Ames Family Historical Collection – Series 3

Anne Jean Robbins Lyman 1789-1867

 

She was born in Milton, Massachusetts, a town a few miles southwest of Boston, into a large family with distinguished roots reaching back to earliest Colonial times.  Her formal schooling ended at age 16, but her thirst for learning, her keen intellectual curiosity, and her wide reading lasted into old age.  

 At age 22, Anne Jean married Judge Joseph Lyman III, a widower twice her age, and moved to Northampton, a small village two days’ hard coach-ride away.  Her parents feared that her sudden removal to such a distance, together with having to run a large household and act the wife of a community leader and step-mother of his five children--all this would be too much for her.  But her constitution was strong.  So was her self-confidence.  She was undeterred.   

“Life in a small country town suited her better than the elaborate societies of the major cities,” her daughter Susan Lyman wrote in her book, ‘Recollections of My Mother’.  “For although there were many people who called my mother aristocratic, it was only because they did not know her.  A certain grandeur of manner, nobility of figure and outline, a flow of elegant English in conversation, may have given that impression to a casual visitor; but no friend thought so....” 

She was one of the town’s most popular hostesses; her guests included such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Lydia Maria Child, the prominent Abolitionist leader, and many of her husband’s fellow judges.  She was a homespun dispenser of good works, and a leader in the rise of Unitarianism.  Her voluminous output of letters to a broad array of friends and younger relatives almost never failed to mention her readings.  She was a born teacher; she spread instructive maxims, often humorous, to all the young people she encountered, including servants.

In’ Recollections of My Mother”, Susan wrote of her mother’s ‘beneficences’:  “They were a part of her nature; she could not help them, they were the great luxuries of her life.  She had no set plan of doing good, she belonged to no organization, was president of no society....  She simply kept her eyes, ears, and heart open all the time; and they were always finding things to do...”

Susan’s book recalls that at Anne Jean’s children’s bedtime, she “would often say, ‘When I was out today, I heard that Mrs. So-and-so called.  She is old and poor and had walked a long distance.  Did you ask her to stop and give her a warm seat....?’  Alas, intent on play, we had never thought of it.... ‘“Oh, my dear children... you¹ve lost your opportunity....’.  Surely no loss could be as great as that, the loss of an opportunity to do a kindness...”

Anne Jean had five children; all but one lived to old age.  One daughter, also named Anne Jean, died at age 22.   She had her share of other difficult times.  In her day, infant and child death was common, and many adults died at ages now considered young.  She mourned many deaths among friends and relatives.  She suffered from severe sciatica in most of her 40’s. When she was 52, her husband, Joseph, suffered a stroke, and was debilitated in body and mind until his death six years later.  At the same time, she suffered from erysipelas, a painful, long-lasting skin disease.  But until, in her 70’s, she fell prey to what may have been Alzheimer’s, she never lost her optimistic, forward-looking spirit.  At age 78, her mind long gone, she died in a nursing home.  

Anne Jean’s father was a judge who served in the Massachusetts legislature and as lieutenant governor.  His family, on the Colonial side of the American Revolution, traced its ancestry back to Anne Hutchinson, the religious leader exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Her mother came from a prominent Massachusetts Loyalist family.  Anne Jean¹s many great-grandchildren included Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Quotes By and about Anne Jean Robbins Lyman

--To daughter Susan from Ralph Waldo Emerson, reminiscing in 1874:  “Your mother was a queenly woman, well formed, in perfect health, made for society, with flowing conversation, high spirits and perfectly at ease...”

--From an article in the Monthly Religious Magazine (no date available). The author of this piece calls on Anne Jean, enters the house and finds her thus:
“Perceiving at once that she is girt about with all sorts of  work, you will beg her not to rise, and will get welcome enough from her warm grasp and her fine, expressive face.  What is she doing...?  Shelling peas, perhaps; not always to the best advantage, for peas will roll under sofas and into nooks from which ‘it does not pay’ to extricate them....
“But this is not all; there is a volume in her lap—Jane Eyre, we will say, or a Margaret Fuller, or some fresh sermon by Dr. Channing.... and as the story deepens in interest...the peas fly about a little more wildly...”

--From a letter to Susan from Lydia Maria Child: “We always liked each other; but in many respects it was the attraction of opposites.  I was a born radical, and her training had been eminently conservative.  Both of us were by temperament as direct and energetic as a locomotive...coming full tilt from opposite directions we often met with a clash....  After such encounters, we shook hands and laughed, and indulged in a little playful raillery at each other’s vehemence.....  I delighted in her earnestness, her energy...and her large view of men and things....  She rose with a lofty disdain above all distinctions that were merely conventional and external....” 

