The scholar Eric Sigg has pointed out that through his tangled family tree baby Tom was related, distantly, to poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell; to novelists Henry Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne; to memoirist Henry Adams; and to the second and sixth presidents of the United States, John Adams and John Quincy Adams.10 Few squealing infants have had quite so much to live up to.

Worried or not at the time of his birth, the new baby’s parents were both strong characters. They treasured their sense of familial inheritance; yet in each there was also something unfulfilled or repressed. Active in local women’s clubs and religious as well as cultural societies, Charlotte cared deeply about education and social welfare. She campaigned for the rights of children in the courts. Her passions encompassed poetry, philosophy and religion; but her own education had not included university study, and the poetry she wrote found only limited outlets, often in Unitarian journals where she had links to the editors. Educated at Washington University in St Louis, her businessman husband had been expected to follow his elder brother and their father into the Unitarian ministry. Hal’s father was the Harvard-educated Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot – Eliot ‘No. 161’ – founder of Washington University, pillar of Unitarianism, writer, ‘unflinching supporter of the temperance cause’, advocate of ‘woman suffrage’ and ‘helper of the colored race’.11 Yet Hal had not become a minister: ‘too much pudding choked the dog’ as he put it; he simply ‘gagged’.12 Nevertheless, Hal, whose cursory short entry in the Sketch of the Eliot Family was dwarfed by the Reverend W. G.’s magisterial three pages, ‘gave as a layman’ to his church ‘the kind of service that ministers rarely find’, becoming ‘a living stone of its spiritual structure and usefulness. His face bore the stamp of real spirituality.’13 Tom was shaped by his parents’ hopes and histories; what he became was guided and abraded by what they had accomplished; and, sometimes, by what they had not.

Partially deaf by the time of Tom’s childhood, his father had once been an eager musician, artist and poet. Hal’s Pocket Diary and Almanac from 1864, when he was twenty-one, records purchases of books including Thomas Hood’s Poems. He strummed the guitar, sang, played the flute. In his diary a poem, ‘Life’, dated ‘April 27 ’64’, begins, ‘Must I suffer ere my spirit, / Shall attain the highest goal’. To his liking for spiritual verse, Hal added a taste for popular song. That same year, the second last of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and while the Civil War still raged, he wrote down lines from ‘Lorena’, a lyric of loss and regret sung by many during a time when perhaps a million Americans were killed.

We loved each other then Lorena

More than we ever dared to tell

And what we might have been Lorena

Had but our loving prospered well …14

Much later, Ezra Pound wrote of meeting in Venice a woman who remembered a young Hal Eliot in St Louis writing poetry and not appearing at all like a businessman.15

Hal’s father was recalled as ‘one of the staunchest supporters of the Union in a city in which it was doubted, for a time, whether it would go with the Union or the Rebellion’.16 In the early 1860s, to his family’s alarm, Hal had followed his elder brother Thomas in volunteering to serve on the Union side in the Hallek Guard, mustered to defend St Louis against attack by Confederate forces which had earlier been driven out of Missouri. Yet by the late 1880s when his last child was born, those days were long gone. True, Hal still enjoyed drawing humorous sketches – not least of cats – and Tom remembered in adulthood ‘a wonderful set of comic animals that he drew long ago, and were kept in an album together – I think he did them for a fair’.17 By Tom’s childhood, however, Hal the clean-shaven, sometimes nervous-looking young poet had been repressed and replaced by Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, the bearded, chess-playing businessman who had moved through several commercial jobs to become a prominent figure in the management of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company of St Louis.

Aspects of Hal’s well-read, older self survived. Having studied Classics in his youth, ‘Papa’, as his children called him, liked to quote Latin tags around the house, peppering his conversation, Tom observed, with occasional phrases such as ‘quam celerrime’, and retaining into old age a taste for bow ties and ancient Greek oratory, which, in his disciplined retirement, he reread in the original. He lived surrounded by books – the Bible, Latin and Greek texts, Americana from the age of Emerson and before – and retained a love of American history and political anecdotes. Tom remembered his father advising both his sons ‘not to take up his own business’.18 To the outside world, however, Hal was not a literary man but principally a sound, successful commercial manager. He helped found a local association of building material dealers. He looked after financial matters for his extended family. He rose, eventually, to become president of his firm and a director of several other brick companies.

In Lottie Eliot the vein of poetry was not repressed. Three months pregnant with Tom, she wrote, as she often did at the advent of spring, a poem celebrating Easter. Lent and Easter were important points in the Unitarian calendar, and often involved concerts at the Eliots’ church. While Lottie’s verse advocates the eschewing of ‘wanton pleasures’, she liked to celebrate how ‘Spring returns with joy and mirth’.19 During the second year of Tom’s life she wrote ‘An Easter Song’, and in 1891 ‘An Easter Hymn’.20 Much, though not all, of her verse was religious in tenor; liking to read theology and the Bible itself before she wrote, she had a high sense of artistic mission: ‘The artist’s soul must expression find / And give of its riches to all mankind, / Their vision to complete.’21 As a girl she had studied ‘Mental Philosophy’; as an adult she ‘sometimes read Philosophy as a preparation for writing’.22

Steeped in high-mindedness, Lottie Eliot’s poetry invokes a divine ‘Infinite Mind’ (a term favoured by Unitarians). Its topics range from ‘The Raising of Lazarus’ and ‘Force and God’ (1887) to biblical paraphrases and poems dealing with episodes in the lives of saints and martyrs.23 She transcribed in Latin and English Fortunatus’ medieval hymn in honour of the Holy Cross, with its details of crucified palms and ‘wound on wound’; she wrote her own verse ‘Vision of St Francis’ seen ‘Rapt in the ecstasy of his devotion’.24 Sometimes, as in ‘Raphael’s “Ste. Marguerite”’, she took inspiration from paintings. Tom’s mother hung reproductions of religious pictures in her bedroom alongside ancestral portraits and pictures of her children. Martyrdom and scenes of violent self-discipline fascinated her.