IN THE summer of 1906 Consul General Wilder was enjoying his new life and his new salary—especially “after 12 years of nose on the grindstone.”23 By July 15 he had sent home a thousand dollars to apply to his debts. He confided in his mother that after years of “standing off” creditors, “you cannot imagine the sweetness of wiping out these obligations beginning with the small ones.”24
He was completely caught up in his official duties, “ratifying contracts and facilitating international commerce” and representing his “native land’s character” as a “congenial and even convivial” good fellow.25 The Hong Kong consul general carried heavy commercial and social responsibilities, although politically and industrially the post was not as important as other missions in China, especially in Shanghai and Peking. But Hong Kong—“the gate way of South China”—was one of the world’s busiest ports, especially for United States business interests.26 Hong Kong was “essentially a freight transit point” but the consul general was expected to be on the lookout for trade opportunities and to report on trade and industrial issues from his gateway perspective. While the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong was not heavily involved with Chinese officials and the keeping of public order, as was the case in Peking and Shanghai, Hong Kong was a strategic port city always on the lookout for international unrest.
Socially Dr. Wilder was directed to “take his place in the official life of the Colony with dignity, and if he be congenial to the prominent families outside the strictly official circle, mainly military and naval in a British Colony, it facilitates business at the consulate, and enhances American prestige.”27 Consul General Wilder and his wife and family were expected to do their part to support this mission.28 In their rented house atop the Peak, the Wilders entertained often—on special holidays, on the occasion of visits from special guests, and at a weekly open house, among other times.29 According to official reports, the Wilders were “very popular” in Hong Kong, performing their social duties with “grace and social tact.” Furthermore, one government report noted, Isabella and the children “certainly” contributed to Amos Parker Wilder’s official and social success in Hong Kong.30
But behind the scenes there were growing headaches. Isabella (whom her husband usually called Isabel) was increasingly exhausted by the daily social demands and the daily care of four rambunctious children, even though there were servants to help. Both parents worried over the limited opportunities for educating their bright youngsters. Dr. Wilder was continually appalled at the cost of living in Hong Kong. What had seemed like a comfortable salary was instead becoming sorely strained to pay the high costs of rent, food, entertaining, clothing, and dues for the clubs he was expected to join, as well as the personal costs of helping stranded Americans, hosting American tourists, and giving to charities to help the poor. Furthermore, back home, debts for the newspaper still had to be paid, along with the rent on their Madison apartment. The financial strain was wearing for Amos and Isabella, and stresses in their marriage intensified accordingly.
Both parents began to worry about how life in Hong Kong affected their children. At an early age most Western boys were sent back to their home countries for schooling, and girls were sent back to boarding schools in their early or midteens. In Hong Kong at that time there was only one reputable school for foreign children, and it was run by the local German Lutheran church, staffed by two German women, with no English spoken. Dr. Wilder hired a German tutor to work with Amos, Thornton, Charlotte, and Isabel after school, for none of the children knew a word of German. This was unsatisfactory even as a short-term arrangement for educating their brood—especially since Dr. Wilder was already thinking of preparing his sons to go to Yale and his daughters to go to Mount Holyoke.31
Isabella did not settle happily into life in Hong Kong, although she was recognized as a gracious hostess, especially at her weekly afternoon “at homes” and her dinner parties. Before their first dinner party, Isabella and her husband wrestled over the protocol of the “awful wine question,” as he termed it—and he eventually won.32 He was irrevocably a teetotaler; he had sworn that pledge as a boy, after all, and it was a matter of deep moral conviction. Furthermore, his own brother, Julian, was an alcoholic, so he had witnessed firsthand the harm excessive drinking could do. Dr. Wilder was not about to further corrupt the morals of his guests, who in his opinion would just have to survive his dinner parties without wine. Nevertheless he recognized the hardship his position would work on Isabella and their guests. He reported to his mother that he understood that it was
