oppressive have I experienced those equal claims which keep me from giving myself to the higher sentiments which we all love to see confessed in a play or a poem. But bear not utter for fear of man. And then as if to confirm both those higher sentiments and the freedom he seeks describing a trip that was never taken but planned. Child continues, my dearest boy, don't think that I'm not with you in our plans for Europe. I put on the mask of Peleus but for a moment thou shalt be marius on the ruins and I shall sketch thee. We will handle the arms of the Sid, offer up shillings to all the showmen of Athens, [Inaudible] the prima donna at San Carlos, drink tokay with Metternich and hoc with the grand dukes, drop a tear on every monument in Westminster Abbey, buy every good book in the London shops, beat the Frenchmen in amusements and the German in study, take better general views than Ramez [Phonetic] and better gossip than Basil Hall [Phonetic] with such glorious realities in sight, who thinks of the insubstantial phantom, money. The answer of course was Child for whom money and status were anything but insubstantial. Have you any faith to ask a new light question, he begins another letter and continues. I haven't the slightest. Though always a little inclined to affect sad fancies. I was happy enough as a boy and being of very sensitive feelings and rather a religious temperament, I had plenty of expressions of a lively kind. To however things went I was active. Life was busy and interesting whether painful or otherwise. I had many hard times but always weathered them. Years have gone by and I am extremely much better situated than ever. I have materials of happiness around me that I never expected to possess and I am less happy than ever. Worst of all I feel dead. The future has no inviting hopes and to my solidity few fears therefore I am very gloomy. I know the reason. It is not because I seek for what I cannot find but because I abhor myself. But I don't think that disappointed ambition is the secret to all my troubles. Nothing to me seems worthy of ambition. Affect, sad fancies, I feel dead. I abhor myself. Nothing seems worthy of ambition. Let us be honest, these are familiar sentiments of adolescents graduating from college. And not necessarily to be too overanalyzed. Yet they are also not what one might expect from someone who had judged the best of his college class and the most likely to rise to a professorship at Harvard. Child however was extremely sensitive about his background. He was of working class mercantile origins. His father was a sailmaker. He, in his early years, was a free flowing boy of the Boston docks rescued by the Boston Public School system if ever there is a testament for public education, it is the Boston Public School system. Educated by Dick Swell [Phonetic] after his success at Boston Latin. And finally on the basis of loans from rich seafaring families in Salem, Massachusetts allowed to attend Harvard University, at that time Harvard College. Still the distance these facts created between himself and his new social milieu rankerd [Phonetic]. Quote, we have struggled, speaking of his family, we have struggled with poverty in our day and I have always been the favored one. The matchless love and patience of my father with his cheerfulness of intemperament which I did not inherit has carried us through and we are in a better place than ever. Now I am the main reliance of my family. You see my dear Ellery you cannot easily comprehend my situation. You must remember that I have grown up in a circle entirely different from that of my family. And all my tastes and notions have been formed under different circumstances. Being extremely sensitive, even fastidious, you'll may imagine that my taste is frequently offended and the comparisons I am obliged to make between my own home and that of my friends are mortifying. Not only is Child mortified by his background, feeling not as, not only is Child mortified by his background, he is feeling what we in the 20th century have come to recognized as the duel consciousness and status anxiety of bright working class students who are pulled from that class and offered the offered to opportunity to be upper middle class and professional. However he is also frightened of the expected sentimentality of 1840s, 1850s middle class life. Quote, I am a crowd of womanish sentiments he writes. And they fill me up these twilight hours and I sometimes think that I indulge them too much for a man. I should hate to be effeminate or have you think me so my dear Ellery. I won't make you taste of all my bitter cups. I had two or three to drink yesterday. They made me wretched and I cannot escape from their fascination but drink, drink, drink. Child's social anxieties carried over into his search for meaningful work. Again he had graduated first in his class and was recognized by all Cambridge as destined for great things. At the same time he did not have the privilege as many of his Harvard classmates did of waiting for greatness to find him. Immediately after graduation, driven by the need to replay, repay his undergraduate loans, they were interest free but nonetheless substantial. He took the position of tutor in mathematics at Harvard under the great scientist Benjamin Pierce, father of the Charles Sanders Pierce. It was not a