Venice and Boston: A 19th Century Love Affair

This blog post is one of a two-part series on collections at the Gibson House Museum from Italy.

When you leave the Music Room at the Gibson House, a small wooden icon frames the doorway above you. Visitors ask about this object regularly: What is it? Who is the saint depicted? Why is it located in such a prominent spot? As one of the only overtly religious items in this Brahmin (and, therefore, staunch Protestant) household, it does catch your eye.

The icon is of St. Mark (San Marco), the patron saint of Venice. On the wall to its right is a copy of Flora, a well-known painting by Venetian Old Master Titian. If Paris is sometimes considered the essential European destination for American travelers today, Venice held the same appeal for late-nineteenth-century American travelers. It wasn’t necessarily a center for contemporary art or fashion; rather, it represented an old Europe that Americans found exotic and romantic. Venice was no longer an international powerhouse, but its Renaissance-era art and architecture reminded travelers of its previous glory (in a distinctly non-threatening way).

The 19th Century Allure of Roman Ruins

This blog post is one of a two-part series on collections at the Gibson House Museum from Italy.

In 1898, after a year of study at MIT for architecture, Charlie Gibson took an extended trip to Europe. It was common for wealthy American men to make such a trip—to cap off their education and before settling down to work and family—known in nineteenth-century parlance as a Grand Tour. The Grand Tour could include a variety of European destinations (some even traveled as far as Turkey), but the essential stops were London, Paris, Venice, and Rome. Travel to Rome, in particular, was seen as a chance to complete a classical education, specifically through study of the architecture and history of ancient Rome.

Traveling to Rome was difficult in the nineteenth century. A robust tourist industry had developed by the eighteenth century, and yet transportation, lodging, and access to reliable guides remained sketchy. Some Italian architects and artists made a living serving Grand Tourists. Giovanni Batista Piranesi was one. Starting as early as 1740, Piranesi worked in Rome producing views of the ancient Roman ruins. For many, Piranesi’s depictions of Rome were the way they imagined and understood the city.

Veduta dell'Anfiteatro Flavio, c. 1771
Giovanni Batista Piranesi

Charlie Gibson, Boston, and the War in Europe

This blog post is part of a series about the Gibson family and the lead-up to the 1920 presidential election, which promised "a return to normalcy" after many years of social upheaval. Read about the Gibsons and suffrage here and Boston during the flu epidemic of 1918 here.

Charlie Gibson, a Citizen Soldier: The Plattsburg Movement and the First World War 

On May 7, 1915, a German submarine torpedoed and sank the HMS Lusitania, a British cruise liner traveling from New York City to Liverpool, England. Almost twelve hundred people died in the attack, including 123 Americans. 

Gibson House Museum

For almost two more years, President Woodrow Wilson maintained official neutrality and a policy of American isolation. Others in the United States believed that American entry into the conflict was inevitable and joined the Preparedness Movement, an effort to ready American troops for war. Led by individuals such as former president Theodore Roosevelt and General Leonard Wood, the Preparedness Movement gained much of its membership from upper- and middle-class Americans in the Northeast. 

Part 1: The Wounded Eros

This post is the first of a three-part series on the life and writings of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., founder of the Gibson House Museum. Stay tuned for parts two and three in the coming months.

Gibson in his rose gardens
at Forty Steps, c. 1910.

How does one measure a life dedicated to poetry, a writing life?   Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. dedicated his entire adult life to the art of poetry, as poet, critic, editor, and literary personality.  He published his first poem in the Boston Transcript in 1894, and, toward the end of his career, he quipped to a curious listener at one of his many public readings, “My dear lady, I have been writing poems for fifty years.  They are like the droppings of pigeons all over the house.” His manuscripts overflowed from portfolios, closets, desk drawers, cabinets, drawing rooms, and even toolsheds! In some ways, Gibson’s poetry was closely connected to the domestic spaces he crafted, curated, and inhabited--his “Victorian Museum,” the Gibson House, and the spectacular gardens of his family’s exclusive summer residence, Forty Steps, Nahant. Like many traditional poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gibson’s work is highly context-dependent.  His poems tend to be formal, referential, commemorative, and backward-looking--vintage before their time--the kind of poetry that was almost completely obscured by the advent of literary modernism.  On the other hand, viewed holistically, there is a compelling sense of quirky humor, passion, historicity, and mystery about Gibson’s writing, a body of work peppered with veiled autobiographical fragments that conceal as much as they reveal.

