Mary Somers. A Narrative from Real Life.

Copyright Christopher C. Dean, 1841. Leather backed boards, 6 x 3.75 inches, 54pp. Frontispiece signed Devereux. Very Good with rubbing to extremities, some foxing and discoloration throughout. 3 copies of the first edition in OCLC; none of this or any other printings.

Mary's story is more complex. Her suffering is not merely material or physical (though her health declined during poverty). She suffers the hardships of her circumstances, including her parents' inability to cope with the same. Depression, addiction, and suicide all enter into the picture alongside physical illness.

Told from the perspective of her childhood friend, Ellen, Mary was the daughter of an affluent merchant, but at the age of 10 their material wealth was destroyed when "the great fire occurred at B. which brought so many from affluence to poverty" (22).

After being financially ruined by the fire, her father became despondent and her mother took to drinking. The book describes not just intemperance, but a familiar pattern of addiction: "For a short time she would be gay and happy; but the stupidity, ill-nature, and other miserable feelings which soon followed, were too disagreeable to be endured, and again she would have recourse to her medicine, until the fatal habit of intemperance was fixed upon her."

One brother died, and Mary and her surviving brother George are effectively left to make their own way. Some time on, an old friend of Mr. Somers, who had also been affected by the fire but had managed to partially recover, offers the family land to live on and profit from farming. The family rallies, things improve--but the friend becomes ill, and, "in a fit of insanity, committed suicide." The news causes Mr. Somers to have his own fit and die; his death causes Mrs. Somers to drink, become delirious and also die, within a week. 

Mary's mother and father were not to be saved. At his father's deathbed, George reads from Proverbs, "'Because I have called and ye refused...I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you; then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me..." "How truly were these awful verses fulfilled in the case of Mr. Somers!" (51-52).

Mary, on the other hand, had become pious throughout her struggles. She had wrangled her life together, married, became a Sabbath school teacher. Still, she died a young woman; but, Ellen says, "Her death was triumphant" (54).