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Richards Laura Elizabeth
(1850—1943)
Books for children
Laura Elizabeth Richards was born February 27, 1850, at 74 Mount Vernon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, to distinguished parents and a home life that would early introduce her to the delights of language and fine arts as well as to a range of people and experiences. Her father, Samuel Gridley Howe, "a restless social reformer . . . [who] later gain[ed] fame as an abolitionist," was also "the practical founder ... of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind" in 1832. Richards's mother, the poet Julia Ward Howe, is perhaps best known as the author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Laura was the youngest of four children: Julia, Florence (named for her godmother, Florence Nightingale), and Henry. A fifth child, Maud, was born a few years later, and a sixth, Sam, (who died of diptheria at age three), several years after.
When still quite young, Richards was introduced to languages through her mother's love of music. Richards grew up surrounded by books.
About 1863, the family moved to 19 Boylston Place, next door to the Richards family, whose youngest son, Henry, would later become Laura's husband. Although she had seen Henry at dancing school, the pair had not actually spoken; the situation changed some time after the move. In the winter of 1869, she became engaged to Henry Richards, by then a Harvard classmate of her brother's. They were married on June 17, 1871, the year he graduated from Harvard.
After their sojourn in Europe, the Richards returned to Green Peace, living there with Laura's parents and younger sister. Children and books came quickly. As Richards explained,
Four years saw the birth of the first three of my seven children, Alice, Rosalind, and Henry . . . I had always rhymed easily; now, with the coming of the babies, and the consequent weeks and months of quite, came a prodigious welling up of rhymes, mostly bringing their tunes ... with them. I wrote, and sang, and wrote, and could not stop. The first baby was plump and placid, with a broad, smooth back which made an excellent writing desk. She lay on her front, across my lap; I wrote on her back, the writing pad quite as steady as the writing of jingles required.
A number of those early rhymes, with illustrations by John Ames Mitchell, were then published in St. Nicholas.
Richards's first book, Five Little Mice in a Mouse Trap was published in 1880, as was The Little Tyrant; two additional titles, Our Baby's Favorite and Sketches and Scraps (the latter illustrated by her husband), appeared the following year. The same decade saw additional publications, including retellings of folktales such as Beauty and the Beast and Hop o' My Thumb (both 1886), and both volumes about Toto (The Joyous Story of Toto [1885] and Toto's Merry Winter [1887]). 1889 produced Queen Hildegarde, which Richards described as "my first stumbling essay in books for girls".
The 1890s brought more girls books, including Captain January, perhaps now best known from the 1936 Shirley Temple movie. She also published several interrelated stories: Melody (1893), Marie (1894), Bethsada Pool (1895), Rosin the Beau (1898). During the 1890s, Richards also added more volumes to the Hildegarde series.
She concluded the series with Hildegarde's Harvest in 1897, the same year she began the Margaret series, which continued into the next decade. Three Margarets, the initial volume, was, according to one reviewer, "conceived on a new plan. The Margarets are three cousins of the same name, -- one from the East, one from a ranch in the West, and one from a Cuban plantation, -- who come together for a summer's visit to an uncle whom they have never seen." Noting that "There is here an opportunity for contrast in character, which Mrs. Richards skillfully, but somewhat melodramatically, improves," the reviewer concluded that Three Margarets was "on the whole a charming little story, with a good deal of human nature in it" but that it lacked "the beauty" of Richards's Captain January. In 1904, the Hildegarde and Margaret series were linked with the publication of The Merryweathers, which incorporated characters from both series. Although the two series are little known now (and Richards says little of them in her autobiography beyond the comments above and a mention that the Richards' Camp Merryweather was named after the book, not the reverse), both series were popular in their time and are fondly remembered by several early historians of children's literature.
