Sarah Helen Whitman, Poet and Literary Critic, Part 1
by Brett Rutherford
This essay will appear in my forthcoming book collecting Sarah Helen Whitman's literary essays and selected poems. The footnote references and citations are not included here. Today's posting will be the part of my essay about Whitman's family history and early life. More installments will follow.
SARAH HELEN WHITMAN (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe’s posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916, the same year the only full-length biography of her, by Caroline Ticknor, appeared. The full text of Whitman’s critical writings, most published under pseudonyms, has only recently been correctly identified and attributed to her. A reassessment of Sarah Helen Whitman as poet places her squarely in the Romantic tradition; and, as critic, as a ground-breaking American defender of Shelley, Byron, Poe, Goethe, and Emerson. Whitman’s literary accomplishments were small but significant, given the limits placed upon her success by the social, gender and religious norms of the time and place in which she lived — Providence, Rhode Island in the antebellum decades, as well as in the 1870s, when she published little, but carried on an extensive literary correspondence and served as her city’s literary den mother.
Providence at Mid-Century
Providence had little significance in America’s literary and publishing history in the 19th century. Boston and New York had the lion’s share of literary fame and virtually all of the nation’s publishing firms. It is easy — but hazardous — to assume that female writers had virtually little chance of being published or recognized in this milieu, and even less if they hailed from places other than New York or Boston.
A glance at published statistics help give us a better feel for the Providence in which Sarah Helen Whitman and her contemporaries lived and wrote. The demographics suggest a society with very distinct class and race boundaries, but still one in which women were often the heads of households. The Census of 1855 documented 8,260 households in the bustling seaport and mill town, of which 1,315 were headed by women (about one in six.) About one in five houses in the city consisted of family groupings or boarding houses in which there were no children. Of the population of 46,400, only 1,390 were listed as “colored,” and the town fathers were in a state of perpetual alarm about foreigners: 22 percent of the residents were recent immigrants from Ireland.
Providence was a rich city. As the birthplace of America’s industrial revolution, it contained six cotton mills and four textile printing works. More than 5,000 vessels arrived that year in the port, and the city was connected to Boston, New York, and to other parts of New England with railroads, steamboats, stagecoaches and an “express steamer.” If anything, Providence was more interconnected with the other cities of the Northeast than it is today.
A writer living in Providence, however, could look forward to little local success. Although, at the time of the 1855 Census, there were four daily newspapers and six weeklies, and one semi-weekly, literary magazines did not thrive in the city. Albert Greene edited the short-lived title, The Literary Journal, and Weekly Register of Science and the Arts (1833-34), and efforts to establish another around 1840 were greeted with ridicule by locals. Many local men attended Brown University, but that institution exerted little influence on the literary life of the city, and the leading families were notoriously conservative in taste. In the late 1870s, Whitman wrote this to John H. Ingram, her British correspondent: “Though called the wealthiest city of its size in the Union, it [i.e., Providence] has no magazine or other literary periodical. ”
According to the 1855 Census, the Brown University library had 26,000 books that year, and The Providence Athenaeum, a membership library, had 19,000 titles. The major vehicle of cultural transmission other than reading books and journals, was the extensive Lyceum movement, which brought authors and speakers on many topics to all the cities and large towns, where large audiences came to hear them lecture or read from their works.
Sarah Helen Whitman’s Family History
Just as it would be impossible to understand fully female writers like the Brontës (captives of class, geography, and familial stricture) without knowing their family history, we must look to Whitman’s genealogy and family history to grasp some of the social and gender pressures against which she had to strive as a writer.
The following is mostly derived from the work of John Austin, published in 1889, the only known genealogy of her family. (A 1974 genealogy by Franklin Powers mostly repeats the facts gathered by Austin.) I include genealogy here, despite its slight tediousness, because the information is, first of all, rather difficult to obtain, and, second, because it puts the Power family and its fortunes squarely in the “Triangle Trade” era.
The Powers were in Rhode Island almost from the beginning. There would be six Nicholas Powers in the family, the last of them Sarah Helen Whitman’s father.
The first Nicholas Power received a home lot in Providence in 1640. He was in trouble briefly with the British authorities for trying to purchase Indian lands in Warwick (RI) — expressly forbidden in the treaties with the local tribes — and was “dismissed with an admonition.”
Nicholas died in 1657, leaving his widow, Jane Power, a daughter, Hope, and the next Nicholas Power. This Nicholas died in the catastrophic King Phillip’s War in 1675. He is not found in lists of combatants, but Austin explains: “He was killed in The Great Swamp Fight in Narragansett, by a shot from the command in which he was serving.”
His son, Captain Nicholas Power, was born in 1673. This Nicholas’s second wife was Mercy Tillinghast, daughter of the ominously-named Rev. Pardon Tillinghast. Captain Power died in 1734. He had four slaves: Cuffy, Tony, Caesar, and Peg.
The next Nicholas Power was a merchant and distiller. He married Anne Tillinghast, and died in Surinam in 1744. He sold his estate and distillery in Dutch Guiana to Captain John Brown in 1743. A family that owned slaves and a distillery would almost certainly have been involved in the notorious Triangle Trade of rum, slaves, and molasses.