decision he welcomed however. He and Pierce clashed from the beginning and increasingly Child loathed his need to hold tightly to the position. Unfortunately there was nothing else at Harvard for him at the moment nor was there likely to be it seemed for he was extremely skilled at the work. Quote, my examinations were at, were excellent, almost triumphant Ell and Fox, a colleague, has said that he has never seen anything like the scores my students get. Still Harvard was unwilling to find him something else to do just because he was unhappy. Quote, the president hinted tonight that I might have to teach mathematics again. One can feel the sigh. And then added, but he also said that Mr. Longfellow has suggested for me to take a small class of seniors in Anglo-Saxon. He, the president had thought on the matter and would like to know if I'd be willing to be set down in the new catalogue as instructor in Anglo-Saxon in Lawrence Scientific School. Notice where he isn't being set down and in which catalogue. After some talk on the language and books I've used we separated. The president concluding with well I'll tell the corporation that they must appoint you Anglo-Saxon professor. Happy with the new possibility yet resigned to necessity, Child concludes the letter. Everybody thinks I am a fool to give up my chance of succeeding Benny. For such a [Inaudible] and perhaps I am still, they won't persuade me to be a mathematician. For all they say of very little done to bring the old forms of English into knowledge if not into vogue. And to put piling into a fence around our fine native speech will be more to my satisfaction than 100 predictions of comets and calculations of invisible planets. However, aware that he could not put all his eggs in Harvard's basket, Child began two letters later. I am driven to the consideration of the advice of many friends to study law. There is no escaping the argument that if my own hope fails my one of obtaining Edward Channing's place, I am forever stripped of my chance of a comfortable future. Very reluctantly I am obliged to acknowledge the wisdom of at least providing an alternative. Still he confessed, my soul sickens at the thought of law. And continued, and when I am sick I don't get misanthropic, I get hypochondriac. I worry he wrote, that I shall ever come to anything, know anything or be worthy of anything good. And I should pause for a second. That's the person writing the letters, my apologies. That is Child at 23. [Pause] Unable literally to stomach the law, three letters later, he turns his attention to theology. I had a long talk today with Dr. Walton Ell on my prospects here, and it was clear when we had finished that I had better study theology. I told him that most of my friends recommended me to the law, [Inaudible] divinity and that the law was counter to my tastes. Still I recognized the necessity of taking some profession and little else was left except divinity. Of divinity I naturally said that I had recently thought of it. I felt no particular call to assume the duties of the ministry, was not aware of any particular talent for it and particularly could never enter the profession without some higher views than earning means of a living. But it did not run counter to my tastes and at least had, I had no objection to pursue theological studies. The doctor openly recommended me to theology. He thought I should do right to begin the study in my present state of mind. Ell, I must have some profession. And then undercutting all of resolve he had just written he concluded, I can say no more tonight my dear, my Anglo-Saxon class begins tomorrow. By September of 1848 these conventional worries were swept aside by love. Edward Everett, the new president of Harvard, had arrived fresh from his ambassadorship to England accompanied by his wife and his daughter Charlotte. In the normal course of events Child and she had become acquainted and a relationship had begun to blossom. From casual meeting at parties and while out walking to surreptitiously arranged meetings to forbidden exchanges of letters, their relationship grew until Cambridge took notice and so too did Miss Everett's parents who proceeded to oppose the relationship loudly and forcefully. Child wrote to Ell, the embargo which mama has tried to put on our intercourse has resulted in such, as such, as such things usually do infrequent smuggling. Last week I received four notes and this two or three. It was easy for me to get hers but hard to send answers without detection. I had written a note or rather two notes amounting to nine pages of note paper which was in my, which I put in my pocket and tried to deliver last night. In the confusion of setting, I forgot it. She was sorry and so was I for to tell the truth there were some things which would read better in the quiet before bedtime after an affectionate talk and moonlight walk than under the cold glare of morning sun. This morning little sis came and took the note increased by another page. It was alternately merry, sad and sentimental and sensible. There was a description of love in a cottage. There was remonstrance about affection and waltzing. There was some mitigated despondency. There was some nonsense about dreams. And then in comment on his confession Child wrote, Ell, you will ask me are you really in love? I shall categorically