How to Help the Poor.
Fields, Mrs. James T. How to Help the Poor. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884.
8vo.; stapled signatures; printed wrappers; upper tip chipped; light wear to extremities.
First edition, wrappered issue, of Fields’s second book, “a semi-official guide to the philosophy of the Associated Charities of Boston,” by a woman “essential to the formation of the first truly efficient large charity organization in the United States” (Annie Adams Fields: The Spirit of Charles Street, by Roman, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 86, 85). In it, Fields argues that prospective volunteers should offer their time and labor towards the eradication of social problems, and that prospective donors should make their financial contributions to a central bureau for more effective distribution. 22,000 copies were sold in its first two years. “The book takes us inside the complicated administrative network which Annie had helped to create and helped to run. It provides a fascinating glimpse into how Annie thought and her underlying sense of values” (ibid.).
At the age of twenty, Boston-born Annie Adams (1834-1915) became the second wife of the publisher James T. Fields and was suddenly and completely absorbed into the literary scene in which he lived.
Mrs. Fields spoke of her wedding as sweeping her ‘suddenly out upon a tide more swift and strong and all-enfolding than her imagination had foretold.’ It was not long before the ‘exquisite eager young woman,’ endowed with most of the social graces, had established a kind of salon in her home at 148 Charles St. …Over the course of years she formed intimate friendship with Hawthorne, Whittier, Lowell, George William Curtis, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Homes, Agassiz, Lydia Maria Child, and Henry James, as well as Thackeray, Dickens, and Landor. …She was of great assistance to him in his work, relieving him of responsibilities to which he was too busy to attend. After his death, the Fields house still continued to be a social center for literary people in Boston. (C.M.F., “Annie Adams Fields,” DAB V/VI, pp. 377-78)
Though an apt hostess and help-mate, Annie was not destined for a literary career of her own, and in the late sixties and early seventies gave up on her pale attempts at aesthetic achievement and began devoting her energies to the amelioration of social disease. She broke new ground in the field of social work in adapting old models and developing new ones to assist the working classes and the urban poor. In addition to being a “traditionally female occupation that served the goals of Christianity,”
[s]ocial work drew on Annie’s strengths—her intelligence, her organizational skill, and her ability to handle people-—and minimized her comparative lack of imagination and creativity. Through a decade of forwarding her husband’s business interests, she had learned to plan both social events and public events such as lecture series, helping to plan Emerson’s last lecture series, Dickens’s second tour, and a lecture series for women which was part of the movement for a women’s college. Her experience in talking to writers had made her nearly fearless, and her writing experience was put to use in publicizing and raising money for her numerous projects. (Roman, p. 78)
Fields worked in a North End mission teaching “French literature and other subjects to working girls…. Annie called upon her husband and friends such as Holmes and Whittier for Friday evening lectures and readings for mixed audiences. And gradually, as one writer puts it, ‘What had been salvation became social improvement or uplift’ (Huggins 50)” (ibid., 80). One of Fields’s earliest plans was to establish coffee houses—the Holly-Tree Coffee Rooms—to compete with ale houses. Soon after they got off the ground she founded a home for working women, to provide not just room and board at an affordable rate, but also a comfortable realm to which to escape the trials and temptations of city
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