How to Help the Poor.
Associated Charities Of Boston’s First Director And Founder Inscribes Her Book To Associated Charities First President And Founder
Fields, Mrs. James T. [Annie]. How to Help the Poor. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883.
8vo.; 16 pp. of ads for Houghton Mifflin’s “Standard and Popular Library Books”; interior fine; brown and tan paper-covered boards, with a rondel in brown on a strawberry vine with words “come over and help us” surrounding the vine; front cover and first signature disbound; spine cracked and mostly missing. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition, with the cover design by Fields’s good friend, Sarah Wyman Whitman.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the inside front cover: To Mr. Paine/ from/ Annie Fields. Signed by Robert Paine on the cover, R.T. Paine/ my copy/ Sept. 1883, with some underlinings in the text, presumably by Paine.
Annie Fields (1834-1915), is cited in most references as an author, biographer, diarist, and literary hostess, wife of publisher James T. Fields, and, later, companion to Sarah Orne Jewett. However, with the publication of this book, How To Help The Poor and her corresponding act of founding the Associated Charities of Boston and serving as its first director (1879-1894) and vice-president (1894-1906), her significance in her own right (rather than as wife or companion) in the American history is defined.
It is generally accepted that the professionalism of social work emerged from three general movements: 1) COS- Christian Organization Society Movement; 2) Settlement Houses; 3) Development of Institutions to deal with a whole range of social problems. The church was the basis of the COS movement, starting in England in 1869 and moving to the U.S. in 1877, in response to what was perceived as a chaotic and indiscriminate approach to poor relief. In 1879 Annie Fields, together with Robert Treat Paine (1835-1910), a Boston philanthropist who has made a fortune after graduating from Harvard Law School, spearheaded this movement in the United States by founding the Associated Charities of Boston. The motto of the Boston Associated Charities “Not Alms but a Friend” as invented by Paine, but it was Fields, in her book How To Help The Poor, that showed exactly how to do that. This book was a best-selling guide to centralizing charitable work, selling over 22,000 copies in two years. The COS movement anticipated the Settlement House movement by at last 25 years, as it did the development of specific institutions. The Associated Charities of Boston attracted many: Hallie Brown’s Homespun Heroines cites African American leader Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin as active in the group. Robert Treat Paine was the first president of the Associated Charities (1879-1907) while Annie Fields was the first director. This, then, is a superb association copy, linking two of the most important names in the history of American social work. The worn condition indicated that Paine paid great attention to the work.
Boston Women’s Heritage Traid, D18
DAB VII, pp. 158-159.
Fighting Poverty with Virtue, by Joel Schwartz.
Homespun Heroines, by Hallie Q. Brown.
NAW I, pp. 615-617.
Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing, p. 317.
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