Word: nineteenth
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...leading spokesman for the Unitarian cause in the early nineteenth century, Channing preached what Emerson called "sublime sermons." His was a life of the mind, as he grappled with the central issues of his day. Andrew Delbanco believes that Channing's inner life may best be understood through his public utterances, and examines the way his subject spoke as well as what he said. In his biography of Channing, the author acknowledges an abbreviation of outward detail. He prepares us quickly for our journey into William Ellery Channing's mind; we learn in six taut paragraphs that he graduated from...
Delbanco is not interested in Channing alone, though he hopes to "help restore Channing to the canon of American literature." He is concerned with the development of the liberal spirit in America in the early nineteenth century. William Ellery Channing is not so much a biography of a man as of an age. It is the story of religion, literature and politics in an experimental democracy, and their intimate and inevitable relationships. Channing serves as an emblem of this age, a man whose religious training and thinking helped draw him into political engagement. Delbanco argues that he is more than...
...Except for a brief period teaching a history correspondence course to under-educated American women, she spent most of her adult life keeping house for her father and suffering from nervous attacks. William, her eldest brother, became America's foremost psychologist and one of the leading philosophers of the nineteenth century; another, Henry, now ranks among the greatest novelists in the English language. Alice, lacking their confidence and powers of expression, became an invalid. Like John Marcher, a character in one of Henry's later stories, her hallmark was "precisely to have been the person in the world to whom...
ALICE SUFFERED her first breakdown at 19, and was bedridden with multiple ailments by the time she reached her forties. Her list of infirmities resembles an-encyclopedia of nervous disorders common to nineteenth-century women: at various points in her life, her condition was called neurasthenia, hysteria, rheumatic gout, suppressed gout, cardiac complications, spinal neurosis, nervous hyperesthesia, and spiritual crisis. Although it never became clear how many of her problems were physical, Alice's condition was at least, in part, a matter of choice. After feeling slighted and neglected throughout a healthy childhood and adolescence, she discovered, during her first...
...Strouse refuses to make the error of presenting Alice as a martyr to frustrated Victorian womanhood. She frequently suggests parallels between Alice's problems and those of other nineteenth century women, and her book offers insight into the psychosomatic ilnesses common to Victorian spinsters. Nevertheless, she never presents Alice as merely a passive victim of masculine oppression. Alice herself, as Strouse argues, recognized her own responsibility for her failures, and one of the few emotions absent from her writings is indulgent self-pity. Toward the end of her life, looking back over her years of illness, she ruefully berated herself...