Today’s post concerns a nineteenth century American novel that few non-specialists will have heard of. If it is not great literature, it is a phenomenally useful (and under-used) resource for the country’s religious history in that era, for Protestant denominations in general, but specifically for my own Episcopal Church. More important, discussing it really gets to the question of how we write that history, moving away from the role of great preachers and revivalists to studying the role of ordinary religious experience, of aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities, of lived religion.
The book in question is Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives, published in 1878 by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896: hereafter in this post, HBS). I have described it as a classic novel, and I think it deserves that label, but it is also a lost or forgotten classic. How obscure is it these days? It does not even have its own Wikipedia page.
I will focus today on the role of Christmas, which is so absolutely central to the book, and next time I will speak more generally about the religious environment, and the book’s lessons for historians. But my point today is what a wonderful seasonal reading it makes for an Episcopalian, or indeed for anyone who is liturgically-oriented. One long section in particular – quoted below as “The Night Before Christmas” – is very evocative. Just imagine a world that has no idea whatever of Christmas, has really never heard of the idea, and then think of the impact of witnessing all the celebrations and ceremonial on a child’s mind. What could that have been like? It would be life-changing, and indeed might drive a full religious conversion.
The Early Days of an “Odd Little Girl”
Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the greatest literary celebrities of her time, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was by far the largest American best-seller of the whole century, but she had some thirty lesser titles to her credit. For present purposes, her family background is critical. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, she was the daughter of celebrity Congregationalist preacher Lyman Beecher, who served the church in that community from 1810 through 1826. This placed her at the center of a whole clan of hyperactive siblings and relatives who were central to religious life and to reform movements, notably abolitionism. Her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, was a prominent Biblical scholar who taught at the nation’s leading seminaries and divinity schools.
Standing as she did at the heart of the Calvinist/Congregationalist elite, it was difficult for HBS to come out of the closet with her true religious identity, which was Episcopalian. In fact, she could not really do this until her father died in 1863, and her husband retired from teaching in 1864. Poganuc People was thus written at a time when she was fully and decisively “out” as an Episcopalian.
If Poganuc People is in no sense an autobiography, the personal element is unavoidable. As she wrote when she was originally planning the project, “It will be my own remembrances of life & times. I have thought of calling it Early Days of an odd little girl— … I have so often made my family laugh over these sketches that they insist that I shall write them.” The book thus tells the story of “Dolly,” a highly intelligent girl who is the daughter of the distinguished Calvinist minister, Parson Cushing, in the small town of Poganuc, which looks uncommonly like Litchfield c.1820. Although we would call his church Congregationalist, the author remarks that this denomination was “as it was then called by the common people, Presbyterianism” which modern readers will find willfully confusing. It is accurate, however, as the two churches at the time operated under a plan of union. (The famous American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), created in 1810, was a joint creation of Congregationalists and Presbyterians). Lyman Beecher himself – the original for Parson Cushing – served both churches during his ministry.
Poganuc People
Like HBS, Dolly is born around 1811, and the book tells her story until her move to Boston as a young woman. Most of the book is a loving recreation of small town New England in that era, roughly the 1820s, focusing on the cycles of the agricultural year, and the town’s festivals and celebrations, above all the Fourth of July. As Edmund Wilson wrote, the book “is full of solidly remembered scenes – of candlemakings, quiltings, and apple bees, chestnuttings and huckleberryings: the whole life of a country parsonage, with the children playing at town meetings or preaching and singing hymns, the minister providing himself with Latin and Greek quotations to be used in next Sunday’s sermon, while his wife packs the doughnuts for a picnic; with the trumpet-blossomed squash vines in the garden, the spinning wheels and corn in the garret, the cider barrels and rats in the cellar.” Although I enjoy the book greatly, I do get seriously irritated by the extensive passages in which HBS tries to record the dialect of her neighbors in some kind of phonetic rendering, which almost requires a translation app in its own right. It gets wearing.
Given her family background, religious themes naturally feature very strongly throughout the book. Parson Cushing is generous and highly educated, and is devoted to promoting his daughter’s education. At the same time, he has no sympathy for some of the foolish ways that are creeping into the once-homogeneous community of faithful Puritan believers. As I will explain next time, these were the years when the Congregationalists were losing their official hold on Connecticut public life.
