Quiet Hours

Salem: Henry Whipple and Son, 1859. Good.. Contemporary blue publisher's cloth, stamped in gilt and blind, a.e.g. Light wear to extremities, front board dampstained. Authorial presentation inscription on front flyleaf; leaf loosening. Internally clean. Scarce volume of antebellum poetry written by the niece of Lydia Maria Child. Susan Francis Preston Clapp (1817-1859) was born in Maine to Judge Warren Preston and Mary Rand Francis, the sister of the noted abolitionist and equal rights advocate. Lydia Child lived with her sister in Maine during her formative years, following the death of her mother in 1814. While there, she attended school, trained as a teacher, and helped care for Susan and the other children. She moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1820 to teach. Susan was married in September 1845 to Reverend Dexter Clapp (1816-1868), a Unitarian minister whose theological views aligned with the liberal religious thought of the era. The couple likely shared a commitment to social and moral reform, a common thread among many Unitarian families of the time. Susan died of cancer shortly after this volume was published. The forty-three poems in the present work deal with death, mourning, faith, the natural world, and family.