Last week, The Field House Museum released With Ten Thousand Kisses, a limited-edition collection of letters from Eugene Field (“The Children’s Poet”) to his first and last love, Julia. They met through her brother Edgar Comstock, a college friend of Eugene’s at the University of Missouri. One summer, Eugene went home with Edgar to St. Joseph, Missouri, for a week, and there he met Julia—who was only 14 at the time. Immediately enraptured with each other, they spent the entire trip together. They begged to marry, but Julia’s father insisted she wait until she turned 18.
From a two-page letter Eugene wrote in August 30, 1872—shortly after the couple met:
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It seems to me hardly possible that having been with you last evening I am now two hundred miles from you. And yet this is a melancholy fact and I have only the thoughts of those few blessed moments with you to remind me of the dear one, whose love has become so precious to me… Send me your picture as soon as you can. Once more, I love you. Here is a kiss—and a thousand ki—no! I will not disgust my dear little bird. I may be an impetuous but I am a very fond lover.
When Julia turned 16, they swept aside the parental ban and decided to marry.
April 28, 1873, six months before their October wedding:
I am real lonesome, Jule, and I suppose I shall be until I have you with me, as my wife. I love you, darling, truly and devotedly and it seems as if I could never be happy without you. I want you to write me as often as you can—at least every other day, and don’t think of me as any other than
Your worshipful lover,
Field.
Ten thousand kisses, darling. I will write tomorrow.
1875, a few years into their marriage:
My dearest Julia,
It is quite late and Roswell is howling for me to come to bed. But I feel that I ought to drop you a line or two before retiring. I was much disappointed that I did not hear from you today… You cannot imagine how I worry about you. I do love you very much, darling, and I miss your dear face more and more every day. Now do let me hear from you very often.
There may have been a little tension by now—Eugene was famously bad with money and spent loads of their household income on toys and collectibles. But clearly, the newlywed bliss remains. They would have eight children together, only five of whom would survive into adulthood.
There’s a CD of Field’s poems set to music, many of them lullabies sung by soprano Christine Brewer. In the liner notes, Brian Abel Ragen writes of Eugene’s tenderness: “He wrote for and about the domestic world: the joys of childhood—and its fears; the love of children—and the pain of losing them; the pleasures of courtship—and the paternal responsibilities that are their natural outcome. He wrote—openly, and without the stoic reserve that became the mark of American manhood—of feelings. He wasn’t above crying over a dusty toy dog or laughing at little boys playing with pop-guns.”
1894, the year before Eugene died:
Dear sweet little wife: You can thank your stars you are not here, for the house is in the hands of the painters and anarchy reigns. Only one room is sacred against the vandals and that is this den of mine which is to preserve all its features of virgin wilderness, but will at least not be torn up… Sweetheart, do you think often of us and of me? We miss you so very much and we shall be so delighted to have you home again. But we want you to get well and enjoy yourself. Then we soon shall all be happier for it.
Eugene died in his sleep, having suffered a heart attack. But he’d lived a full life—as journalist, poet, and prankster. Julia was still alive when the Field House Museum was being assembled, and she donated many of the family’s possessions. Alas, she died a few months before the grand opening, December 1936. She’d never remarried.
Only 250 copies of With Ten Thousand Kisses were printed. The book is available for $100 in the museum’s gift shop or on its website.
