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A direct descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims John and Priscilla Alden, Henry Mills Alden was born in 1836, in Mount Tabor, Vermont, to farm owner Ira Alden and Elizabeth Packard Moore Alden. His mother was the niece of Zephaniah Moor, the second president of Williams College and first president of Amherst College.
While Alden had a seemingly blessed pedigree, his family struggled to make ends meet. His father grew weary of eking out a meager living in Vermont, so the family moved to Hoosick Falls, New York, in 1842, looking for an opportunity in the successful cotton mills of that area.
Alden soon started working in the mills as a “bobbin boy.” Life was difficult, and Alden hoped of one day going to college.
When he was fourteen, he entered the Ball Seminary to prepare for college, earning his keep building fires and cleaning rooms. In 1852, after two years at Ball, Alden delivered the valedictory address. The principal at the time, Reverend Charles J. Hill, who had recently graduated from Williams College, saw promise in the young Alden. Hill urged Alden to go to college and gave him a letter of introduction to his former professors and friends at Williams.
Alden arrived at Williams in 1853 and supported himself by teaching in neighboring schools and performing odd jobs during the summer.
Williams provided an intellectually challenging environment, and Alden counted among his fellow students James Garfield and Washington Gladden. He studied language and philosophy, concentrating on the classics and Greek culture. So involved was he in his work there that his classmates nicknamed him “Metaphysics.” In 1857, he went to Andover Theological Seminary, which pleased his mother, whose wish was for her son to become a minister. However, his time at Andover was the auspicious beginning to his career in literature.
Alden was either the author or coauthor of five books, all under the Harper imprint, and co-editor of six books with Howells. He also published several articles in various periodicals, two of which were about Mark Twain.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous author who also happened to be the wife of Andover faculty member Calvin E. Stowe, read one of Alden’s poems from that time, “The Ancient Lady of Sorrow,” and was duly impressed. Alden showed Mrs. Stowe an article he had written about the Eleusinian mysteries, and she secretly sent it to James Russell Lowell, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. That article and a subsequent one of the same topic was published in the magazine, and Alden started to consider a literary career over his religious pursuits. His career was waylaid, however, when he returned home to relieve his brother in the earing of his invalid father.
When his brother resumed caretaking duties, Alden, urged by his Williams friend Horace E. Scudder in New York, traveled to the big city in April of 1861. He moved in with Scudder and started teaching history and literature at a girls’ school.
He started teaching at a boys’ school and was also writing editorials for the New York Times and the Evening Post.
In the spring of 1862, Alden received a commission to assemble a guidebook on the Central Railroad of New Jersey and its connections to the Pennsylvania coal fields. Unbeknownst to him, this minor job directed the future of his career, as Harper and Brothers published the book and in the summer of 1863 he took a job in their editorial department. Thus began a lifetime career at a single company.
Before beginning his new life at Harper, Alden heard from the Atlantic concerning articles he had submitted while he was back at home nursing his father. The Atlantic publisher James T. Fields found Alden’s writings on Greek culture to be exceptional pieces and he told Alden that Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Wendell Phillips also found them to be accomplished works. Although the Atlantic did not have a suitable place for them within their confines, he invited Alden to present the material in a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston. In the winter of 1863-64, Alden delivered twelve lectures under the title, “The Structure of Paganism.”
Alden’s responsibilities included the selection of articles, caption writing for the pictures, and general office management, while Harper established the general vision of the magazine, made policy, and chose most of the illustrations. Alden looked to Harper as a mentor and learned much from his balanced style of direction. Alden showed great promise as a dedicated worker who espoused firm beliefs in line with the philosophy of the magazine. In 1868, he co-wrote Harper’s Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion with Harper’s New Monthly Magazine editor Alfred H. Guernsey. When Guernsey stepped down in 1869, Harper saw Alden as the perfect successor.
