The Diary of George Pray

[Part 2 of 6]

Country Mouse and City Cats
Pray's diary begins in a burst of indignation and lust. Before Sunday, June 2, 1844, he'd kept a notebook about birds and mathematics. But what he saw at the Presbyterian church that morning made him rail against the "pert misses" of Ann Arbor who were "possessed of as many witching and enticing ways as usual," Pray wrote, "and sought the graveyard only for making love, and I might and will add, for making babies." A couple of Sundays later, he returned to the subject: "I hate a fashionable church. The young misses come to show their pretty faces–their big bustles–their big breasts & bellies."

But these Sunday sirens–students at Mary Clark's Young Ladies' Seminary and daughters of the village's burghers–were unavailable. Pray had many flirtations. chiefly among the daughters of old family friends. He was pursuing two of them at the time he began writing the diary. Sarah Doty was engaged and would be married within four months but seems to have been of a mind to experiment a bit while her parents obligingly left them unchaperoned when Pray called. As Pray recounted it, with "my arm around her, she at full length on the settee," he undertook some amorous maneuvers, which he described in detail, despite being "surprised several times by the unexpected entrance of some one of the family when we were in rather an awkward position."

Later that summer, Pray paid calls on Caroline Bagley from Superior Township who was spending the summer in Lower Town (the part of Ann Arbor on the other side of the Huron). Obligingly, the "old folks" took themselves off, "leaving us alone to our glory." Pray laid siege, but Bagley, too, resisted and sent him away at midnight. Later he regretted his advances. "I wronged her," he wrote Doty, and he blamed "my own baseness" for separating him from Bagley.

Pray's move to town cost him his sense of ease. He'd grown up around farmers and recognized that his education among a tiny elite was separating him from the very people whose company he most enjoyed. "Perhaps if I had been educated diffreently, I might take pleasure in a way that others do," he wrote. This conflict caused unending pain and self-doubt and is a poignant refrain throughout his journal. In Ann Arbor, only 10 miles from his home near Dixboro, he was "a strange being–an odd and lonely one":

I take more pleasure in being alone in my room–my books my only companion ... I felt that I was a stranger in a strange land. I have often looked upon society about me with longing eyes and wished that I too could mingle with those about me–no longer companionless and unknown. I have had the opportunity to mingle in the best society of the village but I shrink from it.

But at college he avoided social functions. Time after time he failed to attend a party to celebrate the end of term or graduation, reluctant to call on the "ladies of the town." It was a self-defeating cycle that he understood but could not break. "Maybe I make myself unhappy," he wrote, "forsaken by the whole world, I feel but persuaded that it's because I forsake the world."

A Foe of Drink and Hubbub
Pray's Sodom and Gomorrah, the village of Ann Arbor, had about 2,500 inhabitants in 1844. As home of the University and the county seat it held an importance beyond its size and attracted a professional class of teachers, professors, lawyers, booksellers and itinerant dancing masters. Pray enjoyed studying human nature. I went all over town twice today," he wrote in January 1845, "and saw almost every kind of people. It is pleasant to study man–to study their dispositions–the effects of circumstances on their characters.

But too often, "circumstances" were "the degradation of drink." Ann Arbor's two breweries, five taverns and three distilleries fueled the public drunkenness and brawling that appalled the abstemious son of a tavern owner. Public events–political rallies, the circus ("real humbug")–dismayed him. Even hubbub supported only by spirits of another kind repelled him:

I went to the courthouse to an Abolition Methodist meeting. It was nearly out and such a yelling I never heard. It was a disgrace to religion, to the community. Imagine fifty cats together and all in a rage.