ABSTRACT
Adele Marion Fielde was born in 1839, when the world of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson was fading, and Queen Victoria was embarking on a long reign that marked a new era. American science and technology were beginning to come of age; during the 1830s and 1840s, crossing the Atlantic Ocean by steamboat became commonplace, and the railroad was becoming a standard mode of travel. The year 1839 had witnessed the passage of the steam packet Britannia from Halifax to Liverpool in a mere ten days, and trains had achieved the astonishing speed of thirty-nine miles per hour. Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle had come to an end, but it was the beginning of a revolution in biology, and Theodore Schwann published his seminal theory that all plants and animals were constructed of a fundamental unit, the cell. An ever increasing number of prodigies – Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman – was beginning to fulfill the Democratic Republic’s promise. Young America was in the grip of a financial panic that could only make life harder for Fielde’s parents. A besieged President Martin Van Buren was finishing his first term at a time of profound and prolonged economic depression. Hard times in a country dependent for its growth on European capital cost this able New Yorker a second term.
