Partnership for posterity

Description

This documentary edition includes 478 letters or parts of letters written by William Maclure and Marie Duclos Fretageot to each other between the years 1820 and 1833. William Maclure (1763-1840), a naturalized American of Scottish ancestry, accumulated a sizable fortune in the mercantile trade and devoted much of his life to educational reforms based on the methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Madame Marie Louise Duclos Fretageot (1783-1833), a French woman, ran a girls boarding school in Philadelphia before returning in 1819 to France, where she was introduced to Maclure. He planned to have her learn the Pestalozzian system of teaching in order to establish a girls school. From this meeting evolved a partnership that endured for the next fourteen years until Madame's death in 1833. During these years, however, Madame and Maclure actually spent just a little more than three years together. This separation required a continuing correspondence, which constitutes the main text of this volume. . This collection not only traces a remarkable partnership, but also contains information pertaining to life in the American "West," reformers and reform movements, and political events in the United States and other countries where Madame and Maclure found themselves. There is also information on science, economics, education, women's rights, and slavery. Above all, the letters from 1824 are especially important for understanding what happened at New Harmony, when in 1825 Maclure joined Robert Owen to attempt an experiment in communitarian living. Although Owen's plans collapsed within a two-year period, Maclure, with Madame's help and management, established a school of industry as well as a scientific and publishing center on the American frontier. This volume gives the reader an understanding of what happened at New Harmony between 1826 and 1831 by providing the reader with all the letters written by Maclure and Madame during this period. This story is also a love story - a somewhat one-sided one in certain ways. No one can read the early correspondence without realizing at once that Madame had fallen in love with Maclure, and that his feelings for her were very likely not similar in either quality or intensity. As the years passed, her love grew quieter and deeper, but would end only with her death. Without Madame and Maclure there would have heen no correspondence, no partnership, and no advances in the fields of education, science, and printing at New Harmony, and New Harmony's history would have been far less distinguished.

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