From the Garden of a Friend

Mary Agnes Tincker (1833–1907)
From American Christmas Stories

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“Tarred and feathered—the 1854 letter of Father Bapst” (Thomas Lester, The Boston Pilot)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Set of Poe,” George Ade
• “A Christmas Party That Prevented a Split in the Church,” Margaret Black
• “The Loudest Voice,” Grace Paley

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Detail from An Orange Garden, 1890, oil on canvas by British artist John William Waterhouse (1849–1917). The painting is of an Italian garden on the island of Capri. (Christies)

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Mary Agnes Tincker wrote her first novel in reaction to a horrific act of bigotry and violence in her hometown of Ellsworth, Maine, in 1854. John Bapst, a Jesuit priest from Switzerland, had been living in town for a year while a new church was built for its growing Catholic population, mostly Irish immigrants. As the Jesuit historian William Leo Lucey notes, “Bapst had discovered a ‘most lamentable ignorance’ of the faith among many Catholics of the missions,” and he hosted lectures meant for his congregants but open to the public. Some of the town’s Protestant residents attended, and at least a dozen young women converted during the course of the year, including twenty-year-old Tincker, a public-school teacher.

The town’s authorities, alarmed by both the influx of immigrants and the conversions, mandated that the King James version of the Bible be used for instruction in the public schools, and Bapst requested that Catholic students be allowed to read from their own editions. When his petition was dismissed, one of the parents sued the school committee and, while the case worked its way through the courts, Bapst established a school for Catholic children and Tincker was hired to be one of the teachers.

Several of the town’s leaders, led by the editor of the local paper, began a campaign against Bapst and his parishioners. Fueled by the Know-Nothing movement then sweeping across New England, mobs attacked the rectory and the newly finished church on three separate nights during the summer of 1854. On July 8, when Bapst was in Bangor, town leaders passed a resolution blaming him for both the violence and the lawsuit; “should the said Bapst be found again upon Ellsworth soil,” he would be cloaked with an “entire suit of new clothes such as cannot be found in the shops of any tailor.” When Bapst did return, on October 14, 1854, he was surrounded by a group of armed men while he was visiting a parishioner’s home, robbed of his possessions, stripped nearly naked, covered with hot tar and feathers, paraded on a rail to the outskirts of town, and left for dead in a field.

Fortunately, the unconscious Bapst was found by friends and he fully recovered; a decade later, he would become the first president of Boston College. The church was destroyed by arson in 1856, but it was rebuilt and the violence in Ellsworth eventually abated. The attack on Bapst would anguish and haunt Mary Agnes Tincker and, fifteen years later, while living in Boston, she wrote The House of Yorke, based on the events of that summer. The novel, in which she “resisted every temptation to embellish the true story which is here entwined with the fictitious one,” was serialized in The Catholic World. Published as a book under the abbreviated pen name of “M.A.T.” in 1872, it went through four printings in a matter of months. Encouraged by its success, she wrote a second novel, also serialized in The Catholic World, and then she moved to Rome. During the next fourteen years, she wrote numerous novels and stories set in Italy, all published by prominent American magazines and commercial publishers, including the celebrated No Name series. In 1887, she returned to the United States and lived in Boston for the last two decades of her life.

Lucey contended in 1955 that Tincker was “the best American Catholic novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,” when her books sold well and received much praise in the national press. Nevertheless, her fiction generated considerable controversy among Catholic critics during her lifetime. An anonymous reviewer in The Catholic World accused Tincker of pandering to non-Catholics and attacked her later Italian novels as the products of a “Catholic writer . . . who desires to reap some more tangible reward than an approving word from his fellow-Christians.” Most prominent among her critics was Orestes Brownson, a fellow contributor to The Catholic World and an ex-Transcendentalist who converted to Catholicism. “She adopts so much of the Transcendental cant which formerly so disgusted me,” he wrote to Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulist Fathers, which published The Catholic World. “The author needs conversion; her soul is not yet Catholic, even if her intellect is.” He went even further in a public review, attacking hints of feminism he detected in her writing. “The women lead in everything; men simply dance attendance on the women, or lean on them for support, for advice, for direction, and for extrication from perils or difficulty”; he grumbled that “the woman’s-rights party is only a logical sequence of the immense intellectual and moral superiority feminine literature ascribes to women.”

Tincker’s novels and stories have long been out of print, and her name appears mostly in historical summaries of the Ellsworth affair and occasionally in accounts of the Civil War, when she served as a volunteer nurse in Washington, DC. The sole exception is the story “From the Garden of a Friend,” which Tincker wrote near the end of her residence in Italy. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the story has reappeared during the last three decades in a handful of Christmas anthologies, including Library of America’s American Christmas Stories. Although the word regifting did not enter common usage until the mid-1990s, thanks to an episode of Seinfeld, the concept has been around for much longer—and, 140 years ago, Tincker took the idea to its logical extreme.

Notes: A portone is a large elaborate doorway to a building or courtyard. The monsignor in the story is jubilato a mezza paga, or “retired at half pay.” Vin santo is a type of Italian dessert wine.

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