Chapter 7

The minister with saint-like eloquence was Dr. Channing. The letter is valuable as showing the source of the flame that had fired her philanthropic soul. For the finer culture of the heart she had passed from the hands of Madam Dix to those of Dr. Channing. The request for the room was granted and Mr. Tiffany tells us that "The little barn-school proved the nucleus out of which years later was developed the beneficent work of the Warren Street Chapel, from which as a centre spread far and wide a new ideal of dealing with childhood. There first was interest excited in the mind of Rev. Charles Barnard, a man of positive spiritual genius in charming and uplifting the children of the poor and debased."

Letters from Miss Dix at this period show that she had a sensitive nature, easily wrought upon, now inflamed to action and now melted to tears. "You say that I weep easily. I was early taught to sorrow, to shed tears, and now, when sudden joy lights up or unexpected sorrow strikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swelling tide of feeling." She is reading a book of poems and weeping over it,--"paying my watery tribute to the genius" of the poet. She longs for similar talents that she "might revel in the luxury of those mental visions that must hourly entrance a spirit that partakes less of earth than heaven." It will be remembered that her father was religious even to folly. Here was his child, only by judicious training, the stream was turned into channels of wise beneficence.

With the management of two schools, the supervision of the household, the care of two younger brothers, and ministries to her grandmother already advanced in years, Miss Dix was sufficiently occupied, but she found time to prepare a text-book upon "Common Things," gathering the material as she wrote. This, her first attempt at book-making, issued in 1824, was kept in print forty-five years, and went to its sixtieth edition in 1869. It was followed the next year by "Hymns for Children" selected and altered, and by a book of devotions entitled, "Evening Hours." Lengthening the day at both ends, "rising before the sun and going to bed after midnight," working while others slept, gave time for these extra tasks. Nature exacted her usual penalties. In the third year of this arduous labor, threatenings of lung troubles appeared which, however, she defied even when "in conducting her classes she had to stand with one hand on a desk for support, and the other pressed hard to her side as though to repress a hard pain." Meanwhile she wrote a bosom friend: "There is in our nature a disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which unless hourly combated will overcome the best faculties of our minds and paralyse our most useful powers.... I have often entertained a dread lest I should fall a victim to my besieger, and that fear has saved me thus far."

Besides the terror of lapsing into self-indulgence, she was stimulated to activity by the care of her brothers, for one of whom she seems to have felt special anxiety: "Oh, Annie," she writes, "if that child is good, I care not how humble his pathway in life. It is for him my soul is filled with bitterness when sickness wastes me; it is because of him I dread to die." Was there no one to advise her that the best care of her brother would be to care for herself, and that if she would do more, she must first do less! Where was Dr. Channing who, more than any other, was responsible for her intemperate zeal! It appears that Dr. Channing, "not without solicitude," as he writes her, was watching over his eager disciple. "Your infirm health," he says, "seems to darken your prospect of usefulness. But I believe your constitution will yet be built up, if you will give it a fair chance. You must learn to give up your plans of usefulness as much as those of gratification, to the will of God."

Miss Dix abandoned her school apparently in 1827, after six years of service and at the age of twenty-five. The following spring and summer she spent as a governess in the family of Dr. Channing at his summer home in Rhode Island. Her duties were light and she lived much in the open air, devoting her leisure to botany in which she was already "no mean proficient," and to "the marine life of the beautiful region." Very pretty letters were exchanged between her and Dr. Channing at the termination of the engagement. "We will hear no more of thanks," he wrote her, "but your affection for us and our little ones we will treasure among our most precious blessings." He invites her to renew the relations another year, and so she did.

To avoid the rigors of a New England climate, Miss Dix, for some years, spent her winters, now in Philadelphia, now in Alexandria, Va., keeping herself busy with reading "of a very multifarious kind,--poetry, science, biography, and travels,--besides eking out the scanty means she had laid by from her teaching by writing stories and compiling floral albums and books of devotion." In 1827, she published a volume of "Ten Short Stories for Children" which went to a second edition in 1832; in 1828, "Meditations for Private Hours," which went through several editions; in 1829, two little books, "The Garland of Flora," and "The Pearl, a Christmas Gift." Occasional brief engagements in teaching are also recorded in this period.

The winter of 1830, she spent with the Channings on the Island of St. Croix, in the West Indies, in her old capacity as governess. A daughter of Dr. Channing gives an interesting account of the preceptress of whom, first and last, she had seen so much. She describes Miss Dix as tall and dignified, very shy in manner, strict and inflexible in discipline. "From her iron will, it was hopeless to appeal. I think she was a very accomplished teacher, active and diligent herself, very fond of natural history and botany. She enjoyed long rambles, always calling our attention to what was interesting in the world around us. I hear that some of her pupils speak of her as irascible. I have no such remembrance. Fixed as fate we considered her."

