Domestic life in New England in the seventeenth century

The publication of the following paper in its present form, became possible when the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art found it necessary to abandon their intention to publish a volume containing the lectures given on the occasion of the opening of the American Wing. The other lectures delivered in the course were devoted to the architecture and arts of New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it therefore seemed fitting that some account of the domestic life of the period should also have a presentation. Within the limitations of time and space it was only possible to touch lightly upon so far-reaching a subject and the reader will soon discover that the following pages may be somewhat over-loaded with facts gleaned from original records. It also should be borne in mind that the public records that have come down to us preserve a chronicle of the offences of the day and generation while the uneventful lives of the honest and the just frequently rest in oblivion.

The evil that men do lives after them The good is oft interred with their bones.

Nevertheless, there were fully as many sinners as saints living within the control of the Puritan autocracy in the Massachusetts Bay and it is to be hoped that the contemporaneous data here presented may aid in bringing about a readjustment of values in the mind of some reader.