Overview of 1882

Several significant events took place in 1882. The Eddys traveled to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, one of the few times Mary Baker Eddy traveled outside New England. Upon returning from their travels, they settled in Boston, rather than returning to Lynn, Massachusetts. Only two months later, Asa Gilbert Eddy, Mary Baker Eddy’s husband, passed on. Even though there were major events taking place in Eddy’s life, the correspondence from 1882 reveals a relatively quieter year for the Christian Science movement, coming in between the upheaval of the Lynn Rebellion in 1881 and the more rapid growth of Christian Science in 1883, when The Christian Science Journal first began publication. The Papers from 1882 contain a higher proportion of Eddy’s letters than some other years, and they provide details on these events in her own words. The Papers from this year also reveal lesser-known aspects of Eddy’s life, such as how she managed several properties that she had come to own. There are some new insights to be gained from the 1882 Papers.

1882 began with Mary Baker Eddy’s departure from Lynn and travels to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. Before leaving, Eddy exhorted her remaining students to continue meeting and working together. She wrote in a letter of instruction to them: “I beg that you allow no envy or root of bitterness to spring up between you but that ye ‘love one another even as I have loved you.’” (L00001Click link to view L00001 document in new window) The trip provided a break between the events of the Lynn Rebellion and the Eddys’ upcoming move to Boston. It was also one of Eddy’s few travels outside of New England. While in Washington, Eddy taught and gave parlor lectures and Asa Eddy studied copyright law. Eddy spoke highly of Washington in her letters home to students. In one letter she wrote: “This is the most beautiful city I was ever in.” (L10642Click link to view L10642 document in new window) In another she said: “Washington is the handsomest city except Paris in the world Those who have seen and travelled through all the principal cities in Europe and America tell me so My front parlor commands the most magnificent view of the entire Capitol and grounds.” (L02497Click link to view L02497 document in new window) She was also able to see some of the sites with her cousin, Fanny McNeil Potter, who had occasionally assisted with hostess duties in the White House during the Presidency of Franklin Pierce. However, the majority of Eddy’s time was consumed with work. As she said in one letter to Clara Choate: “I have worked harder here than ever, 14. consecutive evenings I have lectured three hours every night besides what else I am about. Get to bed at 12, rise at 6, and work I have a goodly number already enlisted in the work.” (L02499Click link to view L02499 document in new window) The Eddys then spent time in Philadelphia, before returning to Massachusetts, to find a place to live in Boston, on April 4, 1882.

For Eddy, the prospect of living again in Boston seemed to offer both challenges and new possibilities (the Eddys had lived briefly in the city a few years earlier). In one letter home to Clara Choate, towards the end of her travels, Eddy wrote: “Please ask Hanover to write me where to take my trunks if he has found a place O I dread going to find one in Boston.” (L02502Click link to view L02502 document in new window) Choate hosted a reception for Eddy upon her return, which was quite a success, according to a letter Eddy later wrote to Ackland: “The reception was indeed a splendid affair There was a crown of flowers and on it the word  Life a large brole of flowers and on the word Truth a large cross with the word Love another bed of flowes on green leaves with the motto Welcome this was over the door The company was so large it took an hour to shake hands we had speeches and then the adieu This was the my entry into Jerusalem Will it be followed with the cross?” (L12626Click link to view L12626 document in new window). After living for a short time at 36 Bromfield Street in Boston, the Eddys moved into 569 Columbus Avenue, where Eddy would stay for the next year and nine months. 

During this time of change, Eddy relied on the support of her dedicated students. She needed their help to maintain the activities of the Church and Christian Scientist Association while she traveled and also to establish the Christian Science movement on a solid footing in Boston. Even though they didn’t all get along, she patiently counseled them to work together and encouraged them in their work. Before leaving on her travels in January, Eddy had written to Julia Bartlett: “The charge is simply this. See that the Christian work of this Church is preserved, and dear Mrs Whiting will help you. She has qualities of inspiration that are glorious and this is needed Now dear remember that Mrs. Choate is a sister in our church and doing much good for our cause in selling books and bearing testimony for Christ.” (L07689Click link to view L07689 document in new window) To Choate she said: “Let the church work together and not separate or Let each who can, take a part, and be not weary in well doing and God will help you.”(L02496Click link to view L02496 document in new window) 

Eddy’s relationship with Choate was perhaps the most complex of the student relationships at this time. Choate did not get along well with Eddy’s other students and Eddy’s support for Choate may have led, in part, to the Lynn Rebellion the year before. And yet, as Eddy pointed out in her letter to Bartlett, she was “doing much good for our cause.” (L07689Click link to view L07689 document in new window) While other students were often asking Eddy for help, Choate was looking to help Eddy in whatever way was needed. The Papers contain several receipts for copies of Science and Health that Choate sold, and Choate also wrote glowingly of the lecturing she was doing while Eddy was away and the success she was seeing in reaching people with the teachings of Christian Science. In response to one of Choate’s letters, Eddy wrote: “I was as usual delighted to hear from you and learn how the stately goings of metaphysics are being seen in Boston. Your own instrumentality in this advance is fully seen and gladly acknowledged by me.” (L04088Click link to view L04088 document in new window) Choate responded with some of her further successes: “In Boston Thursday we seated 80 and more than 40 stood over an hour to listen to me and I did improve this opportunity to inform them who and what you were ....Today our audience was very large and it seemed as if I was inspired for I touched so many minds & dear teacher you know what that means better than I.” (025A.10.028Click link to view 025A.10.028 document in new window). Reading the correspondence between Eddy and Choate in the Papers adds depth and nuance to an understanding of their relationship.

