148 Charles Street (February 1971 | Volume: 22, Issue: 2)

148 Charles Street

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Authors: Barbara Rotundo

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February 1971 | Volume 22, Issue 2

Everyone wanted to be invited to 148 Charles Street, where Charles Dickens mixed the punch and taught the guests parlor games, John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe vied in telling ghost stories, and Nathaniel Hawthorne paced the bedroom floor one unhappy night in the final miserable year of his life. Willa Gather used the address as the title of an essay in her book Not Under Forty , and Henry James described, in The American Scene , the “effaced anonymous door” where he found “merciful refuge.” The address was once nearly as well known as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is today, and for much the same reason—it represented a center of power. The power was not, however, political, but cultural.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the center of publishing and intellectual influence in the United States was still Boston. A major factor for this was the firm of Ticknor & Fields, a publishing house from which the present-day Houghton Mifflin Company traces its ancestry. Ticknor & Fields published the weighty North American Review and the influential Atlantic Monthly , as well as the books of many important English authors, including Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and all the important American authors. (Important in their day, that is. Neither Walt Whitman nor Herman Melville was published by Ticknor & Fields.) Ticknor & Fields, to use the words of literary critic and essayist Van Wyck Brooks, harvested the flowering of New England and basked in the sunny days of its Indian summer.

 
 

The younger of the partners, James T. Fields, was a thirty-seven-year-old widower in 1854 when he married Annie Adams. She was the daughter of the well-known Boston physician Dr. Zabdiel Boylston Adams and a cousin of Fields’ first wife, Eliza Willard, who had died at age nineteen in 1851. For the first year of their marriage, the couple lived in the Adams’ home on Pearl Street while her parents travelled abroad. Early in 1856 the Fieldses were taking a Sunday walk when they saw a house under construction that they immediately decided was the house they wanted. The address was then 37 Charles Street; when the city fathers renumbered the street ten years later they assigned 148 to the narrow three-story house with its long back yard reaching to the Charles River.

One forty-eight Charles was a modest size for the extensive entertainment that took place there. The first floor consisted of a small reception room and a dining room, which overlooked a garden and the river in back. The drawing room, or library, as the Fieldses modestly preferred to call it, took up the entire second floor, except for a small alcove tucked off to the side at each end. Bookcases lined the wall of the library opposite the entrance from the staircase, and full-length windows at the far end gave a memorable