almost impossible to conceive a dinner without all kinds of wines etc. We shall be adjudged cads, pharisees, bumpkins and stingy Americans . . . Isabel wanted to do things “right” and put it on all sorts of grounds of propriety, but I told her that I could not even consider it. She was in great distress for weeks, tears and the like. . . . I had laid in a stock of grape juice! And with Apollinaris water and the like and with no apologies, the dinner went off swimmingly. Isabel had accepted the inevitable some hours in advance & sparkled in conversation, and [the guests] went home at 10:30 reporting a happy evening.33
The American consulate in Hong Kong traditionally hosted a Fourth of July party for Americans, Chinese officials, and the international community, always with “an abundance of all kinds of drinks.” Consul General Wilder was determined to change that practice. For the first Fourth of July celebration he held, he saw to it that the consulate was “handsomely decorated with flags and flowers,” and that the guests were lavishly served grape juice and bottled waters. He pronounced his party a great success.34
EXCEPT FOR school, the Wilder children enjoyed their new life in China—kite flying, pony rides, new games to play. With pride Dr. Wilder described his children in a letter to his mother:
The fact is that Isabel is such a winsome little favorite that Charlotte is overshadowed—but the latter is a strong, forceful self reliant girl and will do us all proud. They have finished [reading] “Robinson Crusoe” and now they are at work on Lamb’s version of the Shakespeare plays. They read to each other for Isabel[la] has no strength left for that and what time I have is devoted to pounding the Bible into their little heads and hearts.35
Committed as they were to the importance of education, both Wilders grew increasingly unhappy with the schooling available to their children in Hong Kong.36 While Amos was already a good student, Dr. Wilder worried that Thornton was “too much of a dreamer & without application to be a scholar,” although he was “quick mentally” and was making friends. Charlotte was a “constant reader,” her father said, and liked to read aloud to her siblings. He could tell she was nearsighted, but there was not a good doctor in Hong Kong to examine her eyes. “Isabel is everyone’s pet,” he wrote, “yet does not seem spoiled.”37
Dr. Wilder wrote to his mother-in-law at length about his hopes for his sons and daughters:
The education of the children is one of my dearest interests. I want the girls as well as the boys to have a college course. . . . Thornton is a very sweet boy but a dreamer. He does the things he wants to do but lacks application. He promises to be an impracticable, dependent little fellow and I must consult some wise educator, for the type must be a common one.38
His son Amos was a different matter, however. Dr. Wilder wished for Amos to have an experience with farm life to “bolster him up,” but he told his mother-in-law that Isabella threw up her hands “in horror” at the idea. Amos was, his father wrote, “affectionate, makes friends with all and scatters sunshine with his perennial gladness.”39
BY SEPTEMBER 1906 troubling events confronted the Wilders in Hong Kong: the visible economic and physical suffering of many of the Chinese people; the perennial rumors of political unrest; and the overpowering force of a natural disaster. On young Amos’s eleventh birthday, September 18, a typhoon swept through Hong Kong without warning, followed by a tsunami, killing an estimated ten thousand people. Amos never forgot the specter of bodies floating in the sea.40 As Cons
ul General Wilder reported in graphic accounts dispatched to newspapers in the United States, thousands of disfigured and decomposing bodies washed ashore in Hong Kong. Isabella remembered that “the British soldiers had to turn out and bury them because the Chinese were superstitious and refused.”41
The storm’s hundred-mile-per-hour winds tossed and overturned rickshaws, streetcars, and huge steamers alike, wreaking massive damage throughout the city. It was disastrous for the Chinese economy, as well as for foreign businesses, and Dr. Wilder turned his attention to the practical urgency of helping to rebuild the port and the business ventures that depended on it.
At home, meanwhile, he was deeply concerned about the toll their demanding Hong Kong life was taking on his wife and children. Truth be known, the husband and wife were seldom completely happy in each other’s company, and his letters reveal his anxiety not only about schools for their children but about his wife’s well-being. Isabella was “economical as always,” he wrote to his mother.
