Wiggin, Kate Douglas (1856–1923)

views updated

Wiggin, Kate Douglas (1856–1923)

American kindergarten pioneer and author of children's books who is best known for writing Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm . Born Kate Douglas Smith on September 28, 1856, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died of bronchial pneumonia at a nursing home in Harrow, England, on August 24, 1923; daughter of Robert Noah Smith and Helen Elizabeth (Dyer) Smith; attended district school in Hollis, Maine, Gorham's (Maine) Female Seminary, Morison Academy in Baltimore, and Abbott Academy in Andover, Massachusetts; graduated from Emma J.C. Marwedel's Kindergarten Training School, Los Angeles, California, 1878; married Samuel Bradley Wiggin, on December 28, 1881 (died 1889); married George Christopher Riggs, on March 30, 1895.

Organized Silver Street Kindergarten (1879) and California Kindergarten Training School (1880).

Selected writings:

(children's stories) The Story of Patsy (1883), The Birds' Christmas Carol (1887), Timothy's Quest (1890), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), Mother Carey's Chickens (1911); (othermajor works) A Cathedral Courtship (1893), Penelope's English Experiences (1900), (with Nora Smith) Kindergarten Principles and Practice (1896); (autobiography) My Garden of Memory (1923); also edited with Nora Smith, a five-volume collection of fairy tales and fables: The Fairy Ring (1906), Magic Casements (1907), Tales of Laughter (1908), Tales of Wonder (1909), and The Talking Beasts (1911).

In 1878, Kate Douglas Wiggin and her family faced a desperate financial crisis. Her stepfather had died two years before, a tragedy which ultimately forced his widow to sell off substantial landholdings and other possessions to keep their home. Kate's younger sister, Nora Archibald Smith , having just graduated from Santa Barbara College, offered French and Spanish lessons to earn money. But Wiggin had little training that allowed her to do her part to keep the family afloat financially. She agreed to play the church organ for a local Episcopal Church for $15 a month, though she had never played this instrument before, only the piano. She also wrote a short story, "Half a Dozen Housekeepers," a work inspired by her own experiences as a student at a female seminary, and sent it to the St. Nicholas Magazine. Within a few months, a shocked Wiggin received a letter accepting the piece and a check for $150.

Four years later, she once again needed to raise some money, though this time not for her family. She hoped to add to the treasury of the Silver Street Kindergarten in San Francisco, California, which she had helped to organize two years before. So Wiggin turned to the "proven" approach of writing another story, this time a longer work entitled The Story of Patsy, a book based in part on her personal experiences with poor children who attended the kindergarten. This piece, printed privately in 1883, was then followed by a second book in 1887, The Birds' Christmas Carol. Genuinely surprised by the popularity of the latter work, Wiggin decided to seek a regular publisher for it. When Houghton Mifflin reissued the story in 1889, the book became hugely successful, and its author quickly emerged as one of the most popular writers of children's books in the United States.

The career of this celebrated writer thus began virtually by accident, though her background and love for literature had certainly prepared Wiggin to write books for children. Born Kate Douglas Smith in Philadelphia on September 28, 1856, she was the eldest of two daughters of Robert Noah Smith and Helen Dyer Smith , both of New England ancestry. Each side of Kate's family included prominent individuals. Her maternal grandfather Jones Dyer, 3rd, was a wealthy businessman who devoted most of his time to intellectual pursuits and extensive travel, and to educating his 14 children. Her paternal grandfather Noah Smith, Jr., served in the Maine legislature, including as speaker of the house. He was later secretary of the U.S. Senate and legislative clerk. Robert Smith was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and educated at Brown University. He received a law degree from Harvard and moved to Philadelphia in the mid-1850s to begin his career. There, Kate and her sister Nora were born.

While traveling on business in 1859, Robert Smith died suddenly. Though only three years old when her father passed away, Wiggin maintained that this brilliant, charismatic man—and captivating storyteller—had a significant influence on her life. Upon his death, Helen Smith moved the family to Portland, Maine, and three years later married Albion Bradbury, a distant cousin. Kate would spend the rest of her childhood in Hollis, Maine, with sister Nora and half-brother Philip. Her stepfather, a physician and Bowdoin graduate, conducted lessons for his children at home.