Miss Dix returned from the West Indies in the spring, very much improved in health, and in the autumn, she reopened her school in the Dix Mansion, with the same high ideals as before and with such improved methods as experience had suggested. Pupils came to her again as of old and she soon had as many attendants as her space permitted. A feature of the school was a letter-box through which passed a daily mail between teacher and pupils and "large bundles of child-letters of this period" are still extant, preserved by Miss Dix with scrupulous care to the end of life. It was a bright child who wrote as follows: "I thought I was doing well until I read your letter, but when you said that you were rousing to greater energy, all my satisfaction vanished. For if you are not satisfied in some measure with yourself and are going to do more than you have done, I don't know what I shall do. You do not go to rest until midnight and then you rise very early." The physician had administered too strong a tonic for the little patient's health.

A lady who, at the age of sixteen, attended this school in 1833, writes of her eminent teacher as follows: "She fascinated me from the first, as she had done many of my class before me. Next to my mother, I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was in the prime of her years, tall and of dignified carriage, head finely shaped and set, with an abundance of soft, wavy, brown hair." The school continued in the full tide of success for five years, during which time, by hard labor and close economies, Miss Dix had saved enough to secure her "the independence of a modest competence." This seems a great achievement, but if one spends nothing for superfluities and does most of his labor himself, he can lay by his income, much or little. The appointments of the school are said to have been very simple, a long table serving as a desk for study, when it was not in use for dinner. Only one assistant is mentioned, who gave instruction in French and, perhaps, elementary Latin. Surely Miss Dix could handle the rest herself. The merit of the school was not in its elaborate appointments, but in the personal supervision of its accomplished mistress. So the miracle was wrought and at the age of thirty-three, Miss Dix had achieved a modest competence.

The undertaking had cost her her health once before, and now it cost her her health again. The old symptoms, a troublesome cough, pain in the side, and slight hemorrhages, returned and, having dragged her frail body through the winter of 1836, Miss Dix reluctantly closed her school in the spring and, in obedience to her physician, went to Europe for rest, with the intention of spending the summer in England, the autumn in France, and the winter in Italy. Prostrated by the voyage, she was carried to a hotel in Liverpool where she was put to bed with the forlorn prospect of being confined to her solitary room for an indefinite period of convalescence. But again Dr. Channing befriended her. From him she had received letters of introduction, one of which brought to her side Mr. William Rathbone, a wealthy merchant of Liverpool and a prominent English Unitarian. Mr. and Mrs. Rathbone insisted upon taking her to their home, a charming residence a few miles out of the city. Thither she consented to go for a visit of a few weeks, and there she remained, as an honored guest tenderly cared for, for eighteen months. "To the end of her days," says her biographer, "this period of eighteen months stood out in her memory as the jubilee of her life, the sunniest, the most restful, and the tenderest to her affections of her whole earthly experience." She wrote a Boston friend, "You must imagine me surrounded by every comfort, sustained by every tenderness that can cheer, blest in the continual kindness of the family in which Providence has placed me,--I with no claim but those of a common nature." And again, "So completely am I adopted into the circle of loving spirits that I sometimes forget I really am not to consider the bonds transient in their binding."

She very much needed these friends and their tender care. Nine months after her arrival, we hear of occasional hemorrhages from which she has been exempt for ten days, the pain in her side less acute, and her physician has given her permission to walk about her room. One would think that her career was practically ended, but, strange to say, the career which was to make her famous had not yet begun. From this date, her convalescence proceeded steadily, and she was able to enjoy much in the delightful home and refined social circle in which she found herself. "Your remark," she writes a friend, "that I probably enjoy more now in social intercourse than I have ever before done is quite true. Certainly if I do not improve, it will be through wilful self-neglect." Apparently, she was having a glimpse of a less prosaic existence than the grinding routine of a boarding school. Madam Dix died at the age of ninety-one, leaving her granddaughter, still in Europe, a substantial legacy, which sensibly increased her limited resources and, when the time came for action, left her free to carry out her great schemes of benevolence without hampering personal anxieties. It ought to preserve the memory of Madam Dix that she endowed a great philanthropist.

