Bacon, Delia Salter

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BACON, Delia Salter

Born 2 February 1811, Tallmadge, Ohio Territory; died 2 September 1859, Hartford, Connecticut

Daughter of David and Alice Parks Bacon

Daughter of Congregationalist missionaries, Delia Salter Bacon was born in a model community her father had established in the wilderness. Bankrupt in 1812, he returned to Connecticut and died in 1817, leaving his wife and seven children. After one year (1825-26) at Catharine Beecher's Hartford school, where she was a classmate and literary rival of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Baker taught (1826-32) at schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. In 1833 she began a series of classes in the home of her brother Leonard, pastor of the First Church (Congregational) in New Haven. Her "Historical Lessons" proved successful in New Haven, New York, Albany, Boston, and Cambridge.

Bacon's eloquence and charm brought large audiences to her literary and historical surveys thirty years before female lecturers became common, and won her friends and admirers such as Elizabeth Peabody and Caroline W. H. Dall. The first fruit of Bacon's intense literary ambition, Tales of the Puritans (1831) consists of three stories, "The Regicides," "The Fair Pilgrim," and "Castine." All are based on historical events in 17th-century New England. "The Regicides," about the escape to New England of Puritan judges who had sentenced Charles I, is the most effective.

In 1832 Bacon's sentimental romance "Love's Martyr" was published in the Philadelphia Sunday Courier. It won first prize and was chosen over five stories by Poe. Based on the scalping of Jane McCrea by the Indians in 1776, the story, like those in Tales of the Puritans, makes a beautiful, romantic heroine the center of the action.

Beginning in 1845, Bacon became more and more absorbed in her belief that the plays attributed to Shakespeare had been written by Sir Walter Raleigh or Francis Bacon, or by a group headed by these men. Family and friends, including Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar, attempted to dissuade her from this pursuit. But Charles Butler, a New York lawyer, gave her the "first fellowship on record to an American woman for advanced study abroad" (Hopkins), and she sailed for England in May 1853 to do research. In England she became increasingly isolated, obsessed with her theory and her attempts to publish it.

In May 1856 Bacon appealed in despair to Elizabeth Peabody's brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne, American consul at Liverpool. He could not believe in her theory, but he not only became her unpaid literary agent, secured English and American publishers for her book, wrote its preface, but spent over $1,100 of his own money on printing and editorial costs. The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (1857) was ignored or ridiculed by contemporary reviewers, but Bacon was followed by numerous "Baconians," and she is blamed for stirring up "the biggest mares' nest in the history of the English-speaking world." In 1858, completely insane, she was brought back to America from England to die at the Hartford Retreat for the Insane.

Other Works:

The Bride of Fort Edward: A Dialogue (1839).

Bibliography:

Altick, R. D., "Delia Bacon," in Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Bacon, T., Delia Bacon: A Biographical Sketch (1888). Beecher, C., Truth Stranger Than Fiction (1850). Dall, C. W. H., What We Really Know about Shakespeare (1886). Emerson, R. W., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (1960). Farrar, E. W. R., Recollections of Seventy Years (1866). Hopkins, V. C., Prodigal Puritan; a Life of Delia Bacon (1959) Pares, M., A Pioneer: In Memory of Delia Bacon, 2 Feb. 1811 to 2 Sept. 1859 (1959).