Moreover, a strange new factor was appearing in the form of a very small and marginal Episcopal presence, which initially was associated with a couple of wealthy families, who build a church. “It was a small, insignificant building compared with the great square three-decker of a meeting-house which occupied conspicuously the green in Poganuc Center.” Even so, that new church gradually draws in several local people who for various reasons are disaffected with the Calvinist establishment. A row with a deacon over a load of potatoes drives one Calvinist believer from his old church to a new Episcopal loyalty. The town thus has both Presbyterians and ‘Piscopals. (Litchfield’s historic Episcopal church traces its post-revolutionary history to a building completed in 1812, which fits the story neatly).
Christmas in Poganuc
The young Dolly herself is increasingly drawn to that upstart church, or more specifically, to one aspect of its life, which is the Christmas celebrations, which are utterly different from anything known elsewhere in the region. For HBS, Christmas is the gateway drug that would one day lead her into full-blown Episcopalianism. The book in fact originated as a short Christmas work, but was nursed into a full-fledged novel to meet the needs of publishers in quest of a more substantial serial.
Poganuc People begins with the family servant Nabby Higgins explaining to an intrigued Dolly about the forthcoming events:
“Well, you see,” said Nabby, “to-morrow’s Christmas; and they’ve been dressin’ the church with ground pine and spruce boughs, and made it just as beautiful as can be, and they’re goin’ to have a great gold star over the chancel. General Lewis sent clear to Boston to get the things to make it of, and Miss Ida Lewis she made it; and to-night they’re going to ‘luminate. They put a candle in every single pane of glass in that ‘air church, and it’ll be all just as light as day. When they get ’em all lighted up you can see that ‘air church clear down to North Poganuc.”
Now this sentence was a perfect labyrinth of mystery to Dolly; for she did not know what Christmas was, she did not know what the chancel was, she never saw anything dressed with pine, and she was wholly in the dark what it was all about; and yet her bosom heaved, her breath grew short, her color came and went, and she trembled with excitement. Something bright, beautiful, glorious, must be coming into her life, and oh, if she could only see it!
HBS describes the church in loving detail:
The little edifice at Poganuc had been trimmed and arranged with taste and skill. For that matter, it would seem as if the wild woods of New England were filled with garlands and decorations already made and only waiting to be used in this graceful service. Under the tall spruces the ground was all ruffled with the pretty wreaths of ground-pine; the arbor vitæ, the spruce, the cedar and juniper, with their balsamic breath, filled the aisles with a spicy fragrance. It was a cheaply built little church, in gothic forms, with pointed windows and an arch over the chancel; and every arch was wreathed with green, and above the chancel glittered a great gold star, manufactured by Miss Ida Lewis out of pasteboard and gilt paper ordered in Boston. It was not gold, but it glittered, and the people that looked on it were not _blasé_, as everybody in our days is, with sight seeing. The innocent rustic life of Poganuc had no pageants, no sights, no shows, except the eternal blazonry of nature; and therefore the people were prepared to be dazzled and delighted with a star cut out of gilt paper. There was bustling activity of boys and men in lighting the windows, and a general rush of the populace to get the best seats.
Dr. Cushing Strikes Back
Living as we do in an age when virtually all churches at least make some nod to Christmas symbolism – to trees and sleighs – it is almost impossible to convey the total ignorance of such things in New England societies of this era, and Dr. Cushing knows scarcely more about the upcoming events than his daughter. For him, a Christmas celebration is not actively Satanic, but it is utterly foolish, and the vestige of silly pagan revelries. As he explains at length to his daughter, we do not even know the date of Christ’s birth, and an extensive study of Patristic literature confirms his theory of the pagan origins of that festivity:
He had heard incidentally that they were dressing the church with pines and going to have a Christmas service, but he only murmured something about tolerabiles ineptiæ [Bearable absurdities] to the officious deacon who had called his attention to the fact. The remark, being in Latin, impressed the Deacon with a sense of profound and hidden wisdom. The people of Poganuc Center paid a man a salary for knowing more than they did, and they liked to have a scrap of Latin now and then to remind them of this fact.
It would be absolutely wrong even to acknowledge December 25 as anything special, and children who fail to attend school on that day are duly punished for their absence. He preaches a brilliant and erudite sermon on the evil foolishness of this Christmas custom, and his hearers urge him to publish it. The sermon has its impact:
Old ladies in their tea-drinkings talked about the danger of making a righteousness of forms and rites and ceremonies, and seemed of opinion that the proceedings at the Episcopal church, however attractive, were only an insidious putting forth of one paw of the Scarlet Beast of Rome, and that if not vigorously opposed the whole quadruped, tooth and claw, would yet be upon their backs.
