His wife had died, and he had reason to believe he would die soon himself, so he wrote up advice for his daughters, under headings of "Religion", "Conduct and Behaviour", "Amusements", and "Friendship, Love, Marriage". And "Introduction".
It would not suit modern Harvard tastes, either in language or sociology, but by and large the advice, or the principles behind it, is sound. His approach to religion struck me as rather more secular than devout. It wouldn't be a "read once and done" book for a young girl; she'd have to re-read it every so often in order to recognize the things in her life and society that John was writing about.
The Harvard book-reading feature is a bit finicky on my machine.
2 comments:
Hard not to cry. Do we know what happened to these daughters?
One of them was Dorothea Gregory. From the wikipedia article it seems as though she rejected an arranged match that would have left her wealthy, and married for love.
Gregory wrote the book when she was about 7 years old.
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