“Gail Hamilton” was Mary Abigail Dodge (1833-1896), American essayist and one of the founders of Our Young Folks. In pieces humorous, satirical, and sentimental, Dodge covered domestic subjects, the American Civil War, and women’s rights. Gala Days is a collection of eight essays—six of which appeared originally in the Atlantic Monthly—on topics serious and frivolous: the family canary, a journey through New York and Canada, young children, and what constitutes real success.
Hamilton includes what she probably considered lyrical set pieces: long, lush ruminations on an eclipse (“Gala-Days”) and music (“Camilla’s Concert”), the role of women during the American Civil War (“A Call to My Countrywomen”) and the idea of success (“Success in Life”). They’re not her best work: they’re dense and unfocused and rambling (“I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again,” she confesses after a section on frugality. “I started for Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket.”).
She’s better when she’s funny. Searching for a cobbler to resole her boot, fishing with more determination than success, negotiating the complexities of keeping cotton gloves in one piece while going about her daily life—these are some of the delights of the book.
Hamilton is even better when she’s scornful. The Mother and her Work, published by the American Tract Society, calls forth a scathing look at cultural expectations of motherhood (“A Spasm of Sense”): “I have seen scores and scores of women leave school, leave their piano and drawing and fancy-work, and all manner of pretty and pleasant things, and marry and bury themselves. You hear of them about six times in ten years, and there is a baby each time. They crawl out of the farther end of the ten years, sallow and wrinkled and lank,—teeth gone, hair gone, roses gone, plumpness gone,—freshness, and vivacity, and sparkle, everything that is dewy, and springing, and spontaneous, gone, gone, gone forever.” She’s equally scathing on the subject of waltzing (“Side-Glances at Harvard Class-Day”), reminding us that in the nineteenth century the dance was considered “profane and vicious”. Hamilton’s paragraph on the waltzing she sees at Harvard is shot through with outrage and studded with malicious adjectives.
The book was hugely popular, with Hamilton receiving letters from fans, and a stranger claiming to be “Gail Hamilton”, herself. Subscribers to Robert Merry’s Museum who were in their teens and early twenties praised her book and played word games with her name.
The text of the first edition is presented here as a single file, with the original page numbers.
The text is also available as an ebook.
[A few notes: “Halicarnassus” was Hamilton’s brother. The concert about which Hamilton waxes lyrical was a comeback for Camilla Urso, who, Hamilton wrote in 1863, “was around several years ago playing the violin as a child—nine or ten. Since then she has been married, lived in Memphis—had five, some say seven, children, a miserable, good-for-nothing husband who has promised to keep away from her, and now she is trying to support her three surviving children by her art. … I never heard anything so fine come from a fiddle.” [in Gail Hamilton’s Life in Letters, vol 1; p. 340]
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