Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • March 12, 2018

March {1857} I found from Nantucket to Chicago more attention than I desired. I had a short seat in one of the cars, through the night. I did not think it large enough for two, and so coiled myself up and went to sleep. There were men standing all around. Once one of them came along and said something about there being room for him on my seat. Another man said, “she’s asleep, don’t disturb her.” I was too selfish to offer the other half of a short seat, and too tired to reason about the man’s being, possibly, more tired than I. . . .One peculiarity in travelling from East to West is, that you lose the old men . . .


My first image is Maria, bonnet on, long skirts and high-top shoes and petticoats and slips beneath with her legs tucked up under her on this train car seat. That’s what I do on the steamship! In my jeans, coat, comfortable sweater, sneakers . . .But the image doesn’t work for a woman of the nineteenth century. Though she is later offered a window seat so that she can prop herself up to sleep which makes me think she really was reclining to some degree. Perhaps the men in the car didn’t think it appropriate! It was not for the time – but I could see Maria not caring because she wanted to be comfortable and, “Darn It!,” she was tired!


I close with her comment about old men – think about all those books you have read about the “wild west” and the likely not accurate movies, not many old men, for several reasons.


JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • August 24, 2026
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Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

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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