Faking the Family Tree

Dining room at the Gibson House.

A family crest hangs over the dining room fireplace at the Gibson House. The vivid red and gold shield on a bright black background is eye-catching. Dinner guests would be unlikely to miss its not-so-subtle implications about the importance of the family lineage. In a scroll along the bottom, the motto reads “In the name of Gibson.” 

The tradition of coats of arms (of which the crest is the top part) dates to the medieval period in Europe, where knights would carry shields with specific designs. The design elements were intended to convey the achievements of the person who carried the coat of arms. Later, families would take a coat of arms as the family logo.  Typically, only noble families were permitted to do this and so the coat of arms came to be associated with the aristocracy. 

From Leisure to Danger: A Gibson Family Vacation on the Verge of War

This blog post is part of an occasional series about the Gibson House Museum Archives; a repository of personal documents and photographs from the extended Gibson family. The archives are accessible by appointment; contact curator@thegibsonhouse.org to make arrangements.

The Gibsons were not just devoted Bostonians, but avid world travelers as well. Multiple photo albums received as part of a recent donation to the museum by Gibson family descendant Rosamond Warren Allen document Mary Ethel and Rosamond Gibson’s travels throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. With the birth of their sons—Henry Freeman Allen and Warren Winslow, respectively—their travel bug only spread. The photo albums that all of these members of the Gibson family created allow us to not only look back at their distinctly personal moments, but also discern their opinions on and relationship to the world outside of Boston.

A Second Look at Annie Crowninshield Warren’s Reminiscences of My Life

Wreck of the U.S.M. steam ship "Arctic," James E. Butterworth, 1854

In a previous post I wrote about Rosamond Warren Gibson’s mother, Annie Crowninshield Warren (1815–1905), drawing upon Annie’s Reminiscences of My Life. For this post I want to return to Annie and her Reminiscences, and this time relate two incidents Annie describes that she seems to have taken some pride in. On both of these occasions, which took place little more than a year apart, Annie claimed that her stubbornness saved the lives of her family.

According to Annie, on the first occasion the family avoided being killed in a serious train accident and on the other, avoided drowning on a sinking ship.

Tributes to Allied Leaders Part II: Winston Churchill

 

In a previous post (see “Tributes to Allied Leaders, Part I," November 1, 2015) I discussed Charles Gibson Jr.’s poetic tribute to President Franklin D. Roosevelt following Roosevelt’s passing, which Charlie sent to President Truman, Roosevelt’s successor. In this post, I will discuss Charlie’s ode to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Writing to the editor of the New York Times in late 1944, Charlie requested that his “To Winston Churchill” be published in both the Times of London and New York. The simultaneous publication, he wrote, could “make a complete international gesture.” As Charlie would later write to MIT Chairman Karl T. Compton, “one of my efforts has been Anglo-American, as well as world[,] fellowship.” Charlie certainly held a lifelong interest in international diplomacy and goodwill (in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he were a supporter of the United Nations when it was created after the Second World War). However, nothing came of Charlie’s plans for an “international gesture.” The Times rejected his poem for publication.

But 1949 presented a new opportunity for Charlie’s poem to be read and appreciated, and MIT Chairman Compton would prove vital in this respect. That year MIT held a convocation for members of the scientific community “to appraise the state of the post-war world, [and] to consider the progress of scientific enterprise.” The event’s keynote speaker was Winston Churchill.

Tributes to Allied Leaders Part I: Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

 

Visitors to the Gibson House will be familiar with the framed letters displayed in the dressing room on the third floor. When giving tours of the house, I always point out my two favorites. One is from Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the other is from President Harry Truman. Both are short but serve to thank Charles Gibson, Jr. for poems he sent to them. Charlie wrote an ode to honor the English prime minister, which was read to him at a science convocation hosted by MIT. And after the passing of President Franklin Roosevelt, Charlie wrote a poem in his memory and sent it to Truman, Roosevelt’s successor.

