In August she confided to her journal: “Soon fell to work on some stories for things were, as I expected, behind hand when the money-maker was away.” In December she was more specific: “Wrote ... a wild Russian story ‘laming a Tartar.’”[11] An unpublished letter in the Leslie archive embroidered Miss Alcott’s unadorned statement. On 13 June 1867, an assistant in the Frank Leslie Publishing House reported to “Miss L.M.Alcott”: “Dear Madam: Your favor of the 10th inst acknowledging the receipt of $72 for ‘Taming a Tartar’ came to hand this morning.”[12] As the Alcott bibliography expanded, Alcott prices rose. And so, the brief entries in the writer’s unpublished journals, counterbalanced by statements in the Leslie business correspondence, have yielded up fresh secrets. I he prolific author of Flower Fables, Hospital Sketches, and Moods, the future creator of Little Women, was even more prolific than had been believed. She was also, as the reader of these stories will discover, more skillful in her narrative development, more varied in her literary motifs. As her already extraordinary productivity increased, her frame of reference widened. The stories in A Double Life add still a new dimension to the image of Louisa May Alcott.

 

[9.] Ibid., April 1865.

[10.] Ibid., May 1865.

[11.] Ibid., August and December 1866.

[12.] "Benj. Ci. Smith for Frank Leslie to Miss L.M. Alcott, New York, 13 June 1867" (Louisa May Alcott Collection [#6255], Manuscripts Department, University of Virginia Library). Smith went on to discuss an apparent misunderstanding about "the amount paid per page. ... I was not aware that any agreement existed between you and Mr. Leslie binding him to pay $100 per story. ... To avoid difficulty in future you might mark the price on the first page of the MS."

 

            All those stories were published anonymously, and all appeared in the pages of Frank Leslie periodicals.[13] Louisa had had dealings with the House of Leslie before the August 1863 journal entry that announced the dispatch of “A Pair of Eyes.” Actually her first known sensation tale had been submitted to a competition announced by Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, offering one hundred dollars for the best story. “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” a fast-paced narrative revolving about the manipulating heroine Pauline Valary, had won the prize and in January 1863 appeared in the weekly, where it was ascribed to “a lady of Massachusetts.” To most ladies and gentlemen of Massachusetts and other states of the Union in those Civil War years, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper was a familiar journal. Indeed, Frank Leslie was a household word.[14]

 

[13.] For the original discovery of Alcott's anonymous and pseudonymous stories, see Leona Rostenberg, "Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa M. Alcott," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 37 (2d Quarter 1943)-

[14.] For details about Leslie and his publishing empire, see Madeleine B. Stern, Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953, 1970).

 

            Frank Leslie was also a pseudonym — a fact probably unknown to the author of “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” In all likelihood she never met the short, broad, black-bearded newspaperman who exuded dynamic magnetism, although she may well have seen his published likeness. Born Henry Carter in Ipswich, England, a glove manufacturer’s son, he had turned his back on the family business and early evinced the artistic propensities that would dominate his career. As Frank Leslie he pursued the skills of engraving and pictorial printing for the Illustrated London News until 1848, when he immigrated to America. By the mid-fifties he had begun to establish a place for himself in the field of illustrated journalism. Within ten years he had become a colossus on New York’s Publishers’ Row.

            The flagship of his fleet of weeklies and monthlies was Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. That weekly catered aggressively to most facets of popular taste. Murder and horror, executions and assassinations, prizefights and revolutions — every cause eelebre, every sensation, every exposure — were grist for its mill. Leslies emphasis was pictorial. His approach, since he was basically an artist, was visual. And so his weekly ran just enough text to float the pictures that reanimated contemporary history (especially its gorier aspects) for the American household. In single woodcuts or in huge double-page engravings, the Illustrated Newspaper reproduced for its vast readership authentic Civil War battle scenes, volcanoes and earthquakes, private scandals and public revelations. In addition, it ran the illustrated serials that lured the old from the fireside and the young from their play — serials that appeared anonymously under such titles as “A Pair of Eyes,” “The Fate of the Forrests,” and “Taming a Tartar.”

            The remaining two thrillers in A Double Life were dispatched to yet another Leslie journal.