The real-life Lyman Beecher was a devout anti-Papist, author of a florid Plea For The West (1835) that became holy writ for America’s flourishing anti-Catholic politics.
Personally, however, the Parson is a kind father:
He rose up early, however, and proceeded to buy a sugar dog at the store of Lucius Jenks, and when Dolly came down to breakfast he called her to him and presented it, saying as he kissed her, “Papa gives you this, not because it is Christmas, but because he loves his little Dolly.”
“But _isn’t_ it Christmas?” asked Dolly, with a puzzled air.
“No, child; nobody knows when Christ was born, and there is nothing in the Bible to tell us _when_ to keep Christmas.”
A dutiful daughter, she totally accepts his explanation, along with the chocolate dog. But like many others, she finds herself ever more seduced by what is happening in that Episcopal church, although she cannot explain its deep appeal to her soul. Even in this tiny church, ignored and condemned by her family and friends, she sees something that is quite wonderful, and which speaks to a spirituality that she has never before encountered. It is no longer the religious life that she sees in the Calvinist church, with its exclusive emphasis on the cerebral and intellectual to the denial of the material and sacramental. What she sees in the Christmas celebrations in the small Episcopal church is nothing less than the beauty of holiness, and it supplies memories that will last throughout her life.
The Night Before Christmas
In this short post, I have to resist the temptation to quote extensively, but it is tough because the material is so rich. That Episcopal Christmas occupies the first quarter or so of the book – roughly, the Christmas story that HBS originally contemplated before it expanded. I will ration myself to one favorite passage, when a sleepless Dolly is so obsessed with the illuminated church nearby that she rises from bed to look at it from afar,. She then decides that it would do no harm actually to wander over the short distance and see it.
There it was, to be sure–the little church with its sharp-pointed windows every pane of which was sending streams of light across the glittering snow. There was a crowd around the door, and men and boys looking in at the windows. Dolly’s soul was fired. But the elm-boughs a little obstructed her vision; she thought she would go down and look at it from the yard. So down stairs she ran, but as she opened the door the sound of the chant rolled out into the darkness with a sweet and solemn sound:
“_Glory be to God on high; and on earth peace, good will towards men._”
Dolly’s soul was all aglow–her nerves tingled and vibrated; she thought of the bells ringing in the celestial city; she could no longer contain herself, but faster and faster the little hooded form scudded across the snowy plain and pushed in among the dark cluster of spectators at the door. All made way for the child, and in a moment, whether in the body or out she could not tell, Dolly was sitting in a little nook under a bower of spruce, gazing at the star and listening to the voices:
“_We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we glorify Thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory, O Lord God, Heavenly King, God, the Father Almighty._”
Her heart throbbed and beat; she trembled with a strange happiness and sat as one entranced till the music was over. Then came reading, the rustle and murmur of people kneeling, and then they all rose and there was the solemn buzz of voices repeating the Creed with a curious lulling sound to her ear. There was old Mr. Danforth with his spectacles on, reading with a pompous tone, as if to witness a good confession for the church; and there was Squire Lewis and old Ma’am Lewis; and there was one place where they all bowed their heads and all the ladies made courtesies–all of which entertained her mightily. When the sermon began Dolly got fast asleep and slept as quietly as a pet lamb in a meadow, lying in a little warm roll back under the shadows of the spruces.
She is amicably woken by her dog.
This passage contains so many references that would be easy to miss. “The bells ringing in the celestial city” quotes Pilgrim’s Progress. Do especially note the line about “whether in the body or out she could not tell,” which is a straight reference to St. Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12.2. How incredibly bold it was at this time to compare that tremendous ecstatic experience, that apostolic vision, with what happens to this “odd little girl” in a Connecticut church in 1820!
Dolly will not easily forget her experience, and above all, the music:
The child had a vibrating, musical organization, and the sway and rush of the chanting still sounded in her ears and reminded her of that wonderful story in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” where the gate of the celestial city swung open, and there were voices that sung, “Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him who sitteth on the throne.” And then that wonderful star, that shone just as if it were a real star–how could it be! For Miss Ida Lewis, being a young lady of native artistic genius, had cut a little hole in the center of her gilt paper star, behind which was placed a candle, so that it gave real light, in a way most astonishing to untaught eyes. In Dolly’s simple view it verged on the supernatural–perhaps it was _the_ very real star read about in the gospel story. Why not?