answer no. Are you going to be? As frankly, I do not know. I am sometimes afraid that I am. I would not Ellery yet I love her well. Looking at it from cold unchained reason I find the business a bad one. Charlotte is to be the only lady whom I shall ever know. She is generous, kind-hearted and sincere. She has excellent qualities under her too frequent affections. She is very docile when told of her faults and tries to mend them. She has a lively mind, abundance of tact, many nice little ways and pretty good taste. But I am uncertain whether it is more absurd of me to fancy that she could love me seriously or more dishonorable to make me, to make her do so. My dear Ell, do you see my perplexity? Do you think he dotes and doubts? I can't be in danger. Charlotte would never be so foolish as to love me but I can't give her up. And won't until things look worse. Despite his doubts, Child and his Charlie, she has become in the letters, his Charlie, cannot keep apart and he cannot stop thinking about her. Your letter came like, your letter came like Elijah. Yes I was think fasting in the desert. I was sick with hope deferred. I had felt for the first time the insipient and half ridiculous torments of love stricken. On the whole, this week has been no laughing matter. I spent four or five hours each day the perfect slave of my nerves, sighing, repining, laughing, swearing and going through the in name phrases proper to my condition. Reason begins to assertive dominion about Thursday and now I am pretty common safe. With a heroism invisible but to myself I have refrained from writing to anyone else. Hero he might see in his mirror but doomed lover was what he continued to play. Quote, I am sure through all she is attracted to me and would be likely, be likely to love me if there was a way, if it was ever less than madness to give into such feeling. When I think of innumerable trials and inconveniences I should expose her to, I am almost convinced that it would be a cruel and ungrateful thing to persuade her to marry me if I could. His issue was the ever present problem again of money. Child still did not have any. Moreover he was unlikely to get any soon. He had attended again Harvard on loans from wealthy Bostonians who fully expected them to be paid back. And the Everett's were after all one of the wealthiest families in America. Child explained his reality simply. Quote, I can almost earn enough to be even and I quite can earn enough as I work now to be happy alone. But I have now no position and no hope of any change and it would seem to finish us if I continue my present employments. Charlotte says she is an expensive creature and I have no doubt that she is. She also says she could live on very little, one-fifth of what she has now. And I partly believe that too but I know her parents are right. All the world will call her silly, foolish girl, if she takes up with me. Do I talk like a stricken deer and callow heart? I will tell you that in spite of your counsels and concerns, in spite of myself, I am far gone. Yes my dear friend there is no denying it. I am in love and I don't care if you know it. And then came the final blow. Meet the final blow. Age appropriate picture of the final blow. Confronted by the continuant contacts and reports of their stolen intimacies, President Everett now in the guise of father Everett, quote, desired a private conference and informed me that he feared an intimacy was forming between us which as he would not be able to encourage it had better stop before it goes too far. Just that day Charlie had written an account of our connections and put it on his table. She told him that she loved me and could be happy with me. He expressed his greatest astonishment. Said he never expected anything of the sort and that we had better both done wrong in keeping the thing secret. He calmly stated my circumstances and my prospects, compared them with his own at the opening of his career, showed the great difficulty and almost impossibility of our getting sufficient means of living properly. At the earliest he said several years would necessarily intervene before we could marry. And we would be subject to the evils of a long engagement. He was decidedly opposed to long engagements because they made the choices of young people dependent on their chosen associations for entering society. Constricted the liberty of selection, wasted their time in sentimental intimacies or unprofitable correspondences. Father Everett went on to point out the burden the wife would be at the beginning of an academic career. Leaving Child in shock and asking dearest Ell, do you think I am taking it like a man? It is not for want of struggling but I am weaker than a woman. I faint in thoughts 100 times a day. I long to wish with sick heart. I am ready to do anything for her. I would give myself up to the law for her so as to have the prospect of something better than a professorship. That her father might surrender. I have no hope however that this would make any difference. The last three weeks have included the most unhappy days of my life. My head has been strangely disordered. So much as to cause me serious alarm and I begin to fear that I should never come to anything except the madhouse. Interestingly, Professor Everett sought to sweeten the pain. The question he wrote, this is