After the Civil War broke out, the town of Concord, Massachusetts rallied, inspiring many young men to volunteer. The company assembled on the town common on April 19, 1861, the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord as they set off. Louisa May Alcott wrote to her friend Alf Whitman that it was "a sight to behold".[1] She was disappointed that she had to stay behind, lamenting, "as I can't fight, I will content myself with working with those who can."[1] She joined local women who volunteered to sew clothes and provide other supplies. On her 30th birthday on November 29, 1862, she made up her mind to do more. She recorded in her journal, "Thirty years old. Decide to go to Washington as a nurse if I could find a place."[2] She received her orders on December 11 and made her way to Georgetown, outside of Washington, D.C. While working as a nurse, Alcott contracted typhoid fever and was treated with mercury in the form of calomel. She survived but later recorded, "I was never ill before this time, and never well afterward."[3]
While serving as a nurse, Alcott wrote several letters to her family in Concord. At the urging of others, she prepared them for publication, slightly altering and fictionalizing them. The narrator of the stories was renamed Tribulation Periwinkle but the sketches are virtually authentic to Alcott's real experiences.[4]
Louisa May Alcott in 1862The first of the sketches was published on May 22, 1863, in the abolitionist magazine Boston Commonwealth edited by family friend Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. The final sketch was published on June 26.[5] Alcott herself did not care much for the writings, dismissing the idea that they were "witty", and admitted, "I wanted money."[6] The pieces received great critical and popular acclaim making Alcott an overnight success.
Transcendentalist Moncure D. Conway, who helped secure the publication of the sketches in the Commonwealth, recommended they be collected as a book.[7] The author was approached by Thomas Niles, an up-and-coming employee of Roberts Brothers, to publish the sketches in book form. Instead, she turned to the more established publisher James Redpath, who paid her $40 for the book.[8] At her father's suggestion, the book was dedicated to Hannah Stevenson, a friend who had helped Alcott secure her position as a volunteer nurse.[5] The book, priced at 50 cents, earned the author five cents in royalties for every copy sold, with an additional five cents donated to children orphaned by the war.[5] Years later, Walt Whitman contacted Redpath, hoping he would publish his own recollections as a Civil War nurse. As he wrote, the book Memoranda During the War, would be "something considerably more than mere hospital sketches."[9]
Fourteen years later after its publication, Alcott reflected on avoiding Roberts Brothers, who later published Little Women (1868): "Shortsighted Louisa! Little did you dream that this same Roberts Brothers were to help you make your fortune a few years later."[8] After that novel's success, Niles offered to republish Hospital Sketches under the Roberts Brothers imprint, and Alcott slightly expanded it.[10]