Smith, Nora Archibald (1859?–1934)

American educator . Born around 1859 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died in 1934; daughter of Robert Noah Smith and Helen Elizabeth (Dyer) Smith; sister of Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856–1923); graduated from Santa Barbara College.

With her sister Kate Douglas Wiggin , Nora Archibald Smith helped run the California Kindergarten Training School and Silver Street Kindergarten, then took over Silver Street in 1881 and the training school in 1884, following Kate's marriage. With Wiggin Nora also co-authored Kindergarten Principles and Practice (1896); and co-edited a five-volume collection of fairy tales and fables. In 1925, Nora wrote her sister's biography, Kate Douglas Wiggin as Her Sister Knew Her.

The Bradbury home near the Saco River provided an idyllic setting for Kate's upbringing. She raised various pets (usually named after characters from the books of Charles Dickens), played with frogs, swam, went sledding, and generally lived in a protected and pleasant environment. With her sister, with whom she shared a very close relationship, she did chores, took piano lessons, and attended community functions. "These are the years that count most," Wiggin noted later. "The first years in the stocking of our memories and the development of our imaginations, in the growing of all those long roots out of which springs real life, these do far more for us than all the rest."

In her autobiography, My Garden of Memory (1923), Wiggin portrayed her childhood as full of happiness. But one of Kate's earliest memories was of tragedy, for she describes the reaction of her community and family to news of the death of Abraham Lincoln. "Families ate little, work in the fields stopped, men gathered in yards and by roadsides and talked in low voices. My mother sat with folded hands and my father paced to and fro in the grass in front of the house." It was Wiggin's first encounter with this sort of public sorrow, but also her "first conscious recognition of the greatness of individual character." She was glad her recollection of the event was so clear.

Within the Smith-Bradbury family, a love of reading prevailed. Wiggin believed that books represented "the most inspiring influence in human life." Her mother read aloud to her children from the time they were born. The family's most beloved author was Dickens, and Kate's mother would read his works, changing her voice to portray the various characters. No author would influence Wiggin's writing more than Dickens. But as a girl, she also read Harper's Magazine and Littell's Living Age, the Bible, and the most popular great novels of the era.

After studying at home as a young child, Kate attended the local district school for a few terms. When she was 13, she went to Gorham's Female Seminary as a boarding student. Here she formed a close relationship with Latin teacher Mary Smith and won prizes for elocution, French, and English. Two years later, Kate attended the Morison Academy in Baltimore, then spent a few months at the Abbott Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Her formal education would end here, however, primarily because her stepfather moved the family to Santa Barbara, California, in 1873. Suffering from severe lung disease, he sought to recover his health on the West Coast.

Wiggin loved Maine but accepted the move to California as a great adventure and adjusted quickly to the new environment. But Albion Bradbury failed to regain his health. His death in 1876 plunged the family into difficult financial circumstances, a crisis they met with fortitude and even good humor. During these trying times, in the early summer of 1877, Kate met an activist woman who changed her life. Caroline M. Severance , a leader of the woman's club movement and proponent of the kindergarten method of education, visited Santa Barbara. Severance had embraced the views of the founder of the first kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel, who believed that childhood learning could be best promoted through games, music, exercise, art, and other active experiences. She convinced Kate to seek training as a kindergarten teacher.

After Severance left Santa Barbara, she helped found a kindergarten training school in Los Angeles, directed by Emma Marwedel . Severance asked Wiggin to come live with her and attend the training school. "You were born for this work," she told Kate, "and are particularly fitted to do pioneer service because you are musical, a good storyteller and fond of children." Though Helen Smith Bradbury had to mortgage their last property to scrape together the $100 for tuition, Kate went to Los Angeles to study. She completed the course in one year, then took charge of a small private kindergarten opened by Santa Barbara College. In 1878, the Public Kindergarten Society of San Francisco founded

the first free kindergarten on the West Coast. Named to run the school, Wiggin turned the Silver Street Kindergarten into a model institution.

