Fitz Hugh Ludlow facts for kids
Fitz Hugh Ludlow, sometimes seen as Fitzhugh Ludlow (September 11, 1836 – September 12, 1870), was an American author, journalist, and explorer.
Ludlow also wrote about his travels across America on the overland stage to San Francisco, Yosemite and the forests of California and Oregon in his second book, The Heart of the Continent. An appendix to it provides his impressions of the recently founded Mormon settlement in Utah.
He was also the author of many works of short fiction, essays, science reporting and art criticism. Ludlow died prematurely at the age of 34.
Contents
Early life
Ludlow was born September 11, 1836, in New York City, where his family made their home. His father, the Rev. Henry G. Ludlow, was an outspoken abolitionist minister at a time when anti-slavery enthusiasm was not popular, even in the urban North. Only months before his birth, Fitz Hugh later wrote, "my father, mother, and sister were driven from their house in New York by a furious mob. When they came cautiously back, their home was quiet as a fortress the day after it has been blown up. The front-parlor was full of paving-stones; the carpets were cut to pieces; the pictures, the furniture, and the chandelier lay in one common wreck; and the walls were covered with inscriptions of mingled insult and glory. Over the mantel-piece had been charcoaled 'Rascal'; over the pier-table, 'Abolitionist.'"
His father was also a "ticket-agent on the Underground Railroad," as Ludlow discovered when he was four — although, misunderstanding the term in his youth, Ludlow remembered "going down cellar and watching behind old hogsheads by the hour to see where the cars came in."
The moral lessons learned at home were principles hard to maintain among his peers, especially when expressed with his father's exuberance.
Henry Ludlow's father was a pioneer temperance advocate, according to one source "adopting and advocating its principles before any general and organized effort for them."
Fitz Hugh's father had obvious and enormous influence on him, with his mother playing a more marginal role in his life. Abigail Woolsey Wells died a few months after Ludlow's twelfth birthday. At her funeral, the presiding minister said that "[f]or many years she has scarcely known what physical ease and comfort were. She labored with a body prostrated and suffering; and laid herself down to sleep in pain."
His mother's suffering may have brought out in Ludlow an obsession with mortality and the connection between the spiritual and animal in man. It was observed that "through all her life [she] had a constitutional and indescribable dread of death; not so much the fear of being dead, as of dying itself. An appalling sense of the fearful struggle which separates the soul from the body."
The college man
Ludlow began his studies at the College of New Jersey, today's Princeton University. Entering in 1854, he joined the Cliosophic Society, a literary and debating club. When a fire gutted Nassau Hall, the College of New Jersey's main building, a year later he transferred to Union College. There he joined the Kappa Alpha Society, the nation's first purely social collegiate fraternity, and lived with its members.
Ludlow evidently took some intensive courses in medicine at Union. As early as 1857, he writes of having been an anesthesiologist during minor surgery, and being asked by surgeons for his opinions on the actions of various courses of anesthesia.
A class in which Ludlow always got the highest marks was one taught by famed Union College president Eliphalet Nott based on Lord Kames' seminal 1762 literary work, Elements of Criticism – although it essentially became a course on Nott's own philosophy. The eccentric polymath Nott would have an influence on Ludlow, but perhaps more immediately his assertion that "[i]f I had it in my power to direct the making of songs in any country, I could do just as I pleased with the people."
In a testimony to Nott's feelings towards Ludlow's philosophy and writing talent, he asked the young man to write a song for the commencement ceremony of the Class of 1856. College legend holds that Ludlow was so unhappy with the late night lyrics he composed to the tune of the drinking song Sparkling and Bright he threw away the manuscript. Fortuitously, his roommate discovered it and brought the work to Rev. Nott's attention. Song to Old Union became the school's alma mater, and is sung at commencement to this day.
Ludlow wrote several college songs, two of which were considered the most popular Union College songs even fifty years later. In The Hasheesh Eater he says that "[h]e who should collect the college carols of our country… would be adding no mean department to the national literature… [T]hey are frequently both excellent poetry and music… [T]hey are always inspiring, always heart-blending, and always, I may add, well sung."
Entering the New York literary scene
His autobiographical book The ... Eater was published when Ludlow was twenty-one years old. The book was a success, going through a few printings in short order, and Ludlow, although he published both the book and his earlier article The Apocalypse of ... anonymously, was able to take advantage of the book's notoriety.