In the next generation, we have another Captain Nicholas Power, a merchant and rope-maker. He was married to Rebecca Corey, and died January 26, 1808. The records indicate he freed a slave named “Prince” in 1781.
The Nicholas who figures in our story is the sixth, known as Nicholas Power, Jr., born September 15, 1771. He married Anna Marsh, daughter of Daniel and Susanna (Wilkinson) Marsh on August 28, 1798 in Newport. He was a merchant, going by the title of Major for some part of his life.
His mercantile life seemed to be land-locked: he formed a partnership as “Blodgett and Power” and opened a store near Providence’s Baptist Meeting House. The goods sold there began with fabrics, linens, threads (English, Indian and Scottish), then dry goods, hardware and groceries. From 1808 to 1810 the store ran auctions of goods. Then, in 1812, the partnership terminated. The war with the British almost certainly interrupted their trade.
The genealogy notes, cryptically: “He was absent from Providence much in later years.” It was a case or adventure and spousal desertion. Nicholas Power had gone to sea to build back his fortune, and was captured by the British during the War of 1812. He was not released until 1815, at which time he did not return to Providence. He was not seen or heard from in Rhode Island until around 1832 or 1833, when he made a sudden return to make amends and presumably resume his family life.
Indications are that his nineteen-year “widow” was aghast at his return and threw him out of the house. He took up residence in a Providence hotel, and, to the dismay of all, spent the years until his death on April 28, 1844, in conspicuous dissolution. In 1842, he got around to placing a marker on his mother’s grave with an inscription lamenting the effect of his long absence on his parent’s well-being. (Rebecca Corey Power had died in 1825, and it is likely that she never knew what became of her son).
The Power children who, for a time, regarded their father as dead, were three sisters. Nicholas and Anna’s first child, Rebecca, was born in 1800. Sarah Helen Power, our and Poe’s “Helen,” was the second daughter, born in Providence on January 19, 1803. The house where she was born was that of her grandfather, Captain Nicholas Power, at the corner of South Main and Transit Streets. They lived in this house until her grandfather’s death in 1808.
As Nicholas Power’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, the young family moved to a succession of houses and lodgings: a house at the corner of Snow and Westminster (now a parking lot in a depressed corner of downtown Providence); “the Grinnell House,” and “the Angell Tavern,” which had a garden leading to the water.
Sarah Helen’s younger sister, Susan Anna, was born in 1813. Hers was a dark-shadowed life: daughter of a merchant euphemistically “lost at sea,” she would mature into a willful manic-depressive, the classic mad relative without whom no New England house seemed complete. Since her mother was descended from the Wilkinson line that had produced the religious cult founder Jemima Wilkinson, there is the possibility of a genetic predisposition for bipolar disease if not schizophrenia. Jemima Wilkinson, declaring herself dead and resurrected, took the name “Public Universal Friend” and persuaded a number of people to forsake community and property and go off to live with her in upstate New York, where she preached to Indians, led a sexless commune, and promised (but) failed to walk on water.
After 1816, Mrs. Power, regarding herself as a widow, purchased the house at 76 Benefit Street (now No. 88) as a residence for herself and her daughters. It would be their home for more than four decades. The family was well able to live on the stocks and mortgages Mrs. Power had inherited from her mother, funds happily untouched by the impecunious Major Power.
Although Benefit Street was then fashionable, it had been built over grave plots. The original settlers of Providence owned long, parallel strips of land starting at the river and running up over College Hill. Until 1710 or so, most families buried their dead on this hillside, and a lane that threaded among the family burial plots was ultimately straightened and paved to become Benefit Street. For some years, the street terminated with a gate, to ward off the denizens of the sinister North End.
With the creation of Benefit Street, the city fathers persuaded families to exhume and relocate their moldering ancestors to the North Burial Ground. A number of gloomy and derelict churchyards were also relocated there gradually, but St. John’s churchyard remained, its wall abutting the Powers’ rose garden. Like the Brontë sisters, the Power sisters’ vista always included a graveyard.
Although a proper Providence upbringing in those days was probably rather stifling to the intellect, Sarah Helen had a few escapes during her younger years: she visited relatives on Long Island, New York and briefly attended a Quaker school.10 Despite the Puritanical suspicions and prohibitions of her relatives, she developed an early passion for poetry. She mastered Latin and would later be sufficiently adept in languages to read and translate both German and French.
In 1821, Sarah Helen’s older sister Rebecca married William E. Staples. Two children were born to them in rapid succession. There is a Judge William Staples home just up the block from the Power house on Benefit Street, and this may be where the couple lived.
Despite her mother’s deep-set mistrust of the male gender, Sarah Helen, too, was wooed and won away from the Benefit Street home. In 1824, during her twenty-first year, she was engaged to attorney John Winslow Whitman. Urged to assume the proper responsibilities of womanhood, Helen was pressured to put aside her literary ambitions. As Ticknor tells it, “Mrs. Whitman’s taste for poetry was frowned upon by certain relatives...[She received] reproving letters, expressing the hope that she ‘did not read much poetry, as it was almost as pernicious as novel-reading’.”
