and found nothing seriously wrong with her. Juliette stayed in Cairo until the end of March. Jem wrote on 5 April that he had seen Juliette several times recently and that he wanted to send his impressions about her state of health. “I cannot help thinking that her winter has been of substantial benefit to her. She speaks of the serious attacks which she still has, & seems to regard herself as doomed. But whenever I saw her, she looked & appeared strong & vigorous, & has evidently enjoyed much in her Cairene life and is familiar with Cairo through frequent visits to its streets & bazaars…. I have a strong faith that you will find that she has gained ground since she came abroad.” Later Jem would write that he did not believe Juliette was as ill as she imagined but that “She is easily excited & depressed” (13 June 1890). After Cairo, Juliette stayed in Alexandria for two or three weeks and then traveled back to Naples where, according to Jem, she stayed “at the Grand Hotel, a delightful house,” waiting for a steamer to New York. There is some obscurity about Juliette’s final days in Italy and when she finally sailed for New York, but it seems unlikely that she arrived back before early June.
Juliette had been away for half a year. During that time, Peirce periodically returned to Quicktown to tend to the estate and probably to spend long hours on his definitions, but he spent the greater part of these months in New York where he had friends and where there was more opportunity to make money. On the first of February, Ernst Schröder wrote to Peirce, resuming a correspondence that had lapsed for five years. Schröder told Peirce that the first volume of his Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (exakte Logik) would soon be published and that he had asked his publisher to forward a copy to Peirce. He was concerned that Peirce might have broken off their correspondence out of anger for “some unknown reason.” Their ensuing exchange of letters, until Schröders death in 1902, was a great stimulus to Peirce, especially concerning the logic of relations. On 5 March, Peirce received a letter of self-introduction from Ventura Reyes y Prosper, who also corresponded with Schröder.
Such communications, and meetings with scholarly friends for dinners or at the Century Club, were important intellectual anchors for Peirce during a difficult time. Juliette’s absence caused Peirce much distress. At first he just missed her and was worried about her health, but the hardship he endured trying to provide the money she needed led to anxiety and a growing sense of failure. Gradually, with so few letters from her and with those he did receive expressing disaffection and disapproval, his frustration turned to disillusion and sometimes bitterness. Peirce wrote on 23 January, after she had been away for two months: “I have only had two letters…. I hear nothing, nothing. Good God, I shall go crazy if I don’t hear soon. This is terrible.” Three months later, feeling that he had done his best for her but having received not the slightest indication of any appreciation from her, Peirce wrote: “Your letters to me are so full of hate and rage, that I know not how to write to you. What my difficulties have been you do not know.”55 Using the third person, Peirce went on to describe the changes in Juliette’s character that he had observed, starting with when they had met.
She was a very true and noble heart, that nothing ever could corrupt. And then I knew her in Washington when she showed capacities which surprized me. Then there was a dreadful period when everything in life was terribly terribly embittered. I wish now I had been drowned before I had to pass through such things. Very gradually, the curse seemed to pass away, & there was a time in Milford when there seemed to be much happiness, shaded by some doubts only. All this time, I was getting to know and to adore this dear lady more and more and to love her more deeply. In the future I don’t know how it will be. The present is dreadful.
The letter from Juliette that had agitated Peirce so much is no longer extant, but it is evident that Juliette had made an urgent and probably indignant plea for more money, perhaps claiming that she could not return without it. She must have threatened to sell a watch Peirce had given her for he pleaded with her not to do it and promised to send more money “no matter what happens, very soon.” He tried to borrow from friends and acquaintances but apparently without success. He urged Pinchot to hire him to tutor his children at fifteen dollars a week, and probably asked for an advance, but on 5 May Pinchot replied that he could not immediately make up his mind. On 14 May, Peirce wrote to C. R. Miller of the New York Times, with whom he had just concluded a successful newspaper debate on Spencer, proposing a series of fifty articles on evolution, but Miller did not think it could sustain the interest of his readers. As late as the first week in June, Peirce sought a consulting assignment with the Astor Library. By this time, however, Juliette must have already been on a steamer for New York, if she had not already arrived. The record does not indicate how she managed to settle her final accounts in Europe.
It is difficult to know whether Juliette ever understood or even cared about how Peirce had managed to support her European convalescence, or whether Peirce became a changed man as a result. The scant evidence suggests that her anger over what he had not provided outweighed any appreciation for what he had managed to send. The fact is, Peirce had managed to raise money from his writing, and his urgent need for cash had disposed him to try writing as a tool to make money rather than for the straightforward exchange of ideas. Of course Peirce’s stock in trade was his ideas, but he had been more willing than ever to turn them, if he could, to commercial ends. How successful he was still remains to be discovered. Extensive searches of New York newspapers and of contemporary magazines remain to be made with the purpose of digging up anonymous reports or hack writings that might have come from his pen (or typewriter). More may be discovered, but we will probably never know how much he managed to sell during that difficult time.
Sometime early in 1890, Peirce and Wendell Phillips Garrison, editor of the Nation, reached an understanding that significantly increased the number of books sent to Peirce for review. Peirce had occasionally reviewed books for the Nation since 1869, but he had never reviewed more than three in a single year, and his August 1889 review of Stock’s Logic had been his first Nation review in three and a half years. Peirce published ten reviews during 1890, and would publish even more in each of the next five years. Only two of Peirce’s 1890 Nation reviews appeared during the period covered in this volume. The first was the review of Noel’s Science of Metrology (sel. 43). Noel was an Englishman who was opposed to the metric system of measurement but who believed that the English system should be reformed. Noel proposed changing the ratios of inches to feet, pounds to gallons, and so forth. Although Peirce saw some merit in Noel’s proposal, he suggested that to challenge the metric system was “like challenging the rising tide” and that the only thing more futile would be to try to change the length of the inch.” The second Nation review was a review of F. Howard Collins’s Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy (sel. 46). This was a very brief notice praising Collins’ “secondhand synopsis” for reducing Spencer’s “heart-breakingly tedious” five thousand pages to a mere five hundred, but lamenting that Collins had gone over fifty.
If Peirce’s increasing number of reviews for the Nation, many of them also appearing in the New York Post, was in fact an outcome of his overwrought effort to raise money during Juliette’s European convalescence, then it should be regarded as his most striking success. For he would produce nearly three hundred more reviews for the Nation and the income supplement from those reviews would be crucial for his and Juliette’s survival—and the loss of that income in 1906, after Garrison’s retirement, would be a serious blow.56 But Peirce’s most notable achievement in raising funds while Juliette was away was his success, working with New York Times’ editor C. R. Miller, in organizing a debate about the soundness of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy that ran for six consecutive Sundays, from 23 March to 27 April. Altogether, the debate consisted of twenty-nine articles and notes. At Miller’s urging, Peirce made a great effort to recruit respondents for this debate. One of his prospects, William James, replied on 16 March that nothing would please him more “than to help stone Uncle Spencer, for of all extant quacks he’s the worst—yet not exactly a quack either for he feels honest, and never would know that a critic had the better of him.” But James begged off because he was so pressed to finish Principles of Psychology. Peirce had sent James copies of his opening article
