167. Lydia Maria Child and the “Thanksgiving” Poem

AMY: Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my co host Kim Askew.

KIM: Hey everyone! It's Thanksgiving week here again in the States. Amy, what's your favorite food from the Thanksgiving dinner table?

AMY: Uh, all of the carbs. Not as much the dessert. Like, the savory carbs. So, the mashed potatoes and stuffing, for sure.

KIM: Oh yeah, love that. 

AMY: Any bread. Although, I try not to actually not have the bread, because I'd rather just have more mashed potatoes and stuffing.

KIM: Yeah, but a good dinner roll…

AMY: Yeah, it's…

KIM: With butter. Yeah. So good.

AMY: A Parker House roll. Mm. What about you?

KIM: I like those. I like the stuffing. I like the savory stuff. I like the sweet potatoes, you know, and sometimes we do it with the marshmallows. Yeah, yeah.

AMY: Which seems like such a weird combo. I wonder if other listeners outside of the country are like “Sweet potatoes and marshmallows?” It's really good. Anyway, um, speaking of sweet stuff, my mom's side of the family, they always had a long-running tradition. I think they still do it, actually, that everyone gathers the day after Thanksgiving to bake the Christmas cookies, which then get frozen or eaten, you know, within a week. And unfortunately I haven't been able to participate in this for a long time because I haven't lived in my hometown since I was 21. But yeah, when I was little, from a very young age, my cousins and siblings and I, we would all gather at my grandma's house to do this.

KIM: “Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go!”

AMY: “The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through the white and drifting snow!” I smell a topic as surely as I can smell the pumpkin pie baking in the oven! ) It's from a poem called “The Thanksgiving Poem.” And Kim, did you ever think about who may have written it?

KIM: No, but something's telling me it might be a lost lady of lit.

AMY: Indeed it was!

KIM: Ha!

AMY: The author's name is Lydia Maria Child, and we're going to end this episode by reading that poem in full, but first, let's find out a little bit more about her. There's actually a kind of new biography written about her by another Lydia: the author Lydia Moland. Moland. Not sure how you say that. That book came out this time last year. It's called Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.

KIM: Radical. Um, I don't think of that poem as radical. It's so quaint. It seems almost more like Norman Rockwell, kind of.

AMY: Yeah, I agree. Um, and from what I can tell, it seems like Lydia Maria Child was sort of the Martha Stewart of her day, actually, because in addition to writing novels and children's books, she wrote a book called The Frugal Housewife, which was published in 1829, and it was a bestseller. It was full of practical advice in the kitchen and for around the house. But I guess probably comparisons to Martha Stewart in her Hamptons home, that's actually wrong because Lydia Maria Child was a staunch advocate of being economical. She thought of luxury as a vice.

KIM: Well, it's a bit more in the vein of MFK Fisher, I guess, we did that episode on her household guide and cooking, How to Cook a Wolf. I don't think she thought of luxury as a vice, but she definitely wanted to make sure that there were ways to have luxury in an economical way. 

AMY: Yeah, how to, like, make do with what you have. Yeah, that probably is a bit more what Lydia Maria Child would be advocating for. She was all about stretching one's resources, letting nothing go to waste. So this book, this household book, was so popular it went through 33 printings over the course of 25 years, which is...it's pretty amazing. She also wrote a manual for mothers called creatively The Mother's Book. 

KIM: Okay. That's reminding me a little bit of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management.

AMY: Yes, Isabella Beeton. Yeah, I had, I owned the Mrs. Beeton book for a while. I don't know what happened to it, but I was so intrigued by that for a while. Of course, there's nothing practical in it for the 21st century, but yeah, it's a fun book to flip through. We should do another episode maybe on all of these kind of household manual books. That would be fun.

KIM: I would be so into that.

