Monday Morning Reading Class, May 5, 1902
(Photo by George Glessner)
(Photo by George Glessner)
Today marks
the 125th anniversary of the first meeting of Frances Glessner’s
Monday Morning Reading Class on November 21, 1894. As her husband John noted in a tribute
written shortly after her death in 1932, “Perhaps the Monday Morning Reading
Class was her choicest activity and the one in which she took most pride and
pleasure.” In this first of several articles
about the class, we will explore the origins of the class and how it was
structured.
In his
tribute, John Glessner noted that the idea for the class originated in an
activity begun several years earlier, while the family was residing in their
home at the northeast corner of Washington and Morgan:
Library of Washington Street house
“While
living on Washington Street, Mrs. Glessner arranged a series of meetings of ladies
in our library and parlors to listen to talks and readings about the latest
books by scholars and experts, which were well attended and interesting and
became the nucleus and forerunner of the Monday Morning Reading Class, so that
that afterwards vigorous society had its origination and beginning then and
there.”
Addie
Hibbard Gregory, a member of the class for its entire 36 years of existence,
recalled in her book, A Great-Grandmother Remembers, that Frances
Glessner renewed the idea of her earlier meetings at the request of William
Rainey Harper, first president of the newly formed University of Chicago:
“Early in
the nineties, President Harper of the University of Chicago had asked Mrs.
Glessner how the newly arrived wives and families of the university faculty
could become acquainted with Chicago women, and we with them. This class was Mrs. Glessner’s answer. We were all grateful for the opportunity of
meeting as soon as we did those delightful and clever women.”
John
Glessner painted the picture of the University families arriving and his wife’s
response in more colorful terms:
“When the
University of Chicago was started and the staff drawn from all over the world
with their families, all cultivated people but strangers to each other, found
living conditions almost unbearable in crudely finished houses, with seas of
mud in street and sidewalks, she made life more bearable by social attentions.”
In her journal
entry for November 18, 1894, Frances Glessner wrote, “I have invited some of
the young matrons on the south side to come here once a week for a reading
class this winter. The first reading is
on Wednesday next – when they will lunch with me.” The following week’s journal entry noted, “Wednesday
my twenty-five ladies came for the reading aloud. Miss Gaylord read to us. We had Meneval’s Memoirs of Napoleon
the first hour and The Memories of Dean Hole for the second hour. Then we had our luncheon.”
Memoirs of the Baron de Meneval
Membership
in the class was by invitation only - with two rules set in place. One was that only married ladies would be
invited, although a few exceptions were made through the years. Secondly, and equally important, was the
requirement that the ladies reside on the south side of the city. In an informal history of the class written
by John Glessner in 1925, he humorously noted:
“Membership
was confined to the South Side – the mudsills of the North were frowned upon
and taboo – only the South Side aristocracy of letters and beauty and gracious
manners were drawn upon. (Alas how the
mighty haven fallen! Our best people
have been driven over the divide and we, the saving remnant, are merely
permitted in tolerance to enter the sacred regions of north latitude beyond the
river.)”
Members
would have been residents of the south side at the time they were invited to
join the class but were permitted to remain in the class if they later moved
elsewhere, as many had by the 1920s.
Library at 1800 Prairie Avenue
The structure of the first class was set – the first hour would consist of more serious reading, usually of a historical nature, the second hour would feature lighter reading. A paid professional reader would read selections from the books. John Glessner, in his history of the class, noted “the labor the reader must give to find what to omit, what to explain, what to emphasize. Every book has some dull pages and pages of indifferent interest that must be cut out to make for speed and to avoid tediosity.” The selection of The Memories of Dean Hole also shows how current the book selections often were. The book had just been published in 1894 by the Rev. Dr. Samuel Reynolds Hole, an English Anglican priest, horticulturalist, and leading expert on roses. As Louise Goldsmith, another life-long member of the class noted, “he had visited Chicago the previous winter and we were all anxious to hear what he said about it.”
A few
adjustments were made as well. The first
class was held on a Wednesday, but the class shifted to Monday the following
week, and soon after the name “Monday Morning Reading Class” was adopted. Invitations were extended to additional
women, and the class quickly grew to fifty.
Additionally, it was soon determined that Miss Gaylord was not the ideal
reader to lead the class. Louise
Goldsmith recounted:
“Miss
Gaylord’s reading was very good; but she was young and could not have the broad
knowledge and experience necessary for a full understanding of the erudite
books she was proposed to read, so Mrs. Glessner looked about for someone who
had the lighted torch of knowledge with which to illuminate the printed page
revealing the thought of the writer in all of its clearness and strength.”
Miss Ann Trimingham
The new
reader for the class, starting on December 17, was Miss Ann Trimingham, a
former teacher at the West Side High School, and a sister of Louise
Goldsmith. She remained the reader
until May 1902, “missing only one of the two hundred or more meetings.”
Regarding
the selection of the books, it was a democratic process from the start. Louise Goldsmith recalled:
“Mrs.
Glessner has always consulted the class with regard to the books, the one thing
insisted upon by her and our reader was that they should be good literature
worth spending time on. Usually at the
beginning of each year, a list of books has been presented to the class from which
to select. These books have been recommended
by some outsider of known literary ability, by our own members, or by our
reader. A vote has then been taken and
the choice of the majority has decided the question.”
The Glessner library (Photo by Chris Tyre)
Regarding
the selection of the books, Addie Hibbard Gregory noted, “I, for one, am most
grateful for glimpses into books which I should not have dared even to begin,
in my busy life.” She also recorded a
delightful barb from New York, “We surely did not deserve the comment (or
inuendo) of the eastern society journal which stated that it was ‘glad that
Chicago women were learning to read, for Mrs. J. J. Glessner has organized a
class for that purpose.’”
On the first
Monday of each month, the class was followed by a luncheon, which frequently
included musical entertainment. A
typical menu, recorded in 1895, featured sandwiches, baking powder biscuits
buttered, sweetbread patties, coffee, hot chocolate, ice cream, and cake.” The ladies would sit at tables of six, set up
in the parlor and dining room. Frances
Glessner purchased a special set of luncheon china in a delicate blue and white
pattern, which was reserved for the use of the monthly class luncheons. (The maker of the hard paste porcelain with
transferware decoration is unknown, as the pieces are unmarked).
Reading Class china
The first
season of the class concluded on May 13, 1895, shortly before Frances Glessner
left Chicago for her summer estate, The Rocks, in New Hampshire. She recorded in her journal:
“Monday, the
Reading Class came to luncheon. Each
lady came walking in carrying a bunch of large long-stemmed American Beauty
roses for me. There were thirty ladies –
and it was a lovely sight to see them coming in processions of six or eight
carrying these roses. Frederick and John
(butler and footman) arranged them in large vases in the dining room – all on
the table, sideboard and side table. It
was very beautiful to look at and certainly a lovely attention to me. We read our Fyffe for an hour and then Miss
Trimingham read her last Fortnightly paper to us – on Sydney Smith and his
friends. After that we had luncheon,
then a little music, then goodbye for the summer.”
(Fyffe is a
reference to Volume I of The History of Modern Europe by Charles Alan
Fyffe, which by the third class had replaced Meneval’s Memoirs of Napoleon,
as class members had found it to be “rather dry.” Sydney Smith (1771-1845) was an English
humorist, writer, and Anglican cleric).
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