Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • November 16, 2015

November 30th. {1857} France did not burst upon me suddenly as I had hoped. We took the route from Folkstone to Boulogne, and when we arrived in Folkstone the sea was awfully rough . . . But we came into Paris in the dark. I came to the Boarding School, and was met by servants who chattered away like parrots but they understood “eau chaud” {hot water} and “feu” }fire}, two very important considerations, for France seems to me the coldest country I ever knew . . . .


Being cold seems to have been a theme for Maria Mitchell while in Europe. Given the warmer but damp climate in which she grew up on Nantucket, I always find it slightly humorous that she complains about the cold. But France, Paris in particular, is a place she took in full stride and loved very much, exclaiming that she saw nothing because there was so much to see and noting how there was so much space in Paris that she could see everything and take in buildings fully. Whereas in crowded London “A building . . . is seen by corners.”


NOTE: I chose and wrote this commentary a few weeks ago, before the incidents in Paris. I have no good words. Except PRAY to your higher being and PEACE. We all live in this tiny space together.


JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • August 17, 2026
August 19 {1857}. There are four great men whose haunts I mean to seek, and on whose footsteps I mean to stand: Newton, Shakespeare, Milton, and Johnson. To-day I told the driver to take me to St. Martin’s, where the guide-book says that Newton lived. He put me down at the Newton Hotel, but I looked in vain to its top to see anything like an observatory. I went into a wine-shop near, and asked a girl, who was pouring out a dram, in which house Newton lived. She pointed, not to the hotel, but to the house next to a church, and said, “that’s it – don’t you see a place on the top? That’s where he used to study nights.” It is a little, oblong-shaped observatory, built apparently of wood, and blackened by age . . . .” Blackened no doubt by the wood ash and soot found in the air throughout over-crowded nineteenth century London. We always think about London being very foggy in the nineteenth century but frankly a lot of it was wood and coal ash as the nineteenth century grew older, particularly as factories developed and belched all of that into the air – think Sherlock Holmes in the 1880s. But Maria Mitchell, while starting in Europe as a young woman’s chaperone, also knew that this tour of Europe was a great learning experience – the equivalent of a college education she could not have. Doors were thrown open to her around Europe – in particular at all of the observatories that dotted the continent. She was not just well-known – she was famous. JNLF
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