Three Villages (1884)
AUTHOR: Howells, William Dean
https://archive.org/details/threevillages00howeuoft
Anderson, Martha Jane
Douglass, Frederick
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Evans, Frederick William
Greeley, Horace
Lane, Charles
SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):
Howells' travel account of the three eponymous villages includes a report on his six-week visit to Shirley, a Shaker town. Early in his account, Howells refers his readers to the writings of Frederick William Evans “for an authoritative statement” on Shaker beliefs and customs (70). Howells notes that the Shakers are known for the “peaceful life” they live and for opening “their quiet homes” to “those disabled against fate, the poor, the bruised, the hopeless” (74). He observes that, while they used to make wine in Shirley “before the wickedness of fermented drinks was clearly established,” they no longer do so, instead living a “very strictly abstemious” life (84, 85) characterized by their refusal to consume flesh:
[t]hey generally avoid also tea and coffee, shortened biscuit, doughnuts, and the whole unwholesome line of country cookery, while they accept and practise the new gospel of oatmeal porridge and brownbread gems in its fulness. Many of the younger people are averse from meat, following the example and precept of our good Elder Fraser, who for the last thirty-five years has kept his tough Scotch bloom fresh upon a diet that involves harm to no living creature, and at seventy looks as ruddy as few Americans at any time of life (85-86).
Howells reflects that it would be unreasonable to expect that the Shakers would be, “as a community, exempt in notable degree from the ills we are all heir to” (86), considering that it may be “too much to expect a single generation, gathered from the common stock of an unwisely-feeding ancestry, to show the good effects of a more reasonable regimen” (86-87).
As their numbers are dwindling, the Shakers are forced to employ “hired labor,” which, “as communists, they think to be wrong” and “deplore” (98). This prompts Howells to make some observations about the current state of farming in general, which he thinks has become unsustainable, because of the high cost of farm labor: "The farmer who can till his own fields and take care of his own stock can live by farming, but no other can" (98).