LETTERS: 19 ALS to Henry Mills Alden and his wife.
Fields, Annie. Nineteen autograph letters signed to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Mills Alden, 1862-1908.
A collection of warm letters from Fields to her friend and editor Henry Alden and his wife, addressing personal, family, and literary matters; sending poems (not present); discussing her writing on Charles Dudley Warner; Alden’s writing; Christmas holidays with family; Charles Dickens; Shakespeare; hoping to meet; travel, and a visit to “Miss Jewett”; and the like. The excerpt below from her letter of July 7, 1863, will give the flavor of the intimacy they shared:
I feel deeply the tribute you have paid in naming your daughter Annie Alden. I can only pray that with the name, if there be any sweetness in my life, any power of love in my character, any of the strength of time mobility in my soul, that she may possess more, far more; and all the discord all the uncertain sounds which the world has extorted from me may be with her set to form a part of the diviner melodies. I am anxious to see the child whose existence is bound up in a measure with mine… Perhaps some day I may be able to show you the author of several other songs known to everybody but which seem to have grown up as violets do: they are just as common. Few persons can associate them with him: but many love them, which is far better. Give your little Annie a deep long kiss from me full of wishes she cannot understand. She holds her wisdom to us now… (July 7, 1863)
Alden, a writer in his own right, is best known as the editor – for half a century – of Harper’s Magazine. His friend Harriet Beecher Stowe gave his career its initial boost when she sent two of his articles to the Atlantic Monthly while he was still a graduate student at the Andover Theological Seminary. Alden never entered the ministry. In 1961 he moved to New York where he taught a school for girls and continued to write. In 1962 he wrote a book on commission for Harper’s publishing house, and became an assistant editor of the Harper’s Weekly soon after. By 1969 he was editor of Harper’s Magazine, and died at that post fifty years later, in 1919. His theological training served him well in his books God in His World (1890) and A Study of Death (1895), which he wrote in addition to monthly essays for the magazine and his final book, Magazine Writing and New Literature (1908). (He also edited several volumes of American literature and short stories with William Dean Howells.) A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Alden received the honorary degrees of Doctor of Literature and Doctor of Laws in 1890 and 1907, respectively, from Williams College, where he achieved his undergraduate degree.
Much of Alden’s professional literary correspondence is at Emory University, where they have his files of letters from George William Curtis (1824-1892), Charles Anderson Dana (1819-1897), Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909), Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909), Whitelaw Reid (1837-1912), Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908), and Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933), and a number of others. They have no correspondence with Fields.
(www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/alden.htm)
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