 Title page for The Story of a Bad Boy, 1870 | |
| Author | Thomas Bailey Aldrich |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | 1870 |
| Publication place | USA |
The Story of a Bad Boy (1870) is a semi-autobiographical novel by American writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich, fictionalizing his experiences as a boy in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The book is considered the first in the "bad boy" genre of literature, though the text's opening lines admit that he was "not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy".
"Tom Bailey" is born in the fictitious town of Rivermouth, New Hampshire, but moves to New Orleans with his family when he is 18 months old. In his boyhood, his father wants him to be educated in the North and sent him back to Rivermouth to live with his grandfather, Captain Nutter. Nutter lives with his sister and an Irish servant. There, Tom becomes a member of a boys' club called the Centipedes. The boys become involved in a series of adventures. In one prank, the boys steal an old carriage and push it into a bonfire for the Fourth of July. During the winter, several boys build a snow fort on Slatter's Hill, inciting rival boys into a battle of snowballs. Later, Tom and three other boys combine their money to buy a boat named Dolphin and sneak away to an island. Tom also befriends a man nicknamed Sailor Ben, whom Tom originally meets on the ship that took him away from New Orleans. Revealed as the long-lost husband of Captain Nutter's Irish servant, Ben settles in Rivermouth in a boat-like cabin. Sailor Ben helps the boys fire off a series of old cannon at the pier, much to the confusion of the local townspeople. When his father's banking job fails, Tom is invited by an uncle to work in a counting-house in New York.
The Story of a Bad Boy was first published in 1869 by Ticknor and Fields in their juvenile magazine Our Young Folks . [1] It was published in book form a year later [2] by Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co. [3] It was republished in 1895 by Houghton, Mifflin and Company with illustrations by A. B. Frost. [4]
The fictional town of Rivermouth is based on Portsmouth, New Hampshire. [1] After Aldrich's death in 1907, the author's widow purchased the home where the book takes place and restored it to look as it did in 1850. It has been a house museum open to the public since 1909, now part of Strawbery Banke. [5]
The book is considered the foundational text in a genre of "bad boy" literature which also includes Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Charles Dudley Warner's Being a Boy (1877), William Dean Howells's A Boy's Town (1877), [6] James Otis Kaler's Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus (1877), [7] [8] Hamlin Garland's Boy Life on the Prairie (1899), and Booth Tarkington's Penrod (1913). [6] A precursor was Horatio Alger, Jr.'s "Ragged Dick" series beginning in 1868, [9] though scholar Kenneth B. Kidd says his works are generally excluded from the list. [10] Aldrich also owed inspiration to the popular British book Tom Brown's School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes. [1] The bad boy genre, intended to be read by both children and adults, shows boys as irrational, primitive, and masculine. [11]
Though the main character is relatively mild (something that Aldrich himself admits in the book's opening lines), The Story of a Bad Boy was the first to celebrate a misbehaving boy as protagonist rather than antagonist. [9] Contemporary reviews hailed the book as a departure in traditional children's literature. [12] The book was praised for showing the true life of a boy, rather than dictating what it ought to be. Ultimately, the story shows that a young troublemaker can grow up to become a successful adult. [1] Though it has also been compared to the "girls book" genre initiated by Louisa May Alcott in Little Women , The Story of a Bad Boy does not have a single overarching narrative and is instead a series of sketches. [13] Aldrich established the precedent that, generally, bad boy stories do not depict the characters' maturation to adulthood, though there is some evidence that they do grow up. In the case of The Story of a Bad Boy, Aldrich notes early in the book that the characters are now adults and serving as "lawyers, merchants, sea-captains, soldiers, authors, what not." [14]
Twain, in particular, was heavily influenced by the book, though he was not originally impressed. He once wrote to his wife Livy, "I started to mark the Story of a Bad Boy, but for the life of me I could not admire the volume much." [15] Scholar Andrew Levy suggests that Twain was downplaying his interest in the book and was driven to disdain it in private due to "a competitive pique". [16] Literary scholar Marcus Klein has noted, however, that Twain later felt Aldrich to be the wittiest man in the past seven centuries. [17]
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel by American author Mark Twain that was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." Twain's novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and cowrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1869.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American writer, poet, critic, and editor. He is notable for his long editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, during which he published writers including Charles W. Chesnutt. He was also known for his semi-autobiographical book The Story of a Bad Boy, which established the "bad boy's book" subgenre in nineteenth-century American literature, and for his poetry.
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"The Heathen Chinee", originally published as "Plain Language from Truthful James", is a narrative poem by American writer Bret Harte. It was published for the first time in September 1870 in the Overland Monthly. It was written as a parody of Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (1865), and satirized anti-Chinese sentiment in northern California.
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Strawbery Banke is an outdoor history museum located in the South End historic district of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is the oldest neighborhood in New Hampshire to be settled by Europeans, and the earliest neighborhood remaining in the present-day city of Portsmouth. It features more than 37 restored buildings built between the 17th and 19th centuries in the Colonial, Georgian, and Federal style architectures. The buildings once clustered around a waterway known as Puddle Dock, which was filled in around 1900. Today the former waterway appears as a large open space.
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Media related to The Story of a Bad Boy (1870) at Wikimedia Commons
The Story of a Bad Boy public domain audiobook at LibriVox 