Hospital Sketches

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

Across Hospital Sketches, Alcott identifies herself as an Abolitionist, and the collection was first published in an Abolitionist newspaper. To understand the intention and impact of her book, it is helpful to understand the social, political, and spiritual climate out of which it emerged.

The American Abolitionist movement was founded in the 1830s with two key events. One was The Liberator, a weekly Boston newspaper founded by William Lord Garrison in 1831. The paper’s purpose was to expose the evils of enslavement, inspire action against the institution, and promote the value of equal rights for all. It featured literary works, articles, and sermons, all of which exposed the inhumanity of enslavement and its brutal conditions. A second major force was the establishment of the Garrison-led American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 in Philadelphia, which inspired similar organizations to form in Northern cities including New York and Boston.

The Abolitionist movement has been understood as an outgrowth of the 1790s-1830s Protestant revival movement known as the Second Great Awakening, which believed it was possible to recreate the conditions of Eden on earth, also known as Edenism. Among the Second Great Awakening’s objectives were cultivating a personal relationship to God, behaving in a morally upright fashion, and acting on one’s beliefs through social action.