Whenever I directed tour groups into the dressing room to show them the letters, I always wondered whether there were any existing copies of those poems and whether there were any way to find out why Charlie cared so much about having them read by these men. After all, couldn’t he simply have submitted the poems for publication in some newspaper? Fortunately, I was able to locate copies of these poems and related documents—including Charlie’s response to Churchill’s thank you note and the letter he sent to Truman with the FDR poem—in the museum archives.

In a two-part post, I want to share these poems and provide background information regarding their creation and why Charlie wanted to have them read by Churchill and Truman. This week I am focusing on Charlie’s poem on President Roosevelt, and in our next post, the one on Winston Churchill.

To Senator H.C. Lodge: A Call for Reform in the Congo

King Leopold II of Belgium

Published in the Boston Daily Globe on January 12, 1907, the following letter expressed Charlie Gibson, Jr.’s support of a Senate resolution introduced by Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge the previous year:

Hon. H. C. Lodge, Senior Senator from Massachusetts, US Senate:

            Dear Sir—I have learned with much gratification of the resolution which you have introduced in the senate, to empower this government to take such steps as may be possible to urge the government of the Congo to carry out, with some degree of effectiveness, reforms in the administration of that state.

            I have been cognizant, in company with many thousands of others in this state, for some years of the oppression and cruelties inflicted upon natives of the Congo by officials and others there.

            I believe there is a strong feeling upon the part of bankers and business interests, entirely apart from the religious movement, that in the cause of humanity such brutalities and oppression should, if possible, be stopped at the earliest moment.

            May I, therefore, in company with them, respectfully urge you to use every power at your command to induce the US senate to take such action as is desirable and at the present time. Believe me to be, with high regard, yours very truly,

            Charles Gibson.

            Boston, Jan. 5, 1907.

In writing the above letter in support of the senator’s resolution (full text provided below), Charlie added his voice to the growing international movement against the cruel and oppressive policies that Belgian King Leopold II inflicted upon the Congolese. 

Enduring Evenings

“The fact that our nineteenth-century forebears did not spend all their evenings speechlessly gazing at a moving version of their magic-lantern does not mean that they were as bored as we may be when deprived of the monotonous, habit-forming, visual diet that we accept as entertainment. Hopefully a happier and more enlightened generation of the future, having rediscovered that it is satisfying for man to do things for himself, may wonder how we endured entire evenings gazing at coloured lights.” 

I found the preceding quote maligning television as a form of entertainment in a book written in 1974 by Patrick Beaver entitled Victorian Parlor Games. Beaver was making the point that while we might sometimes look back on the Victorians and think they must have led incredibly stuffy and boring lives, they would not have thought so themselves. In his book, Beaver describes a collection of different parlor games played during the Victorian era that ,reveal that the Victorians  did actually enjoy having fun.  

History Repeats Itself

On November 1, 1856, the steamer Lyonnais left New York harbor en route to France with 150 persons on board. One of the 39 cabin passengers was John Gardiner Gibson, Jr., the oldest son of Catherine Hammond Gibson and brother of Charles Hammond Gibson (the first residents of what is now the Gibson House Museum). He was twenty-one years old.  

The next night, the ship Adriatic hit the Lyonnais, despite the Lyonnais’s having displayed its lights and sounded its whistle upon first seeing the Adriatic. The Adriatic kept going, not knowing it had done severe damage to the other vessel. The Lyonnais began rapidly taking on water through a hole in its side. The water put out the fires that would have kept the ship moving. Crew members and a few passengers tried to pump the water out, but cinders clogged the pumps so they resorted to using buckets. Excess cargo was thrown overboard to lighten the ship’s load, and mattresses were used to try to plug the hole. None of this was sufficient; water kept coming in. The crew guessed there was probably another hole on the bottom of the ship. 

The attempts to bail out the Lyonnais lasted for about seven hours. Meanwhile, a raft was built—out of such materials as masts, chicken coops, and doors—in case the ship had to be abandoned, because there weren’t enough lifeboats for all 150 people on board. By morning, it was decided to abandon the ship. More than 100 people  piled into the five lifeboats, and 40 boarded the raft. 

Only one boat was ever heard from again. It had been boarded by 18 people, and only 16 were still alive by the time it was rescued, six days later. During that time, they had faced freezing temperatures, a shortage of water, and snow and ice storms. Overall, more than 130 people died as the result of the shipwreck.