Lidian Jackson Emerson
We continue our series on the strong women in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life by profiling his wife Lidian (Lydia) Jackson Emerson.
Lidian Jackson was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second wife and the mother of his four children. She fiercely opposed any cruelty inflicted on animals or people, and she stood up for those beliefs publicly at a time when women’s roles were often delegated to tending the home and raising the children. Horrified by slavery, she co-founded the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, and she was an associate member of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) at its founding in 1868, remaining its vice president her entire life. She was also a strong supporter of women’s rights.
Born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1802, Lidian lost both her parents when she was sixteen years old. She experienced a religious conversion in 1825, and her Unitarian faith was very important to her for the rest of her life. By the time she met Emerson in 1834, she was living at the Winslow House in Plymouth and leading an independent life. Emerson and Lidian married in 1835 and moved to Concord, where they lived for the rest of their lives. However, Lidian never lost her love for Plymouth and visited regularly.
Lydia adopted the name “Lidian” upon her marriage to Emerson. She was a graceful woman who loved to dance and had a beautiful gait and posture. A voracious reader and intellectual, she studied German; wrote poetry; and attended many lectures—including those given by Emerson—and Margaret Fuller’s Boston “Conversations.” After being introduced to her, Emerson wrote: “When two good minds meet, both cultivated, and with such difference of learning as to excite each the other’s curiosity and such similarity as to understand each other’s allusions in the touch-and-go of conversation.” [1] Lidian believed that a “most perfect marriage would be one in which opposite temperaments would be united.” [2]
Lidian was a multi-talented woman. Her daughter Ellen wrote of her: “She had a very large and varied vocabulary, probably because of her perfect memory and her constant reading, and her deep and powerful feeling brought it out in quite fresh forms continually.” [3] Lidian was a very conscientious manager of the Emerson household, where she habitually hosted visitors, friends and strangers alike. Emerson also traveled frequently giving talks across America and Europe, and was gone for long stretches of time. He was often lax in his correspondence home and not as affectionate as Lidian might have liked. Lidian bore all the responsibilities of managing the house, accounts, and staff—and raising the children—during his absences. Ellen remarked, “Economy was natural to Mother. She wished everything to serve all the purpose it could. She was, as naturally, magnificent and generous.” [4]
Emerson’s stature as a great writer and speaker brought an almost constant stream of ministers, writers, and artists to their home. Lidian welcomed them and often joined in their conversations, with visitors sometimes finding her thoughts more interesting than Emerson’s. Her sense of humor helped keep Emerson grounded. She called the years 1840 through 1845 “Transcendental Times,” and “reliably popped the balloon of her husband’s pretensions. ‘Save me from magnificent souls,’ she told him, ‘I like a small common-sized one.’” [5]
In 1837, shortly after her marriage to Emerson, Lidian invited Southern abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimke to Concord for tea and a meal at the Emerson home. After they left, Lidian pledged not to “turn away my attention from the abolition cause till I have found where there is not something for me personally to do and bear to forward it.” [6] As Emerson biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr. wrote in The Mind on Fire, “as the Grimke sisters got to Lidian, so she undoubtedly got to her husband.” [7] Lidian advocated at home for Emerson to speak out more publicly for abolition. In fact, two months after the Grimke sisters’ visit, Emerson delivered an address on slavery in a Concord church. And in 1837, Lidian joined Mary Merrick Brooks and others to found the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society.
Lidian Jackson Emerson, 1866. Photograph by Black & Case, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
A pastel of Lidian by Jessie Noa hangs beside a bust of Emerson by sculptor Daniel Chester French in the Emerson House. Photo by B. Ewen.
Lidian’s desk, built for her in Plymouth and brought to Concord in 1835. The heart shaped item was her pen wipe and it is resting on her lap desk. Photo by B. Ewen.
Lidian Jackson Emerson with her son Edward.
Carte de visite portrait photograph of Lidian.
With a compelling urge to push Emerson into action on humanitarian crises in America, Lidian took up the cause of the Cherokee Indians who were being forced to leave their lands in Georgia. “Lidian urged her husband to speak out against this ‘outrage on humanity;’ to remain silent was to ‘share the disgrace and the blame of its perpetration.” [8] Ultimately, Emerson wrote a protest letter to President Martin Van Buren.
Lidian loved all animals and worked hard to protect them and to relieve their suffering. After joining the MSPCA, she wrote articles for their periodical and distributed copies to friends and acquaintances. Her devotion extended to the many animals at the Emerson House, especially the large troop of rescued cats. When the Emersons began keeping chickens she worried about confining them, though they were digging up her gardens. Henry David Thoreau, a close family friend, made the chickens little cowhide shoes so they could still walk around and not destroy the plants.
Lidian experienced many emotional trials in her life. Grief joined the loneliness and burdens in her husband’s absences. With diseases like tuberculosis and scarlet fever rampant in the 19th century, families often suffered deep losses of life. In her 47 years of marriage to Emerson, Lidian lost her firstborn child Waldo when he was five years old; her sister Lucy; five Emerson family members; and her close friends Elizabeth Hoar and Henry David Thoreau. The Emersons’ house caught on fire in 1872, forcing them to move out for more than a year, and Lidian lost her husband in 1882. With these tragedies to face, Lidian’s faith and commitment to ending suffering kept her strong for herself and her family.
After Emerson’s death, Lidian continued to live a vibrant life, with trips to Plymouth; excursions around Concord; attendance at Bronson Alcott’s School of Philosophy; and visits to her grandchildren in Milton and on Naushon. At the age of 87, she found a Boston shopping trip with her daughter Ellen exhilarating. She lived with Ellen until 1892, when she passed away at the family home.
Lidian’s life was very well lived.
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
WORKS CITED:
Robert D. Richardson, The Mind on Fire, (Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1995), 191.
Qtd in Richardson, 192.
Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1992), 121.
Qtd in Ellen Tucker Emerson, 96.
James Marcus, Glad to the Brink of Fear, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024), 108.
Qtd in Richardson, 270.
Qtd in Richardson, 270.
Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (New York, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 523.
