Instead of the usual Harvard student's account of the period, with an
uninspiring recitation of classes, chapel and walks about Cambridge,
the diary contained a lock of chestnut brown hair, a cluster of pressed
flowers and a handwritten poem of worshipful love and inconsolable loss.
Brian A. Sullivan was working as Harvard's senior reference archivist when he randomly pulled down a box of 19th-century student journals and was left spellbound by an extraordinarily vivid love story.
The inscription beneath the lock of hair read: ''Katie Loring's hair. Jan. 22, 1857.'' The poem, which began with a verse about ''a lovely girlish head, with falling tresses fair,'' and ended with ''a mother's dying head/ alone with a lock of hair,'' was dated March 13, 1894. Who was Katie Loring? Who was this Harvard student who had loved and lost her? What had happened between 1857 and 1894?
Leafing through the pages, Mr. Sullivan learned that the student diarist was Francis Ellingwood Abbot, class of 1859. Katie Loring was the soulful 17-year-old girl he had met at a party in Concord on Jan. 7, 1857 (''I thought of her all night instead of going to sleep. If there ever was a fool, his name was Frank Abbot''), and married three years later. Mr. Abbot had pasted the lock of young Katie Loring's hair in his journal, with his poem, after her death.
Standing in the vast underground archives, just across Harvard Yard from Hollis Hall, where Mr. Abbot had begun his journal as a freshman on Aug. 30, 1855 (''today I begin the first term of my freshman year, and at the same time, a new era in my life''), Mr. Sullivan could not put the journal down. While the entry from Dec. 25, 1856, concerned Mr. Abbot's lively conversation in Concord about poetry with one Henry David Thoreau, ''somewhat known for his writings,'' the journal Mr. Sullivan held was, more than anything, a record of a pure and all-consuming love.
''It was like a novel,'' Mr. Sullivan said, recalling that first glimpse, in the spring of 1996, of the story that he would spend the next several years plumbing. ''I was just stunned by the quality of the writing. He used dialogue, quoting his own words and those around him. That's an unusual component of any diary from any era.''
Last week Regan Books published the Victorian love story, ''If Ever Two Were One,'' that is Mr. Sullivan's compilation of those diaries, and of the hundreds of letters the lovers exchanged, from their courtship through 34 years of married life.
Brian A. Sullivan was working as Harvard's senior reference archivist when he randomly pulled down a box of 19th-century student journals and was left spellbound by an extraordinarily vivid love story.
The inscription beneath the lock of hair read: ''Katie Loring's hair. Jan. 22, 1857.'' The poem, which began with a verse about ''a lovely girlish head, with falling tresses fair,'' and ended with ''a mother's dying head/ alone with a lock of hair,'' was dated March 13, 1894. Who was Katie Loring? Who was this Harvard student who had loved and lost her? What had happened between 1857 and 1894?
Leafing through the pages, Mr. Sullivan learned that the student diarist was Francis Ellingwood Abbot, class of 1859. Katie Loring was the soulful 17-year-old girl he had met at a party in Concord on Jan. 7, 1857 (''I thought of her all night instead of going to sleep. If there ever was a fool, his name was Frank Abbot''), and married three years later. Mr. Abbot had pasted the lock of young Katie Loring's hair in his journal, with his poem, after her death.
Standing in the vast underground archives, just across Harvard Yard from Hollis Hall, where Mr. Abbot had begun his journal as a freshman on Aug. 30, 1855 (''today I begin the first term of my freshman year, and at the same time, a new era in my life''), Mr. Sullivan could not put the journal down. While the entry from Dec. 25, 1856, concerned Mr. Abbot's lively conversation in Concord about poetry with one Henry David Thoreau, ''somewhat known for his writings,'' the journal Mr. Sullivan held was, more than anything, a record of a pure and all-consuming love.
''It was like a novel,'' Mr. Sullivan said, recalling that first glimpse, in the spring of 1996, of the story that he would spend the next several years plumbing. ''I was just stunned by the quality of the writing. He used dialogue, quoting his own words and those around him. That's an unusual component of any diary from any era.''
Last week Regan Books published the Victorian love story, ''If Ever Two Were One,'' that is Mr. Sullivan's compilation of those diaries, and of the hundreds of letters the lovers exchanged, from their courtship through 34 years of married life.
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