Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

Lucy Larcom’s A New England Girlhood (1889) contains a wealth of information about life in Beverly, Massachusetts, in the 1820s and 1830s when the town was a tiny seaport. Larcom was an author and poet, an impassioned abolitionist, an associate of John Greenleaf Whittier, and later a teacher at Wheaton College. Of particular interest to us, however, is the insight she offers into the extent (or non-extent) of fairy folklore in Beverly, Massachusetts, in the 1830s.

Similar to other writers of her generation, Larcom believed that her Puritan ancestors had brought little-to-no fairy folklore with them to North America. Nevertheless, being a girl who loved to read (especially the “old poetic legends”), she learned about the fairies from literature and harbored a vague, “childish” belief in them:

I supposed that the beings of those imaginative tales had lived some time, somewhere; perhaps they still existed in foreign countries, which were all a realm of fancy to me. I was certain that they could not inhabit our matter-of-fact neighborhood. I had never heard that any fairies or elves came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower. (A New England Girlhood, p. 79)

Similarly worded statements about New England’s lack of fairies can be found in the writings of Larcom’s contemporaries, including Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), and the above-mentioned Whittier (1807-1892). The “no-fairies-on-the-Mayflower” claim may even have been something of a cliché among educated Anglo-Americans in early-to-mid nineteenth-century New England. The expression was shorthand for the belief that the Puritans had abandoned fairy superstitions and had passed down a “disenchanted” land to their descendants. Whether this belief corresponded with New Englanders’ actual experience of nature and the supernatural is something I’ve sought to examine in my book and in posts on Hartford, Connecticut, and Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The juvenile Larcom clearly possessed a belief in fairies, although she portrayed this belief as a childhood foible rather than a reflection of the wider culture. She also suggested that some children took this belief more seriously than others, for she described having a “little red-haired playmate” who indulged in fantasies about the fairies. This playmate often retold stories from books and other sources as if they’d happened to her. Some of the girl’s sources were literary (Regina Maria Roche’s bestselling novel The Children of the Abbey, for example), but others appear to have been folkloric, including the story mentioned in the following account:

[The girl] used to take me off with her into the fields, where, sitting on the edge of a disused cartway fringed with pussy-clover, she poured into my ears the most remarkable narratives of acquaintances she had made with people who lived under the ground close by us, in my father’s orchard. . . She said that these subterranean people kept house, and that they invited her down to play with their children on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons; also that they sometimes left a plate of cakes and tarts for her at their door: she offered to show me the very spot where it was,—under a great apple-tree which my brothers called the “luncheon-tree,” because we used to rest and refresh ourselves there, when we helped my father weed his vegetable-garden. But she guarded herself by informing me that it would be impossible for us to open the door ourselves; that it could only be unfastened from the inside. She told me these people’s names—a “Mr. Pelican,” and a “Mr. Apple-tree Manasseh,” who had a very large family of little “Manassehs.” She said that there was a still larger family, some of them probably living just under the spot where we sat, whose surname was “Hokes.” [Larcom here remarked on the name’s similarity to the word “hoax,” claiming that the girl was too young to have understood the homophone’s irony] . . . These “Hokeses” were not good-natured people, she added, whispering to me that we must not speak about them aloud, as they had sharp ears, and might overhear us, and do us mischief. (p.79-80)

The girl’s use of folkloric motifs when describing these “subterranean people” clearly identifies the beings as fairies. This includes the fact that they live underground, that they invite humans into their homes, that they’re sometimes associated with trees, and that one mustn’t “speak about them aloud” because they have “sharp ears” and can “do us mischief.” In an interesting inversion of one motif (that is, that humans leave food for the fairies), the girl claimed that the fairies actually left food for her rather than the other way around. Based on Larcom’s portrayal of the self-aggrandizing nature of the girl’s storytelling, we can perhaps conclude that the inversion was an expression of the girl’s egoism.

Whether the girl learned these motifs from a written or oral source is unclear, but their presence in the story demonstrates that a certain familiarity with fairy folklore existed in Beverly in the 1820s and 1830s. Apparently, the girl was a keen reader, and her “plagiarized” stories stuck close to the originals: it might be interesting to compare her narrative with the contents of any fairy folklore collections circulating in the 1820s (a rather early date for the field of folklore). As for the fairies’ names (Mr. Pelican, Mr. Apple-tree Manasseh, and the Hokeses), these are a mystery. The girl must have taken Manasseh from her religious instruction, as it refers to one of the twelve patriarchs in Genesis. As for Mr. Apple-tree Manasseh’s fathering of many “Little Manassehs,” this clearly mirrors the relationship between Manasseh and his tribe. The image of a fruit-bearing tree is also a fitting symbol for a patriarch.

While the fairies’ befriending a young child echoes elements of Algonquian and Haudenosaunee Little People stories, it seems unlikely that a girl in Beverly in the 1830s would have learned about the Little People from Indigenous sources. It’s more likely that the story derived from a storytelling tradition similar to the one that Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story mentioned in his 1831 autobiography: There, Story described growing up in neighboring Marblehead, Massachusetts, where he learned about many fairy beings (including bogles, will-o’-the-wisps, and hobgoblins) from “credulous” sailors and fishermen. In contrast to Beverly’s apparent lack of fairies, children across the bay in Marblehead, some thirty years before Larcom was born, were apparently learning about “bogles” chasing people home at twilight. Beverly in the 1830s was not dissimilar to Marblehead, both being fishing villages with a similar history. Whether the town harbored a similar treasury of oral fairy stories (which Larcom’s “playmate” might have drawn on) can only be surmised.

The implication of Larcom’s memoir is that early nineteenth-century fairy belief in New England was the prerogative of young girls. However, another example of fairy belief can be identified in the 1830s, espoused by an adult woman from Campton, New Hampshire. Recorded in the early 1900s and later compiled by folklorist Eva A. Speare, the story (presented in my book) suggests that Lucy Larcom’s friend was not alone among early-nineteenth century Anglo-Americans when it came to believing in fairies.

Read about more New England fairies in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.