Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Nineteenth Century, 1800-1914

From an early age, literature influenced her thoughts. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which the March sisters in Little Women read and from which Alcott took many of the novel's chapter titles, was a family favorite. Modern writers also figured prominently: Scott, Goethe, Hawthorne, Frederika Bremer, and Fanny Burney. But Dickens ranked above the rest. Alcott's journals over three decades reveal her and her family reading, rereading, and dramatizing scenes from Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and Bleak House; in Little Women, the sisters form the ʻPickwick Club,ʻ producing a weekly newspaper, The Pickwick Portfolio. Alcott's own aspirations to author- ship also reflected her appreciation for other women authors: After reading a biography of Charlotte Bronte in June 1857, she wrote, ʻSo full of talent, and after working long, just as success, love and happiness come, she dies. Wonder if I shall ever be famous enough for people to care to read my story and struggles. I can't be a C.B., but I may do a little something yetʻ (Journals, 85).

Henry Adams was a man at odds with his world. Adams took the ideas of Agassiz, Lyell, and Comte to tell the history of the decline of Western society. Comte's stages of human thought were adopted by Adams, but it was the the- ological stage that was now highest. So, too, did Adams absorb the varying philosophies of natural history in order to demonstrate that humanity was not evolving upward but was sliding into a precipitous decline. The reader of Henry Adam's works should not be surprised by his gloomy outlook, for Adams was a man in love with order and history in a time of anarchy and change.