Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches

My dissertation recovers the abolitionist might of the first nursing narrative of the U.S. Civil War, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863), which was published as a series of letters in Boston’s Commonwealth newspaper (1862-1896) in summer 1863 before its collection in a volume published by journalist James Redpath in fall 1863. As I uncover the abolitionist context of the original Sketches, I employ Alcott’s letters, the most enduring literary work to emerge from the pages of the Commonwealth, as an opportunity to examine the paper’s first year. Using practices of periodicals studies, I scrutinize the conditions and context in which the paper was produced in order to assess its goals, methods, and audience. I apply the same methods in my assessment of Hospital Sketches, tracing the reception of the letters in press reviews. I examine the founding of the Commonwealth in September 1862 just before the announcement of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22 and discuss its principled editors Moncure D. Conway and Franklin B. Sanborn along with its funder George Luther Stearns. Exploring their connection to John Brown’s militant abolitionism in the 1850s, I consider the paper’s aim to transform the war to preserve the union into a conflict against slavery after July 1862’s Second Confiscation Act and the Militia Act suggested the possibility. Additionally, I probe the way the Commonwealth initially defined itself as fully engaged in wartime political strategy, positioning itself against Boston’s powerhouse abolitionist newspaper and another Stearns-funded venture, The Liberator.
Treating Alcott’s contributions during the weekly’s first year as a body of work that deserves comprehensive evaluation, I discuss her January 1863 short story “M.L.” alongside her series “Letters from the Mountains” and poem “Busy Bessie, At Her Spinning Wheel,” both published in fall 1863, noting Alcott’s use of the picturesque and travel sketches in her Commonwealth publications. I then discuss Hospital Sketches as it appeared in the weekly and in its collected edition, arguing that the two chapters Alcott added for the august compilation encourage an appraisal of the text as an abolitionist travel sketch. Finally, I track the development of the Sketches during the 1860s, concluding with their illustration by Alcott’s friend Elizabeth Greene in 1869’s Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories.
My dissertation shows Alcott exercising her literary dexterity by adapting Hospital Sketches for different audiences when she found success as a professional writer. In examining the Commonwealth, I also depict the context in which readers originally encountered her hospital drama and trace responses to it through press reviews and advertisements. By tying Hospital Sketches to the paper’s abolitionism, I not only investigate the use of literature to accelerate social reforms, but I also situate literary output as a primary strategy of the mid-war abolitionist effort. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, literature could be deployed rhetorically to imagine reconstructive possibility as the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation flourished.