At this point, you are undoubtedly seeking the answer to a question, namely, is this a genuine memory of an actual experience, or is it wholly fictional? Is HBS reporting an adventure that she actually undertook, as the “odd little girl”? Nothing in her extensive writing offers any firm guidance as to this point. Clearly, it is always tempting to assume that any author is reporting something that actually occurred, and writers are far more creative, and subtler, than this approach might suggest. We should never identify the author with her characters. Having said this, I am very tempted to believe that much in the account might well have some basis in reality – the curiosity about the Christmas decorations, hearing the music and seeing the illuminations, the conversations with her father, and who knows what else? And as we will see, the Christmas theme really seems to have played a major part in HBS’s later spiritual life.
So did young Harriet actually run away to witness the Christmas Eve services? I don’t know for certain, but I strongly suspect that the account is autobiographical. Call me a Romantic.
Being In A Great Army – One Of A Great Host
I don’t think this calls for a spoiler alert, but when the fictional Dolly reaches adulthood she goes to stay with her aunt in Boston, and being a fashionable lady, that aunt is an Episcopalian. (The real life Harriet also had a doggedly Episcopal aunt). This is wonderful news for Dolly, who recalls that amazing childhood experience as she writes to her parents:
This Christmas puts me in mind of the time years ago when they dressed the little church in Poganuc, and I ran away, over to the church, and got asleep under a great cedar-bush, listening to the Christmas music. It affected me then just as it has done now. Is it not beautiful to think we are singing words that Christians have been singing for more than a thousand years! It gives you the feeling of being in a great army–one of a great host; and for a poor little insignificant thing like me it is a joyful feeling.
Is there a better statement of the appeal of tradition within a liturgical service? She continues,
You ought to see how delighted Aunt Deborah is that I take so kindly to the prayer-book and the service. She gives me little approving nods now and then, and taps me on the shoulder in a patronizing way and says there is good blood in my veins, for all I was brought up a Presbyterian!
And she concludes:
But it is past midnight and I must not sit up writing any longer. Dear parents, I wish you a happy Christmas!
And there is a happy ending in terms of family relationships. As her father writes, magnanimously,
Of course, while with them you will attend the services of the Episcopal Church; for that you have my cordial consent and willingness. The liturgy of the church is full of devout feelings, and the Thirty-nine Articles (with some few slight exceptions) are a very excellent statement of truth. In adopting the spirit and language of the prayers in the service you cannot go amiss; very excellent Christians have been nourished and brought up upon them.
The Author as Episcopalian
As I said, family pressures meant that HBS had to be diplomatic about her Episcopal sympathies, although she went so far in 1854 as to have bought a Christmas tree (!) Through the 1850s, she invokes that dreaded C-word ever more frequently in her correspondence, and in 1859, she wrote from Florence to “My dear Husband,—I wish you all a Merry Christmas, hoping to spend the next one with you.”
In The Minister’s Wooing, from 1859, she describes preparations for a wedding, and remarks in passing,
Well, you see, come to get all things together that were to be done, we concluded to put off the wedding till Tuesday; and Madame de Frontignac she would dress the best room for it herself, and she spent nobody knows what time in going round and getting evergreens, and making wreaths, and putting up green boughs over the pictures, so that the room looked just like the Episcopal Church at Christmas.
When Episcopal historian Robert Prichard quotes this passage, he aptly remarks that all her readers would have known what she meant by that: that was the sort of thing the Episcopal Church was famous for. Do note that once again, it is the Christmas decorations that so dominate the author’s impressions of that church.
This book, The Minister’s Wooing, plainly shows her growing distaste for Calvinism, and its theology of conversion. Whether or not we can legitimately connect this to her Episcopal leanings, she shows here a strong preference for a more feminized or egalitarian spirituality, in contrast to the hard edged masculine character of the Calvinist deity. She was irresistibly drawn to “the balm of devotional liturgy and the cool shadowy indefiniteness of more æsthetic forms of worship.” And what a lovely description that is! Sign me up.
HBS discusses her early theological roots in other novels, including The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862) and Oldtown Folks (1869), but Poganuc People brings out that Episcopal theme powerfully and centrally. Her Episcopal identity became more overt, as she formally joined the church, in solidarity with her two daughters, Hattie and Eliza, who had preceded her in 1862. As she wrote on that occasion, “In my heart and belief I am an Episcopalian – and if ever I leave this position here shall fully unite with that church whither I should be happy to have all my children go.” The particular congregation she joined was St. John’s in Hartford.