For a time he studied law under William Curtis Noyes (himself a lawyer who had begun his legal studies at the age of fourteen in the offices of Ludlow's uncle Samuel). Ludlow passed the bar exam in New York in 1859, but never practiced law, instead deciding to pursue a literary career.
The late 1850s marked a changing of the guard in New York City literature. Old guard literary magazines like The Knickerbocker and Putnam's Monthly were fading away, and upstarts like the Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Press, and Vanity Fair were starting up. Ludlow took on a position as an associate editor at Vanity Fair, a magazine which at the time resembled Punch in tone. It was probably through the Vanity Fair staff that Ludlow was introduced to the New York City bohemian and literary culture, centered around Pfaff's beer cellar on Broadway and Saturday night gatherings at Richard Henry Stoddard's home. This scene attracted the likes of Walt Whitman, Fitz James O'Brien, Bayard Taylor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Artemus Ward.
New York City's vibrant literary scene and cosmopolitan attitudes were a boon to Ludlow. "It is a bath of other souls," he wrote. "It will not let a man harden inside his own epidermis. He must affect and be affected by multitudinous varieties of temperament, race, character."
New York was tolerant of iconoclasts and of people with just the sort of notoriety Ludlow had cultivated. "No amount of eccentricity surprises a New-Yorker, or makes him uncourteous. It is difficult to attract even a crowd of boys on Broadway by an odd figure, face, manner, or costume. This has the result of making New York an asylum for all who love their neighbor as themselves, but would a little rather not have him looking through the key-hole."
The late 1850s and early 1860s found Ludlow in just about every literary quarter of New York. He wrote for, among many others, the Harper's publications (Weekly, Monthly and Bazar), the New York World, Commercial Advertiser, Evening Post, and Home Journal, and for Appleton's, Vanity Fair, Knickerbocker, Northern Lights, The Saturday Press, and the Atlantic Monthly.
George William Curtis, the editor of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, remembered Ludlow as "a slight, bright-eyed, alert young man, who seemed scarcely more than a boy," when he came in for a visit. Curtis introduced Ludlow to the princes of the Harper publishing family as an upcoming literary talent who, before his twenty-fifth birthday, would have his first book go through several printings and would place more than ten stories in Harper's publications, some of which were printed serially and spanned several issues.
Rosalie
Ludlow's fictional stories often mirror with fair accuracy the events of his life. One can suppose that the childlike eighteen-year-old with brown hair and eyes and "a complexion, marble struck through with rose flush" who falls for the narrator of Our Queer Papa, a young magazine sub-editor described as a "good-looking gentleman with brains, who had published," is the fictionalized Rosalie Osborne, who follows that description, and whom he would marry the year after the story's publication.
Rosalie was eighteen when she married, not particularly young by the standards of the day, but young enough in character that it would later be remembered that "she was… but a little girl when she was married." Memoirs written by members of the New York literary circle in which the Ludlows were an active part universally paint Rosalie as both very beautiful and very flirtatious. The wife of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, for instance, remembered Mrs. Ludlow as "the Dulcinea who had entangled [Aldrich] in the meshes of her brown hair."
The couple spent the first half of 1859 in Florida, where Ludlow wrote a series of articles, "Due South Sketches," describing what he later recalled as "the climate of Utopia, the scenery of Paradise, and the social system of Hell." He noted that while apologists for slavery condemned abolitionists for condoning miscegenation, "[t]he most open relations of concubinage existed between white chevaliers and black servants in the town of Jacksonville. I was not surprised at the fact, but was surprised at its openness… not even the pious shrugged their shoulders or seemed to care."
From Florida, the couple moved to New York City, staying in a boarding house and diving rapidly back into the literary social life.
The Heart of the Continent
In 1863 Albert Bierstadt was at the peak of a career that would make him America's top landscape artist. Ludlow considered Bierstadt's landscapes representative of the best American art of the era and used his position as art critic at the New York Evening Post to praise them.
Bierstadt wanted to return West, where in 1859 he had found scenes for some of his recently successful paintings. He asked Ludlow to accompany him. Ludlow's writings about the trip, published in the Post, San Francisco's The Golden Era, the Atlantic Monthly and then later compiled into book form, according to one biographer of Bierstadt, "proved to be among the most effective vehicles in firmly establishing Bierstadt as the preeminent artist-interpreter of the western landscape in the 1860s."