Child to Ellery, was presented to me last Friday by Mr. Everett himself, with reference to my literary career. He asked me to come to his office and said that I would remember his proposal to me a year ago of a course of study in some foreign university and that time he had expressed a desire to assist me in removing any difficulty which might be in my way. Circumstances now having changed for the better with his wife's inheritance he wished to renew his proposal and would be very happy if I would accept a loan without inference of such a sum of money as I might require. He would regard it as a favor done to him and would offer it as a present if he thought I would take it as such. I told him that my plans were in utter confusion and that I had begun to think more of earning my living than gratifying my tastes or cultivating my familial pleasures. I told him that my plans and wishes as far as they were [Inaudible] looked toward the department of rhetoric. Quote, Mr. Channing has been there 30 years said the president. And the man does not hold on long after that teaching at college. We were interrupted without settling anything and I am to inform him of my conclusion soon. It is easy to make. I must decline. Agreeable as the plan is in many respects I cannot take on the added debt and whether it was hypochondria or not I have been in a state of spirits bordering on insanity. To come to this I have devoted myself to walking, to dumbbells and to shower baths. I even resolved to go away to India and stay there, to immigrate to the west to die at once. Oh Ell, I have been alone on a wide, wide sea without God and without hope. Life is a nightmare now. I see the skeletons in everything. Despite family attempts to separate the couple, Frank and Charlie continued their romance underground alternating seeing and fleeing from each other across the spring and early summer of 1849. In August and September of that year they were separated. He was in [Inaudible], she was at Newport. Only to renew their relationship when the new term began. Quote, and not surprisingly at that point Child's hormones were raging. Quote, I want to take her in my arms and kiss for an hour he writes to Ell. She has her faults and is so humble to entreat me to speak of her of what I do not like in her. But there is so much good left and the soul is so worth redeeming. I desire nothing more perfect. I prefer my Charlie with all her faults to all the faultless women I ever saw or heard of. And in his next letter he writes. Quote, it is just 6:00 o'clock and I have returned from a solitary walk on a cold rainy night. We had a dreary sermon about death this afternoon Ell. I call it dreary and yet the man tried to make out that death was a light matter. Now I have been wanting to die all day. And yet the sermon did not please me. I cannot communicate by description the peculiar character of my feelings when I am in such a condition as the foremost. It seems as if some of my senses have gone. Every object is tinged with a dark color. I have felt the same comfortless sensation in dreams long ago. But never like within this year in waking hours. A week later things sound even more dangerous. But Friday night we did transgress our ardor Ell. We were in a quiet, quiet little cozy corner alone. I did draw Charlie's head to my heart and we shared forbidden kisses. The next day we walked together and we talked everything over. We talked of being married, of married love. Of the early love days of our past sorrows. There isn't a hope. Finally at the end of October, 1849 Child is heart-stricken in extremists and something must be done. Quote, I have got through with mewing and puking. I have the written order of the doctor to go. Here is what the doctor says. My advice to you is to indicate this coming winter to a voyage to Europe of such length than and residence as circumstances shall dictate. My advice is based on the observation and impression of many cases of a peculiar nervous morbidity to which men who have been long and constantly engaged in intellectual pursuits are not into frequently liable. It is difficult to make the theory of this instability of the nervous system very clear to persons who pursuits have not been directed to these pathological matters. But it is no uncommon case for a person to have the patient disturbance of that group of organs, the nerves indicating in sleeplessness, suffering without palpable injury augmenting to neuralgia of great anguish all without the disease of digestion or the circulatory apparatus. Of half of the diseases of literary men in my opinion owe their existence to an overworked brain and the dispective or consumptive symptoms are all consequent. Change, sea voyage, but especially the abstention from books and a compulsory attention to the thousand new excitements of men and things gives a chance to the fully, to the full cooperation of the obstructed parts of the constitution. Your complaints are now of a moderate degree of intensity and no different than in a thousand literary men. But they are a warning and not to be neglected. With the full resents of responsibility of recommending a planned requiring sacrifices I do not hesitate in saying the future perspective advantages outweigh all other considerations. And then Child's writes in triumph, the corporation agrees that I shall