Her older sister, Catharine Beecher, a noted educational reformer, also joined the church around this time. Explaining that decision, Catharine wrote, “I have entered the Episcopal church, not as a controversialist, but as an educator, seeking for a measure of liberty I can find no where else.”
Looking Backward From Florida
With her husband, in 1867 HBS moved to Mandarin, Florida, partly to seek a winter home, but also with a goal of working for the improvement of local freed Black people. Intentionally or not, her writings did much to encourage tourism and investment in their new state. As she wrote,
The Episcopal Church is, however, undertaking, under direction of the future Bishop of Florida, a wide-embracing scheme of Christian activity for the whole State. In this work I desire to be associated, and my plan is to locate at some salient point on the St. John’s River, where I can form the nucleus of a Christian neighborhood, whose influence shall be felt far beyond its own limits.
On a trivia point, the bishop referred to here was John Freeman Young, whose claim to lasting fame was as the English translator of the hymn Silent Night.
In 1867, she wrote to her brother Charles Beecher to lure him to join the church, and to build the grand project:
I am now in correspondence with the Bishop of Florida, with a view to establishing a line of churches along the St. John’s River, and if I settle at Mandarin, it will be one of my stations. Will you consent to enter the Episcopal Church and be our clergyman? You are just the man we want.
Charles did not accept the invitation to convert, but he did move to Florida to work with Freedmen under the Reconstruction regime.
HBS’s letter to Charles then continued with praise of the Episcopal Church that reads sadly to a modern audience:
If my tasks and feelings did not incline me toward the Church, I should still choose it as the best system for training immature minds such as those of our Negroes. The system was composed with reference to the wants of the laboring class of England, at a time when they were as ignorant as our Negroes now are.
Writing Poganuc People
In 1877, HBS published the devotional anthology Footsteps of the Master, a collection of hymns, poems and meditations, which was very high church Anglican indeed both in contents and organization. The book was structured according to the liturgical year – Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and so on – and the hymn-writers and poets that she used included such distinguished Anglicans as John Keble and J. M. Neale, as well as the Catholics Frederick Faber and even Ignatius Loyola. That clearly suggests where she stood on the ecclesiastical spectrum when she turned her attention to writing Poganuc People, and how highly she valued such great feasts as Christmas.
It was in Florida that she wrote Poganuc People, which became a solid late career success. As her son remarks, this became “that series of delightful reminiscences of the New England life of nearly a century ago, that has proved so fascinating to many thousands of readers.” As HBS explained,
I am again entangled in writing a serial, a thing I never mean to do again, but the story, begun for a mere Christmas brochure, grew so under my hands that I thought I might as well fill it out and make a book of it. It is the last thing of the kind I ever expect to do. In it I condense my recollections of a bygone era, that in which I was brought up, the ways and manners of which are now as nearly obsolete as the Old England of Dickens’s stories is.
Or to quote Edmund Wilson, “At last, at the very end, Mrs. Stowe writes an excellent book – possibly her best novel, as a novel, since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
In the 1880s, HBS’s family organized the Episcopal Church of Our Savior, where long after her death, in 1916, Louis Comfort Tiffany installed a fine window to commemorate the faithful couple. If HBS is not exactly canonized in the modern-day Episcopal church, she is now commemorated on July 1 as a “Writer and Prophetic Witness.”
I will have more to say about Poganuc People next time, with a focus on what it says about American religious history in this era.
SOURCES
James Bratt, “The Reorientation of American Protestantism, 1835-1845,” Church History 67 (1998): 52-82.
Lorinda B. Cohoon, “Stowe, Harriet Beecher,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. I don’t understand why the author states that “Poganuc People examines religious life in New England during Jonathan Edwards’s Great Awakening,” which it assuredly does not.
John Gatta, “The Anglican Aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” The New England Quarterly 73(3)(2000) 412-433
Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Nancy Koester, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life (Eerdman’s, 2014)
Robert W. Prichard, A History of the Episcopal Church, 3rd edition (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 2014)
Charles Edward Stowe, Life Of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Compiled From Her Letters And Journals (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1890)
Edward Tang, “Making Declarations of Her Own: Harriet Beecher Stowe as New England Historian,” The New England Quarterly 71(1)(1998): 77-96
Obbie Tyler Todd, The Beechers: America’s Most Influential Family (Louisiana State University Press, 2024)
Edmund Wilson, “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” New Yorker, September 3, 1955
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