Before the Civil War, Harper’s had the highest circulation of any magazine in the country, exposing its pages to almost two hundred thousand readers.
When Harper retired in 1875, Alden found new freedom with the new publishers, but the editorial policy of high standards reaching out to a large audience would remain intact.
Towards the end of his tenure at Harper’s, Alden lost much of his vitality, though he was still highly regarded as an impassioned and important member of the literary community. Harper’s was past its prime and general interest magazines such as McClure’s and Cosmopolitan overcame the magazine world. Alden died on October 7, 1919.
The career of Henry Mills Alden is extraordinary in that he was the head of a major American magazine for fifty years.
As editor of Harper’s New-Monthly Magazine, he contributed to the development of American culture.
For half a century, Alden remained a steady force at a magazine that was no less than one of the major cultural fixtures of an America that was in the midst of great social development. An extraordinary editor whose democratic beliefs and respect for new writers led Harper’s to great heights, Alden remains an exemplar in the history of magazine publishing.
While known at Harper’s for his directness and logic, Alden did possess an affinity for religion and mysticism. His interest in religion was expressed in the writing of two books, God in His World: An Interpretation (1890), an anonymous publication declaring his faith in Christ and a reconciliation of that faith with modern science, and A Study of Death (1895), written close to the time of his first wife’s passing. According to Connery', a critic for the New York Times called A Study of Death “the profound essay in mysticism ever written by an American.”
The journal Harper's Weekly, A Journal of Civilization, where Alden worked as an editor, was known for its advancement of literary realism, its unique understanding of a singular American morality, and the exposure it gave to many new and brilliant writers and illustrators. These ideas were firmly espoused and successfully promoted by the dedicated Alden, who was both a critical and focussed editor and a supporter of the struggling, unknown voices of his time.
His own experiences growing up instilled in him a strong belief in rewarding the talented and the hard working. A staunch supporter of education and democratic ideals, Alden was a passionate advocate of literature that enlightened its audience.
Alden’s interest in the practical and educational powers of literature was solidly illustrated in his 1908 book, Magazine Writing and the New Literature, in which he explored the relationship between periodical and general literature, and the ideas of authorship and purpose. He also examined the characteristics of literature as a distinct mode of communication in the age of modernity that America was experiencing at the tum-of-the-century.
A distinguished literary magazine, Harper’s gained public acclaim by showcasing works by English writers such as Thackeray, Dickens, and Eliot. It was Alden’s mandate to strike a balance between uncovering American literary greatness and maintaining the position of a family magazine for the masses. In fact, unifying the worlds of literary academicism with the rural and working-class was a circumstance Alden had already done in his own life.
Alden thought that the best way to serve the reading public would be to inform and enlighten in an entertaining way. He had to find a way to convey that which was interesting and useful to the average American, a main editorial principle of Harper.
He believed that realistic fiction - what he termed “new realism” - created the most reliable portrait of life.
Alden was dedicated to the publication of what he called “new literature,” literature that dealt with the complexity of human nature as opposed to the classic American stories of good and evil. To Alden, this realism was critical to the understanding of the prevailing forces of modernity that were affecting all Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century. His commitment to seeing and sharing the vastness of America, both in its geographic diversity and its varied and unique writers, is apparent in Under the Sunset, a collection of novelettes that he edited with Howells in
1905.
Quotations: “Harper’s addressed to all readers of average intelligence, having for its purpose their entertainment and illumination, meeting in a general way the varied claims of their human intellect and sensibility, and in this accommodation following the lines of their aspiration.”
Alden was an early member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Highly respected in both literary and journalistic circles, Alden was referred to by his colleague at Harper’s, William Dean Howells, as “the greatest editor of his time, or almost any time,” according to Thomas B. Connery in a Dictionary of Literary Biography essay.
Alden was married to Susan Frye Foster, whom he had met in Andover. In February of 1900, Alden remarried; his second wife was Virginian poet Ada Foster Murray.