It is rarely a consul has a wife who can so help him socially. . . . Isabel gets pretty well tired by the eternal making of senseless calls and other functions where it is necessary to keep up a flow of small talk—but she does it very successfully and is in great favor. She thinks later she would like to go to Italy or Switzerland and as the women come and go home (England) a good deal here to escape the climate, I may let her go with some or all of the children. It would be as cheap as keeping up an establishment.42
Isabella kept insisting that she should take the children to live in Switzerland or Italy, but her husband ultimately balked at that plan. If she had to leave, he thought she should go back to the United States and live on the West Coast. He insisted that his sons should stay with him in China, but Isabella wanted to keep all the children with her. Finally, after five and a half months in Hong Kong, the couple decided to live separately, with the children’s education as the stated motivation. Consul General Wilder would, of course, remain in Hong Kong, and would move to a room at the nearby Peak Hotel. Isabella and the children would return to the United States to rent a house in Berkeley, California, where there were good schools, a university, and some old Madison friends.43
On October, 30, 1906, Isabella, Amos, Thornton, Charlotte, and Isabel once again boarded the SS Siberia for a monthlong voyage, this time bound for San Francisco. Typhoon flags were flying at the harbor, and departure preparations were accelerated because of a looming storm. “It seemed best for Isabel & the children to go,” Dr. Wilder wrote sadly to his mother, “though it was a hard decision to make.”44 He worried especially about Thornton, the one of his children who “dreads leaving his ‘Papa’ the most,” he told her in another letter. Such family separations were “like pulling teeth—they break relationships, and it will not be so hard the next time to leave Papa—but God knows I am doing my duty as I see it. I have been clouded by debt and a lack of money so long that it has changed me.”45
He took comfort that in California the children would have more playmates, more opportunity for healthy play outdoors, and, most of all, access to much better schools—and that he could save more money living on his own. He wrote to his mother in December, “I am happy enough in my lonely life.”46
THE YEAR 1906 marked a turning point for the Wilder family. For the first time they did not live together under one roof. The children now inhabited a home with an absent father and a mother who had to manage the household, the budget, and the child rearing as best she could, almost entirely on her own. Now deprived of their father’s daily presence, they had to rely on slow-moving letters to and from Hong Kong to sustain their relationship with him. This was also the time when the family’s financial stress began to filter into their daily awareness. Amos Parker Wilder, lonely in China for his family in California, was now essentially responsible for maintaining and supporting three households—his own in Hong Kong, the rental house and the needs of his wife and four children in Berkeley, and the apartment he still leased in Madison. He had hoped that the family could live on half his salary, with the other half devoted to paying his debts. The budget was stretched tight, however, and the Wilder children began to learn the challenges, discomforts, and insecurities of genteel poverty. Young Amos remembered that the years in Berkeley “were sometimes desperately difficult for our mother, who had four young children to care for with very limited funds.”47
Isabella created as much comfort in their Berkeley home life as her energy and resources would permit. Her children remembered that she had a great gift for making something out of nothing, and her “wonderful high spirits” came in part from the support she drew from music, art, and poetry.48 The school-age children attended Emerson Grammar School in Berkeley. Just as Isabella had taken advantage of university resources in Madison, she explored the University of California community, making friends with faculty members, especially in the French and Italian circles. She wrote poetry and translated poems by Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916), a Belgian poet and critic who wrote in French, and Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907), one of Italy’s greatest poets. She reconnected with her Dobbs Ferry Sunday school teacher, William Lyon Phelps, now famous as a writer, lecturer, and teacher of literature and the humanities. Phelps, a member of the English faculty at Yale, his alma mater, was a guest lecturer during the 1908 summer session at the university in Berkeley.49
