Maggi Smith-Dalton

Grace, Beauty, and … Masculine Fire? - Mass Humanit...

Artists often work in an atmosphere of insecurity, whether financially or creatively (or both). One thing worth remembering as you study historical subjects is that, although you survey their work and lives from a kind of bird's eye view, your subject's future success or failure was as unknown to them as the outcome of your own future life is to you.

In March 1862, Nathaniel Hawthorne followed signs of spring southward, ready to “clip a little margin off the five months’ winter, during which there is nothing genial in New England save the fireside.” He intended to see a bit of the “dread” war himself, since merely reading about it, he said, was “irksome.”

The northwest corner of Twentieth and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, where Alfred Edward Newton was born in August 1864, was a world apart from Balassa-Gyarmat, Hungary, where, in January 1862, Moritz and Helene Pissk Weiss welcomed their son, Gabriel.

Henry Edwards Huntington, his blue eyes no doubt sparkling, as they were often described to do, was a man on a mission. Having made his fortune as the magnate of Los Angeles street railway systems, with interests in numerous Western train companies, wine, banks, and the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, he had, since turning 50, decided it was time he had "some fun."

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's youth, the air was, for him, as likely to be filled with the scent of a blossoming springtime orchard and the perfume of the deep woods as it was to be the salt air wafting over the wharves standing quiet sentinel on Salem's harbor.

Salem in the 19th century was a city devoted to the life of the mind–science, literature, learning, and the arts. Like other old New England towns, Salem displayed preoccupation with its history and genealogical heritage, and, like others, evidenced a strong undercurrent of ethnic and racial prejudice.

Arthur Platt Howard (left) had only been active in Salem a few months. The newspaper he and Ralph Lee were now publishing as a challenge to the monopolistic Salem News struggled to survive.

Salem's cultural life was an intense point of pride for her inhabitants and the landscape of that pride was molded as much by her cultural sophistication as in any material success or natural beauty she possessed.