LYDIA MARIA

See also:

• CHILD
• CHILD, FRANCIS JAMES (1825-1896)
• CHILD, L
• LYDIA MARIA CHILD (1802-1880)
• CHILD, SIR FRANCIS (1642-1713)
• CHILD, SIR JOHN (d. 1690)
• CHILD, SIR JOSIAH (163o - 1699)

CHILD (1802-1880)  , American author, was born at Medford, Massachusetts, on the 11th of February 18o2 . She was educated at an academy in her native town and by her brother Convers Francis (1795-1863), a Unitarian minister and from 1842 to 1863 Parkman professor in the Harvard Divinity School . Her first stories, Hobomok (1824) and The Rebels (1825), were popular successes . She was a schoolmistress until 1828, when she married David Lee Child (1794-1874), a brilliant but erratic Boston lawyer and journalist . From 1826 to 1834 she edited The Juvenile Miscellany, the first children's monthly periodical in the United States . About 1831 both she and her husband began to identify themselves with the anti-slavery cause, and in 1833 she published An Appeal for that Class of Americans called Africans, a stirring portrayal of the evils of slavery, and an argument for immediate abolition, which had a powerful influence in winning recruits to the anti-slavery cause . Henceforth her time was largely devoted to the anti-slavery cause . From 184o to 1844, assisted by her husband, she edited the Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City . After the Civil War she wrote much in behalf of the freedmen and of Indian rights . She died at Wayland, Massachusetts, on the loth of October i 880 . In addition to the books above mentioned, she wrote many pamphlets and short stories and The (American) Frugal House-wife (1829), one of the earliest American books on domestic economy, The Mother's Book (1831), a pioneer cook-book republished in England and Germany, The Girls' Own Book (1831), History of Women (2 vols., 1832), Good Wives (1833), The Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836), Philothea (1836), a romance of the age of Pericles, perhaps her best book, Letters from New York (2 vols., 1843-1845), Fact and Fiction (1847), The Power of Kindness (1851), Isaac T . Hopper: a True Life (1853), The Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages (3 vols., 1855), Autumnal Leaves (1857), Looking Toward Sunset (1864), The Freedman's Book (1865), A Romance of the Republic (1867), and Aspirations of the World (1878) .

See The Letters of

Lydia Maria Child, with a Biographical Introduction by J . G . Whittier (Boston, 1883) ; and a chapter in T . W . Higginson's Contemporaries (Boston, 1899) .