Customs And Fashions In Old New England

by Alice Morse Earle

The writings of Alice Morse Earle (1853-1911) on early American life are perennial favorites because of the skill with which she portrayed the olden times. This volume includes the following chapters: Child Life; Courtship and Marriage Customs; Domestic Service; Home Interiors; Supplies of the Larder; Old Colonial Drinks and Drinkers; Travel, Tavern, and Turnpike; Holidays and Festivals; Sports and Diversions; Books and Book-Makers; Artifices of Handsomeness; Raiment and Vesture; Doctors and Patients; Funeral and Burial Customs.

Genres: Nonfiction, Audiobook, Fashion, History

387 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1893

About the author

Alice Morse Earle was an American historian and author from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was christened Mary Alice by her parents Edwin Morse and Abby Mason Clary. On 15 April 1874, she married Henry Earle of New York, changing her name from Mary Alice Morse to Alice Morse Earle. Her writings, beginning in 1890, focussed on small sociological details rather than grand details, and thus are invaluable for modern sociologists. She wrote a number of books on colonial America (and especially the New England region) such as Curious Punishments of Bygone Days. She was a passenger aboard the RMS Republic when, while in a dense fog, that ship collided with the SS Florida. During the transfer of passengers, Alice fell into the water. Her near drowning in 1909 off the coast of Nantucket during this abortive trip to Egypt weakened her health sufficiently that she died two years later, in Hempstead, Long Island.

Reviews

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic and intriguing social history or people’s history written in the late 19th century about daily life in early colonial New England. I was drawn to this book for several reasons, partly because it personifies the strange and mysterious puritanical colonist that is so pervasive yet implicit in modern American thought and ideology, and partly because of Alice Morse Earl's casual approach to chronicling her subject through inviting the reader to participate in the bizarre spectatorship of what would have been the unremarkable and simplistic elements of daily life for the colonies, but to modern eyes and ears, comes as sometimes shocking, and other times comedic curiosities. My chief interest in the book was in the structures and functions of domestic life in the colonies as an intersection of two of my current interests in the histories of religious and romantic life, and it did NOT disappoint. The second chapter titled "Courtship and Marriage Customs" did a phenomenal and extremely funny and entertaining job of exploring the subject through the love life of old Judge Sewall (the same from the Salem Witch Trials), several times a widower and frequent re-marrier, and whom the entire town of the Massachusetts Bay colony seemed to conspire for to help him find a wife; for remaining single was considered almost a crime in itself. Earl refers us to Hartsford, where bachelors were ordered to pay a 20 shilling tax to the court each week for "the selfish luxury of solitary living."
Earl's book is thoughtfully structured from the beginning of life with the first chapter "Child Life" to its end "Funeral and Burial Customs" and seems to chart the different stages of the life of a colonial individual in between. This adds a certain laudable depth to Earl's work because it really brings an entire colonial life into color.
I very much enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone because it is so approachable, fun, extremely interesting, educational, and thought provoking. In particular it is suited best to those with an interest in post/de-colonialism and America in the 17th-18thC.

[Joshua]

(Refers to the Project Gutenberg edition: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24159 )

Charming book, although there is some overlap with Earle's other books (also on my reading list). Nonetheless, there is enough new material here to make it an enjoyable reading. Sewall's diaries form a key part of the narrative.

p.26 describes gathering "boxberries, checkerberries, teaberries or gingerbread berries" in the fall. What are these? I've never heard of them.

p.169. "Mumm, a fat ale made of oat-malt and wheat-malt, appears frequently in early importations and accounts." Homebrew recipe?

The "degradation of Christmas" is not a new thing: p.214 "The hatred of "wanton Bacchanallian Christmasses" spent throughout England, as Cotton said, in "revelling, dicing, carding, masking, mumming, consumed in compotations, in interludes, in excess of wine, in mad mirth," was the natural reaction of intelligent and thoughtful minds against the excesses of a festival which had ceased to be a Christian holiday, but was dominated by a lord of misrule who did not hesitate to invade the churches in time of service, in his noisy revels and sports. "

p.226 Seems like it should be a movie script: "In 1817 a negro boy named William Read, enraged at being refused the high privileges and pleasures of Artillery Day, blew up in Boston Harbor a ship called the Canton Packet."

Chapter on book printing is wonderful. Book-printers/sellers (they were the same person) were the internet millionaires of colonial new england.