Appledore Letter from Celia Thaxter, Aged 12

Another passage about Celia’s new kittens is especially well crafted.

"We have three kittens all very pretty, that run about the Island, and sleep under the rocks, for they will not come into the house. They will let my brothers and myself play with them, but they will let no one else touch them. They live principally on the wild birds and crabs that they find in large quantities here. One of the kittens is particularly handsome. She is as black as black can be and has eyes almost ovoid. She is very intelligent and will stand and hold her paws to catch anything we give her."

Three times Celia mentions her Boston tutor Mr. Levi Thaxter. He has been helping her press sea moss. He has a Newfoundland dog named Luria. She tells Martha:

"Do you remember Mr. Thaxter, one of the gentlemen that were at White Island when you was there? The one that performed the lady. He teaches my brothers and myself now."

Until this letter appeared, the oldest surviving correspondence of the "Island Poet" dated from March 1851 more than three years later. By then, the 15-year old Celia wrote to her friend Jennie Usher about her impending marriage to Levi Thaxter, a man 11 years her senior.

"Perhaps you do not know who Mr. Thaxter is," Celia wrote. "He is the gentleman whose wife I shall probably be this fall.

The passage, according to Celia scholar Stephanie Nugent is cryptic, elliptical and haunting. We never truly know how Celia feels about what appears to have been an arranged marriage between her father and Mr. Thaxter, who was Thomas Laighton’s business partner for a short time and who loaned him $2,500 on the eve of his engagement to Celia.

We do know, from recently discovered letters by Levi, that he had his eye on the young girl as a potential mate by the time she was 12, when he was 23. Married at 16, Celia Thaxter was taken away from her beloved island. Nine months later she returned to Appledore where her first child Karl was born. Karl suffered with physical and emotional problems that kept him in his mother’s care for the rest of her life. Celia quickly had two more sons, and although she and Levi never divorced, the marriage quickly faltered and the two lived separately.

"What did she think of her marriage to Levi?" Stephanie Nugent asks today. "This new letter helps me build my answer to the question."

Stephanie, who also portrays Celia in a popular one-woman theater production, notes that in this 1847 letter, Celia appears to be responding, point by point, to questions from her mainland friend Martha. Celia, however, leads the letter with news of Mr. Thaxter and mentions him twice more.

Jane Vallier of Iowa State University, a long time devotee of Celia’s writing, says she has always seen the young girl’s engagement to the older, brooding Mr. Thaxter of Boston as "a rather dark and gothic affair." Jane asks – "Was Celia the wunderkind and he the evil educational experimenter? Did he get engaged to get his parents off his back about settling down?"

The letter does indicate that the little Portsmouth-born girl, raised in isolation in an island lighthouse, was at least fascinated by the worldly Mr. Thaxter. We can also see that, even before his influence as a tutor, Celia’s artistic and social skills were highly evolved. The 1847 letter demonstrates too how much Celia had learned from her father Thomas, an educated and well-spoken man, before Levi became her tutor. Levi may have corrected her grammar and fostered her talents, but he did not invent her.

"The 1847 letter is fascinating," says Norma Mandel, author of the most recent Celia biography, "Beyond the Garden Gate". "Celia's language is mature for a teenager at any time. I think it shows not only Levi's influence, but reflects the atmosphere in which she grew up. While her mother may have been illiterate, her father certainly was able to impart an exceptional love of language to her. Celia herself was like a sponge, absorbing whatever the visitors to the islands had to provide."

The most significant part of the discovery, Norma says, is that it confirms what we already know – that the facts are just as Celia presented them in her later writing. And we now know that from the beginning, she says, Levi Thaxter "was very much a welcome part of her life".

Through the amazing world of Internet auctions, Celia’s letter has come home. When I asked David Jaret if I might see a Xerox or computer scan of the letter, he sent me the original the next day by Federal Express. Rather than sell it for profit or store it in his collection, Jaret thought the letter would be most appreciated in Celia’s birthplace. I donated it in Jaret’s name to the Portsmouth Historical Society, and it will be archived at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, just a block from where Celia was born..

"I had never heard of Celia Thaxter until I got your note and read about her on your web site. Then I talked to a couple of friends who are historians," David Jaret says. "They told me just to give the letter to the people who could appreciate and care for it best. It seemed like the right thing to do. I wanted it to be seen by the public."

"Do you have any idea how much this item is worth?" The expert asks the owners this question time and again on the popular PBS TV-series "Antiques Roadshow." The value of history, we are told, can be translated directly into dollars. And so it is painful, time and again, to see local artifact collections broken up and sold in online auctions. But sometimes we win one, and every piece of the puzzle helps. If all politics are local, as Tip O’Neil was fond of saying, then all history is local too. David Jaret’s little gift makes that wonderfully clear.

Copyright © 2006 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Originally published here in 2003.

J. Dennis Robinson is editor and owner of the regional Internet portal SeacoastNH.com containing thousands of web pages of local history and culture. Essays by Robinson, Jane Vallier, Norma Mandel and others appear in the book "One Woman’s Work: The Visual Art of Celia Laighton Thaxter" edited by Stephanie Nugent, published by Peter E. Randall, Publisher and available at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.