The Spencers of Amberson Ave: A Turn-Of-The-Century Memoir

This memoir introduces the family of Charles Hart Spencer and his wife Mary Acheson: seven children born between 1884 and 1895. In a large Victorian house in Shadyside, an affluent Pittsburgh neighborhood, the family begins a middle-class way of life at the turn of the century. Mr. Spencer, who worked--not very happily--for Henry Clay Frick, was one of the growing number of middle-management employees in American industrial cities in the 1880s and 1890s. His income, which supported his family of nine, a cook, two regular nurses, and at times a wet nurse and her baby, guaranteed a comfortable life but not a luxurious one. The Spencers represent a class that ＂too often stands silent or stereotyped as we rush forward toward the greater glamour of the robber barons or their immigrant workers.＂ Through the eyes of Ethel Spencer, the third daughter, the reader is led through the routine of everyday life in the Spencer household: school, play, church on Sundays, illness, family celebrations, and vacations. Ethel was an observant child, with little sentimentality, and she wrote her memoir in later life as a professor of English at Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University. The Spencers of Amberson Avenue offers a compelling account of middle-class Pittsburgh urban life. The book is richly illustrated with family photographs taken by Charles Spencer, who was a talented amateur photographer.

Ethel Spencer (1889-1966) graduated from Radcliffe College and did graduate work at St. Hilda’s Oxford. Later she was a professor of English at Carnegie Tech from 1920 to 1955 (now Carnegie Mellon University), and was the head of the Department of General Studies when she retired. The third of seven children of Charles Hart Spencer (1852-1912) and Mary Acheson Spencer (1863-1950); upper middle-class, Presbyterian, Pittsburghers, who raised their family in (then) suburban Shadyside at the turn of the 19th century. Her family lived on Amberson Avenue until the death of Mary Spencer in 1950.

Michael P. Weber and Peter N. Stearns, who edited the memoir and wrote the introduction, are historians in the Department of History and Philosophy, Carnegie-Mellon University.