As Isabella and her children adjusted to their new life in California, they filled their days with school and church activities and the rich cultural events of the university community. The children took music lessons, practicing on a rented piano in the parlor. They heard the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play, and saw the Ben Greet Players perform Shakespeare in the William Randolph Hearst Greek Theatre. The walled amphitheater, inspired by ancient Greek architecture, opened on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1903, a gift from Hearst. As often as her budget permitted, Isabella indulged her love for theater, taking one or more of the children with her—most often Thornton, who loved the spectacle and the magic of plays so much that he began making up his own dramas and staging them in the backyard, casting and directing his brother and sisters and any of the neighborhood children who would cooperate, costuming them in cheesecloth and filling their mouths with “grandiloquent speeches.”50 The Wilders lived just ten or twelve minutes away from the Berkeley hills that enfolded the Greek Theatre, where Isabella volunteered her skills as a seamstress. Her children were cast in mob scenes in plays there, as well as in Nativity pageants at their church. Thornton would often climb a tree or sneak into the theater to watch rehearsals in the Greek Theatre. Sometimes he got caught, but when he didn’t, he sat enthralled. Those moments in the shadows, with his eyes and ears fixed on the stage, helped to launch his lifelong love affair with drama, including the fascinating collaborative rehearsal process.
The family often attended Sunday afternoon performances at the Greek Theatre—concerts, plays, dance recitals. There Thornton saw dramas by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and others. There were two theaters in Oakland, and in one of them Thornton saw the well-known actress Viola Allen in Twelfth Night, as well as popular comedies and melodramas.51 Steeped in drama, his already robust imagination expanding, he began to get up early in the morning before school so he could write down his own plays. Thornton’s love for books led him regularly to the university library as well as the public library. At his father’s request, Thornton mailed letters to China about what he was reading. “Dear Papa, Books I have read this month:” he began one letter, listing Shakespeare’s Othello, part of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, and Wilbur Fisk Crafts’s Successful Men of Today, as well as John S. White’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives and Sarah Knowles Bolton’s Poor Boys Who Became Famous. Thornton concluded his letter to his father with a brief evaluation: “None of the books were unsatisfactory.”52
Isabella read to and with her children, experiences deeply imprinted in her son’s imagination and memory. “Do you remember how
we read ‘Ulyssees [sic] together,” he wrote to her when he was a teenager. “Since then I have learnt some of him by heart”53 His passion for books, reading, and making up plays and stories marked him early on as a verbally gifted child, and as he began to write down his plays and stories, his attentive mother was “his confidante and stimulus.”54
He could be glib as well, as in this fourth-grade English assignment when he was asked to write about Vulcan: “Vulcan was the god of goldsmiths, ironsmiths, leadsmiths, silversmiths, and Mrs. Smiths—there, now I’m out of breath.”55
AMOS PARKER WILDER and his family were tethered by the letters that made their slow way from Hong Kong to Berkeley and back again. In China and in California, a part of each Sunday afternoon was devoted to sharing the news of the week in letters—long ones from Dr. Wilder, shorter ones from the children and Isabella. Dr. Wilder reported that he was giving literary and cultural lectures in Hong Kong, focusing in the fall of 1906 on Thoreau in a literary course at the Union Church.56 He sent his wife an affectionate letter on December 3, 1906, their twelfth wedding anniversary. Isabella had often told her husband that their wedding day was “the worst day that ever befell either of us.” Dr. Wilder wrote to his mother, adding,
I always tell her that despite the long, weary way if I had it to do over, I would choose no other companion, and as I think of my dear children and the many happinesses, God knows I spread the truth. Had the dear girl married some more pliable fellow, some well-to-do man of the world, she might have been happier—but I am not sure. I am a patient old fool and in some of her moods perhaps I have been more successful than a higher-strung companion would have been. I never forget what a devoted, intelligent Mother she was in the early hard years. . . . I hope the coming years will be easier for [Isabella].57