The Peterkin Papers

…and vividly recalled; Lucretia Hale’s Peterkin Papers (1880), just as funny today as a century ago, perfect nonsense produced in a non-nonsensical era; and Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy (1870). This, it is often forgotten, preceded Tom Sawyer by seven years, offered a model for many later…

…1868), that filled two books, The Peterkin Papers (1880) and The Last of the Peterkins (1886). The Peterkins, a family of quite Bostonian and quite ingenuous folk devoted to self-improvement and lofty notions, encountered in the sketches a variety of difficulties arising from their scatterbrained naïveté and were rescued from…