In the autumn of 1837, Miss Dix returned to America, and avoiding the New England climate, spent the winter in Washington, D. C., and its neighborhood. Apparently, it was not a wholly happy winter, chiefly because of her vain and tender longings for the paradise she had left across the sea. The Washington of 1837 seemed raw to her after the cultivated English home she had discovered. "I was not conscious," she writes a friend, "that so great a trial was to meet my return from England till the whole force of the contrast was laid before me.... I may be too craving of that rich gift, the power of sharing with other minds. I have drunk deeply, long, and Oh, how blissfully, at this fountain in a foreign clime. Hearts met hearts, minds joined with minds, and what were the secondary trials of pain to the enfeebled body when daily was administered the soul's medicine and food." Surely, that English experience was one upon which not every invalid from these shores could count, but when, a few years later, Miss Dix returned to England as a kind of angel of mercy, giving back much more than she had ever received, the Rathbone family must have been glad that they had befriended her in her obscurity and her need.

It was in 1841 at the age of thirty-nine that the second chapter in the life of Miss Dix began. Note that she had as little thought that she was beginning a great career as any one of us that he will date all his future from something he has done or experienced to-day. It happened that Dr. J. T. G. Nichols, so long the beloved pastor of the Unitarian parish in Saco, Maine, was then a student of Divinity at Cambridge. He had engaged to assist in a Sunday School in the East Cambridge jail, and all the women, twenty in number, had been assigned to him. The experience of one session with his class was enough to convince him that a young man was very much out of place in that position and that a woman, sensible if possible, but a woman certainly, was necessary. His mother advised him to consult Miss Dix. Not that her health would permit her to take the class, but she could advise. On hearing Mr. Nichols' statement, Miss Dix deliberated a moment and then said, "I will take the class myself." Mr. Nichols protested that this was not to be thought of, in the condition of her health, but we have heard of her iron will: "Fixed as fate we considered her," said one of her pupils; and she answered Mr. Nichols, "I shall be there next Sunday."

This was the beginning. "After the school was over," says Dr. Nichols, "Miss Dix went into the jail and found among the prisoners a few insane persons with whom she talked. She noticed that there was no stove in their rooms and no means of proper warmth." The date was the twenty-eighth of March and the climate was New England, from which Miss Dix had so often had to flee. "The jailer said that a fire for them was not needed, and would be unsafe. Her repeated solicitations were without success." The jailer must have thought he was dealing with a woman, not with destiny. "At that time the court was in session at East Cambridge, and she caused the case to be brought before it. Her request was granted. The cold rooms were warmed. Thus was her great work commenced."

Such is Dr. Nichols' brief statement, but the course of events did not run so smoothly as we are led to suppose. The case had to be fought through the newspapers as well as the court, and here Miss Dix showed the generalship which she exhibited on many another hard fought field. She never went into battle single-handed. She always managed to have at her side the best gunners when the real battle began. In the East Cambridge skirmish, she had Rev. Robert C. Waterston, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Howe visited the jail and wrote an account for the Boston _Advertiser_. When this statement was disputed, as it was, Mr. Sumner, who had accompanied Dr. Howe, confirmed his account and added details of his own. He said that the inmates "were cramped together in rooms poorly ventilated and noisome with filth;" that "in two cages or pens constructed of plank, within the four stone walls of the same room" were confined, and had been for months, a raving maniac and an interesting young woman whose mind was so slightly obscured that it seemed any moment as if the cloud would pass away; that "the whole prison echoed with the blasphemies of the poor old woman, while her young and gentle fellow in suffering seemed to shrink from her words as from blows;" that the situation was hardly less horrid than that of "tying the living to the dead."

Where was Miss Dix during this controversy? Why, she was preparing to investigate every jail and almshouse in the State of Massachusetts. If this was the way the insane were treated in the city of Cambridge, in a community distinguished for enlightenment and humanity, what might not be going on in more backward and less favored localities? Note-book in hand, going from city to city and from town to town, Miss Dix devoted the two following years to answering this question exhaustively.

Having gathered her facts, she presented them to the Legislature in a Memorial of thirty-two octavo pages, the first of a series of seventeen statements and appeals presented to the legislatures of different states, as far west as Illinois and as far south as Louisiana. "I shall be obliged," she said, "to speak with great plainness and to reveal many things revolting to the taste, and from which my woman's nature shrinks with peculiar sensitiveness.... I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience.... I give a few illustrations but description fades before reality." If we could dismiss the subject by saying she reports instance after instance where men and women were confined in the almshouses in Massachusetts in such conditions of inhumanity and neglect as no intelligent farmer would tolerate for his swine, we could avoid some unpleasant details; but the statement would be ineffective because it would seem incredible. At the almshouse in Danvers, confined in a remote, low, outbuilding, she found a young woman, once respectable, industrious and worthy, whose mind had been deranged by disappointments and trials. "There she stood," says Miss Dix, "clinging to or beating upon the bars of her caged apartment, the contracted size of which afforded space only for increasing accumulations of filth,--a foul spectacle; there she stood, with naked arms, dishevelled hair, the unwashed frame invested with fragments of unclean garments, the air so extremely offensive, though ventilation was afforded on all sides but one, that it was not possible to remain beyond a few moments without retreating for recovery to the outward air. Irritation of body, produced by utter filth and exposure, incited her to the horrid process of tearing off her skin by inches; her neck and person were thus disfigured to hideousness.... And who protects her," Miss Dix suggestively asks, "who protects her,--that worse than Pariah outcast,--from other wrongs and blacker outrages!" This question had more meaning for Miss Dix than we might suppose, for at the almshouse in Worcester she had found an insane Madonna and her babe: father unknown.

