Camp Laurence

Camp Laurence is the improvised outdoor camp established by Theodore Laurence at Longmeadow for a day of boating, croquet, lunch, and informal companionship. Conceived as a place of shared activity rather than ceremony, it gives the young people a temporary community in which friendship crosses household, national, and social boundaries, while the camp’s playful organization reveals Theodore’s generosity and his instinct for turning isolation into fellowship.

Setting and Creation

Camp Laurence occupies a pleasant green field at Longmeadow, not far from the March family home and the Laurence mansion. The field has three wide-spreading oak trees at its center and a smooth strip of turf suitable for croquet. Tents, lunch, and the croquet equipment are sent ahead, so that the site is already prepared when the party arrives. Its openness contrasts with the neighboring houses: the March home is old, brown, and somewhat shabby, while the Laurence mansion is a comfortable stone residence whose luxury appears secluded and unused.

The camp therefore extends the social space that the Laurence mansion seems unable to provide. From the March garden, Theodore has appeared to Jo as a lonely boy looking down from an upper window, separated from ordinary youthful pleasure by the quiet restrictions of his household. Camp Laurence answers that isolation with movement, company, outdoor play, and a deliberately communal arrangement. The field becomes a meeting ground between families whose homes are divided by a low hedge but whose relationships are increasingly joined through friendship.

Organization and Participants

Theodore presents the camp as a miniature institution with its own practical hierarchy. He names John Brooke commander in chief and himself commissary general, assigns the other young men to staff positions, and makes the girls the company. The tent is designated for their special use, one oak becomes a drawing room, another serves as a messroom, and the third is the camp kitchen. These titles are comic, but they also give the gathering an intelligible structure: labor, hospitality, recreation, and sociability all have their place.

The party reaches Longmeadow in two boats, with Theodore and Jo rowing one and John Brooke and Ned rowing the other. Fred Vaughn paddles about in a wherry, trying to upset both boats, while Mr. Laurence watches from the shore and waves his hat. The mixed company includes members of the March and Laurence circles as well as English visitors and the Vaughns. Because the camp is organized around shared activity, distinctions of household and nationality become material for play rather than barriers to intimacy.

Games and Social Exchange

Croquet supplies the first major activity at Camp Laurence. John Brooke chooses Meg, Kate, and Fred for his side, while Theodore chooses Sallie, Jo, and Ned. The English players are competent, but the Americans contest the game fiercely. Jo and Fred engage in several quarrelsome skirmishes, and Fred cheats by nudging his ball with his toe after it stops on the wrong side of the wicket. The incident gives the camp’s sociability a competitive edge: fellowship is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to contain rivalry within a shared game.

Theodore’s earlier invitation promises a full day of collective pleasures: rowing the entire party to lunch, playing croquet, making a fire, and preparing food in a gypsy fashion. Camp Laurence is consequently less a fixed building than a program of activities carried out in common. The temporary rooms under the oaks, the boats, the tent, the playing field, and the planned meal together produce a domestic world outdoors, combining the comfort of a household with the freedom of an excursion.

Relation to the March-Laurence Spaces

The camp gains meaning from the spatial pattern around it. A garden and a low hedge separate the March and Laurence estates, establishing both proximity and division. Jo repeatedly tests that boundary: she observes Theodore from the March side, imagines the Laurence mansion as an enchanted palace, and seeks ways to cross into the life she believes he lacks. Camp Laurence makes such crossing socially legitimate. Instead of a solitary visit or a daring passage across the hedge, the families meet in a space designed for mutual participation.

Other improvised spaces in the March household follow a similar principle of turning boundaries into connections. The hedge post office is created in an old martin house so that letters, manuscripts, books, and bundles can pass between the neighboring “nations,” each with its own key. Jo’s secret departure from the house also involves crossing roofs, banks, and roads in order to reach the city. Against this recurring pattern, Camp Laurence is the most generous version of shared space: it does not merely permit passage but actively stages cooperation, with every participant assigned a place in the collective day.

Narrative Significance

Camp Laurence represents Theodore’s successful response to loneliness. The Laurence mansion contains books, pictures, statues, curiosities, comfortable chairs, and a great open fireplace, yet Theodore observes that a person cannot live on books alone. Camp Laurence supplies what the mansion lacks: people, noise, games, fresh air, and the unplanned energy of young companions. Its richness is social rather than material.

The location also anticipates the later transformation of Plumfield. After Jo marries Friedrich Bhaer and settles at Plumfield, the estate becomes crowded with six or seven boys, including poor boys whose support Mr. Laurence helps provide. Plumfield changes from a prim, well-ordered household into a boys’ paradise, a place of education, play, and refuge. Camp Laurence is an earlier, temporary form of the same spatial ideal: a carefully prepared environment in which affection is expressed through hospitality and where a house’s boundaries can be widened into a community.