While social-distancing and self-isolation are expressions that seem very much of our time, the concepts behind them are hardly new. By necessity, people in the past were often isolated and separated from the people and places they cared for. Eighteenth century people didn’t have the consolation of video chats or texts, either, and months or even years could pass before a letter or a relayed verbal reassurance could come from someone far from home.
Phebe Folger Coleman (1771-1857) must have known all about this kind of separation. She was born on the island of Nantucket, 30 miles out to sea from the mainland of Massachusetts. The island’s population was fewer than 5,000 people in the 1790s, and the majority of the man were employed as sailors or whalers, occupations that could take them from home for an extended time. A child conceived during shore leave could be born, walking, and talking before he or she finally met Papa.
Unlike many 18thc women, Phebe was fortunate to belong to a family that valued education for both their daughters and sons (her niece Lydia Folger Fowler became the second woman to earn a medical degree in America). Phebe was accomplished in mathematics, French, and astronomy as well as a talented writer, artist, and poet. As a teenager, she began keeping a commonplace book that she titled Un Recueil [A Collection]. Commonplace books were a kind of combined literary scrapbook and diary, filled with whatever the keeper - poems, article, drawings, inspiring essays and quotations - thought was worth preserving for posterity and reflection. Phebe continued to add to hers through 1806.
The painting and poem, above, are from Un Recueil. It’s likely that Phebe copied the figures from a European print. The stylish shepherd and shepherdess may flirt among their flocks in the background, but the young woman - “The Fair Secluder” - in the foreground prefers her solitude and the company of the poets in her book:
“Far from life’s busy noisy scene/I seek a calm retreat/Where Nature smiles with brow serene/Around my humble seat./Of all her beauteous works so bright/I take a rapt’rous view/And then peruse what Poets write/And ancient Sages knew.”
Perhaps Phebe could romanticize the notion of being a dreamy scholar, lost in a book. Perhaps she lived in a crowded family household where privacy was at a premium, and the idea of sitting alone in a tree, far away from the distractions of other people, was a tempting one.
Soon after, however, solitude lost much of its imagined appeal. In 1798, Phebe married a sailor, Samuel Coleman. She taught him the mathematics necessary for navigation and trading, and his career prospered. On shore in Nantucket, Phebe taught school and raised their three children while Samuel was away, and his long voyages separated them for months at a time. They both missed one another so acutely that, in 1809, he quit the sea. They sold their house, left Nantucket, and moved to a farm near Ghent, New York. There they remained, together, until his death in 1828.
Phebe’s commonplace book is now in the collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University. It has been recently digitized, and can be read online here.
Thanks to John Overholt, Curator of Early Books & Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University, for leading me to Phebe’s commonplace book.
Above: Page from Un receuil : containing painting, penmanship, algebra and pieces selected from various authors in prose and verse, with a few pieces in French with their translation by Phebe Folger of Nantucket : manuscript, 1797-1806. Houghton Library, Harvard University.
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