Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1836 - 1907, Boston
During the early 1850s, Aldrich published poems in the Sunday Atlas and in Harper's Monthly Magazine. His first collection of poems, "The Bells: A Collection of Chimes," was published in 1855. That same year his poem "The Ballad of Babie Bell" made him an instant popular success and helped to open his way into the literary and artistic circles of New York City. Nathaniel Parker Willis, editor of the Home Journal, hired him first as a junior literary critic for the Evening Mirror. Within a year Aldrich had been appointed subeditor of the Home Journal.
Aldrich's early poetry, generally lyric, often follows Romantic tendencies. His earliest verse is sentimental and, like Edgar Allan Poe's, deals with the deaths of beautiful women and young girls. Given his early life in Portsmouth, it is not surprising to see the Romantic sense of isolation developed in his work as well. Never an innovator, he had great respect for the traditional Romanticism of Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and Poe, and he disliked realism in poetry.
Like most writers of his time, Aldrich wrote fiction as well as poetry. He began to write prose in the middle of the 1850s, while at the Home Journal. Just as he disliked realism in poetry, his short stories display no glimpse into the harsh reality that other authors of his time examined. In the main, his stories are neither profound nor socially conscious. His early fiction, like his poetry, tends to be imitative and sentimental, displaying the influences of Dickens, Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His first novel, Daisy's Necklace: And What Came of It, was published in 1857, and his first collection of stories and sketches, Out of His Head, appeared in 1862.
A collected edition of Aldrich's poetry was published in New York in 1863. Titled simply Poems, it was noticed by many of the New England literati and drew praise from Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others. Aldrich's poetic fame was assured when his work was published in 1865 in the prestigious Blue and Gold Series of Ticknor and Fields, the leading U.S. publishers at the time.
In 1865, with his new wife, Lilian Woodman, Aldrich moved to Boston to edit Every Saturday, which he continued to edit until 1874. The couple had twin sons, their only children, in 1868. In 1870, The Story of a Bad Boy was published in book form; it had been earlier serialized in the juvenile magazine Our Young Folks, as well as in Atlantic Monthly in 1869. This semiautobiographical novel depicts an adult narrator remembering his childhood in Portsmouth. As such, it is the first realistic treatment of American boyhood. Critics claim it is an early contribution to the development of realism and that it helped to establish the tradition of treating boyhood in American fiction. The novel is considered an influence on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. William Dean Howells praised the originality of the boyhood theme in the Atlantic Monthly. Despite this originality, Aldrich was not adept in handling longer narrative structures, and the novel's weaknesses are evident in the episodic arrangement that lacks an effective climax. Aldrich's four other popular novels are unremarkable for similar reasons.
In 1873 Aldrich published Marjorie Daw and Other People, which contains a number of his best stories. Howells praised the collection, claiming that Aldrich had created a species of fiction "in which character and incident constantly verge with us towards the brink of a quite precipitous surprise ending without being for a moment less delightful as character and incident, and without being less so even when we look up from the gulf into which they have plunged us" ("Recent Literature," Atlantic Monthly 32 [Nov. 1873]: 625; as quoted in Samuels, p. 66). The short story "Marjorie Daw" was an instant success, gained an international reputation, and was anthologized well into the second half of the twentieth century. Like most of his fiction, it is not considered great literature but is an artfully crafted, well-told tale. A few other stories in this collection utilize local color techniques, though this is not a form he admired. Gothic tales painted in fanciful touches occur in this collection as well. Aldrich's fiction shows a good deal of variety and range. The pieces are noteworthy for their light touch, their amusing wit and charm, and, particularly, their surprise endings. On the whole, Aldrich's short fiction is skillfully crafted and aimed at providing pleasure if not read too seriously.
Aldrich wrote almost exclusively for the Atlantic Monthly for several years, eventually serving as editor from 1881 to 1890. As an editor, Aldrich was known for literary taste, attention to form, and precise craftsmanship. During his years at the Atlantic Monthly he drew contributions from such major literary figures as Longfellow, Holmes, Henry James (1843-1916), and Thomas Hardy. His tenure at this position, however, was probably not the most successful in the magazine's history, in spite of its being described in a London journal as "the best edited magazine in the English language" (Greenslet, p. 147). He lacked the range of interests that both Howells and James Russell Lowell enjoyed before him, and he was more interested in the cultivated rather than the general reader; as a result, readership declined during his editorship.
Aldrich was an immensely popular poet, novelist, and editor during his lifetime. Polls taken in the 1880s and 1890s by the Critic, the Harvard Crimson, and Literature favorably ranked him among the most popular and significant authors of his time. Esteemed and respected as a major literary figure during the last half of the nineteenth century, Aldrich has fared less well in the eyes of twentieth-century critics who acknowledge his competence but see him as a part of the declining New England tradition. His poetry is prettily made but imitative, which makes Aldrich one of the better minor poets in American literature; his art lacks the seriousness and innovation of the first rank of writers. He died at his home in Boston.
Bibliography
Aldrich's manuscripts, papers, and personal effects are somewhat scattered. Most of his papers are preserved in the Harvard College Library. Other literary effects, such as manuscripts and correspondence, are elsewhere, including Princeton University, St. John's University in New York, and the University of Virginia. His primary works, not previously mentioned, include The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth (1858), Poems (1863), Prudence Palfrey, a Novel (1874), From Ponkapog to Pesth (1883), Two Bites at a Cherry, with Other Tales (1894), The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich: The Revised and Complete Household Edition (1897), A Sea Turn and Other Matters (1902), Ponkapog Papers (1904), and A Book of Songs and Sonnets Selected from the Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1906).
Ferris Greenslet's Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1908) is the "official" biography and contains a number of his letters. A book-length study of Aldrich's work is Charles E. Samuel's Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1965), which puts Aldrich and his work into historical and critical perspective. This work also has an extensive bibliography of both primary and secondary materials related to Aldrich. Of additional interest is Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Crowding Memories (1920), which supplements Greenslet's biography, recounting Aldrich's social life and friendships with major literary figures of the time, such as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells. Few articles on Aldrich's work have been written recently. See Ann Beattie's "The Story of a Bad Boy," Children's Literature 5 (1976): 63-65, for a later assessment of Aldrich's most famous novel. A chapter-length study of Bailey's tenure as editor of Atlantic Monthly is presented in Ellery Sedgwick's A History of the Atlantic Monthly 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (1994). Aldrich's boyhood home, his library, and memorabilia from his office are preserved at a memorial in Strawberry Banke, a historic preservation site in Portsmouth, N.H.
Robert Lee Lynch
Source:
Robert Lee Lynch. "Aldrich, Thomas Bailey";
http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00027.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Mon Jul 22 2013 14:33:48 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
Person TypeIndividual
Last Updated8/7/24
Terms
Hartford, Connecticut, 1833 - 1908, New York
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1835 - 1894, Appledore Island, Isle of Shoals, Maine
Richmond, Virginia, 1863 - 1945, Charlottesville, Virginia
active Boston, 1845 - 1854
Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, 1837 - 1934, Chicago
Cincinnati, 1857 - 1930, Washington, D.C.
Boston, 1848 - 1913, Vevey, Switzerland
Martins Ferry, Ohio, 1837 - 1920, New York
