Josiah Gilbert Holland (July 24, 1819 – October 12, 1881) was an American novelist, essayist, poet and spiritual mentor to the country in the years following the Civil War.Author and Book Info.com
Born in Western Massachusetts, he was "the most successful man of letters in the United States" in the latter half of the nineteenth century and sold more books in his lifetime than Mark Twain did in his.Bloom, Margaret. "Emily Dickinson and Dr. Holland", University of California. Chronicle, 35 (Jan. 1933), 96–103. 76.Mark Twain Project and Papers, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.
Known by his initials "J.G.", Holland penned the first biography of Abraham Lincoln, just months after his assassination, which was a bestseller, and he published the first known poem written by an African American. One of Holland's novels was among the earliest examples of the genre that became literary realism and he published a few poems of Emily Dickinson's in The Republican, the newspaper he edited. Holland and his wife, Elizabeth Luna Chapin, were close friends with her.
Holland became a popular Lyceum lecturer and wrote advice essays under the pseudonym Timothy Titcomb. He composed lyrics to hymns, such as the beloved Methodist Christmas tune "There's a Song in the Air", which was published worldwide including translations into Tagalog and Belarusian. He helped establish, and was editor of, the middle-class flagship magazine Scribner's Monthly.
Though Holland was a contemporary of the canonical and more renowned poet and novelist Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, respectively, neither men "ever tasted the sweets of success as Holland did, perhaps, because neither wrote what the nation’s readers cared so much about".Randel, William Peirce. Centennial: American Life in 1876. United Kingdom, Chilton Book Company, 1969. His writings are quoted by politicians and pastors alike though few today recognize Holland's name.
Birth
He was born in a low-slung bungalow, built of logs, in a glade along the Hop Brook, near the intersection of Federal Street and Orchard Road, in the village of Dwight, in Belchertown, Massachusetts, on July 24, 1819.
His birthplace, once frequented by admirers, is to the immediate southwest of the Holland Glen Conservation Area, which was named for him in the early 20th century. Today it encompasses 290 acres, part of an old-growth forest, with steep hillsides, waterfalls, vistas and hiking trails.
His mother Anna's family, the Gilberts, from Hebron, Connecticut, arrived to North Belchertown by 1799 and operated an inn on the Bay Road not far from his birthplace (the home remains at 111 Old Bay Road). Josiah Gilbert Holland was likely named for his mother's younger brother, Josiah Gilbert, who died, at age 27, a few months after Holland's birth.Connecticut, U.S., Hale Cemetery Inscriptions and Newspaper Notices, 1629–1934, Collection, ancestry.com, p. 637 of 738
Holland grew up in a poor family struggling to make ends meet. Young Josiah spent only a few years at the farmhouse at Dwight and later quipped that he’d like to “burn it to the ground.” His wish came true, in fact, a few years before his own death, when someone intentionally set the old cottage on fire in 1876.The Springfield Republican, November 29, 1876, page 6.
Josiah was the middle of seven children (a brother died at age 3) and his parents were deeply religious and evangelical, from pious Puritan stock. He was often called by his middle name, Gilbert, throughout his life by family members and intimates. His great-uncle Jonas Holland came to Belchertown from nearby Petersham in 1795 followed by his paternal uncles, Luther and Park, and his father. His uncle Luther manufactured, in Belchertown, the first horizontal pump fire engine made in the United States"Holland's horizontal pump" Pittsfield Sun, August 3, 1911. (his great-uncle Luther began building fire engines at Petersham).
Josiah's parents were married in 1810 by the "venerable" Belchertown pastor Justus Forward, of New England vampire panic notoriety and who assiduously cataloged the vital records of Belchertown inhabitants for half a century. His parents converted to Congregationalism in 1813, part of the evangelical furor brought on by the Second Great Awakening.J. G. Holland Memorial Address delivered by Reverend P. W. Lyman at Belchertown, Mass., October 16, 1881.
Josiah's father Harrison painted the first wagon manufactured in Belchertown, which became a center of the carriage trade in the United States. It was called "Warner's butterfly." Harrison Holland likely erected a small stone mill for a carding machine along a brook from Holland Pond, near the farm on which Josiah was born. There was little money to be earned: carding was transitioning to the larger factory mills at this time. The mill was later converted into a powder mill.
Harrison was what biographers called a "failed inventor;" his patented silk machine was used in China but he received little or no return. He moved the family every year or two: Heath, back to Belchertown, South Hadley, Granby and Northampton. "He was always inventing ingenious trifles," a biography states. "And sometimes made verses, and held the fatuously sanguine view that some other place and some distant morrow held a boon and blessing denied to the here and now." Josiah G. Holland later loosely based characters in several of his novels on his father.
Josiah worked in a factory to help the family. He then spent a short time studying at Northampton High School before withdrawing due to ill health. He tried daguerreotypy and taught penmanship from town to town, reciting "his own poems to his intimate friends." Between 1842 and 1843, three of Josiah's sisters died, Clarissa, Louisa and Lucretia, which had a profound impact upon him. He then saved enough money to study medicine at Berkshire Medical College, where he took a degree in 1843.