Mr. Whitman seemed a good match. He was not one of those lawyers whom Shakespeare would have us kill. The third son of Massachusetts Judge Kilborne Whitman, he graduated from Brown University in 1818. He started a law practice in Boston, and practiced later in Barnstable.
During their long engagement, in 1825, Sarah Helen’s grandmother, Rebecca Corey Power, died.
Sorrow struck again that year when Sarah Helen’s older sister Rebecca died on September 14th. She had been married only four years, and then her two children, according to the Power family records, “died young.” Was her death childbirth-related, or did a contagion such as tuberculosis (”the galloping consumption”) sweep through the Staples home, taking the young mother and then the children? This tragedy must have made a deep impression on the poetical Sarah Helen, who would have followed four coffins to the North Burial Ground in swift succession.
Sarah Helen’s respectably-delayed marriage took place in 1828, with a Long Island wedding held on July 10th at the home of Sarah Helen’s uncle, Cornelius Bogert. A four-year engagement may seem excessive by today’s standards, but Mr. Whitman may also have needed time to establish his law practice and set up a suitable home.
John Whitman turned out to have a creative side, too. It is interesting to note that Mrs. Whitman’s biographers, and most of Poe’s, seem to know her husband only by his profession. I was startled to discover, during an Internet search, that John Winslow Whitman had another persona altogether: he seems to have had some involvement with the Boston-based magazine, The Ladies’ Album. He was also, briefly, partner in a weekly Boston newspaper titled The Times.
The Ladies’ Album published some of Whitman’s poems, under the name “Helen.” Ticknor, incorrectly, writes that Whitman’s first published poem was in that journal in 1829, a poem titled, “Retrospection.” Actually, Whitman published two poems there in 1828, the year of her marriage. It is telling that her second published poem, “To the Spirit of Poetry,” is a direct refutation of the religious admonitions against poetry that her family and friends had pressed upon her, as these lines reveal:
Thou art religion, virtue, faith;
Through thee the martyr conquers death;
Thy voice, like solemn music leads
To godlike thoughts, and glorious deeds.
Borne upwards on thy radiant wings,
Man’s soaring spirit heavenward springs,
And burst the ignoble chains that bind
To earth’s dull dross the immortal mind.
To thee alone, the power is given,
To render earth a present heaven:
Oh! may thine influence elevate
My soul above the ills of date:
May thy pure present ne’er depart,
But, treasured deep within my heart,
There may the spirit ever be,
A beauty, and a mystery.14
Through her husband’s Boston affiliations, she met and came to know the circle of Transcendentalists, and started writing and publishing essays on Goethe, Shelley and Emerson. Articles and poems in other magazines soon followed. Mrs. Whitman was clearly not going to vanish into the draperies, and she was fortunate to have a literary ally in her husband.
A few years later, a new kind of turmoil roiled the family. Sometime between 1831 and 1832, Sarah Helen’s mother lost the right to wear her widow’s bonnet, with the sudden reappearance of the wandering Nicholas Power. Did the Major return in a remorseful state, wanting to make amends and restore his family’s fortune? Or was he ruined again, returning to old haunts to nibble away at his wife’s property? Another legend has it that he had a second wife and family in the Carolinas, and had now abandoned them, too.
Sarah Helen, who had cherished a somewhat heroic image of her father, was crushed — and one can only imagine the effect of all this on the younger sister.
Like her errant father, Sarah Helen’s husband was not destined for commercial success. Money vanished into failed inventions, and several business ventures went belly-up. Mr. Whitman even appears to have gone to jail for a few months in a legal upset involving a bad loan — not a happy career turn for a young attorney. His name also appears as co-author of a series of booklets that appear to be transcripts of controversial Boston lawsuits, including one libel suit that involved a clergyman.
Worse yet, John Whitman also turned out to have a frail constitution. He caught colds frequently, and one of them, contracted in 1833, lingered and worsened into a total collapse and sudden death. There is a mystery here, and much more needs to be learned about Mr. Whitman. Ticknor disposes of Mrs. Whitman’s youth and marriage in a mere 13 pages, and Mrs. Whitman pulls a veil of silence over the subject for the rest of her life. Husband and wife were clearly partners in the literary life they found in Boston, and one can only assume that inordinate family pressures back in Providence created the virtual cover-up that ensued.
In 1833, then, Sarah Helen Whitman found herself a widow after only five years of marriage. She donned the official “widow’s bonnet” and moved back in with her mother and younger sister on Benefit Street. Her defense of Shelley, published in Providence’s first and only literary journal early in 1834, bore the Roman-Etruscan pseudonym of “Egeria.”
Although she would resume the role of dutiful daughter, Sarah Helen was now a published literary figure in her own right, confident in her worth and powers, and acquainted with many of the best minds of New England.
SUBJECTS: Edgar Allan Poe, Providence, Rhode Island, Sarah Helen Whitman.
