Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner was planned, started, and edited by the femme fatale Miriam Squier, apex of a melodramatic triangle, soon to become the w ife of Frank Leslie. This fascinating beauty was also an astute editor, and she planned her Chimney Corner as an illustrated fireside friend that would provide American mothers with domestic stories, their daughters with romances, their sons w ith dramatic escapades, and youngsters with adventures and fairy tales. On 3 June 1865, in the w ords of the editor:

 

            We present herewith, just as the aurora of peace irradiates the horizon, the first number of The Chimney Corner . . . which shall be a welcome messenger of instruction and amusement to the young and old, in the family and by the fireside — that altar around which cluster our holiest and most cherished recollections. ... We give a story a day all the year around, some to touch by their tragic power, some to thrill with love’s vicissitudes, some to hold in suspense with dramatic interest. . . . Come then, and welcome, to our Chimney Corner, sure of a feast of good things.[15]

            Part of that feast had been requisitioned from the Leslie prizewinner Louisa May Alcott, who wrote in her journal: “Leslie asked me to be a regular contributor to his new paper ‘The Chimney Corner,’ & I agreed if he’d pay before hand, he said he would & bespoke two tales at once $50 each. Longer ones as often as I could, & whatever else I liked to send. So here’s another source of income & Alcott brains seem in demand, whereat I sing ‘Hallyluyer,’ & fill up my inkstand.”[16] And so “A Double Tragedy” was given a place of honor on page 1 of the first issue of America’s “Great Family Paper,” while “Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse,” the author’s “second” Chimney Corner tale, followed in July.

 

            All five stories in this collection reveal Louisa May Alcott as a writer sensitive to the cultural and social currents of her time. She employs as themes art and the theater — two lifelong passions — as well as the contemporary interest in what might now be termed the occult. Always present, too, are examples of the struggle between the sexes, reflecting the rise of feminism.

            Alcott’s preoccupation with the art theme is thoroughly understandable. Her sister May was an eager art student, who illustrated her sister’s effusions, studied at the School of Design in Boston, served as drawing teacher in Syracuse, and took anatomical drawing lessons under the distinguished Dr. William Rimmer. [17] Eventually she would go abroad to study art, and after her tragie death her box of paintings would be sent home to Concord. Now, in the early 1860s, the two young women shared their excitement over literature and art just as they shared lodgings in Boston. Between May’s enthusiastic reports and her own exposure to art exhibitions, Louisa May Alcott was enabled to inject the art motif into at least two of these tales, “A Pair of Eyes” and “Ariel.”

 

[15.] Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner i:i (3 June 1865); Stern, Purple Passage, pp. 45-46.

[16.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished journals (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University), March 1865, printed with deletions in Ednah Dow Cheney, -Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, andJournals {Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889), 'p. 165.

[17.] It is interesting to note that Rimmer was drawn to Shakespearean subjects. His paintings include scenes from The 'Lempest, Macbeth, and Romeo andJuliet. See Jeffrey Weidman et al., William Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985).

 

            In the former, published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in October 1863,[18] the black-bearded artist Max Erdmann (who, curiously, bears a close resemblance to Erank Leslie) finds a model for his portrait of Lady Macbeth in Agatha Eure, whom he later marries. Agatha, however, jealous of Max’s better-loved mistress Art, practices mesmeric pow ers upon him and so subdues him in one of Alcott’s more remarkable versions of the pow er struggle between man and woman.

            In “Ariel,” Philip Southesk, a poet-artist, sketches the nymph Ariel, making “the likeness perfect with a happy stroke or two,”[19] a tribute to economy in brushwork. In “A Pair of Eves,” Max Erdmann creates a far more arresting painting. Erdmann is the artist incarnate, going far beyond Erank Leslie or May Alcott in his devotion to a muse that was to him “wife, child, friend, food and fire.” And the portrait of Lady Macbeth for which a mesmerist acts as model sets the w'eird and sinister tone of this tale. Alcott describes the portrait in detail: “the dimly lighted chamber, the listening attendants, the ghostly figure with wan face framed in hair, that streamed shadowy and long against white draperies, and whiter arms, w'hose gesture told that the parted lips were uttering that mournful cry — ‘Here’s the smell of blood still! / All the perfumes of Arabia wdll not / Sweeten this little hand — ’”

 

[18.] "A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern Magic," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (24 and 31 October 1863), 69-71, 85-87.

[19.] All quotations are from the stories that follow, unless otherwise indicated.

 

            Was the portrait a copy, or a Louisa Alcott original? The great eighteenth-century Sw iss artist John Henry Fuseli produced a pen and gray wash of Lady Macbeth sleepwalking that has much in common with Max Erdmann’s portrait, including the listening attendants, the gesture of Lady Maebeth’s arms, her long streaming hair.