Sigourney, Lydia (Howard) Huntley

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SIGOURNEY, Lydia (Howard) Huntley

Born 1 September 1791, Norwich, Connecticut; died 10 June 1865, Hartford, Connecticut

Daughter of Ezekiel and Zerviah Wentworth Huntley; married Charles Sigourney, 1819; children: five, two of whom survived infancy

Lydia Huntley Sigourney was christened "Lydia Howard," in memory of her father's deceased first wife. As a child, she was favored by the widow of Dr. Daniel Lathrop, who employed Sigourney's father as a gardener. Mme. Lathrop made a pet of the clever, bookish girl, read with her and nurtured her sentimental tastes. After Mme. Lathrop's death in 1806, Sigourney became acquainted with Lathrop's relatives, the Wadsworths of Hartford, and with their assistance she and a friend—Nancy Maria Hyde—opened a school in Hartford in 1814. In 1815 Daniel Wadsworth helped her publish her first volume of poetry, Moral Pieces. In the following year, Sigourney published her first elegiac volume, a tribute to her former colleague, Nancy Maria Hyde.

In 1819 Sigourney gave up teaching to marry Charles Sigourney, a widower with three young children. Five children were born to her, of whom two survived infancy. When her husband's hardware business began to fail in the 1820s, Sigourney turned to writing as a source of income and quickly became successful. A book of her poems was published by Samuel Goodrich in 1827. By 1830, according to her biographer Gordon Haight, more than 20 periodicals were regularly accepting her occasional verse.

In 1840 Sigourney made a tour of Europe, intending both to meet the literary great and to view the "ruinous castle, where romance lingered, or royal palace, where pomp abode …" Her Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands (1842) records this trip and gives her probably exaggerated account of "friendships" with Europe's literary elite. Sigourney was, at this time, an attractive woman with a cultivated manner who dressed carefully and was known for her elegant hands, a hallmark of the Victorian lady. Mrs. Thomas Carlyle's description of this "over-the-water poetess" suggests Sigourney seemed artificial and provincial to her, "beplastered with rouge and pomatum—with long ringlets that never grew where they hung…all glistening in black satin…staring her eyes out, to give them animation," and even taking "the liberty of poking" Carlyle "now and then to make the lion roar…." Sigourney was nonetheless received by many writers abroad and so enabled to puff her reputation at home in an era when European acceptance virtually guaranteed American success. To the end of her life, Sigourney remained a public figure, well known, even revered, especially in her native Connecticut.

Sigourney was early labeled "the American Hemans," a reference to her English counterpart, Mrs. Felicia Hemans, a popular writer of elegiac verse. Sigourney's work was indeed derivative and, like Heman's, unstintingly sentimental. Best known as a contributor to the "graveyard school" of popular verse, her "tributes," sometimes written at the request of unknown admirers, combine stilted rhetoric, conventional Christian consolation, and commonplace references to the condition or character of the deceased. Collections of her verse catalogue occasions on which the mourning note may be sounded. In one such volume, "The Anniversary of the Death of An Aged Friend" is followed by other verses lamenting deaths—"The Faithful Editor," "The Babe Who Loved Music," "The Good Son," "A Sunday School Scholar," and "The Original Proprietor of Mount Auburn" (a well-known rural cemetery near Boston). Despite the individualized titles, the verses are almost interchangeable evocations of genteel religiosity and the postures of decorous sorrow. Such collections, prettily printed and illustrated, were republished throughout Sigourney's lifetime. Their popularity reflects conventional attitudes toward death, the quality of popular piety, and the widespread admiration for cultured refinement in Victorian America.

Always a popular writer, Sigourney was never respected by contemporary literati. Edgar Allan Poe condemned her imitation of Hemans and her "gemmy," or overcolored, diction. (Sigourney described her home, for example, as a "domain…beloved by flowers" where life "in its varied forms, biped and quadrupedal, leaped and luxuriated among us.") Bayard Taylor in Diversions of the Echo Club (1876) parodied her verse "to see whether a respectable jingle of words, expressing ordinary and highly proper feelings, can be so imitated as to be recognized." The best known parody of Sigourney's style and its imitators is Mark Twain's "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd" in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). However meager its merits, Sigourney's verse is an important index of an era in American taste, and she herself was hailed by Taylor as "good old Mother Sigourney" who had once been "almost our only woman-poet." John Greenleaf Whittier, in a memorial verse of 1887, also noted "She sang alone, ere womanhood had known / The gift of song which fills the air today."

Other Works:

The Writings of Nancy Maria Hyde (1816). The Square Table (1819). Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822). Sketch of Connecticut Forty Years Since (1824). Poems (1827). Female Biography (1829). Biography of Pious Persons (1832).

Evening Readings in History (1833). The Farmer and Soldier (1833). How to Be Happy (1833). The Intemperate (1833). Letters to Young Ladies (1833). Memoir of Phebe P. Hammond (1833). Report of the Hartford Female Beneficent Society (1833). Poems (1834). Poetry for Children (1834). Sketches (1834). Tales and Essays for Children (1835). Memoir of Margaret and Henrietta Flower (1835). Zinzendorff, and Other Poems (1835). History of Marcus Aurelius (1936). Olive Buds (1836). Poems for Children (1836). History of the Condition of Women (1837). The Girl's Reading-Book… (1838). Letters to Mothers (1838). The Boy's Reading-Book (1839). The Religious Souvenir for 1839 (1839). Memoir of Mrs. Mary Ann Hooker (1840). The Religous Souvenir for 1840 (1840). Letters to Young Ladies (1841). Pocahontas, and Other Poems (1841). Poems, Religious and Elegiac (1841). The Pictorial Reader… (1844). The Lovely Sisters (1845). Poetry for Seamen (1845). Scenes in My Native Land (1845). Myrtis, with Other Etchings and Sketchings (1846). The Voice of Flowers (1846). The Weeping Willow (1847). Water-drops (1848). The Young Ladies Offering (with others, 1848). Illustrated Poems… (1849) Poems for the Sea (1850). Whisper to a Bride (1850). Letters to My Pupils (1851). Examples of Life and Death (1852). Margaret and Henrietta (1852). Olive Leaves (1852). Voices of Home (1852). The Faded Hope (1853). Memoir of Mrs. Harriet Newell Cook (1853). Past Meridian (1854). The Western Home, and Other Poems (1854). Sayings of the Little Ones, and Poems for their Mothers (1855). Examples from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1857). Lucy Howard's Journal (1858). The Daily Counsellor (1859). Gleanings (1860). The Man of Uz, and Other Poems (1862). Selections from Various Sources (1863). Sayings of Little Ones (1864). Letters of Life (1866). The Transplanted Daisy: Memoir of Frances Racilla Hackley (n.d.).