Fanny Butcher: Early Life
Fanny Butcher family home. 1880/1890. Newberry Library.
Fanny Butcher was born on February 13th, 1888, in Fredonia, Kansas. She was the only child of L. Oliver Butcher and Hattie May Young. Soon after her birth, the family relocated to Chicago. Their move was influenced by Butcher’s father’s career; his day job was creating commercial art, but he desired to be an artist on his own terms, and began taking night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Butcher, for the most part, writes of her childhood with fondness, but it was not without hardship. The family’s new life in Chicago was going well when Butcher’s father was left unable to work after a mishap during a dental procedure. Losing their main source of income, the Butcher family sunk quickly into poverty.
Fanny Butcher with Dog. 1830. Newberry Library.
Despite the unhappy atmosphere at home (as well as more specific difficulties, such as the fact that Fanny only had a single dress to wear for all occasions), she never seemed to be jealous of her wealthier, more comfortable classmates. This may have in part been due to her mother’s frankness with her—Hattie May did not hide the fact that her daughter had not been planned for and that, now she was here, she would not be spoiled. Later in life, Butcher wrote in her 1972 memoir that this knowledge “made me unquestioningly obedient on the one hand, and almost obsessively generous on the other. To this day, I still feel a little guilty when I don’t yank it off and say, ‘You take it,’ if someone has admired a pin I am wearing, but I learned long ago to stifle that impulse” [1].
Thankfully, Butcher had her early love of books to occupy her mind, which perhaps allowed her to avoid despairing over her family’s circumstances. From a young age, Butcher was captivated by the written word. An early Christmas gift, an attractively bound copy of Black Beauty, was a motivating factor in her learning to read. Butcher’s mother, who herself was not a dedicated reader, reportedly told Butcher later in life, “You were teethed on a book” [2].
[1] Fanny Butcher, Many Lives—One Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 15.
[2] Butcher, Many Lives—One Love, 5.