Three writings by Hannah M. Beal, a girl who has been taught some things about dying, ca. 1853-1862
[Maine, 1853-1855 / unidentified]
This item was featured in the catalog Mark Making, pt. 3: Pedagogy.
1: Penmanship copybook completed under the tutelage of Henry Dudley in Winthrop, Maine, over two weeks in January, 1855.
Full of traditional penmanship exercise specimens from the course, a short essay, “The Differences,” also appears on the last 2-page spread and dated in another pen, “So. Durham, Sept 1853..” The essay expounds on the Columbus narrative with typical pejorative bias, “Schools are established and children are taught something better than to pursue the hunter, or fallow the canoe.” She appears to have copied the essay before the book was used for penmanship lessons—clearly proud of her writing, but fond of the handsome copybook, and probably saving it for “something special” (an unexpectedly relatable practice).
2: Six manuscript pages meditating on the funeral of a young friend, then revisited after the death of her “twin sister” a year later (1853, 1854).
“I have been today to attend the funeral of my young friend, Martha Jones…” There is a performative aspect to her writing, as though the meditations are also an address. Her initial writing after the funeral shows her posturing as a more worldy figure able to contextualize and find meaning in the girl’s loss. She writes with borrowed authority, “May her survivors imitate her examples and prepare to follow her, for we know not how soon we may be called to share her fate…. we are all liable to be cut down as the flower of the field.” Her writing parrots the religious rhetoric of dying—not about sorrow, but warning.
Hannah returns a year later to write about the death of her “nearest, dearest friend, a twin sister.” The paper has gilt edges—more special stationery—which may help explain why she chose to return to that physical space to continue her thoughts. She’d lost her mother to consumption four years prior and now had only a little sister left. She mentions an aunt, her last connection in the Society of Friends. She “feels all alone in the wide world,” writing with twinges of self-pity and disillusion appropriate to her age; yet her narrative description resumes the odd posturing.
Her friend, like Florence Kidder, becomes holy in her dying. Described as “the most patient sufferer I ever saw,” the dying girl not only puts the comfort and consolation of others above her suffering, all she wants to do is read Scripture and petition for their spiritual enlightenment—that they, too, may have the opportunity to meet Jesus, which she was very lucky, after all, to get to do so soon.
3: The rise and progress of our Sabbath School, a 10-page address by a burnt-out Sabbath School teacher, presumably Ms. Beal
Hannah’s assertion of control over a situation through narration ultimately fails her. In the last example, the borrowed authority of a young girl negotiating death yields to the beleaguered realization of authority (without power) as a young woman. Lacking a date or location, we only know that she’s in an unspecified leadership role at a fledgling Sunday School during the Civil War, inflamed with chaos and uncertainty. Her address goes through the motions of exhaustion, people-pleasing and projecting gratefulness, pleading for help, trying to admonish without isolating people—and generally sounding defeated in the course of asserting the contrary. Despite establishing that improvements have been made, she says “our strength has become weaker, our numbers have diminished and the burden rests heavily on the remaining few.” The writing is more difficult to decipher*, and written with a frenzied stream-of-consciousness that suggests, if she did deliver the address, it was probably really uncomfortable to witness.