The childhood and adolescence of Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) brought both boons and obstacles. Born into wealth—her father was a successful New York banker—she grew up in luxury, but her mother died in childbirth when Julia was 5. As she grew older, her father, acting both from overzealous religious principles and from reasons of propriety, strictly regulated her life: the books she read, the friends she made, the entertainments and dances she might attend. She must have felt his influence profoundly, for, after his death, when she was 20, Howe continued for a while to lead an austere life.
A portrait of Julia Ward Howe, 1925, by John Elliott. Public Domain
In 1841, she met Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a figure famous at the time for his foray as a volunteer in the Greek War of Independence and for his work with the blind. Eighteen years older than Julia, Howe fell deeply in love with her, and they married but the union proved to be tumultuous. Howe was controlling, cold, and showed particular contempt for his wife’s writing. Years into their marriage, Julia wrote in her journal, “Books—poems—essays—everything has been contemptible in his eyes because not his way of doing things. ... I am much grieved and disconcerted.”
Despite this antagonism, Julia bore six children, published poetry and books, gave lectures in her later years, famously wrote the 1870 tract “A Mother’s Day for Peace,” and even more famously wrote the poem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” After years of marriage, during which they had once considered divorce, Howe came to accept his wife’s talents with a sort of bewildered amusement.
‘I Will Simply Call Myself a Student’
The cover of the illustrated version of Julia Ward Howe's autobiography "Reminiscences."
So Howe wrote of herself in her autobiography “Reminiscences.” As Jaime Fuller notes in “A Julia Ward Howe Reading List,” this self-description—student—aptly described her lifelong approach to reading and learning.
Though her father prohibited her from reading certain books, he permitted his daughter her studies. Consequently, Howe gained some command of German, French, Italian, and Latin and was so intent on learning more that, at one point, she would have herself tied to a chair with orders not to release her until her study time was up.
In her father’s house, she read some Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, was, of course, familiar with the Bible, and even slipped in a visit to Goethe’s “Faust,” which brought a reprimand from her father: “My daughter, I hope that you have not read this wicked book!” Howe was permitted to read some poems by Lord Byron and, in school, encountered William Cowper and John Milton.
She was a frequent visitor to her older brother’s library, where she read French novelists like Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, but it was George Sand, whose novels then were considered off-limits for young women, who made the deepest impression on her. Of Sand’s novels, she later wrote, “The very world seemed not the same world after as before. She had given us a real gift; no criticism could take it away.”
Moving On
As an adult, Howe continued her voracious reading. She explored the plays of Molière and Friedrich Schiller; she went through Dante accompanied by the Italian patriot, professor, and later diplomat, Felice Foresti, and studied with pleasure the essays of Cicero.
In what she describes as “the first score of years of my married life,” Howe breathed new life into her knowledge of Latin, making her way through Virgil’s “Aeneid,” the histories of Livy and Tacitus, and verse by poets like Horace. She became so engrossed in these writers that, as she recounts in “Reminiscences,” her husband frequently asked, “Have you got those elephants over the river yet?” referencing Hannibal and the wars he waged against the Romans.
Howe was so fervent in her pursuit of learning that in “Reminiscences,” she even laid out a general study plan for women. She wrote, “If you have at your command three hours per diem, you may study art, literature, and philosophy, not as they are studied professionally, but in the degree involved in general culture.” Alternatively, she advised, “If you can command only fifteen or twenty minutes, read the Bible with the best commentaries, and daily a verse or two of the best poetry.”
The Reader as Writer
The 1913 bas-relief plaque of Julia Ward Howe, with book in hand, by Cyrus Dallin. AndrewTJay/CC0
These many expeditions into literature and history gave breadth and power to Howe’s writing. She produced books on topics ranging from stories for children to biographies to travel, and her essays and poetry appeared in a variety of publications. Though little read today, Howe in the latter half of the 19th century was a household name, famed not only for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but for her writing and her lectures on an array of social causes.
To understand how Howe’s reading contributed to her command of the English language, we have only to revisit the “Battle Hymn.” Set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” her lyrics, familiar to so many of us even today, constitute some of the most profound verses ever composed by any American writer.
Those words and their rhythms came from sensibilities shaped and trained by years of reading.
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Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
