Knowlton Biography, Chapters 4 and 5
Four: TAKE CARE
I had found that my disease was worse after having exercised the previous day…So I was very careful not to over-exercise…at length, to aid me in being cautious, I printed with a pen upon a piece of paper, in large capitals, the words “TAKE CARE,” and fastened it upon the cuff of my coat-sleeve. This excited some attention. Many asked me the object of it; and I used to wish that people would mind their own business.
By the time he turned twenty, Charles Knowlton was so weak and so afraid that he rarely left his room. He was weak from the medicines he took daily and from avoiding work and exercise. He was afraid because he believed his disease was worsening, and “could see no reasonable prospect of my getting well.” After all, nearly a dozen doctors had been unable to cure him during the three years he’d suffered.
Charles nearly gave up. He stopped venturing out, and spent his time huddled by a warm fire. In his most hopeful moments, Charles clung to the belief that he would somehow get well. A big part of this hope was that he would be able to leave his parents’ home and make his own way in the world, but Charles had “no sort of conception how this would be.”
By this time, the people of Templeton had learned of Charles’s malady. Rumors of his illness added to observations about the boy’s oddness, and townspeople concluded that Charles was a very strange character. Seeing Charles on his rare ventures outdoors must have been eerie. He was a tall, pale, emaciated young man, walking slowly about the town. His careful movements and the note pinned to his sleeve must have convinced many of his neighbors that Charles had finally lost his sanity as well as his health. And apparently they had no trouble expressing their opinions and meddling in what Charles considered none of their business.
Charles realized that the worse he got, the farther he was from a cure. Charles began to suspect he might never be cured, and his physicians “favored this idea.” After all, they hadn’t been able to help him with their poisons and moralizing—so clearly he was a hopeless case. Charles was not in much pain, but deep in a depression he later remembered as a “heartsunken despondency…I shall never be able to describe.”
Charles didn’t say much about how his family responded to his illness, but his parents’ concern was probably tinged with frustration. Stephen Knowlton was a meticulous record-keeper. He had an account book and kept detailed records of what his sons contributed to the family and what he gave them. Charles had not pulled his weight for three years. Although Charles never criticized his parents, he did recall his life at home. “A full description of my feelings I have not attempted to give,” Charles said. “I was at home, in my father's house. My parents, with my two brothers and myself, composed the family. There was little to divert my attention. There I sat, and there I lay, brooding over my sad case, day after day.”
The Knowlton family was small by the standards of the day, but Charles’s description suggests more than this. It was a family without life or joy, and living with the Knowltons gave Charles nothing to lift his depression or take his mind off the disease he believed was slowly killing him. The Knowltons seem to have been typical nineteenth-century New Englanders: children of the Puritans, cold-blooded Yankees unable to show whatever concern or affection they had for their ailing son. But that’s not surprising—this was Massachusetts in 1820. Luckily for Charles, he was about to discover there was another world not far away, and a completely different way to live life and be with people.
Five: Tabitha
He had no sons, but six daughters, all at home, and all singers, dancers, and adepts in the amusements and pleasures of accomplished and well-educated young women. Many people were about there; and we had checquer-playing, backgammon, chess, music and dancing, more or less, almost every day and evening. There was the company of the girls, also, and then that electerizing business…It put the "vital fluid" into me, as I was made to believe…Mr. Stuart also had a little black-eyed daughter, who used to go to the same school with me, and who I well remembered.
In January 1821, a former neighbor of the Knowltons named Richard Stuart visited Stephen Knowlton to talk about Charles. Richard Stuart was known throughout the area as “an ingenious mechanic,” whose tinkering had led to several practical inventions such as the improved water-powered sawmill used by many local lumbermen. Charles described Stuart as “a Jack-of-all-trades, and in several respects somewhat singular.” Coming from Charles Knowlton, that’s high praise—and a suggestion that Stuart really was quite unusual.
Richard Stuart was intelligent and well regarded in the neighborhood. A respectable citizen like Selectman Stephen Knowlton would listen carefully to his advice. Not long after their conversation, Stuart visited the Knowlton home on a winter evening, and was shown into the room where Charles lay brooding by the fire. Richard Stuart was no stranger to Charles. He had lived close to the Knowltons until Charles was ten or twelve. Charles had not forgotten Stuart, and had often hoped to see him again. As a boy, Charles had spent hours watching the inventor tinkering in his workshop. Stuart apparently saw something in Charles as well. Charles remembered the older man “would let me in, pinch my fingers moderately with his nippers, and then laugh at my fright.”
The Stuarts had moved about since leaving Templeton, before finally settling in nearby Winchendon. The village of Winchendon, about seven miles from the Knowlton farm, was a community of woodworkers—especially toymakers. These craftsmen probably appreciated Stuart’s inventiveness. Richard Stuart told the Knowltons he was in Templeton on “some mechanical job,” but he may have come primarily to see Charles. Stuart had been studying the medical use of electricity, and had built his own “electrical machine” that he was eager to test out. Charles had always been interested in Stuart’s tinkering, so he was an ideal subject—especially since nearly all the local doctors had already declared him incurable.
Medical electricity was an unusual interest for a village inventor in 1821 Massachusetts, but not unheard-of. About the time Ben Franklin flew his kite in Philadelphia in 1752, natural scientists in Europe and America became fascinated by the “animal-electrical economy.” Although it would be over a century before electricity became a household necessity, friends of Franklin’s such as Dr. Erasmus Darwin of England and Joseph Priestley, who left England for America in 1794, began experimenting and writing about their findings. Darwin was the grandfather of Charles Darwin and one of several people who wrote about evolution decades before his grandson’s famous theory. Joseph Priestley was one of the discoverers of the element oxygen. Priestley was hounded out of his native Britain by religious rioters who demolished his home and laboratory after the freethinker said some unpopular things about the church.