In 1880, she created the California Kindergarten Training School, which was attached to the Silver Street institution. Her sister Nora, a graduate of Santa Barbara College then serving as a girls' department principal in Tucson, entered the first class, then took over Silver Street in 1881 when Kate married Samuel Bradley Wiggin. Samuel was a childhood friend who had moved from Boston to San Francisco to practice law. Kate continued to help run the training school until her move in 1884 to New York City, and she continued to raise monies for it even after that point.

The book … is the most faithful of all allies and, after human friendship, the chief solace as well as the most inspiring influence in human life.
—Kate Douglas Wiggin

The year 1889 was both an exciting and terrible one for Kate Douglas Wiggin. Houghton Mifflin published The Birds' Christmas Carol and The Story of Patsy, launching the career of one of the nation's most successful authors of children's books. But while visiting the Silver Street school for commencement, Kate learned that Samuel Wiggin had died suddenly back East. Distraught and tired, Kate went back to Maine, to the family home in Hollis, where she mourned the loss of her husband, and tried to rest. She would retain the pen name "Kate Wiggin" for the rest of her life, though she did remarry.

While Kate rested, her fame as a writer spread quickly. The Story of Patsy and The Birds' Christmas Carol are highly sentimental tales where the protagonists—both young, fragile children—die. Patsy is the victim of an abusive father, who had thrown him down the stairs when he was a baby. This violence leaves Patsy badly deformed, a fate the young boy accepts without bitterness. In fact, his presence brightens the lives of those he touches, especially the narrator of the story, his kindergarten teacher. Like many of Wiggin's books, Patsy contains stereotyped characters, moral lessons, and healthy doses of both heart-rending sadness and humor. The Birds' Christmas Carol followed a similar formula. In her autobiography, My Garden of Memory, Wiggin herself describes the book that became her first big success:

It was the simplest of all simple tales: the record of a lame child's life—a child born on Christmas day and named Carol. The [period] in which I wrote [was] full of literary Herods who put to death all the young children in their vicinity. I was no exception with my fragile little heroine. What saved me was a rudimentary sense of humor.

Actually, it was this humor which "saved" most of Kate Wiggin's books; or to put it more accurately, it is what made them so popular.

Translated ultimately into French, German, Swedish, Japanese, and other languages, The Birds' Christmas Carol long remained a staple offering in the body of children's literature, selling over a million copies. Like many of Wiggin's stories, it remains in print. Its initial success allowed Kate Wiggin to become a full-time author and to travel extensively in Europe. Her first trips abroad in the 1890s led to the publication of three popular books for adults, A Cathedral Courtship (1893), Penelope's Progress (1898), and Penelope's English Experiences (1900). Also, on her way to England in 1894, she met an American linen importer, George Christopher Riggs. Before the ship had reached port, George had proposed. Kate Wiggin and George Riggs married in All Souls Church in New York City on March 30, 1895.

By this point, Wiggin had become one of the leading authors of children's books in the United States. Timothy's Quest (1890), the story of two orphans seeking a home, became almost as popular as The Birds' Christmas Carol, and represents the maturation of Wiggin as a writer. Like many of her works, it owes its theme and plot to Dickens, but the rural Maine setting renders this work special. It was the first time that Wiggin had set a story in the region she knew best and based her characters on Maine's unique culture. The characters were stern and stoic, but also compassionate and honorable despite their outward coldness. Kate Wiggin generally wrote about subjects with which she had firsthand experience, and she knew rural Maine and its people better than anything. Thus it is not surprising that her best works were located there. The success of Timothy's Quest set the stage for her later focus on Maine settings.

After marrying George Riggs, Kate settled into a life that changed little for the next 20 years. George and Kate would spend their summers at their Hollis home, Quillcote, winters in New York City, and springs in Europe (often in England). Kate did suffer from some bouts of ill health, and often spent short stints convalescing in hospitals and sanitariums. But she considered this more of a nuisance than a serious problem and continued to write prolifically before World War I. Much of this work was completed during the peaceful summer months she remained at Quillcote, the summer home in Hollis she purchased in the mid-1890s.