AMY: Yeah, because I'm also, it's reminding me of the TV show “1900 House,” which we loved. Just, I'm always fascinated by how people did their chores and kind of went about their daily lives in history. But anyway, so getting back to Lydia Maria Child, she was also an outspoken abolitionist, and this was well before the Civil War. So in 1833, she wrote a book called An Appeal in Favor of the Class of Americans Called Africans. And that book really shone a light on the cruel treatment of enslaved people in this country. She considered slavery to be a moral disease, which undermined democracy because it really produced a bunch of lazy, rich white people who were unwilling to do their own work and therefore they were bringing nothing to society in terms of their usefulness to the country. So it might seem like the homemaker book that she wrote had nothing in common with this anti-slavery book, but there actually was a tie-in, because she saw that the people who craved luxuries in life were complicit in slavery because of all the luxuries that they had. Like sugar, for example, came from the toil of enslaved people.

KIM: Right. It kind of makes you think now of, you know, the discussions about cell phones and how they're made and a lot of things… the fast fashion and things that we buy now that we know that, you know, it's harming other people and the environment. But anyway.

AMY: Yeah, so she was kind of onto… 

KIM: She was already onto that… 

AMY: A long time ago, yeah.

KIM: So what do we know about this famous Thanksgiving poem she wrote? How did that happen?

AMY: Well, it was published in 1844 in a book of poetry called Flowers for Children, Volume 2. And we know it as “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go.” But in the original poem, it was Grandfather's house. That got changed over the years. Um, it was originally also titled “The New England Boys’ Song About Thanksgiving Day.” Which is kind of a mouthful.

KIM: A really long title, but okay.

AMY: Yeah. Um, okay, so when you're hearing “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house to go,” what do you picture Grandmother's house being like?

KIM: Oh, it's totally like Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods. Like a log cabin or something. Definitely something super rural on a farm.

AMY: Yeah, I thought that, too. But you can actually look up her grandfather's house online. It's a house called the Paul Curtis House. That's the “Grandfather's house” that she's writing about. And it looks like a mansion. Like, Google it right now. Paul Curtis House. It's a huge, white, three story, Greek Revival-looking mansion. 

KIM: More like, um, Little Women. Like the, like the grandfather who lived next door in Little Women. 

AMY: Yeah, Mr. Lawrence, 

KIM: I did not picture that at all. 

AMY: No, it's totally not what you think. 

KIM: Yeah, so was she rich?

AMY: Yeah, apparently. So it's interesting that she was all anti-luxury because it looks like her family was pretty well-to-do.

KIM: Interesting.

AMY: But it's funny because she ended up paying a pretty heavy price for the stance that she took against slavery in her life. People were outraged by this. They didn't want her lecturing to them about it, and they stopped buying all of her books. And as a result, she ended up living the later years of her life in poverty. Or so she claimed, actually, because, um, her friends, they were stunned to find out, when she died in 1880, that she really still had a tidy little nest egg that in today's money would be somewhere around three quarters of a million dollars, so she was claiming poverty because nobody was buying her books and she probably wasn't making any money, but because of her ability to live so frugally on the money that she had earned, she had a large savings still at the end of her life.

KIM: Making a mental note to pick up a copy of The Frugal Housewife to see if I can pick up any tips.It obviously worked out well for her. 

AMY: Yeah, So let's finish up this episode by reading the full version of “The Thanksgiving Poem.” Um, I think in subsequent decades some people swapped the Thanksgiving for Christmas, so if you think of this poem as more of like a Christmas poem, that's probably why.

KIM: I do. 

AMY: Oh, you do? Okay. I always think of it as Thanksgiving. Anyway, here we go. I'm going to read, uh, and I think I'm actually just going to read an abridged version, because I were to read all the stanzas, it would start to feel interminable. 

So:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather's house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.

Over the river, and through the wood,
to Grandfather's house away!
We would not stop for doll or top,
for 'tis Thanksgiving Day.

Over the river, and through the wood—
oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose
as over the ground we go.

Over the river, and through the wood—
and straight through the barnyard gate,
We seem to go extremely slow,
it is so hard to wait!

Over the river, and through the wood—
When Grandmother saw us come,
She will say, "O, dear, the children are here,
bring a pie for everyone."

Over the river, and through the wood—
now Grandmother's cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!

There's six more stanzas in the original poem, but I spared you.

KIM: I think the two stanzas we all know and love by heart is probably sufficient. 

AMY: Yeah, I think that's enough. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah, but Happy Thanksgiving to all of our listeners who celebrate. We're grateful for all of you.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.