HARRIET WILSON
(1825-1900)
Peddler, Author, Medium
Harriet Wilson is celebrated as the first African
American woman novelist. The publication of Our
Nig in 1859, however, represents only one chapter
in her history as a resourceful entrepreneur. Wilson's
ingenuity enabled her to develop and market various
products as an itinerant peddler in New England. As
a young woman, she traveled to communities in southern
New Hampshire and central Massachusetts peddling hair
products and later her novel. As a mature woman, she
traveled for thirty years to communities throughout
New England as a renowned trance reader and lecturer.
Although the commodities that Wilson sold shifted
from hair restorers and books to spiritual messages,
Wilson's marketing expertise was evident throughout
her life.
Wilson was born in poverty and abandoned by her parents
as a small child. She was an indentured servant to
the Hayward family in Milford, New Hampshire for nearly
fifteen years. Working in the Hayward home, she endured
an abusive, debilitating childhood that formed the
basis of her novel. During the 1850s Wilson married
and bore a beloved son who died in 1860. She struggled
financially as a single parent following her husband's
death, and sporadically worked as a seamstress, house
servant, or itinerant peddler. She developed recipes
for hair products that she sold in bottles embossed
with her name. More than once illness and economic
destitution forced her to live in the Hillsborough
County Poor Farm. In the early 1860s, she became involved
with the spiritualist movement. She moved to the Boston
area in 1867 where she pursued a successful career
as a trance reader and lecturer, advertising her itineraries
in The Banner of Light. In 1900, Wilson was
living as a nurse in Quincy, Massachusetts, where
she died on June 28. In 2006, a full-size bronze memorial
statue of Harriet Wilson was unveiled in Milford,
New Hampshire. Fern Cunningham's statue of Wilson
is the first in New Hampshire history to honor a person
of color.
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