Fair and beautiful Newton finds a place in this chapter of dishonor, with a woman chained, nearly nude, and filthy beyond measure: "Sick, horror-struck, and almost incapable of retreating, I gained the outward air." A case in Groton attained infamous celebrity, not because the shame was without parallel but because the overseers of the poor tried to discredit the statements of Miss Dix. The fact was that she had understated the case. Dr. Bell of the McLean Asylum, confirmed her report and added details. In an outbuilding at the almshouse, a young man, slightly deranged but entirely inoffensive, was confined by a heavy iron collar to which was attached a chain six feet in length, the limit of his possible movements. His hands were fastened together by heavy clavises secured by iron bolts. There was no window in his dungeon, but for ventilation there was an opening, half the size of a sash, closed in cold weather by a board shutter. From this cell, he had been taken to the McLean Asylum, where his irons had been knocked off, his swollen limbs chafed gently, and finding himself comfortable, he exclaimed, "My good man, I must kiss you." He showed no violence, ate at the common table, slept in the common bedroom, and seemed in a fair way to recovery when, to save the expense of three dollars a week for his board and care, the thrifty Groton officials took him away. He could be boarded at the almshouse for nothing, and, chained in an outbuilding, he would not require any care.

We can follow Miss Dix in her career through a dozen states of this Union, into the British Provinces, to Scotland and England, thence across to the Continent, without repeating these details, if we bear in mind that such as we have seen was the condition of the pauper insane at that period. Her memorial was presented by Dr. S. G. Howe, then happily a member of the Legislature, and a bill was passed, not without opposition, but finally passed, enlarging the asylum at Worcester to accommodate two hundred additional patients. The provision was inadequate, but a reform of old abuses had begun. It was her first victory.

Grateful for what had been accomplished in Massachusetts, Miss Dix turned to Rhode Island, whose borders she had often approached and sometimes crossed in her investigations in the adjoining state. Rhode Island was perhaps not less civilized than her neighbor, but Rhode Island furnished the prize case of horrors in the mistreatment of insanity, a case which in a letter introducing the discoverer, Mr. Thomas G. Hazard said went beyond anything he supposed to exist in the civilized world. The case was this: Abraham Simmons, a man whose name ought to go on the roll of martyrdom, was confined in the town of Little Compton, in a cell seven feet square, stone-built, stone-roofed, and stone-floored, the entrance double-walled, double-doored and double-locked, "excluding both light and fresh air, and without accommodation of any description for warming and ventilation." When this dungeon was discovered, the walls were covered by frost a half inch in thickness; the bed was provided with two comfortables, both wet and the outer one stiffly frozen, or, as Miss Dix puts it, "only wet straw to lie upon and a sheet of ice for his covering." Lest two locks should not be enough to hold this dangerous man, his leg was tethered to the stone floor by an ox-chain. "My husband," said the mistress, "in winter, sometimes of a morning rakes out half a bushel of frost, _and yet he never freezes_; sometimes he screams dreadfully and that is the reason we had the double wall and two doors in place of one; his cries disturb us in the house." "How long has he been here?" "Oh, above three years." Nothing in the traditions of the Bastile could exceed these horrors, and yet they were not the product of intentional cruelty, but of unfathomable stupidity.

Disregarding the well-meant warnings of her attendant that he would kill her, Miss Dix took his hands, tried to warm them in her own, spoke to him of liberty, care and kindness, and for answer "a tear stole over his hollow cheeks, but no words answered my importunities." Her next step was to publish the terrible story in the Providence Journal, not with a shriek, as might have been expected and justified, but with the affected coolness of a naturalist. With grim humor, she headed her article, "Astonishing Tenacity of Life," as if it had only a scientific interest for anybody. If you doubted the statements, you might go and see for yourself: "Should any persons in this philanthropic age be disposed from motives of curiosity to visit the place, they may rest assured that travelling is considered quite safe in that part of the country, however improbable it may seem. The people of that region profess the Christian religion, and it is even said that they have adopted some forms and ceremonies which they call worship. It is not probable, however, that they address themselves to poor Simmons' God." Their prayers and his shrieks would make a strange discord, she thinks, if they entered the ear of the same deity.