Hoping to become a successful physician, he began a medical practice with classmate Dr. Charles Bailey in Springfield, Massachusetts. He then opened a women’s hospital in Springfield with his former roommate from college, Charles Robinson, who would become the first governor of the State of Kansas, but it failed within six months.
In 1844, he wrote a city mystery (similar to the penny novel) called The Mysteries of Springfield under the pseudonym J. Wimpleton Wilkes. The cover states that it could be bought from dealers not only in Boston, New York, New Haven, and Hartford, but in Northampton and Cabotville (Chicopee) as well.Erickson, Paul Joseph. Welcome to Sodom: The Cultural Work of City-Mysteries Fiction in Antebellum America. Dissertation, Graduate School, The University of Texas at Austin, May 2005.
Marriage and career In 1845 he married Elizabeth Luna Chapin, “the scion of an old and substantial Springfield family.” The Puritan, an iconic statue of her ancestor Samuel Chapin, stands today in downtown Springfield.Harry Houston Peckham, Josiah Gilbert Holland in Relation to His Times. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940. She would become a confidant and intimate friend of Emily Dickinson.
In early 1847, Holland begin publishing a newspaper, The Bay State Weekly Courier, but the attempt proved unsuccessful, as did his medical practice.McAlpine, Frank. Our Album of Authors: A Cyclopedia of Popular Literary People. United States, Elliott & Beezley, 1885. He also published work in the Southern Literary Messenger.Boynton, Percy Holmes. A History of American Literature. United Kingdom, Ginn, 1919, p. 500.
He left New England that spring for the South, and took a teaching position in Richmond, Virginia, followed by one in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he was named superintendent and implemented the ideas of fellow Massachusetts educator and reformer Horace Mann.
In fall 1848, he and his wife were invited to a large cotton plantation in northeastern Louisiana and Holland wrote down his observations. Here he received word that his poetry would be published in the Knickerbocker Magazine and The Home Journal.
Springfield In April 1849, Holland and his wife returned to Western Massachusetts. His mother-in-law was dying and his wife went to care for her. The following month he was offered $40 a month as assistant editor of The Springfield Daily Republican, where he began working with the younger, formidable and charming owner—the journalist and editor Samuel Bowles.
On Wednesday, September 26, 1849, The Republican began publishing Holland's writing of plantation life in a seven-part series, though uncredited, titled, "Three Weeks on a Cotton Plantation." They were well-received by a curious public. He wrote local news and essays, many of which were collected and published in book form, helping establish his literary reputation. Bowles encouraged Holland to publish under the pseudonym Timothy Titcomb, which he did to great success. The writings were oftentimes formatted as letters, offering the public simple, personal, moral guidance and inspiration.
Under the editorial leadership of Bowles and Holland, The Republican became the most widely-read and respected small city daily in America. In 1851, Holland received an A.B. honorary doctorate degree from Amherst College, a few miles north from his birthplace, where Edward Dickinson (Emily Dickinson's father) was treasurer.
Holland's first book under his birth name was a two-volume History of Western Massachusetts (1855), the first book to feature a poem by a Black woman poet in the U.S. He followed in 1857 with an historical novel, The Bay-Path: A Tale of Colonial New England Life, and a collection of essays titled Titcomb's Letters to Young People, Single and Married in 1858. There were at least fifty editions of this book. He also published his narrative poem “Bitter-Sweet” that year. In 1857, he began touring on the Lyceum lecture circuit, soon mentioned with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bayard Taylor and George William Curtis.
Gold-Foil: Hammered from Popular Proverbs under his Timothy Titcomb pen name came out in 1859. He published his second novel, Miss Gilbert‘s Career: An American Story, in 1860. It is considered one of the first novels of American Realism, anticipating “much abler and more penetrating realists” who would come later that century.Peckham, 100. The year following he released Lessons in Life: A Series of Familiar Essays (1861).
In 1862, he erected an opulent home in the Italianate villa style (also called a “Swiss-chalet style”). It was located on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River in North Springfield near present day 110 Atwater Terrace. Holland named the mansion “Brightwood”; it was painted Venetian red. The neighborhood today retains the name Brightwood.The Atwater Neighborhood Walking Tour Springfield Preservation TrustClogston, William. King's Handbook of Springfield, Massachusetts: A Series of Monographs, Historical and Descriptive. United States, J.D. Gill, Publisher, 1884.
In August 1864, his poem, The Heart of the War, was published in the magazine,The Atlantic Monthly.
When Sam Bowles took an extended trip to Europe, Holland temporarily assumed the duties as editor-in-chief of The Springfield Republican. After the Civil War he reduced his editorial duties and wrote many of his most popular works, including the Life of Abraham Lincoln (1866), and Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, In a Poem (1867).
Lincoln Holland wrote an eloquent eulogy of Abraham Lincoln within days of Lincoln's death, prompting a commission for a full biography of the late president. He quickly pulled together the lengthy Life of Abraham Lincoln, finished in February 1866. The 544-page bestseller portrayed Lincoln as an emancipator opposed to slavery and began many enduring myths about the slain President.
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