Kate Douglas Wiggin

Kate Douglas Wiggin (September 28, 1856 – August 24, 1923) was an American educator, author and composer. She wrote children's stories, most notably the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and composed collections of children's songs. She started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco, the Silver Street Free Kindergarten, in 1878. With her sister Nora during the 1880s, she also established a training school for kindergarten teachers. Wiggin devoted her adult life to the welfare of children in an era when children were commonly thought of as cheap labor.

Wiggin went to California to study kindergarten methods. She began to teach in San Francisco with her sister assisting her, and the two were instrumental in the establishment of over 60 kindergartens for the poor in San Francisco and Oakland. When she later moved from California to New York, without kindergarten work on hand, she devoted herself to literature. She sent The Story of Patsy and The Bird's Christmas Carol to Houghton, Mifflin & Co., who accepted them at once.

Besides her talent for storytelling, she was also a musician, sang well, and composed settings for her poems. She was also an excellent elocutionist.

After the death of her husband in 1889, she returned to California to resume her kindergarten work, serving as the head of a kindergarten normal school. Some of her other works included Cathedral Courtship, A Summer in a Canon, Timothy's Quest, The Story Hour, Kindergarten Chimes, Polly Oliver's Problem, and Children's Rights.

Early life

Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of lawyer Robert N. Smith, and of Welsh descent. Wiggin experienced a happy childhood, even though it was colored by the American Civil War and her father's death. She and her sister Nora were still quite young when their widowed mother moved her little family from Philadelphia to Portland, Maine, then, three years later, upon her remarriage, to the little village of Hollis. There she matured in rural surroundings, with her sister and her new baby brother Philip.

Notably, she once met the novelist Charles Dickens. Her mother and another relative had gone to hear Dickens read in Portland, but Wiggin, aged 11, was thought to be too young to warrant an expensive ticket. The following day, she found herself on the same train as Dickens and engaged him in a lively conversation for the course of the journey, an experience which she later detailed in a short memoir titled A Child's Journey with Dickens (1912).

Her education was spotty, consisting of a short stint at a dame school; some home schooling under the "capable, slightly impatient, somewhat sporadic" instruction of Albion Bradbury (her stepfather); a brief spell at the district school; a year as a boarder at the Gorham Female Seminary, a winter term at Morison Academy in Baltimore, Maryland; and a few months' stay at Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where she graduated with the class of 1873. Although rather casual, this was more education than most women received at the time.

Early career

In 1873, hoping to ease Albion Bradbury's lung disease, Wiggin's family moved to Santa Barbara, California, where her stepfather died three years later. A kindergarten training class was opening in Los Angeles under Emma Marwedel (1818–1893), and Wiggin enrolled. After graduation, in 1878, she headed the first free kindergarten in California, on Silver Street in the slums of San Francisco. The children were "street Arabs of the wildest type", but she had a loving personality and dramatic flair. By 1880 she was forming a teacher-training school in conjunction with the Silver Street kindergarten.

In 1881, she married (Samuel) Bradley Wiggin, a San Francisco lawyer. According to the customs of the time, she was required to resign her teaching job. Still devoted to her school, she began to raise money for it through writing, first The Story of Patsy (1883), then The Birds' Christmas Carol (1887). Both privately printed books were issued commercially by Houghton Mifflin in 1889, with enormous success.

Wiggin had no children. She moved to New York City in 1888. When her husband died suddenly in 1889, she relocated to Maine. For the rest of her life she grieved; but she also traveled as frequently as she could, dividing her time between writing, visits to Europe, and giving public reading for the benefit of various children's charities. She traveled abroad and back from Liverpool in the United Kingdom at least three times. Records from the Ellis Island logs show that she arrived back in New York City from Liverpool in October 1892, July 1893, and July 1894. On the logs for the 1892 trip, Wiggin describes her occupation as "wife", despite her former husband having died three years prior. In 1893 and 1894, she describes herself as an "authoress".

On her way to England in 1894, Wiggin met George Christopher Riggs, an importer of dry goods, specifically linen. The pair are said to have hit it off and to have agreed to marry even before the ship docked in England. In the Ellis Island logs from Wiggin's 1894 trip back to New York from Liverpool, the two signed their names next to each other, indicating their closeness. They married in New York City on March 30, 1895, at All Souls Church.

Riggs soon became one of Wiggin's biggest advocates as she became more successful. She continued to write under the name of Wiggin after the marriage. Her literary output included popular books for adults. With her sister, she published scholarly work on the educational principles of Friedrich Fröbel: Froebel's Gifts (1895), Froebel's Occupations (1896), and Kindergarten Principles and Practice (1896). In 1903 she wrote the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which became an immediate best-seller, as did Rose o' the River in 1905. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Mother Carey's Chickens (1911) were adapted to the stage. Houghton Mifflin collected Wiggin's writings in 10 volumes in 1917.