{"id":3523,"date":"2020-03-03T18:28:43","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T23:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/?p=3523"},"modified":"2020-03-03T18:28:43","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T23:28:43","slug":"wright-among-the-foliage-origins-of-the-friendship-of-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/2020\/03\/03\/wright-among-the-foliage-origins-of-the-friendship-of-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Wright Among the Foliage: Origins of The Friendship of Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"

The title page of <\/span>The Friendship of Nature <\/span><\/i>by Mabel Osgood Wright tells the reader the title, author, and publisher of the book. With the subtitle of \u201cA New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers,\u201d Wright establishes her intention of bringing nature to the forefront and of focusing on the natural world in her book. Born in 1859 in New York City, Wright was raised to appreciate education and the exposure to new thinking and ideas. Her father, Samuel Osgood, built \u201cMosswood,\u201d a family country home in Fairfield, Connecticut that boasted lavish gardens and a prominent connection to the nature surrounding it. With this home in Connecticut, Wright learned to appreciate the natural world and she greatly developed her observational skills. At the age of 16, she anonymously published her first nature essay in <\/span>The New York Evening Post,<\/span><\/i> inspired by Mosswood and exploring the outdoors around her and her family. Nineteen years later, she created a collection of her nature essays published in newspapers and formed <\/span>The Friendship of Nature<\/span><\/i> in 1894<\/a>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Wright published her first book with the Macmillan Publishing Company. She did this through a personal connection, an English man named George Platt Brett Sr. who was the president of the publishing company and a fellow resident of Fairfield. Although this is not confirmed, she may have connected with Brett through her husband, James Osborne Wright, who was also English with strong ties to Fairfield. After the publication of her first book, Brett then asked her to write a handbook on birds, which led to her writing <\/span>Birdcraft,<\/span><\/i> the book that really launched her career in 1895. At the time, Macmillan Publishing Company was doing fairly well in America, with the company having spread from England to New York City in 1869 by Brett\u2019s father, George Edward Brett. As seen in the last pages of my copy of <\/span>The Friendship of Nature,<\/span><\/i> Macmillan successfully published many works around the time of Wright\u2019s. Wright continued to value Macmillan\u2019s part in her success; the next twenty-four of her books were published by the company. Thus explains why Wright\u2019s book about the natural life of New England was not published in the area of America it celebrates; the town of Fairfield connected Brett and Wright into a partnership that would kick Wright\u2019s success as an author into action, and continue to thrive throughout her lifetime of writing<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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As her love for nature and the outdoors matured, Wright\u2019s priorities shifted from enjoying writing about the natural world to wanting to inspire people to conserve it, particularly during the time of industrialization and the expansion of urban life. She became a central figure in reviving the Audubon Society, founding the Connecticut Audubon in 1898 and serving as the editor to the organization’s publication. Her books, including <\/span>The Friendship of Nature<\/span><\/i>, are aimed towards opening the eyes of Americans to the damage they are doing on the natural world and reminding them of the beauty that is being taken advantage of. While <\/span>The Friendship of Nature<\/span><\/i> is most likely written for adults during the turn of the century, many of her other works are children’s books that attempted to inspire the younger generation to look beyond their urban, industrialized lives into the miracles of nature. Because of the time frame of industrialization when the book was published, it is likely that <\/span>The Friendship of Nature <\/span><\/i>is meant for mainly upper-class people, as they would have the spare time to read about nature and they would perhaps be able to experience the outdoors like Wright did, through a much more privileged view.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wright also expresses her love for the outdoors through photography; the photograph of \u201cThe Grist Mill\u201d before the title page was taken by Wright, as she used many of her own photos in her books to display the magic she writes about. The grist mill in the first and only picture of my edition of <\/span>The Friendship of Nature<\/span><\/i> could, based on our knowledge of Wright herself, have been taken in Fairfield or the surrounding area, where she spent much time observing and writing.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The edition does not give information about the printer of the book. Based on the look of the letters and the time period of the late nineteenth century, <\/span>Friendship of Nature<\/span><\/i> could likely have been printed using a typesetter, which was the primary strategy to form mass-produced books at the time<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The title page of The Friendship of Nature by Mabel Osgood Wright tells the reader the title, author, and publisher of the book. With the subtitle of \u201cA New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers,\u201d Wright establishes her intention of bringing nature to the forefront and of focusing on the natural world in her book. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10593,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[399581,499941],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10593"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3523"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3528,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523\/revisions\/3528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}