Tom’s brother Henry remembered from his earliest infancy an engraving in her room of the Emperor Theodosius and St Ambrose, about which she wrote a poem. Her accompanying prose gloss explains to less learned readers that,

By the order of Theodosius, Emperor of the East, in reprisal for the murder of one of his generals, thousands of innocent people were slain at the circus in Thessalonica. On account of this cruel and unjustifiable deed the Emperor was refused admission to the Cathedral, by St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and not allowed to partake of the Communion until after eight months of penitence and humiliation.

Lottie’s emperor prostrates himself before Ambrose who represents the ‘Authority’ of the Church:

On the marble floor

Kneels Theodosius to implore

From heaven, mercy. Day by day

Upon the ground he prostrate lay,

Till months had passed. And many came,

With him to weep and share his shame,

Till fierce desires, and passions rude

He had within his soul subdued.25

Fascinated by ascetic figures from the sufferings of Catholicism, Mrs Eliot was also alert to the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Unitarian New England-inflected writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing. She published verse in the Unitarian Christian Register, pasting her printed poems carefully into scrapbooks. Tom’s younger cousin Abigail Eliot thought his mother ‘wasn’t much interested in babies’, but she cherished her children as well as her verse, and grew to love her poet son with particular intensity.26 She went on writing throughout her life, but never published a book-length collection, and her poetry underwent almost no development. It was, however, hugely important to her; and in her husband, the St Louis businessman who had once written, into his own diary, verses with the epigraph ‘Perfect through Suffering (Saul)’, she found a staunch life’s partner.27

Tom grew up in an idealistic, bookish household where knowledge of saints and martyrdoms was readily taken for granted, even when it came to the punchlines of old jokes. He recalled being told a political anecdote by his father, who remembered the days of the debates over slavery in 1858 between the Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Democrat Stephen Douglas, famed for his political oratory. Mr Eliot enjoyed telling his son how, after Douglas had given one of his best speeches and received thunderous applause, Lincoln then stood up, took off his coat, rolled up his cuffs and said, ‘“We will now proceed to stone Stephen.”’28

Though their home was St Louis, both Lottie, who had been raised in Massachusetts, and Hal (a confirmed Republican in politics) shared a mutual pride in their New England ancestors. ‘We tended to cling to places and associations as long as possible,’ Tom recalled.29 His parents had first met in St Louis, but had married in a historic house, the Old Reed home, in Lexington, Massachusetts, on 27 October 1868. As a present for Lottie’s thirty-ninth birthday in 1882 Hal, who had spent most of his life in Missouri, had gone to some trouble to buy and bring to St Louis an antique grandfather clock said to have been one of a batch shipped to America from Falmouth, England, in the 1760s. Nathan Reed, soon to be part of a company of Minute Men led by Captain Parker who faced the British at the Battle of Lexington on 19 April 1775, had bought the clock in 1770. One of Lottie’s distant ancestors, Samuel Dawes, had ridden at the same time as Paul Revere to warn the rebels at Lexington that the British were coming. The clock Hal presented to his wife and which was a feature of Tom’s boyhood home in St Louis had stood in the old Reed home at Lexington for many decades.30 In Tom’s childhood the hall clock told not just the present-day time but the story of the American Revolution. As a boy, Tom’s brother relished the heroism of Paul Revere; among Tom’s earliest surviving boyhood writings is a short, illustrated account of George Washington. Like most American children, Henry and Tom learned about these national heroes at school; but, thanks to their hall clock, their books, pictures and ancestral stories, such history was also part of the fabric of their home. Hal passed to his younger son an edition of Jefferson’s writings; and so it was that Tom came to feel that the early history of the United States was somehow ‘a family extension’.31

In thriving St Louis the family lived in some style. Running southwards through the grid-planned city for well over a mile past the Eliots’ house in the direction of the Mississippi, Locust Street was named, like nearby Olive, Pine and Chestnut Streets, after a familiar American tree. Inside the Eliots’ substantial four-storey, brick-built home with its heavy, dark wood furniture and elaborately patterned carpets hung treasured familial pictures. The walls of several rooms were a three-dimensional family album. A collection of portraits belonging to Tom’s parents and his grandmother Abigail Adams Eliot (née Cranch), who lived nearby, included those of President John Adams and his Secretary of State John Marshall, as well as many ancestors with the surname Eliot, Stearns, Cranch, Blood or Dawes. Above and to the right of the fireplace in his mother’s bedroom were at least fifteen pictures, including a Madonna and child, as well as head-and-shoulders photographic portraits. Photographed for the parental gallery, Tom grew up among a rich clutter of familial collectanea: a bronze Japanese vase, brass candlesticks, the gold-headed cane which had belonged to his formidable Grandfather Eliot.

Tom had never met Grandfather Eliot, who died in 1887, but the abiding memory of this man whom Emerson had termed the ‘Saint of the West’ was felt in the family home and in the city beyond.32 The little boy learned about him from his Eliot grandmother, from his Aunt Rose Smith and lawyer Uncle Ed Eliot (who lived locally) and from his own parents. Grandfather Eliot had travelled to Europe; in the American South he had bought slaves and set them free, even writing the biography of one, The Story of Alexander Archer (1885); he had given the name of his dead daughter, Mary, to the school that all Tom’s sisters had attended – the Mary Institute, situated right next door to 2635 Locust Street. Tom’s mother had once taught there for a year. Straight out of Harvard Divinity School, Grandfather Eliot had reached St Louis in 1834 and founded the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. Tom and his family still served and attended it. Social reformer, zealous preacher, occasional poet and part-time professor of Philosophy at Washington University, handsome stern-countenanced Grandfather Eliot was dead but unavoidable: visible in a large oil portrait painted by a Cranch, his deeds praised in a memorial tablet at his Church of the Messiah. Lottie Eliot worked on a biography during Tom’s boyhood; it was published eventually in Boston in 1904 as William Greenleaf Eliot: Minister, Educator, Philanthropist, and dedicated to Lottie’s children ‘lest they forget’.

There was little danger of that.