go. And then he ends with what is an amazing non sequitur. Did I tell you of my visit to the madhouse Ell? I did it in a frenzy last winter. Two months later after a tearful separation and promises of constancy, Child gave Charlie a book. She gave him a Newport [Inaudible]. They kissed chastely and parted with understanding but not engagement. Child sailed to Europe and began his studies in Germany. Four months later in May, 1850, beloved Charlie wrote to inform that him that she was engaged to be married in late summer. Confronting the event in his feelings he wrote with more than a touch of New England's famed emotional frost. Quote, and now my dear Ell having run through the facts of the last fortnight I will come to a subject which I cannot avoid to any other than you. I could not compel myself to speak of it. Your surmises as to the contents of the letter you enclosed were perfectly correct and before this time the engagement of Miss Everett has now publically announced. I need not say that I was not at all prepared for such an event. I had not received the least warning. The reports of her flirting which had reached me through various channels affected me disagreeably as you must have perceived from the last letter I sent you. I considered it very unworthy conduct. But that a year of such certainty as ours in the course of which she had suffered so much for me and at the end of which she fancied herself bound to me by every tie of infection. And while she was bound to me by almost every tie of faith that such a painful year should be forgotten so lightly was not in accordance either with my perceived views of feminine character or with the opinion which I fondly entertained of Miss Everett in particular. Still I am by no means more affected by this second overthrow to my hopes than I was in December of 1848, liar. My prevailing thought is that I will never hazard my peace of mind again. Let me read that once more. My prevailing habit thought is that I will never hazard my peace of mind again. But for the desire to be, but the desire to be loved is so strong that my heart sinks sometimes. I do not deserve such happiness and I must not think of impossibilities. A year later in May of 1851 in the midst of planning his return to Cambridge to take up the Boylston Professorship, Channing had in fact retired after 30 years of undergraduates, and the position that he had so desperately coveted, Child wrote his last words on Charlie and their love. Ell, I have left dente [Phonetic] to be with you. Were you here dearest Ell? Today is an anniversary for me. I have a lived a year since I received the letter which shattered all my plans and stifled so many of my hopes. I can say now without tears though my heart is so much harder than before. But I never would set my eyes for those dead feelings again. The worst is that I can never love anymore. You wonder if I have no regret that I ever felt such passion for one who did not deserve it. Yet I must confess it is you, only to you, yes she did not deserve it. Yet she was loved as the gentlest and truest rarely are. As every young man with a heart loves for the first and only time. She is gone forever from me and I do not regret the loss anymore. For those of you who feel as if you have wandered into a public reading of Gertes [Phonetic], The Sufferings of Young Werther, do not quail. How else might one react after listening to an anguished lover pour out his heart to his friend William about a girl called Charlotte whom he cannot have and yet wants desperately? The extravagance of utterance and feeling the extremes of exaltation and loathing of deprecation and grandiosity are almost difficult to hear. Nonetheless these moments of injured love and ambition are the way some overeducated young men of Charles generation suppose they ought to express themselves. Such suffering they thought was necessary to cultivate originality and of course this Child in his historical moment is a nearly perfect exemplar of the suffering self as a work of art. And though Child does not commit suicide as Werther does, well I am not completely sure as a Penn graduate I regret he took the job at Harvard. He certainly flings himself about with the same bathic [Phonetic] energy as he tries to merge the realities of who he is with who he wants to be. A man, a loyal son, a professor, an ardent lover. He also comes to term with life as it is and not as it might have been. Stiffly but sadly Child's rhetorical identity has shifted. Injured ambition, poverty, status anxiety and the excesses of love have given way to a quiet resignation and is somewhat measured reflection. An identity founded in angst and nurtured in anguish has mutated into the comfortable neuroses of an ordinary pertherial [Phonetic] life. Gertes young romantic genius chooses to accept Thomas Hardy's life's little ironies and the frenzied almost mad Child, like the rest of us, settles for less hazard and more security. Unlike Orsino in Twelfth Night he will have his Olivia if he can find her and count himself lucky. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] I should point out for those of you who might be slightly worried soon after this he meets Ellery's sister Elizabeth and begins a ten year courtship with him chasing her and her family saying she's not healthy enough until they finally do get married where upon they have four children in seven years. So I guess they were wrong about that part of the family worry. And they remained a happy couple for many, many years in Cambridge. And my last picture. This is if not the most famous, the most important picture of Francis James Child. At their house in Cambridge they had no front lawn. It was nothing but rose bushes. And Child was one of the greatest rose growers in that era. People would come to stare at his front lawn in the spring and early summer when all the roses bloomed. He became jolly and genial and stubby. And I'd be happy to take any questions if you have them. [Pause] This is real terror moment, did I silence you? >> Well were all dying for a picture of Charlotte. >> Oh yes. >> Michael Bell: I just found one about two weeks ago in an uncatalogued folder at the University of Michigan but I couldn't get to it in time. Yea. She later married Henry Augustus Wise whom she met here in Washington who was an author and a soldier and tall and exactly the kind of person her parents wanted her to marry. He actually was a famous traveler. Nancy, yea? >> Can you tell a little bit about your research about finding [Inaudible]? >> Michael Bell: Okay. Most of my discoveries of Child materials is the consequence of getting bored in the library and not wanting to work on what I actually wanted to work on. So in this particular case every so, Child scholars like a lot of historians periodically just sit down at Google, because it's all Google, and type of Francis James Child just to see what the most recent thing is. And maybe five years ago I typed in Francis James Child and what up popped was Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick Child, University of Michigan. And I thought that doesn't make any sense. What is Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick Child doing at the University of Michigan? And Michigan as libraries do had bought a collection of papers that were available at auction. And I looked at the one page not finding guide, finding guide that said collection includes letters between Elizabeth and Francis. And I thought I have to see them. And so my wife asked me what I wanted for Hanukah? And I said I wanted a plane ticket to Ann Arbor. And she bought me a plane ticket to Ann Arbor. And I went to Ann Arbor and I stayed in the house of a colleague. We had lived in Ann Arbor previously. And I went to the library and I opened them up. And in the midst of all these letters I found the love letters of Francis James Child to Elizabeth Sedgwick. Of which I have transcribed two or three and have a small essay on. Child's courtship habits largely come from 2nd Corinthians if anyone is interested. But we really don't have very many other documents on love that quite do it as well as that document does it. At least that are not poetry. And so I came back to Massachusetts and I thought well I wonder where the Sedgwick papers are. The Sedgwick's being an extraordinarily famous Massachusetts family. They go back to Theodore who was actually the lawyer for Mumbai, the African American woman who was one of the first slaves who was freed as a consequence of northern lawyers challenging slave laws. Mumbai is the only African American buried in what's known as the Sedgwick pie which is the grave yard in Lennox, Massachusetts in the shape of a pie. Child is also buried there as [Inaudible]. And so I thought oh, I'll go to the Massachusetts Historical Society where it turned out all the Sedgwick papers were. And I went in and I looked up Elizabeth and there were some things about Elizabeth. And then I saw there was a note that said Ellery Sedgwick. And it said correspondence between he and Francis James Child. And I thought how come nobody knows about this? And then I thought I found it, I found it. And I went and literally they, you know, they bring you the box and they're very wonderful and calm. And they set the box next to you and you're in this room where you feel absolutely, all of Massachusetts [Inaudible] and puritan silence folds in on you. And I opened up the box and I opened up the first folder. And I realized that this was an amazing moment. We suddenly had access to Child, the person. And at the beginning of his career. Again, before he became a ballad. At the moment and I don't want to make too much of that. I mean Child's collection stands apart from Child. It is an extraordinary piece of historical documentation. But in a funny sort of way because he never wrote an introduction and we never knew the man or had a way of knowing the man. We really lack the ability to say anything about the collection. And so it stands as an origin document for us without commentary by and large. There are five or six attempts at commentary in Child across the last hundred odd years since the last volume was published. But it really you, because it isn't in time. So you can't say oh well, Child was a really great scholar and he collected 305 ballads and X number of variance of the ballads. But we have long since moved on between, from Child's original definition of the ballad. None of that got said. And in a funny sort of way folksong scholarship ended up being endless collection. But it didn't have any documentary structure for its analysis in the ways folktales did or ironically in the way other smaller genres