Celia Laighton Thaxter. . - Books About Antiques - 'Among the Isles of Shoals' - book review

Magazine Antiques, May, 2002 by Alfred Mayor

The nine small Isles of Shoals, ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire, were so named for shoals of fish not shoals of rocks, although in truth there are a great many rocks both above and below the surface of the sea there. Except for day-trippers during the summer months, there is not much life on the islands today. However, in the nineteenth century there were popular hotels on Hog (renamed Appledore), Smuttynose, and Star Islands, all three built and operated by the Laighton family.

When Thomas Laighton was made the keeper of the lighthouse on White Island in 1839 he brought his wife, Eliza, and his three-year-old daughter; Celia, with him to that Spartan rock. Thus began a lifelong attachment to the islands by one of the best-known poets of the nineteenth century, Celia Laighton Thaxter, whose talents also included painting and gardening.

The largest of the Laighton hotels was Appledore House, which opened in 1848. Thomas Laighton's partner in building it was Levi Thaxter; who was Celia Laighton's tutor and then, in 1851, her husband. She was sixteen and he was twenty-seven. Within a year she had the first of three children--a son, Karl, injured at birth, and forever after dependent on his mother. Two more sons followed, but the marriage drifted into prolonged separations.

One Woman's Work, the catalogue of a traveling exhibition of Thaxter's artworks, contains a photograph of the teenage mother in profile staring sadly out of the frame above the heads of two of her sons, John and the melancholy Karl. Another photograph shows her husband Levi, gaunt and suspicious--just the sort of man who might refuse to allow his wife a maid even if she paid for one with her own earnings, which is what he did.

Then Thaxter took charge of her life. During the season she and her brothers Oscar and Cedric managed the three hotels. Appledore House held three hundred at capacity and welcomed "a who's who of late nineteenth-century notables, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Childe Hassam to Richard Henry Dana and future U. S. president from New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce." Thaxter welcomed them all, but was herself not above self promotion, endorsing the Hall typewriter, allowing the County Fire Insurance Company of Philadelphia to use a photograph of her Appledore cottage and garden on the cover of a calendar; and lending her name and photograph to a brand of cigars appropriately named Celia Thaxter. Her book Among the Isles of Shoals, published in 1873, "can be read as a thinly disguised travel brochure for the Appledore Hotel." Nonetheless, a late nineteenth-century card game entitled Authors includes her as one of the fifty most famous English and American writers. She shares the deck with Milton, Pope, Dickens, S hakespeare, and Twain.

Thaxter's cottage parlor became a retreat for Boston's cultural elite, one of whom wrote: "Under the circumstances the world could not beat a path to Mrs. Thaxter's door; but you may imagine a groove in the Atlantic left there by the prows of many voyages made by distinguished literary men, among them Whittier; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Whitcomb Riley and James Russell Lowell."

Thaxter's poetry, renowned in her day, celebrated the natural world, by which she was so abundantly surrounded on the Isles of Shoals. As William Dean Howells wrote of her: "it is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the mystical environment of the ocean." She turned the same concentrated lens on her surroundings when she painted, always realistically and chiefly flowers worthy of a botanical portraitist. Apropos she wrote: "It is one of the wisest things in the world to carry in one's pocket a little magnifying glass, for this opens so many unknown gates into the wonders and splendors of Creation." For friends and other customers, she painted translucent and minutely detailed flowers over the type in her volumes of poetry, using the proceeds to offset the constant need to pay her bills.

When the enthusiasm for china painting began to embrace ladies of leisure, Thaxter was on the crest of the swell. Practical in this as in everything else, she concentrated on affordable forms, such as vases, dishes, tiles, and even buttons. She used Haviland and Wedgwood blanks and had her products fired at Cooley's in Boston, a much respected firm. Then, signing her work with her well-known name, she sold her production briskly. "The demand for the olive branch, the poppy, the scarlet pimpernel, and seaweed was high and she reproduced these personally meaningful designs over and over again. Her favorite flowers crept around plates, interwined on vases, and enveloped cups." Unlike her poetry, which seems somewhat overheated today, her painted china is as enchanting now as when she sent it off to Cooley's.

Finally, Thaxter had her flower garden, wresting from the sloping granite meadows of Appledore vases full of flowers for every room in her cottage. The flowers were so carefully chosen, and each arrangement was so accomplished that "I have seen people stand before it mute with delight," she wrote in An Island Garden.