The Journals of Caroline Healey Dall
The Journals of Caroline Healey Dall, edited by Helen R. Deese, is a project of the Massachusetts Historical Society (www.masshist.org). Dall (1822-1912) was born in Boston into the family of a well-to-do merchant. Though her solid private education ended its formal phase at age fifteen, she continued her education over a lifetime by reading in almost all fields of knowledge. Her early years were marked by the influence of the Transcendentalists and other Boston intellectuals, especially Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker. She went on to become the wife of a Unitarian minister, who eventually left her and their two children to become a missionary to Calcutta, an abolitionist, a prominent figure in the women's rights movement, a founder of the American Social Science Association, an author, critic, and freelance journalist. Living her last thirty-four years in Washington, D.C., she moved in political and scientific circles, was a well-known hostess and the friend of First Lady Frances Cleveland, and led a reading group for young women. In her later years, known as "Madam Dall," she was an institution in the city. Dall chronicled in her journals some seventy-five years of her remarkable life, this diary thus constituting the fullest account of a nineteenth-century American woman's life. Her journals are marked by intelligent and incisive commentary on the intellectual, religious, political, and social scenes and by her compellingly told personal story.
The first volume of the Massachusetts Historical Society edition, Selected Journals of Caroline Healey Dall, 1838-1855, published in Spring 2006 through the Society's distributor, the University of Virginia Press (www.upress.virginia.edu). Separately, Beacon Press (www.beacon.org) published in October 2005 Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-century Woman, Caroline Healey Dall, a highly selected version of the journals for general readers, also edited by Helen R. Deese.
Contact information:
Helen R. Deese, 403 Vick Court, Ann Arbor, MI 48103
helendeese@comcast.net
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