While Richards was turning out books, her husband's family was strugging with the paper mill and the effects of technological change. As she explained, "By 1884 it became evident that if the Richards Paper Company were to live, its nature and its habitat must be changed. A pulp mill was built on the Kennebec at South Gardiner . . . and here the new industry -- new in this country; our mill being the first to introduce it -- was vigorously carried on. Sulphite pulp took the place of rags; instead of the long, echoing sheds, and the vats and 'rolls,' came 'digesters,' huge iron containers in which the spruce logs, carefully selected, were 'cooked' to pulp". Disaster struck in 1893, when "on a winter's night, the pulp mill burned to the ground". Although it was rebuilt, "the paper-making world [was] changing . . . like the shifts of a kaleidoscope, the great combination companies relentlessly strangling the small ones", until, in 1900, the mill finally closed.
After some thought, the Richards family considered opening a small private school. Asked his advice, their friend, Reverend Endicott Peabody of Groton School, instead suggested a camp for boys. Henry remembered "a spot that greatly took his fancy; a strip of forest bordering on Belgrade Great Pond", which the owner was persuaded to sell. Camp Merryweather (so named because in the Hildegarde and Margaret books, the Merryweather family spent their summers "at a Camp somewhat resembling [the one] at Cobbossee") opened 30 June 1900, and was still in operation 30 years later when Richards wrote her autobiography.
Richards was also active in designing activities for youth and in community affairs in Gardiner. In 1886, she created the Howe Club (named for her father), for her ten-year-old son Hal and his friends. The group met for ninety minutes on Saturday evenings. As Richards described it
I read to them -- first a poem, then Scott or Dickens for half the time; then there were apples -- or peanuts -- and games in many varieties, all with the pill of Information heavily sugar-coated. To give the boys something that school in its crowded curriculum could not give; to enlarge first their vocabulary and then their horizon; to show them the fair face of poetry; first and last to give them a good time; this was my ardent desire.
The Howe Club lasted for approximately 25 years. Additionally, Richards was involved in founding the Ten Times One Club (afterschool activities for children) and the Good Comrades Club (for young girls in the workforce). Her interest in lifelong education led to her involvement with the History Class (later the Current Events club); this was an adult study group, where she and her husband "studied with ardor; wrote our papers with passion and read them . . . before a neighborly, friendly audience" . In 1895, she helped found the Women's Philanthropic Union (designed to correlate the activities of various women's organizations to avoid duplication of effort) and served as its president until 1921. She and her husband also were two of the founders of the Gardiner Library Association and participated in assorted fundraising activities for a library building (which her husband designed).
In the twentieth century, Richards continued to write children's stories and verse, including the two-volume Honor Bright series (Honor Bright: A Story for Girls [1920] and Honor Bright's New Adventure [1925]), and an unsuccessful sequel to Captain January (Star Bright [1927]). Her best-known collection of verse was Tirra Lirra: New Rhymes and Old from 1932 (reissued in 1955 with a preface by May Hill Arbuthot), which incorporated early verses, many of which had been published in children's magazines, along with new material. During this period, Richards also wrote biographies, some of family members or friends, including Florence Nightingale: Angel of the Crimea (1909), Two Noble Lives: Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe (1911), and Laura Bridgman: The Story of an Opened Door (1928). Richards and her sister Maud Howe Elliott co-authored Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (1915), for which they received the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1917. Her final book, What Shall the Children Read, was published in 1939; the following year, the Gardiner Public Library Association issued Laura E. Richards and Gardiner, a compilation of Richards' poems and articles which had been previously published in local newspapers.
Bequia, 2001, Star with Captain January
Bequia, 2001, Star with Elisa Croft
Bequia, 2001, Star and stork
Bequia, 2001, Star in class
Bequia, 2001, Star with Capt. January and Capt. Nazro
Bequia, 2001, Star in a boat
Bequia, 2001, Star with Captain January
Bequia, 2001, Star and Sheriff
Bequia, 2001, Star with baby
Bequia, 2001, Star wits Sailor
Bequia, 2001, Star with Capt. January and Capt. Nazro
Sierra Leone, 1996, The Queen the Orkney islands
