Maria Cummins, 1827-1866
No. 14972 by Maria Cummins
Books by Maria Cummins include:
The Lamplighter. (1854)
Mabel Vaughan. (1857)
El Fureidis. (1860)
A Talk About Guides. (1864)
Haunted Hearts. (1864)
Around Mull. (1865)
Born in Salem in 1827 to a family of some social standing and relative affluence, Maria Susanna Cummins moved, while still quite young, with her family to Dorchester, at that time still a rural suburb separate from Boston. Maria’s father, David, had become a judge of the court of common pleas of Norfolk County.
Her mother was David’s third wife. He already had four children prior to this marriage, and three more followed Maria, making eight children in the family. Families of stepbrothers and sisters were common, so the characters of stepmother or father, orphan, etc., of the fiction of the day were not unrelated to the reality of the times. The Cummins Colonial home may have been the model for the country seat in the suburb of D—— in The Lamplighter. Maria attended Mrs. Charles Sedgwick’s Young Ladies’ School in Lenox, Massachusetts. Mrs. Sedgwick’s husband, Charles, had a sister Catharine Maria Sedgwick who was the nation’s foremost woman author and who lived with her brother and maintained an occasional literary salon. Maria could not have failed to be influenced by her association with this author.
Old Cummins House, photo of drawing published in The Dorchester Book. Illustrated. Boston, 1899
No. 1194 Old Cummins House
Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, first published in 1854, sold 40,000 copies in the first month and 100,000 by the end of a year. It is the story, as described in the Dictionary of American Biography, of a child lost in infancy, rescued from a cruel woman by an old lamplighter, adopted by a blind woman, and later discovered by her well-to-do father. It tells a woman’s story: a young girl, without financial resources or family support, must find her own way. The plot focuses on the development and use of the main character’s own talents, and he book is intended in this manner to be useful and instructive. Readers should examine their own circumstances and should develop self-contol and self-discipline. The characters in the book are mainly people from the country who have come to Boston from small towns and farms of New England, a trend reflective of society at the time. Nina Baym says “Rural women … Could not merely replicate the behavior of the uplands they had left behind. To be a woman in a new social setting was, in effect, to be a new kind of woman.”
The Lamplighter was published when Maria was tweny-seven years old. She became seriously ill ten years later and died in 1866.
Maria Cummins was the daughter of the Honorable David Cummins, Judge Cummins, lived on Bowdoin Street, Meeting House Hill, in the old “Turks Head Tavern,” an eighteenth-century tavern. She was born April 9, 1827, in Salem, and she moved with her family in 1845 to Dorchester to a home bought by her father from John Goodnow, situated on Bowdoin Street. The Cummins family were members of the First Parish Church, Unitarian, on Meeting House Hill, and she taught Sunday School for the children of the church. The Sunday School, under the directorship of William Taylor Adams (who used the pseudonym Oliver Optic for his books for young people), was established in 1822 and was one of the earliest in Massachusetts.
Maria Cummins was one of three sisters, one of whom married Edmund Pitt Tileston, a co-owner of the Tileston & Hollingsworth Paper Mills in Milton and Dorchester. Maria lived in the former Turks Head Tavern building till 1860 when her mother sold the house to C.L. Gibson, and they moved to Hancock Street, where she died October 1, 1866.
Maria wrote The Lamplighter, which was to prove an important social-awareness-type book. It was used in the Sunday School of the First Parish Church for many years and made a comfortable living for Miss Cummins.
The Lamplighter was first published in 1854, and at once sprung into prominence with Uncle tom’s Cabin and The Scarlet Letter. Forty thousand copies of The Lamplighter were sold in two months, and it was translated into many languages. Miss Cummins was the daughter of Judge Cummins who moved to Dorchester and occupied a small house on Bowodin Street, moving afterwards to the Parson Danforth house (Billings) for a short time while his new house was being completed on Hancock Street.
The Lamplighter was a first book, written to amuse a niece, with no thought of publication. The first editions appeared without her na me. Many Dorchester pople remember her perfectly today, ash she came to church at Meeting House Hill and sent about in a quiet way among her neighbors.
The original plates of the famous story were destroyed in the great Boston Fire, and in 1908 a new edition was brought out by Houghton, Mifflin Co.
Miss Cummins’ funeral was held in the First Parish Church, conducted by Mr. Hall. He preached a Memorial Sermon that was afterwards printed. She went early to a girls’ school at Lenox kept by Mrs. Charles Sedgwick, and she began to write about 1850.
The Lamplighter was followed by Haunted Hearts and several minor pieces. She contributed to the Atlantic Monthly. Many thousand copies of the The Lamplighter were placed in Sunday Schools all over the country. The Christian register of Sept. 12, 1918, ahs an article about her. She was aunt to Mrs. Munroe Chickering and Miss C. Tileston.
A pdf version of an article on Cummins by Anthony Sammarco, published in the Dorchester community News on January 10, 1991 appears a the link below.
PDF1063 Sammarco Maria Cummins
For more information, consult:
Cummins, Maria Susanna. The Lamplighter. Edited and with an introduction by Nina Baym. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.