Josiah Gilbert Holland

Josiah Gilbert Holland (July 24, 1819 – October 12, 1881) was an American novelist, essayist, poet and spiritual mentor to the Nation in the years following the Civil War. Born in Massachusetts, he was called “the most successful man of letters in the United States” in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His writings are quoted by politicians and celebrities alike who oftentimes overlook crediting him. Holland was the first to publish a poem written by an African American and he penned the first biography of Abraham Lincoln, which was a bestseller. Holland was among the earliest writers of the genre that became literary realism. He was a popular Lyceum lecturer and wrote essays under the pseudonym Timothy Titcomb as well as lyrics to hymns, including the Methodist tune, "There's a Song in the Air.” He helped establish the middle-class flagship magazine, Scribner's Monthly, of which he became editor-in-chief. He sold more books during his lifetime than Mark Twain did during his though few today recognize Holland’s name.

Biography

Born near the intersection of Federal Street and Orchard Road, in the village of Dwight, in Belchertown, Massachusetts, on July 24, 1819, Holland grew up in a poor family struggling to make ends meet. He spent only a few years at the low-slung family farmhouse at Dwight and later quipped that he’d like to “burn it to the ground.” The youngest of six children, his parents were deeply religious and evangelical, from pious Puritan stock.

His father was a “migratory ne'er-do-well,” a failed inventor, moving the family every year or two: Heath, back to Belchertown, South Hadley, Granby and Northampton. Josiah worked in a factory to help the family.

He then spent a short time studying at Northampton (Massachusetts) High School before withdrawing due to ill health. He tried daguerreotypy and taught penmanship from town to town, reciting "his own poems to his intimate friends."

Three of his sisters died within a year of one another (between 1842 and 1843), two of consumption, one of typhus fever, "affecting his sensitive and affectionate nature more than all of his other troubles."

He saved enough money to study medicine at Berkshire Medical College, where he took a degree in 1843. The following year, under the pseudonym J. Wimpleton Wilkes, Holland published a forty-page story "in paper covers" entitled "The Mysteries of Springfield, a Tale of the Times."

Hoping to become a successful physician, he began a medical practice with classmate Dr. Charles Bailey in Springfield, Massachusetts. He helped quell an epidemic of a skin infection known as "black tongue" in Norwich (now Huntington, Mass.). He then opened a women’s hospital in Springfield with his former roommate from college, Charles L. Robinson, who would become the first governor of the State of Kansas, but it failed within six months.

In 1845 he married Elizabeth Luna Chapin, “the scion of an old and substantial Springfield family.”

In early 1847, Holland begin publishing a newspaper, The Bay State Weekly Courier, but the attempt proved unsuccessful, as did his medical practice. He left Western Massachusetts that spring and took a teaching position in Richmond, Virginia, followed by one in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he was named superintendent and implemented the ideas of fellow Massachusetts educator and reformer Horace Mann.

In fall 1848, he and his wife were invited to a large cotton plantation in northeastern Louisiana and Holland wrote down his observations. Here he received word that his poetry would be published in the Knickerbocker Magazine and The Home Journal.

Springfield

In April 1849, Holland and his wife returned to Western Massachusetts. His mother-in-law was dying and his wife went to care for her. The following month he was offered $40 a month as assistant editor of the Springfield Daily Republican, where he began working with the younger, formidable and charming owner--the journalist and editor Samuel Bowles.

On Wednesday, September 26, 1849, the Republican began publishing Holland's writing of plantation life in a seven-part series, though uncredited, titled, "Three Weeks on a Cotton Plantation." They were well-received by a curious public. He wrote local news and essays, many of which were collected and published in book form, helping establish his literary reputation. Bowles encouraged Holland to publish under the pseudonym Timothy Titcomb, which he did to great success.

Under the editorial leadership of Bowles and Holland, the Republican became the most widely-read and respected small city daily in America.

In 1851, Holland received an A.B. honorary doctorate degree from Amherst College, a few miles north from his birthplace, where Edward Dickinson (Emily Dickinson's father) was treasurer.

Holland's first book was a two-volume History of Western Massachusetts (1855) in which he published the first poem by a Black woman poet in the U.S. He followed in 1857 with an historical novel, The Bay-Path: A Tale of Colonial New England Life, and a collection of essays titled Titcomb's Letters to Young People, Single and Married in 1858. There were at least fifty editions of this book. He also published his narrative poem “Bitter-Sweet” that year. Gold-Foil came out in 1859.

He published his second novel, Miss Gilbert‘s Career: An American Story, in 1860. It is considered one of the first novels of American Realism, anticipating “much abler and more penetrating realists” who would come later that century.

