A Longfellow Childhood: Toys, Lessons and Loss Behind The Children's Hour

An 1883 Christmas card based on "The Children's Hour" (Longfellow House, National Park Service).

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's most famous poem about children, "The Children's Hour" (1859), shows his three daughters surprising him in his study, and the public loved it so much that it was taught in schools, set to music and printed on commercial goods such as this 1883 Christmas card. The real childhood behind it, as the National Park Service's Longfellow House exhibit shows through toys, drawings, schoolwork and keepsakes, was just as full of play and lessons, and also of loss.

Six children, one idea of childhood

Henry and Fanny Longfellow had six children, all born in the 1840s and 1850s: Charles (Charley), Annie, Alice, Ernest (Erny), baby Fan and Edith (Edie). In this period childhood was starting to be seen as a distinct stage of life, which brought a wealth of clothes, books and objects made for children; eight-year-old Alice put it in a poem: "Childhood is a happy time / O enjoy it when you have it."

The Longfellows were wealthy and had privileges: a good education, leisure, travel, the finest clothes and toys, and a live-in nurse. They also faced the expectations placed on a famous parent's children, illness, tragedy and ordinary struggles with schoolwork, discipline and sibling rivalry. They were partly public figures: Henry put their actions and names in his poems, and they came to stand for an ideal of childhood and family life.

Portraits of the six Longfellow children: Charles, Anne Allegra, Alice, Ernest, baby Fan and Edith.

Playthings

In 1861 Fanny wrote that her daughters "live over every phase of married life with their dolls," and journals mention doll parties and a Christmas tree for the dolls. Baby dolls became popular partly to foster motherly instincts, so the girls were rehearsing expectations of their future.

A paper doll, about 1868, probably homemade; Edith wrote of making paper dolls for a young neighbor.

The 1848 Christmas gift Fanny described to Erny, age 3, as "a man walking selling buttermilk in a barrel."

A toy-making boom followed technology and leisure, and the wooden toy, made in Germany, has a mechanism that moves the man's legs as the cart rolls. Such toys were among the pricier ones. The Longfellow children regularly played with classic toys too: blocks, lead figures their father cast and simple dolls their mother made.

A doll dinner set from the French retailer A. Giroux, given in 1859 to eight-year-old Alice by family friend Charles Norton.

School at home and in Boston

The Longfellows encouraged art, and Henry drew with the children for fun. Erny's mid-1850s watercolor of the house gets the chimneys and front door paneling right and shows three children, perhaps his sisters, peering from a second-story window. Henry kept the children's drawings and labeled them, such as Annie's first drawing lesson, April 13, 1860, at four: simple doors and windows.

Charley and Erny went to a private boys' school in Boston from 1857 to 1860, where their weekly reports were good. Fanny reported that at 13 Erny won a prize and began to like Latin better, though he later said he could never see the good of learning Latin or Greek and always excelled at mathematics. In 1859 an English governess, Hannah Davie, set up a school for the girls and neighbors in a front bedroom of the house, which she taught until 1867 with several gaps; Henry taught the group French. The lessons included reading, writing, composition, spelling, arithmetic, French, Latin, poetry, geography, natural history, dictation and drawing.

Books and poems

Children's publishing boomed in the Victorian era. Fanny recalled that her boys liked stories of simple truth, without horrors or fairy fancy, and Henry and Fanny read aloud and gave inscribed books. One 1849 gift to four-year-old Erny, Pleasure Books for Young Children, edited by Joseph Cundall, had the first version of "The Three Bears" with a girl as the protagonist, named Silver-hair, half a century before Goldilocks; it also shows a hazard of 19th-century printing, arsenic in fancy book covers. For Charley, then five, Henry chose a translation of the Brothers Grimm in which the editor cut violence and adult references.

Many of Henry's poems drew on his children but were meant for adults, dealing with parenthood, memory, innocence and grief. "To A Child" (1845) addresses one-year-old Charley and mentions the staircase and tiles of their home, and its best-known stanza calls George Washington, an earlier resident, "Father of our Country."

Baby Fan

Fanny, the third child, was born April 7, 1847, and lived 17 months. She wore her first shoes at 10 months, was walking "quite famously" by April, and her mother saved the shoes with a note. Two months after her death Henry wrote in his journal that he missed "my dear little Fanny." He used pencils to write "To my Children" and "Resignation," the poem born of grief over her death, and kept the pencil stub.

A mourning pin with locks of hair from baby Fan and her grandfather, Stephen Longfellow, inscribed with their 1848 and 1849 death dates.

Clothes

The children wore imported and domestic clothes, hand-me-downs and gifts, and Fanny saved fabric snippets and mended their clothes each spring and autumn. A green polka-dot dress, labeled "1847 Erny's gown," was worn by Erny and later his sister Fan. A collarless green wool jacket with brass buttons appears on Charley in an 1853 photograph with his siblings and Mackintosh cousins.

The green wool jacket and the 1853 photograph in which Charley wears it.

Sources

• National Park Service, Longfellow House Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, The Patter of Little Feet: A Longfellow Childhood; rewritten in hubnx's own words.