by Linda Ames Cowan June 6, 2006

At age 21, Susan Inches Lyman wrote to a best friend:  “…how strange it seems to me to hear people looking back to their childhood as light-hearted and unconscious!  mine never was.  Can you remember the moment since you were a very little child that you had not a sense of personal responsibility?”

She describes her girlhood as being raised in “ardent liberalism” in an extended family of “large-hearted influence” in Northampton, MA.  Her parents founded the first Unitarian church in town.  They hosted a steady stream of visitors.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Lydia Maria Child and Catherine Maria Sedgwick were among the many.  There was constant lively conversation to which the children were always invited to listen.

As a child, Susan describes herself as being of a “sensitive” nature and with a great love of books.  Fragile health kept her from much formal education, though she did attend Mr. George B. Emerson’s prestigious School for Young Ladies in Boston for a year; there she formed a lasting friendship with Lucretia Peabody Hale¹. Later she visited New York where in the company of Lydia Maria Child and others, she had her first glimpse of city slums and the need for organized social action.

In 1849, age 25, she married J. Peter Lesley, then a fledgling minister in Milton, near Boston.  But only three years later Peter gave up his ministry.  They moved to Philadelphia (a “wrench,” Susan wrote) where Peter began his distinguished lifelong career in geology.  The early years were unsettled for Susan; Peter’s work took him away from home for months at a time, and she was frequently ill.  They had two daughters, Mary, born 1853, and Margaret, born 1857.  In spite of slender means, the Lesley household bulged with boarders, friends, relatives and anyone who, daughter Mary later wrote, needed “ministering to.”  

By the time of the Civil War, Peter’s professional standing and family livelihood were secure.  But in 1866, Peter, who had always had a sensitive emotional constitution, suffered a breakdown.  Leaving their little daughters, then ages 9 and 12, with friends, he and Susan spent nearly two years touring Europe and Egypt.  On their return there was a new era of more regular habits, steadier health and calmer family life.  The family moved into the Philadelphia house where they lived for twenty-five years.  According to Mary, at age 45 Susan “found a haven” from which she could “allow herself to enter upon some public work.”

“Some public work” is a gross understatement.  Alternating bursts of intensity with periods of recovery, she threw herself into recruiting and instructing 100’s of volunteers for the new Charity Organization of Philadelphia founded in 1876.  More specialized organizations followed:  the Children’s Aid Society and then the St. Mary’s Street Day Nursery and Kindergarten.  Susan was also active in the establishment of Spring Garden, the second Unitarian church in Philadelphia.  Her roles were never of official leadership; she preferred to “influence” others on working together.  For many years she held meetings in her parlor, raised money by discrete letter writing, served on boards and generally gave active encouragement.

Susan wrote and had printed a biography called “Recollections of My Mother” about Anne Jean Lyman².  The third edition (1889) featured an introduction by James Freeman Clarke, a prominent Unitarian minister. She also gave Peter long-term clerical support and contributed to cataloguing the Library of the American Philosophical Society where he was Secretary.

In due course both Mary and Margaret married, moved away, and produced grandchildren, to Peter and Susan’s delight.  Peter suffered a breakdown in 1893 that caused him to retire.  He and Susan passed their late years back in Milton.  Susan died in 1904, only six months after Peter.  She had been his anchor and he hers.  Their long marriage of passion, unusual frankness, lively intellectual interests and mutual respect is fully reflected in the voluminous correspondence generated during the frequent times when they were apart.

Unitarian minister Charles Gordon Ames preached a memorial discourse for the couple:  of Susan he said, “In Miss Lucretia Hale’s playful (children’s stories) The Peterkin Papers, Mrs. Lesley figures as “the wise lady from Philadelphia.”  Her friends readily caught up the epithet, and used it in good earnest.  Her speech and conduct were wise, and her open hand was guided by an open eye….  She prayed with both hands.”
(lac 6-6-06)

Footnotes
1.  Lucretia Peabody Hale (1820-1900) was a sister of Edward Everett Hale and an author best known for her children’s stories about the scatterbrained Peterkin family whose conundrums were always solved by “the wise lady from Philadelphia.”

2.  Anne Jean Robbins Lyman, Susan’s mother, was a social leader in Northampton, a lively intellect, and a woman of innumerable kindnesses.

Brief Quotes from the letters of Susan Inches Lesley
(From The Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, Volumes i & ii, Knickerbocker Press, 1909, unless otherwise noted.)

