Household Papers and Stories. Гарриет Бичер-Стоу

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       Harriet Beecher Stowe

      Household Papers and Stories

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664565327

Table of Contents

       INTRODUCTORY NOTE

       HOUSEHOLD PAPERS AND STORIES

       HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS

       I THE RAVAGES OF A CARPET

       II HOMEKEEPING VERSUS HOUSEKEEPING

       III WHAT IS A HOME

       IV THE ECONOMY OF THE BEAUTIFUL

       V RAKING UP THE FIRE

       VI THE LADY WHO DOES HER OWN WORK

       VII WHAT CAN BE GOT IN AMERICA

       VIII ECONOMY

       IX SERVANTS

       X COOKERY

       XI OUR HOUSE

       XII HOME RELIGION

       THE CHIMNEY-CORNER

       I WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH HER? OR, THE WOMAN QUESTION

       II WOMAN’S SPHERE

       III A FAMILY TALK ON RECONSTRUCTION

       IV IS WOMAN A WORKER

       V THE TRANSITION

       VI BODILY RELIGION: A SERMON ON GOOD HEALTH

       VII HOW SHALL WE ENTERTAIN OUR COMPANY

       VIII HOW SHALL WE BE AMUSED

       IX DRESS, OR WHO MAKES THE FASHIONS

       X WHAT ARE THE SOURCES OF BEAUTY IN DRESS

       XI THE CATHEDRAL

       XII THE NEW YEAR [1865.]

       XIII THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS

       OUR SECOND GIRL

       A SCHOLAR’S ADVENTURES IN THE COUNTRY

       TRIALS OF A HOUSEKEEPER

      vii

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

       Table of Contents

      Mrs. Stowe had early and very practical acquaintance with the art of housekeeping. It strikes one at first as a little incongruous that an author who devoted her great powers to stirring the conscience of a nation should from time to time, and at one period especially, give her mind to the ordering of family life, but a moment’s consideration will show that the same woman was earnestly at the bottom of each effort. In a letter to the late Lord Denman, written in 1853, Mrs. Stowe, speaking of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, said: “I wrote what I did because, as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and heartbroken with the sorrows and injustice which I saw, and because, as a Christian, I felt the dishonor to Christianity.” Not under the stress of passionate emotion, yet largely from a sense of real responsibility as a woman, a mother, and a Christian, she occupied herself with those concerns of every-day life which so distinctly appeal to a woman’s mind. How to order a household, how to administer that little kingdom over which a woman rules, and, above all, how to make family life stable, pure, and conservative of the highest happiness, these were the questions which she asked herself constantly, and which she tried to solve, not only incidentally in her fiction, but directly in her essays, and in that field of one tenth fiction and nine tenths didacticism, which constitutes most of the present volume.

      A Scholar’s Adventures in the Country and Trials of a Housekeeper appeared in the miscellany to which she gave the name of The Mayflower, and reflect humorously the viii Cincinnati experiences which again are playfully recounted in letters published in her son’s Life. The former, contributed in 1850 to The National Era, was drawn pretty closely from the experiments of Professor Stowe. It is noticeable that in this paper and in Our Second Girl, which was contributed to The Atlantic Monthly for January, 1868, the author poses as the masculine member of the household, as if this assumption gave her some advantage in the point of view. At any rate, she adopted the same rôle when she came more deliberately to survey a wide field in a series of articles.

      The House and Home Papers were contributed first to The Atlantic Monthly, and afterward published in book form as the production of one Christopher Crowfield, though there was not the slightest attempt otherwise at disguising the authorship. The immediate occasion of the papers was no doubt the removal of the Stowes from Andover and their establishment in Hartford, an event which took place shortly before the papers began to appear in The Atlantic. The years which followed during the first Hartford residence saw also a marriage in the family and new problems of daily life constantly presenting themselves, so that a similar series appeared in the same magazine, purporting to be from the same householder, entitled The Chimney Corner. This series, indeed, entered rather more seriously