Celia Thaxter
Thaxter, Celia (29 June 1835-26 Aug. 1894), poet and essayist, was born Celia Laighton in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the daughter of Thomas B. Laighton, a merchant, editor, and state legislator, and Eliza Rymes Laighton. Failing in his ambition to become governor of New Hampshire, Celia's father had himself appointed lighthouse keeper at the Isles of Shoals, a group of nine small, rugged islands about ten miles off the New Hampshire coast. In 1839, vowing never to return to the mainland, he took his wife, Celia, and her younger brother Oscar to tiny White Island, one of the shoals, to work as lighthouse keeper there. The parents tutored their children, soon three in number, with the help of occasional visitors, including a handsome, bright, but unstable Harvard graduate named Levi Lincoln Thaxter, who was eleven years Celia's senior. Thaxter soon noticed and fostered Celia's love of poetry.
Thomas Laighton resigned his post in 1845 and moved to the largest of the Isles of Shoals, Appledore Island, which he had purchased in 1834. In 1847 he began building a summer hotel there with the help of Thaxter's father. Perhaps the first of its kind along the Atlantic coast, the resort was enormous--with eighty sleeping rooms in the top three of its four stories. Opening in June 1848, it immediately attracted not only friends but also artists, musicians, preachers, scholars, and writers. From the outset, Celia was helpful and courteous to the guests. The structure was gradually added to: in 1860 it could accommodate 300 people; in 1866 its enlarged dining hall could seat 500. Over the years, the swarm of visitors included Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Ole Bull, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Caleb Cushing, Charlotte Cushman, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, James T. Fields and his wife Annie Adams Fields, Childe Hassam (who gave Celia art lessons and painted pictures of her garden), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Morris Hunt (who drowned, perhaps intentionally, in a pond at Appledore), Sarah Orne Jewett, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville (whose aborted "Agatha story" was inspired by a sad woman living near the Isles of Shoals), Franklin Pierce, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In time, Celia met and favorably impressed most of this varied group of celebrities.
To keep Thaxter away from Celia, her parents sent her to the Mount Washington Female Seminary in Boston. But she soon returned, and in 1851 the two married and eventually had three children, one of whom, Roland Thaxter, became a prominent mycologist. For a while, Thaxter taught and preached on nearby Star Island. They lived in Newtonville, Massachusetts, for four years, during which Celia was always homesick for the islands. Part of that time, Thaxter deserted Celia to go on hunting trips. To support the family, she composed poems, the first of which, "Land-locked," James Russell Lowell published in 1861 without her permission in the Atlantic Monthly, which he edited. Its first line sounds a bitter tone, often struck in Celia's later works: "Black lie the hills; swiftly doth daylight flee." More of her verses appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Century, Harper's, the Independent, and other periodicals. She placed poems and stories for juvenile readers in Our Young Folks, St. Nicholas, Youth's Companion, and similar magazines.
In 1861 Celia Thaxter's brothers built their parents a large cottage near their resort hotel. In the 1860s, her professional success and her love of the shoals combined to help her establish a summer literary salon at Appledore. When her father died in 1866, Celia remained at the family cottage to care for her mother. She also took charge of her oldest son, who was mentally retarded. Though never divorced, she began to live in the cottage on Appledore apart from her husband, who resented her success as a writer and as a friend of the illustrious. After her mother's death in 1877, Celia conducted seances in an attempt to communicate with her spirit. In this venture she was aided by Sarah Jewett. In 1880 Celia moved to a house at Kittery Point, Maine, with a view of the shoals, and lived again with her husband. She and her brother Oscar enjoyed a six-month tour of England and the Continent (1880-1881). A decade after her husband's death in 1884, Celia died in her Appledore cottage.
Celia Thaxter assembled her periodically published pieces in book form, notably Poems (1872; enlarged ed., 1874), Among the Isles of Shoals (prose sketches, 1873), Poems for Children (1884), and An Island Garden (prose sketches, with illustrations by Childe Hassam, 1894). Her works sold well, and her delicate paintings on china also helped support her and her family. Her poetry is about the sea and weather, animals and birds, midsummer flowers, the stars, and a range of emotions including grim responses to the seeming indifference of forces--human, natural, and cosmic--beyond one's power to control. Her diction is uniformly old-fashioned, with standard but unforced rhyme schemes. Representative is her conclusion upon seeing the consequences of a shipwreck:
Do purposeless thy children meet
Such bitter death? How was it best
These hearts should cease to beat?
Typical of her moralistic stories for children is "The Bear at Appledore," about a bear cub brought as a pet from Georgia to Appledore, but as it grew it escaped and rampaged until it had to be shot. Critics are usually in agreement that Celia's finest writing is in An Island Garden, a distillation of her abiding love affair with Appledore. There she planted, experimented with, and nurtured a spectrum of flowers, uncannily prevailing against inimical insects, fungi, and slugs, and fenced her blossoms against the adverse winds.
In 1914 Appledore House, together with seven nearby cottages, burned to the ground. In 1977 Celia Thaxter's unique island garden was reconstructed at its original location by the Shoals Marine Laboratory.
Bibliography
The bulk of Celia Thaxter's widely scattered papers are at the Boston Public Library, in libraries at Colby College and Harvard University, and at the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Oscar Laighton, Ninety Years at the Isles of Shoals (1929), places his sister Celia in context in a quaint, lively, and observant memoir, which includes several of her poems and a few of his own. Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden, ed. John M. Kingsbury (1985), includes an informative introduction, color reprints of Childe Hassam's excellent illustrations, and a secondary bibliography. See also Julia Older's introduction to her edition of Celia Thaxter, Selected Writings (1997), which also has a brief bibliography. In Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), William Dean Howells praises Celia Thaxter's appearance as "fine, frank, finished," and calls her poetry "strangely full and bright." The most detailed of several comments by contemporaries concerning Celia Thaxter and the Isles of Shoals is in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks; see especially Claude M. Simpson's annotated edition (1972). Rosamond Thaxter, Sandpiper: The Life and Letters of Celia Thaxter (1962; rev. ed., 1963), is a loving biography by her granddaughter. An obituary is in the New York Times, 28 Aug. 1894.
Robert L. Gale
Online Resources
Cornell University Library: Making of America
http://library5.library.cornell.edu/moa/moa_search.html
A search on "Thaxter, Celia" retrieves 92 listings of poems and essays published by Thaxter in the Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine. The individual items are photographically reproduced.
Celia Thaxter Papers, 1873-1893, MS 25, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH, USA.
Eleven holograph letters from Thaxter to various friends and admirers. Most are brief notes and several are accompanied by stamped envelopes. Also 2 photographs of Celia.
http://www.library.unh.edu/special/index.php/celia-thaxter-1835-1894-2