Her childhood:  “A child’s simplicity and unconsciousness were more sacred to (my mother) than to any one I have ever known…  Always ready to sympathize with and approve them, she yet never allowed herself or others to express admiration of children in their presence… She dressed them in the plainest clothes, taught them always to be ready to give up personal ease or pleasure for the sake of older people…”  (Recollections of My Mother by Susan I. Lesley, page 432)

1849, Letter to husband a few days before marriage:  “You often speak of your variable moods, as if you thought they would trouble me.  But it is never so.  I rejoice that you express them all, and I rejoice that they all give a variety to my own thought, which my more monotonous temperament fails to supply me with: --indeed I am constantly rejoicing in the unlikeness of our temperaments, as much as I delight in the likeness of our hopes, aims, tastes and purposes.”  (i 211)

Nov 27, 1859, to Aunt Kitty Robbins about John Brown:  “…I can’t tell you how distressed Peter and I have been with this dreadful Harper’s Ferry affair…  It is rare to disapprove so entirely of a man’s deed, and yet have such entire sympathy with his motives and character.” (i377)

July 1863 to JPL:  “…I felt a little self-condemned by your last most excellent advice, for I had just gobbled up the rest of Les Misérables after reading Fantine carefully.  I shall try to mend my ways in future.  I always want to get a novel “off my mind,” so as to do my work, and that is the reason I seldom read one.  For I am so weak as to become absorbed in the story….  I shall never lose my interest in reading ethics, or biography,  …  I note what you say of going along with the children’s studies—geography, history, etc. … I regret that all these things are so great an effort to me, and that my education was so poor in youth, but I shall struggle against it as best I may.” (i431)

April 24, 1865 to JPL:  “I suppose you are as much pleased as I am that (John Wilkes) Booth was taken dead.  I am thankful that the public will be cheated out of a trial and a hanging, which are so demoralizing, and never fail to create a morbid sympathy for the criminal in certain minds….”

Sept 8, 1869 to JPL re child-raising:  “…I had no rules and no methods, only believed in surrounding children with good people and good influences, good conversation to which they could listen thoughtfully, seldom joining; never to discuss before them what they should eat, drink or wear, so that their meals should be an unconscious delight and their clothes an unconscious comfort; and for the rest, leave them much to themselves.”  (ii 84)

1875 Mar 2 to Aunt Kitty Robbins re a family reading of the book Supernatural Religion which questions what gospels were written when and by whom:  “…this is an age that brings everything into the light of criticism, and we cannot avoid the young hearing it.  So it is perhaps as well for them to see, that nothing but moral and spiritual ideas have any sure basis, and that they are eternal…” (ii 145-146)

1877 Feb 5 to Aunt Kitty Robbins:  “Every week, different sets of people meet in my parlor to consult and arrange about the formation of all sorts of good things.  A Women’s Club, the Moral Education Society; a committee to introduce Higher Education and the Harvard Examinations into our schools….  I keep out of holding any offices, for I have neither taste nor talent for being President or corresponding secretary….  But I find by allowing the meetings in my house…I have a chance to influence somewhat the formation of these various societies, to keep out dangerous, or inharmonious, or inefficient elements.  So much depends on things being started rightly, and so very many good people have small insight into character, that though my help is all “under the rose,” I hope it is at least a drop in the ocean…”

1879, Jan 5 to Aunt Kitty Robbins re her “wonderful experiences” organizing Wards for the Organized Charity Association of Philadelphia:  “I half feel as if I had already landed in another sphere, as Hebrew, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Orthodox Friend, Hicksite, come to me with every kind of question, which they could answer better themselves, but which I have to try to, since they think I can….”   (ii 215)

1880 to daughter Margaret studying art in Paris.  As unconventional as it was to allow her to study art at all, especially alone in Paris, Susan urges her to use her own judgment about joining the men’s drawing class where live models are used:  “Both you and we have made a great sacrifice in this separation, but we know what we made it for.  To defeat the main object of the sacrifice, because others whom we love and esteem can’t see it as we do, would be both a crime and a blunder….  Be not disturbed at anything any one may say of your Father and me on your account.  We are too old people to be hurt by that kind of thing, I assure you.”  (ii272-273)  (Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown became a successful portrait painter who contributed substantially to her own family’s income.)

1898, age 75, to her daughter Mary:  “…sometimes I am anxious without reason, which I suppose is the effect of years, but I try to hope and have faith at all times.  My visits did me a world of good.  But when Father says I have a world of courage and sunshine, and that he lives upon it, I feel what a sham I really am, for it seems to me that all my courage has oozed out, and all I have done, or can do is to

And, oh! how beautiful the world is, and this little piece of it (their cottage in Milton), where the lines have fallen to us in pleasant places.”  (ii437)

Extracts from a memorial discourse preached by Charles Gordon Ames:
(Appendix K from Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley)

“For many years I had opportunity to observe the unstinted hospitality of the Lesley home in Philadelphia… and there was deliberate arrangement for a succession of invited guests, with a preference for those who required, but could not afford, a change…  Often I have known Mrs. Lesley, when passing through a course of physical depression, to shut herself up in the dark all day in order to collect strength to meet her evening guests with a smiling welcome.”

“She made large use of moderate means; but she collected for benevolent objects many thousands of dollars by appeals to her friends and to persons of public spirit.  …In this propaganda she also employed printer’s ink, procuring and mailing at her own cost no end of slips, leaflets, and pamphlets, selected and original.”

“When Emerson died, she wrote me that from her girlhood he had impressed her as “a reverent listener.”  She knew what that meant.”