Anne Jean wrote hundreds of letters.  Her most frequent correspondent was her niece, Abigail (Abby) Lyman Greene, twelve years her junior.  Some excerpts:

--1823:  “I think...the birth of a first child is something of a more elevated and exciting cast than anything we ever experience afterward....  I can attest, after twelve years of ordinary experience on the subject, there is no pleasure or satisfaction in human life which is equal to that afforded to us by our children....”

--In 1824, when Anne Jean was 35, she and her husband were among a small number of local citizens who broke away from the Congregational church and established a more free-thinking “meeting” that ultimately became Unitarian.  She writes to a friend:  “In my opinion, Christianity does not belong to one sect more than another.... as it regards myself, belief has but little hold with the religion of the heart....”

--1826:  “I think less and less of fine accomplishments every day.  If they are the ornaments of a very fine character it is very well; but if they decorate a coarse material, they only illustrate more powerfully the defect of the original fabric....”

--1832:  “There are few immutable principles in education that will never be controverted....  Let examples and surrounding influences...tend to cherish a love of truth and perfect sincerity....” 

--1837: “³People are not happier or better for being rich.... the practice of economy lays the foundation of much virtue....  And we ought to be grateful for any event in our destiny upon which by force we must erect a virtue....”

--Feb, 1837, to Dr. Austin Flint, the family physician, ten days after her daughter, Anne Jean, age 22,died following a long siege of rheumatic fever:  “I have no language adequate to the expression of what I have suffered, and what I must suffer.  The shadows of the past hang like a cloud over my path; they obstruct my view of the future; and I am almost in doubt where I am....  I can say, with Job, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in God.’ But think of how all my plans, all my objects in life, were connected with her that is gone!  Was she not my sunlight, my angel of mercy, my pride, my stay, my companion and friend....my holy child?...  I wish I could dispossess my mind of the weeks and months of anguish by which she was finally brought to resign this life.”

Quotes by and about Anne Jean Lyman – page 2

To son Joseph, 1834:  “We have had very warm weather, and a fine shower has made the country look beautiful....and every new flower...is only a new expression of a Heavenly  Father’s love and kindness....”

To son Joseph, 1837:  “I am disgusted with the great commendation given to the Pickwick Papers.  I think it might have done to publish one volume of such stuff; but four is oppressive, and promotes a waste of time that is unpardonable, to say nothing of furnishing an additional quantity of vulgarity to contemplate, when there is already a superabundance in everybody’s experience of every-day life.” [Susan’s remark:  “...it was almost funnier to hear her talk about Dickens than to read him....”]

Susan recalls, in 1847, her mother wrote, “I have read Jane Eyre; and though it is intensely interesting, I advise you not to read it, for I think it has a most immoral tendency.”

To son Edward, 1840: “It is a common idea, I know, that leisure and repose bring pleasure.  A very little experience shows how untrue is the fact.  We all require an object, a motive, something to exercise continually the restless activity within us; and I believe those the happiest on earth who are under a pressure of business, who have a definite duty to perform....”

In 1840, the Unitarian congregation in Northampton hired, but a year later fired, a minister who was a transcendentalist and who believed, pantheistically, that God was contained in all things.  Anne Jean writes her sister Catherine, “I can never substitute intuition for the word of God or the teachings of our Savior; neither can I substitute feeling for doctrine, nor sentiment for worship.  Nature-worship is...far below my idea of the adoration due to God.... To me it would be idolatry....”  But later she writes to Abby, “...it was very wrong in us to settle [i.e., hire] him under the circumstances, and wicked in us to thrust him out as we did....”

--1843:  “I often esteem myself fortunate that my destiny fell in that walk of life which prevented isolation and exclusion.  Indeed, it has thrown me in continual contact with all the sorts and kinds of beings which constitute humanity; and what most people deprecate I feel that I may rejoice in, for I never feel out of place with the highest, more moderate, or the lowest society. In neither case is my dignity raised or impaired.” 

To her sister, Catherine Robbins (1845), “Marriages, births, sickness, and death  are everywhere mingled in human experience; and, if we can find an interval occasionally long enough for a little recreation and exhilaration of our spirits, we should be grateful for it in this vale of tears.”

Daughter Susan Lesley writes in ‘Recollections of My Mother’:  “I recall the beautiful winter evenings when she gathered us after tea...to read to us...a plentiful amount of English history....  It is difficult for us to think of ‘that old wretch, Henry the Eighth,’ as she always called him, in any other light than hers.”

When warned that members of two families invited to one of her parties were not speaking to each other, Anne Jean replied, “The Lord only knows when they will if no one ever gives them a chance.”

END