The fact that the scientists studying electricity were not religious men probably had a lot to do with Richard Stuart’s interest in the subject. Stuart was a freethinker—the first of many who would come into Charles Knowlton’s life. Freethinkers believed that truth was found through experience and thought, and not through faith and revelation. Although some nineteenth-century freethinkers believed the universe had a creator, they all rejected a personal God who did miracles and took an interest in human affairs. Freethinkers agreed that all religious texts were written by men, and thus had no more authority than other man-made theories. They prized reason and revered people who had the courage to challenge orthodox dogmas. Richard Stuart’s interest in Charles may have been based on his suspicion that Knowlton, known far and wide for his illness, but also for his oddness and his talent as a mathematician, might be a kindred spirit.
A few days after Richard Stuart’s visit to the Knowlton home, Stephen Knowlton wrapped his son in buffalo robes and drove him to Stuart’s house in Winchendon. After three years of expensive consultations and ineffective treatments, Charles’s family could see no hope of a conventional cure. Richard Stuart was “pleased, if not proud,” Knowlton said, to have him for a patient. Although he wasn’t a doctor, Stuart “pried into the nature of my case,” asking detailed questions about Knowlton’s symptoms and his reactions to the medications he’d been given. Stuart’s questions surprised Charles. Unlike the doctors Charles had seen, Stuart was not above gathering empirical evidence and seeing where it led him.
Also unlike the physicians who had treated Charles, Richard Stuart “took much pains to divert my mind and cheer me up.” In addition to being an inventor, Stuart was a talented musician who played several instruments including the violin. Stuart played music for Charles, and then taught Charles to play the violin himself. After a lifetime spent in a lifeless, puritanical home, the music and laughter of the Stuart household were shocking for the young man. Years later, Charles would make a point of practicing his violin on Sabbath mornings by an open window, to entertain the faithful on their way to church.
While Richard Stuart treated his patient with his “electerizing machine” and taught him music, he exposed Charles for the first time to freethought. Stuart “possessed Paines Age of Reason, and spoke highly of it,” Charles said. But Charles refused to read Thomas Paine’s most controversial book. He’d been taught, in his church and his orthodox home, that The Age of Reason was blasphemy. “I supposed it a bad book,” Charles said, “and its author a very wicked man.” Gradually, Charles’s respect for Stuart drove him to reexamine his beliefs and question the truths he’d been taught.
Like many eighteenth-century freethinkers, Thomas Paine had objected to organized religion but had retained his belief in an impersonal higher power. Richard Stuart took freethought a step further, and rejected the spirit altogether. Unlike Paine, Stuart was a materialist. Stuart accepted no supernatural miracles, insisting that nature could be understood completely by studying causes and effects in the observable world. “But in those days I knew not what materialism is,” Charles said. “I remember asking him one day what he supposed becomes of the soul when a person dies?” To Charles’s utter shock, “he gave me no answer but this: What becomes of the blaze of the candle when you blow it out?”
The Stuarts had no sons, but they had six daughters. The oldest girl, Tabitha, was seventeen; the youngest, Emeline, was four. The girls were all bright, talented, and happy—and as a freethinker Stuart believed none of his neighbors’ repressive traditions that would have prevented him from teaching the girls music, science, and whatever else they cared to learn. Charles was impressed by their poise and their accomplishments, and also by the steady stream of visitors who made the Stuart household a “great and strange novelty.” Living with the Stuarts, there was always something to take Charles’s mind off his own troubles.
From his very first night in Richard Stuart’s home, Charles felt as if he had been transported “to quite another world.” The change was so complete and so sudden that Charles was shocked out of his depression. He “began to think of other things besides myself, and to have new hope.” Although Charles had brought a bag full of the prescriptions he’d been taking daily at home, he soon forgot to take them. “To my surprise and joy,” Charles said, he “found that I felt just as well without them.” And then there was Tabitha.
Charles had remembered the Stuarts’ oldest daughter as “the little black-eyed schoolmate” of his childhood. Along with his interest in Richard Stuart’s tinkering, she was the reason Charles had hoped to see the Stuarts again. Charles stayed through the rest of the winter with the Stuarts, taking electrical treatments, talking with Richard Stuart about science, philosophy, and religion, and enjoying the family’s festive social life. During that winter, Charles’s interest in Tabitha became a romance.
Although Tabitha was four years younger than Charles, turning seventeen about the same time he arrived in her parents’ home, she was the daughter of freethinkers. Tabitha had no fear of Charles or his oddness, and she and felt free to express her interest in him. Three months after Charles’s arrival in Winchendon and three weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Charles and Tabitha were married. They “went directly ahead,” Charles said, “without consulting anyone.” The marriage of two under-age people without the consent of their parents was barely legal, and it was completely unheard of in families like the Knowltons. But Charles’s health was improving, for the first time in three years, so they kept their objections to themselves.
Charles was still only able to do moderate work, but his “disease” was gone and his strength was slowly returning. Over the next few months Charles and Tabitha split their time between the Stuart and Knowlton households. Charles discovered he had a future, and began to make plans for it. He had found his cure at last, in Richard Stuart’s house. It wasn’t electricity.