illustrated from drawings made by Miss Norah Hamilton of
Hull-House, and the cover designed by another resident, Mr. Frank
Hazenplug.  I am indebted for the making of the index and for
many other services to Miss Clara Landsberg, also of Hull-House.

If the conclusions of the whole matter are similar to those I have
already published at intervals during the twenty years at
Hull-House, I can only make the defense that each of the earlier
books was an attempt to set forth a thesis supported by
experience, whereas this volume endeavors to trace the experiences
through which various conclusions were forced upon me.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]


"Chapter I: Earliest Impressions." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)
From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane
Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 1-22.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

CHAPTER I

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS

On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our
childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that
"No-Man's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless
settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this
record with some impressions of my childhood.

All of these are directly connected with my father, although of
course I recall many experiences apart from him.  I was one of
the younger members of a large family and an eager participant in
the village life, but because my father was so distinctly the
dominant influence and because it is quite impossible to set
forth all of one's early impressions, it has seemed simpler to
string these first memories on that single cord.  Moreover, it
was this cord which not only held fast my supreme affections, but
also first drew me into the moral concerns of life, and later
afforded a clew there to which I somewhat wistfully clung in the
intricacy of its mazes.

It must have been from a very early period that I recall "horrid
nights" when I tossed about in my bed because I had told a lie. I
was held in the grip of a miserable dread of death, a double
fear, first, that I myself should die in my sins and go straight
to that fiery Hell which was never mentioned at home, but which I
had heard all about from other children, and, second, that my
father--representing the entire adult world which I had basely
deceived--should himself die before I had time to tell him.  My
only method of obtaining relief was to go downstairs to my
father's room and make full confession.  The high resolve to do
this would push me out of bed and carry me down the stairs
without a touch of fear.  But at the foot of the stairs I would
be faced by the awful necessity of passing the front door--which
my father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not lock--and of
crossing the wide and black expanse of the living room in order
to reach his door.  I would invariably cling to the newel post
while I contemplated the perils of the situation, complicated by
the fact that the literal first step meant putting my bare foot
upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the door, only a few inches
wide, but lying straight in my path.  I would finally reach my
father's bedside perfectly breathless and having panted out the
history of my sin, invariable received the same assurance that if
he "had a little girl who told lies," he was very glad that she
"felt too bad to go to sleep afterward." No absolution was asked
for or received, but apparently the sense that the knowledge of
my wickedness was shared, or an obscure understanding of the
affection which underlay the grave statement, was sufficient, for
I always went back to bed as bold as a lion, and slept, if not
the sleep of the just, at least that of the comforted.

I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven
years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business
that day was closed in 1867.  The mill stood in the neighboring
town adjacent to its poorest quarter.  Before then I had always
seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes
of a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its
streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which
contained the glittering toyshop and the confectioner. On that day
I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and
felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the
country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest
streets.  I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry
why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together,
and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much
firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house,
but it would not be built among the other large houses, but right
in the midst of horrid little houses like those.

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's
affairs which little children often exhibit because "the old man
clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd
manifestation.  I dreamed night after night that every one in the
world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the
responsibility of making a wagon wheel.  The village street
remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was "all there,"
even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary
place near the door, but no human being was within sight.  They
had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery,
and I alone remained alive in the deserted world.  I always stood
in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to
how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully
realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until
at least one wheel should be made and something started.  Every
victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive
sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful
handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps
never were the odds more heavily against "a warder of the world"
than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in
equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the
end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of
whom were found in the village.  The next morning would often
find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further
disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the
village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly,
red-shirted figure at work.  I would store my mind with such
details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and
sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more.  "Do you always
have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how
horrid it would be to do.  "Sure!" the good-natured blacksmith
would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and
walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of
course I confided to no one, for there is something too
mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields
of sleep" to be communicated, although it is at the same time too
heavy a burden to be borne alone.

My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in
curious ways.  On several Sundays, doubtless occurring in two or
three different years, the Union Sunday School of the village was
visited by strangers, some of those "strange people" who live
outside a child's realm, yet constantly thrill it by their close
approach.  My father taught the large Bible class in the lefthand
corner of the church next to the pulpit, and to my eyes at least,
was a most imposing figure in his Sunday frock coat, his fine
head rising high above all the others.  I imagined that the
strangers were filled with admiration for this dignified person,
and I prayed with all my heart that the ugly, pigeon-toed little
girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held
very much upon one side, would never be pointed out to these
visitors as the daughter of this fine man.  In order to lessen
the possibility of a connection being made, on these particular
Sundays I did not walk beside my father, although this walk was
the great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the
side of my Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be
mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain so
conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might
identify an Ugly Duckling with her imposing parent.  My uncle,
who had many children of his own, must have been mildly surprised
at this unwonted attention, but he would look down kindly at me,
and say, "So you are going to walk with me to-day?"  "Yes,
please, Uncle James," would be my meek reply.  He fortunately
never explored my motives, nor do I remember that my father ever
did, so that in all probability my machinations have been safe
from public knowledge until this hour.

It is hard to account for the manifestations of a child's adoring
affection, so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the
affairs of the imagination.  I simply could not endure the
thought that "strange people" should know that my handsome father
owned this homely little girl.  But even in my chivalric desire
to protect him from his fate, I was not quite easy in the
sacrifice of my uncle, although I quieted my scruples with the
reflection that the contrast was less marked and that, anyway,
his own little girl "was not so very pretty." I do not know that
I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it
thrust itself as an incongruity into my father's life, and in
spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black
moments when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might
not share the feeling.  Happily, however, this specter was laid
before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very
trifling incident.  One day I met my father coming out of his
bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to
me a veritable whirlpool of society and commerce.  With a playful
touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat
and made me an imposing bow.  This distinguished public
recognition, this totally unnecessary identification among a mass
of "strange people" who couldn't possibly know unless he himself
made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity
of the entire feeling.  It may not even then have seemed as
absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to
collapse or to pass into the limbo of forgotten specters.

I made still other almost equally grotesque attempts to express
this doglike affection.  The house at the end of the village in
which I was born, and which was my home until I moved to
Hull-House, in my earliest childhood had opposite to it--only
across the road and then across a little stretch of
greensward--two mills belonging to my father; one flour mill, to
which the various grains were brought by the neighboring farmers,
and one sawmill, in which the logs of the native timber were
sawed into lumber.  The latter offered the great excitement of
sitting on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which
was cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to
escape a sudden and gory death.  But the flouring mill was much