During the overland journey, they stopped at Salt Lake City, where Ludlow found an industrious and sincere group of settlers. He brought to the city prejudice and misgiving about the Mormons, and a squeamishness about polygamy which embarrassed him almost as much as his first view of a household of multiple wives. "I, a cosmopolitan, a man of the world, liberal to other people's habits and opinions to a degree which had often subjected me to censure among strictarians in the Eastern States, blushed to my very temples," he writes.
He couldn't believe that a pair of co-wives "could sit there so demurely looking at their own and each other's babies without jumping up to tear each other's hair and scratch each other's eyes out… It would have relieved my mind… to have seen that happy family clawing each other like tigers."
His impressions of the Mormons came when Utah was seen by many of his readers back home as rebellious and dangerous as those states in the Confederacy, with which the Union was then involved in the American Civil War. Ludlow encountered frequent snide comments about the disintegration of the Union, with some Mormons under the impression that with the flood of immigrants to Utah fleeing the draft, and with the decimation of the male population in war time making polygamy seem more practical, the Mormon state would come out of the war stronger than either side. Ludlow's opinions were read with interest back East, and would constitute an appendix to the book he would later write about his travels.
"The Mormon system," wrote Ludlow, "owns its believers — they are for it, not it for them. I could not help regarding this 'Church' as a colossal steam engine which had suddenly realized its superiority over its engineers and… had declared once for all not only its independence but its despotism." Furthermore, "[i]t is very well known in Salt Lake City that no man lives there who would not be dead tomorrow if Brigham willed it so." Ludlow spent considerable time with Orrin Porter Rockwell, who had been dubbed the "Destroying Angel" for his supposed role as Brigham Young's assassin of choice. Ludlow wrote a sketch of the man which Rockwell's biographer, Harold Schindler, called "the best of those left behind by writers who observed the Mormon first-hand." Ludlow said, in part, that he "found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met."
Ludlow wrote that "[i]n their insane error, [the Mormons] are sincere, as I fully believe, to a much greater extent than is generally supposed. Even their leaders, for the most part, I regard not as hypocrites, but as fanatics."
San Francisco
During his stay in San Francisco, Ludlow was a guest of Thomas Starr King, the youthful California preacher and passionate public speaker.
There, Ludlow again found himself in a vibrant literary community, this time centred around the Golden Era, which published Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte. Twain was at the time still a virtual unknown (he had first used the pen name "Mark Twain" in a published piece a few months before). Ludlow wrote that "[i]n funny literature, that Irresistable [sic] Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position… He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself." Twain reciprocated by asking Ludlow to preview some of his work, and wrote to his mother, "if Fitz Hugh Ludlow, (author of 'The Hasheesh Eater') comes your way, treat him well… He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain, (the same being eminently just & truthful, I beseech you to believe) in a San Francisco paper. Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself…"
From San Francisco, Bierstadt and Ludlow ventured to Yosemite, then to Mount Shasta, and then into Oregon, where Ludlow was struck "by a violent attack of pneumonia, which came near terminating my earthly with my Oregon pilgrimage" and which stopped their wandering for the better part of a week.
By late in 1864, after Ludlow's return to New York City, his marriage was in trouble. The reasons for the strife are unknown. Rosalie obtained a divorce in May 1866. She would, a few months later, marry Albert Bierstadt.
Ludlow quickly started up a relationship with Maria O. Milliken, of whom little is known except that she was ten years his senior and had children of her own. They were married shortly after Rosalie's marriage to Bierstadt.
New York stories
There was little in the field of literature that Ludlow did not feel qualified to attempt. He wrote stories for the magazines of his day, poetry, political commentary, art-, music-, drama-, and literary-criticism, and science and medical writing. As a newspaper writer, he also translated articles from foreign newspapers.
Most of his stories were light-hearted romances, sprinkled with characters like "Mr. W. Dubbleyew," or "Major Highjinks," and generally concerning some semi-ridiculous obstacle that comes between the narrator and a beautiful young woman he's fallen in love with. Occasional stories break from this pattern.
Final years
Ludlow left for Europe in June 1870. He travelled from New York with his sister Helen, who had been a constant source of support, and his wife, Maria, and one of her sons. They stayed for a month and a half in London, then left for Geneva, Switzerland when his health again took a downturn.
He died the morning after his thirty-fourth birthday.
See also
- Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library