The year following he released Lessons in Life: A Series of Familiar Essays (1861).

In 1862, he erected an opulent home in the Italianate villa style (also called a “Swiss-chalet style”). It was located on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River in North Springfield near present day 110 Atwater Terrace. Holland named the mansion “Brightwood”; it was painted Venetian red. The neighborhood today retains the name Brightwood.

When Sam Bowles took an extended trip to Europe, Holland temporarily assumed the duties as editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican. After the Civil War he reduced his editorial duties and wrote many of his most popular works, including the Life of Abraham Lincoln (1866), and Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, In a Poem (1867).

Lincoln

Holland wrote an eloquent eulogy of Abraham Lincoln within days of Lincoln's death, prompting a commission for a full biography of the late president. He quickly pulled together the lengthy Life of Abraham Lincoln, finished in February 1866. The 544-page bestseller portrayed Lincoln as an emancipator opposed to slavery and began many enduring myths about the slain President.

The reader learns about the railsplitter earning his first silver dollar, the millhorse’s kick to his head, the wrestling match with Jack Armstrong, Lincoln making restitution for a ruined book and the idyllic family cabin hewn from logs. Holland relays homey stories about the young Illinois legislator and lawyer and poignant ones about the president during the dark days of the Civil War.

Although Holland wrote using "on-the-ground investigation," later historians noted that as a journalist with a deadline, the work had "the signs of hurry."

In Holland's view, Lincoln was a model youth who rose on the strength of his merit and high ideals. Holland characterized Lincoln as "savior of the republic, emancipator of a race, true Christian, true man." The portrayal of Lincoln as a combination of Christ and George Washington was echoed in dozens of other nineteenth-century biographies.

His work also spurred Lincoln's law partner William Herndon to commence his own research and biography. Herndon was happy to help Holland but took issue with a tangential quote attributed to Lincoln in the work describing God's role in emancipation; Herndon believed Lincoln "had no religion more intense than a bland deism."

The book sold more than 100,000 copies, considered a bestseller in its day, and was translated into several languages.

Holland helped found Springfield’s Memorial Church (still standing) as a nondenominational Christian church, named in honor of “the memory of the deceased ministers of New England.” Holland has been called an adherent to a ”bland, liberal Congregationalism.”

In 1868 Holland traveled to Europe, and while there he met Roswell Smith. Together they developed the idea of starting a magazine. When they returned to the United States in 1869, the two men collaborated with Charles Scribner to establish Scribner's Monthly. The first issue was published in 1870 with Holland as editor. That year the U.S. census valued Holland’s estate at about $50,000, or the equivalent of more than $1.2 million today.

New York

He moved with his family to 46 Park Avenue in New York City in 1872, his home becoming “a Mecca for literary lights of the time.” These years in New York were also productive for his own literary efforts. During the 1870s he published three novels: Arthur Bonnicastle (1873), Sevenoaks (1875), and Nicholas Minturn (1877), which first were serialized in Scribners (afterwards it became the Century Magazine). His poetry volumes included The Marble Prophecy (1872), The Mistress and the Manse (1874), and The Puritan's Guest (1881).

In 1877, Holland erected a summer house on one of the Thousand Islands in upstate New York, in Alexandria Bay, where one of its streets is named for him. The mansion itself would be given the name “Bonniecastle” from the fictional work of his novel, Arthur Bonnicastle (1873). It is known as the Bonnie Castle Resort & Marina today. Holland founded the Holland Library in Alexandria Bay and supported the expansion of the Reformed Church of the Thousand Islands, sometimes known as the Holland Church.

J.G. Holland died on October 12, 1881, at the age of 62, in New York City. The evening prior, he “remained late at the office to finish an editorial tribute to the martyred President James A. Garfield,” who had been assassinated a few weeks before. Most major metropolitan dailies published tributes including journals that had often spoken scornfully of his “literary mediocrity, his triteness, and his intellectual parochialism.” The New York Times referred to him as “one of the most celebrated writers which this country has produced.”

Holland is buried in Springfield Cemetery in Springfield, Massachusetts. His imposing monument includes a bas-relief portrait sculpted by the eminent American 19th-century sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and includes the Latin inscription "Et vitam impendere vero" meaning "to devote life to truth".

Legacy

Although Josiah Gilbert Holland’s 22 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry are rarely read, during the late nineteenth century, they were enormously popular, and more than half a million volumes were sold.