As Eddy began to regain her footing in Boston, she reopened the Massachusetts Metaphysical College at 569 Columbus Avenue in May 1882 and taught a class. It was announced in a notice, likely read at a church service: “We have the pleasure of announcing to our hearers the establishment of the Mass. Metaphysical College in Boston at 569 Columbus Av. - The locality is airy and pleasant the house a freestone front with and rooms large and comnodious.” (A10214Click link to view A10214 document in new window) The notice also announced that Eddy would “give public lectures at this college on Thursday of every week at 3 P. M. on the subject of Christian healing Science for the small admittance fee of 25 cts.” (A10214Click link to view A10214 document in new window)

The greatest challenge came in June with the death of Eddy’s husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, who had been Eddy’s strongest supporter both personally and professionally. While steadfast students wrote with their condolences, Eddy's letters show her struggle with grief. To one student she wrote: “Words are vain, I cannot write my grief and you cannot have the least conception of it. I feel almost as if I never should be comforted while I stay away from my loved precious one that has gone before me.” (L02059Click link to view L02059 document in new window)

In July, Eddy traveled to Vermont, accompanied by Alice Sibley, to spend time at Arthur Buswell’s family home in Vermont while she dealt with Asa Eddy’s death. While there, she wrote Clara Choate of how she was faring: “I am up among the towering hights of this verdant state, green with the leaves of earth and fresh with the fragrance of good will and human kindness. I never found a kindlier people. I am situated as pleasantly as I can be in the absence of the one true heart that has been so much to me. O, darling I never shall master this point of missing him all the time I do believe, but I can try, and am trying as I must ― to sever all the chords that bind me to person or things material.” (L04089Click link to view L04089 document in new window) Later in the month she wrote to Julia Bartlett: “I shall never forget dear, dear Gilbert his memory is dearer every day but not so sad I think as when I left home.”(L07691Click link to view L07691 document in new window) Eddy returned to Boston in early August, and her letters are helpful in understanding how she got through this challenging time.

Interesting to note is just how much time Eddy needed to devote to clerical and management-type work unrelated to Christian Science during this year. In addition to her work teaching and preaching and revising Science and Health, Eddy was also managing several properties that she had purchased or acquired in the past. She was renting her property at 8 Broad Street, in addition to another property she owned in Lynn at 439 Boston Street. Also, with Asa Eddy’s passing, she was managing the Eddy family farm in Londonderry, Vermont. So interspersed throughout the papers are letters dealing with questions about rent (568.59.011Click link to view 568.59.011 document in new window), along with the possibility of freezing pipes and other maintenance needs (362.48.020Click link to view 362.48.020 document in new window). With these demands on her time, in addition to those of the Christian Science movement and the loss of Asa Eddy, it made all the more sense that Eddy hired Calvin Frye in August of 1882 to serve as her personal secretary, a post he kept for the rest of her life. 

In the fall of 1882, Eddy again taught a class and also began holding church services at 569 Columbus Avenue. In a letter to a prospective student she wrote: “I have on hand the largest class I ever had, and our sunday services fill all our rooms with interested hearers. I think in the spring we shall graduate about fifty. The ship of science is again walking the wave, rising above the billows, biding defiance to the flood-gates of error, for God is at the helm.” (L04885Click link to view L04885 document in new window)There are fewer letters in 1882 of the type we see in surrounding years, where prospective students are sharing the details of their lives leading them to Christian Science, and successful students are writing to Eddy in rich detail of their healing practices. Whether fewer letters of this type were received, or simply fewer were preserved, is not known, but in some ways, 1882 feels like an interlude between the Christian Science movement’s past in Lynn, and the more rapid and expansive growth that would be coming in the next few years. The year ends with Eddy’s Christmas sermon, “Seventh Modern Wonder,” delivered on December 17, 1882. Eddy’s notes for this sermon conclude with this idea: “There is nothing to fear when we know the fear, where we know the infinity of Love.—will help us walk over all that we meet in the flesh: that is the natural and not the supernatural. Let us begin in Boston by making the right the natural and the wrong the unnatural.” (A10270Click link to view A10270 document in new window)

To see the originals for any documents quoted in this essay, click on the accession number listed at the end of each quote. In the documents quoted here, insertions and deletions by the author have been made silently, but spelling errors have been retained.