did. There's a generation upon generation of folklore scholarship about lots of genres. But ballads actually sort of got frozen. And if it weren't for folk singers, air quotes, they might never have been sung since most of the people who collected them didn't collect their tunes and didn't actually think of them as sung documents. The world of their singing had disappeared in the, at the end of the middle ages. They were remembered in recitation mostly because they had to be written down by hand. And many of the people could not note tunes so they presumed to be recitative documents as much as they were singing documents. And so in a sense as brilliant as the moment of his collection is it freezes us apart from and an ability. So think for example and I'm wandering a bit but I'm not. Who would essay a criticism of a ballad today? Who would treat it like the poem, the sung poem it is? Who would pick up Lamkin [Phonetic] or Sir Hugh and the Jew's daughter and read it the way you would read any other poem? We actually lack a critical, critical language for that level of analysis. We have an extraordinary language described at structure, to describe its form, to point out all of its variation. Yet in the ballad which doesn't exist there is no single text. So in all the text of all the ballads and all the work we've done historically, to conjure all of that structure we would find it amiss if we actually commented on the beauty or the lack of beauty of this extraordinary moment in human creativity where no one single voice ever captures the poetry of the ballad. Even if we can't find the poets, the poetics of that experience and the critical value of that experience is ironically something that we've been denied, I think, by the absence of Child's biography. So, the more that we can do to fill that part of the story in, I think, more the possibility that we might free ourselves to begin to call public attention not to the existence of but to the beauty of the ballad. I know for a fact many of us who are sitting in this room found ourselves in listening to those songs for the first time a long time ago. I know that many of us can date the moment when they froze and we're totally captured. I think if we can tell Child's story we can give life to that part that made him dedicate his life to the collection and preservation of these materials. Is that enough there? And besides it's just fun. It's just fun. Any other? >> So if I remember correctly, this is just a chunk of letters? >> Michael Bell: This is, this is. You want chapter two? >> Did he get happier? >> Michael Bell: He got happier. He actually settled down at Harvard to a career. And he very systematically set out. I mean in a way that's quite remarkable. He became the Boylston Professor. I don't know if you know what the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric did at Harvard. The Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard was a composition professor. He taught composition to freshman and sophomores. He didn't teach rhetoric. He corrected compositions, as in a side, all the compositions are there in Harvard if you want to go see Child's corrections. Because apparently they didn't give them back. He realized that to advance he had to publish a book. He found a book of four plays that had never been published in the United States that had been badly edited. He edited those plays, issued that as a book and that was his first publication. He then searched around within English studies for his next area of specialization and chose Chaucer. And he did extraordinary work on Chaucer leading to an essay on the language of Chaucer which is still taught today in Chaucer classes as the fundamental foundational text of understanding language both real and poetic language in Chaucer. And then he stopped doing Chaucer and in one of the letters to Ell that I've just been working on he said in effect, there is not career for me in Chaucer. The English have the manuscripts. Nothing I write will ever top what they can top me with. And he turned his attention to Spencer. And he wrote and produced the first American six volume Spencer. But again the English had Spencer. And so in a late letter to Ell, which I've just gotten to he wrote to Ell and said I'm going to do some books on ballads for the British poets. I think I found my subject. And so he did the six volume British poets in the 1850s. And then he turned around almost immediately and did the, started the work that would end up by 1896 being the five volume, ten part giant folio English and Scottish popular ballads. And that bit with the reason he dedicated it to Ell was because Ell had the collection of books in which Child first encountered the ballad in their roommate moment with shared bookshelves. And in fact in this letter that I'm looking at now Child writes to Ell and says, do you still have the Jamison in your library? Do you think I could borrow it? And those of you who know Child's career know he was always writing to libraries asking for books. And so that's, that sort of completes the story. Thank you very much. I'll be, I'll, you know, if you want to come up and ask questions or whatever I'm happy to take them as long as you can tell, as long as you want to ask them. But thank you so much for coming. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.