Literary clubs in his honor formed in towns and cities across the country, especially in the Midwest. Newspapers published memorials on the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

Fans were said to obtain wood from maple trees standing in the yard of his birthplace at Dwight, Mass., to fashion into memorabilia such as penholders.

The doorstone of his birthplace, which burned to the ground in 1876, was recovered in 1932 and placed at the Stone House Museum, which also displays first editions of his works.

Postbellum spiritual mentor

In the devastating wake of the American Civil War, Holland offered Americans spiritual guidance and ultimately, hope.

That there was a Dr. Holland, a man who brought hope, reassurance, continuity and order into a chaotic, threatening world was itself a fact of great spiritual significance for millions of Americans. Unlike Henry Ward Beecher, whom he steadfastly supported, nothing even remotely suspect ever came near him. Instead, in such essays as "The Reconstruction of National Morality," published in April 1876, and "Falling from High Places," published in April 1878, he offered acute analyses of why, in the post-war years, so many Americans, including prominent Christian leaders, had succumbed to the temptation of attempting to obtain great riches dishonestly. Such was the sanctity of Holland's own life that he seemed to offer a living, earthly warrant for the promise of eternity that he pictured in his writings.

Of poets and their mission, Holland wrote: The poets of the world are the prophets of humanity. They forever reach after and foresee the ultimate good. They are evermore building the Paradise that it is to be, painting the Millennium that is to come. When the world shall reach the poet’s ideal, it will arrive at perfection; and much good will it do the world to measure itself by this ideal and struggle to lift the real to its lofty level.

He also wrote:

God never said it would be easy, He just said He would go with me.

Holland’s narrative poem “Bitter-Sweet” would become one of his most popular, and was described in 1894, by biographer Harriette Merrick Plunkett, as “Dr. Holland’s reflections on the mysteries of Life and Death, on the soul-wracking problems of Doubt and Faith, on the existence of Evil as one of the vital conditions of the universe, on the questions of Predestination, Original Sin, Free-will, and the whole haunting brood of Calvinistic theological metaphysics.” She declared it to be “truly an original poem,” and compared it to the works of Robert Burns or Sir Walter Scott. She cited the praise that it had earned from poet James Russell Lowell. However, the poem, and many of other works, were criticized as excessively sentimental and moralistic.

Holland and his wife were frequent correspondents and intimate family friends of poet Emily Dickinson. Holland and Samuel Bowles published a few of her poems in the Springfield Republican. As editor of Scribner’s Monthly, Holland told Dickinson’s childhood friend Emily Fowler Ford that he had “some poems of [Dickinson’s] under consideration for publication—but they really are not suitable—they are too ethereal.”

Notable people, politicians, spiritual leaders, clergy, and artists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., frequently quote a sentence or paragraph penned by Josiah G. Holland.

Publishes first Black poet

He was also was the first person to publish a Black poet in the U.S., a woman who wrote the oldest known work of literature by an African American. A 16-year-old named Lucy Terry witnessed two White families attacked by Native Americans in 1746. The fight took place in Deerfield, Mass. Known as “Bars Fight,” her poem was not published for another 109 years. It was told orally until it was published in 1855 by Holland in his History of Western Massachusetts.

Holland coined a term that later became the word "jazz." The word "jasm" appeared in his second novel, Miss Gilbert's Career (1860), and meant “lively," and was used to describe the "inexpressible personal force of the Yankee" By the early twentieth century it evolved into the word “jazz.”

Reviewing Melville and Whitman

Holland, as associate editor of the Springfield Republican, was critically favorable to canonical novelist Herman Melville and as co-founder and editor of Scribner's Monthly, Holland turned down publishing the more widely read canonical poet Walt Whitman.

Considered a writer and man of "Victorian virtue," Holland found Whitman's poetry immoral.

Whitman later called Holland “a man of his time, not possessed of the slightest forereach; ... the style of man ... who can tell the difference between a dime and a fifty-cent piece—but is useless for occasions of more serious moment.” The irony was that Holland wrote a bestseller after the “more serious moment” of President Lincoln’s assassination. All the same, even Springfield Republican publisher Samuel Bowles considered Holland a “prig.”

In the “History of American Literature,” by Leonidas Warren Payne, Jr., and published in 1919, Holland is “said to have reached a wider popular audience than most of the other minor poets.” One of Holland's books of poetry remained in print four decades after his death.

The noted Native American and Osage politician Arthur Bonnicastle was named for the titular character in Holland’s 1873 novel. He appears as a character in the 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon.

Holland’s work may be found at HathiTrust. His papers are collected at the New York Public Library and at Yale University. Some of his work remains in print.