It is a bit ironic, however, that Kate Wiggin's most classic work, though set in Maine, was not written at Quillcote. Suffering from poor health in late 1903, she spent some time at a hospital in New York, and two sanitariums—in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and Dansville, New York. There, she penned Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, her most beloved creation. Set in Hollis ("Riverboro"), the book told the story of "the nicest child in American literature," as Thomas Bailey Aldrich described Rebecca. Though sometimes dismissed by modern critics as the epitome of the overly sentimental nature of the children's literature of the era, Rebecca is a book that deserves recognition as a genuine classic.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm tells the tale of Rebecca Rowena Randall, a fatherless ten-year-old who goes to live with two maiden aunts in Riverboro. As the story opens, the young girl is the sole passenger on a stagecoach traveling country roads in Maine, recalling her past life at Sunnybrook Farm to driver Jeremiah Cobb. Her father, whose free-spirited ways Rebecca has inherited, had died, leaving wife Aurelia to look after seven small children. Rebecca had lightened the burden on her mother by going to live with aunts Miranda and Jane.

When she gets to Riverboro, there is immediate conflict between the domineering, materialistic, and stern Aunt Miranda and the carefree, creative, and optimistic child (Aunt Jane is more pleasant but dominated by her sister). Like Kate Wiggin, Rebecca loves the natural beauty of pastoral settings, romantic literature, and helping people. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is the story of hard times, cruel fate, and duty—but it also glorifies fundamental decency and imagination. Rebecca ultimately wins over Aunt Miranda, acquires a useful education, helps her family financially and spiritually, and eventually inherits the house in Riverboro when Miranda dies. Her life is a triumph of goodness.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm earned great praise when it appeared. Mark Twain called it "that beautiful book, beautiful and moving and satisfying," while other prominent literary figures also expressed their appreciation. To Mary Mapes Dodge , "Rebecca is delightful in every sense, a masterpiece of simple but vivid dramatization." The story lent itself to the stage, and Wiggin developed a play which opened in New York in 1910 and enjoyed a long run in the U.S. and Europe. As motion pictures were fast becoming the newest rage in American popular culture, Rebecca proved a natural choice for a film production. Mary Pickford portrayed Rebecca in the first screen version, while Shirley Temple (Black) played Rebecca in a 1937 movie.

In subsequent years, Wiggin adapted other stories to the stage, including the work that sold more copies than any other book other than Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Birds' Christmas Carol, Mother Carey's Chickens. Published in serial form beginning in 1909, and by Houghton Mifflin in 1911, the story depicts the struggles of a fatherless family who triumph over bad luck and poverty. Set in Maine, it was popular among children for many decades, though seldom read today. Between 1906 and 1911, Kate and her sister Nora Archibald Smith also compiled and edited The Library of Fairy Literature, a five-volume collection of fables and fairy tales.

World War I interrupted Kate's pattern of traveling abroad. She also wrote little during the period, no doubt because her moral tales seemed incongruous with the carnage in Europe. After the war, she wrote a number of short stories and her autobiography, My Garden of Memory. With her health failing, she put most of her energy into

the autobiography between 1919 and the spring of 1923. She was almost finished when she sailed for England with husband George in April of that year. Ill during the voyage, she feared she would not complete the book. But her health recovered enough to send the final chapters to her sister by early August. She had entered a nursing home at Harrow upon her arrival in Britain, and it was in this institution that Kate Wiggin died of bronchial pneumonia on August 24.

The beloved author and kindergarten pioneer had requested that her body be cremated, and the ashes taken home to Hollis, Maine. George Riggs followed her wishes by returning to Quillcote with Kate's remains. After a memorial service, he scattered her ashes on the Saco River. Following her death, her stories remained immensely popular for another two generations. When Edna Boutwell observed that "thousands of children found the world a better place because Kate Douglas Wiggin lived in it," she underestimated Wiggin's influence—the numbers of children were in the millions. If her stories are not read with the frequency of past years, many of her children's books are still in print, and still entertaining and instructing young people. If the name of Kate Wiggin is no longer known to most Americans, the author's legacy remains very tangible in the holdings of virtually every library in the country. Modern readers would do well to make their way to the area in the stacks where Wiggin's books still await new readers.