Hannah Dunlap

Spouse of Gideon Hale Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Hannah Dunlap was born in 1781 in Newbury, Massachusetts, at the mouth of the Merrimack, and she taught school in the mill towns and harbours of New England for thirty-five years. She married Gideon Hale Faulkner, a printer six years her junior, in 1812, and raised two children with him, one of whom, Lewis Faulkner, became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. She died in 1836, aged fifty-five, of the sweating sickness, having taught the alphabet to some two thousand children and, in the family's telling, having talked the Red Ledger's youngest hunters out of more than a few reckless plans. Newbury was an old Puritan town on a tidal river, settled in 1635, famous for its shipyards, its salt marshes and its tall, well-kept farmhouses. It sent timber and ships down the Merrimack, and its people, who were Congregationalists of the strictest sort, valued two things above almost everything else: a good sermon and a good schoolmaster. Hannah's father, whom the family papers do not name, kept a small shop near the river landing. She was the clever girl of the family, who read the almanac at four, could recite the Westminster catechism at six and was put to school at the dame school on the common before she was seven. She was so quick that the dame, an elderly widow, let her hear the younger children's letters before she was ten. What the New England of her girlhood gave her was a school system. Massachusetts had required every town of a hundred families to maintain a schoolmaster since the seventeenth century, and by the 1790s the larger towns had both grammar schools for boys and summer schools for girls. A girl who wished to teach could earn a modest wage by keeping a summer school from May to October, when the boys were needed on the farms, and Hannah did so at seventeen, in a schoolroom at the edge of a salt marsh, with twenty-eight pupils between four and twelve and a stove that smoked. She taught reading from the New England Primer and the Bible, spelling from Webster's Blue-Backed Speller, arithmetic from a chalkboard and handwriting with a goose-quill pen she cut herself. She found that she was good at it, and she was not going to be parted from it. By twenty she had moved south to the mill villages up the Merrimack, where the first cotton mills were going up and the girls who worked in them needed evening schooling, and then to a school in Salem, where she met the Faulkner family. A Faulkner cousin, who was a clerk at a counting house, brought her a letter from the Red Ledger household in Marblehead asking whether she would take on the schooling of a number of children whose parents were often away at night. She said yes without asking why. She soon understood. The children were of the hunting families, and they came to her school with a particular kind of cleverness, a quick eye and a tendency to fall asleep at their desks in the afternoons. She taught them, without comment, for years. She gave them the same lessons as the other pupils and never mentioned the silver knives she sometimes found in their pinafore pockets, which she removed and returned at the end of the day. A few of the boys, who had a great love of tales of monsters, she set to writing their own, and the copybooks are still there, in the Faulkner archive, with their odd spellings and unflinching drawings. She had, in her own dry manner, a large appreciation of the hunters' world, and she took pride in it, as one might take pride in the eccentricities of a neighbour. She met Gideon Hale Faulkner in the Salem schoolroom, when he came to deliver a box of primers from the printing house where he worked. He was twenty-four, she thirty, and she corrected a misprint in the copy before she took it. He said afterwards that it was the most enjoyable thing that had happened to him in a year. Gideon, born in 1787, was a printer, brother to the midwife and slayer Sally Faulkner Hale, and he had the quick wit and inky fingers that she liked. They were married in 1812, in the same week that the United States declared war on Britain, which he said was a coincidence, and she said was a warning. Their daughter Cora Faulkner was born in 1813 and lived until 1868. She did not become a hunter; she became a teacher like her mother, and kept a school in Newburyport for many years before she married a farmer. Their son Lewis Faulkner, born in 1814 and dead in 1894, was called to the work young, and became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, one of the long-lived hunters of his generation. Hannah raised them in a small house near the Newbury green, in rooms that were always full of books, chalk dust and the smell of printer's ink. She taught them both to read before they were four and to write a good hand before they were six. She was a formidable woman. She was small, straight-backed and sharp-eyed, with a voice that never needed raising, and she had a way of saying a child's name that made it stand still. In the schoolroom she kept order through a mixture of high expectation and dry humour. She believed in teaching girls arithmetic, geography and natural philosophy, and she believed that boys should learn to sew a button. At the Faulkner gatherings, which she attended as the printer's wife, she was the one who asked the hunters questions they did not like: what did they intend to do when they were too old, who would keep the Ledger when they were gone, and had they taught their children to write. The War of 1812 was hard on New England, where the embargo had already ruined trade, and it was harder still on a household with a printer in it, for the demand for books shrank and the demand for broadsides grew. She kept her school open through it all, taking payment in firewood, cider and, once, a pig. After the war the coastal towns began to recover, and Hannah's school grew. By the 1820s she had an assistant, by the 1830s a schoolhouse of her own on the green. In the autumn of 1836 a fever, which the old women called the sweating sickness, went through Newbury, and Hannah, who had been nursing a pupil, was taken ill on the second day. She died on the fifth, at the age of fifty-five. The school closed for a week. Gideon, who lived until 1849, set a short notice in type himself and printed it on his own press. Hannah Dunlap is remembered in the Faulkner family as the teacher of Newbury, the woman who schooled a generation of hunters and never once mentioned the knives. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet authority of the classroom, where the people who would one day keep the Red Ledger first learned to read, to count and to write a clear report.