"I'm a Thinker from Thinkersville": Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa

To celebrate my grandfather’s eightieth birthday, this week’s book is one he recently gave to me for my birthday and which centers around a character whose adventures my grandfather tells me he used to read when he was a boy.

The book is actually two volumes in one. The first is Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa and Compendium of Fun, Profusely Illustrated, a collection of stories written by George Wilbur Peck (1840-1916) and published by Stanton and Van Vliet, Co. of Chicago, in 1911. The title page proclaims that this is the “Complete Edition” and is accompanied by 100 illustrations by True W. Williams (1839-1897), who gained his own fame as illustrator for stories by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). The book was first published in 1883 under the title Mirth for the Million: Peck’s Compendium of Fun, Comprising the Immortal Deeds of Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa, and All the Choice Gems of Wit, Humor, Sarcasm, and Pathos. In the same year, the first edition was followed by a stand-alone narrative, The Grocery Man and Peck’s Bad Boy. The stories themselves had almost all first appeared, however, in Peck’s weekly newspaper, The Sun, beginning in 1874. The Bad Boy quickly gained famed far beyond Wisconsin, however, and a Canadian edition followed in 1884, a Swedish edition in 1898, and additional U.S. editions in 1893, 1895 1900, 1905, 1907, and 1911, along with a scattering of other Bad Boy adventures published separately (including the collection of songs “Peck’s bad boy songster” in 1884 and, in 1907, Peck's bad boy with the cowboys: relating the amusing experiences and laughable incidents of this strenuous American boy and his pa while among the cowboys and Indians in the Far West).

In 1885 the character was so well known and loved that Atkinson’s Comedy Company, at the Boston Theatre, on Washington Street in Boston, presented “scenes in the every day life of Peck’s bad boy and his pa, without plot, but with a purpose, to make people laugh, the only authorized dramatic version, in three acts, of the celebrated Bad boy sketches, by Geo. W. Peck”, adapted for the stage by Charles F. Pidgin. Even after Peck’s death, other American writers continued the Bad Boy’s adventures, such as James Austin’s Return of Peck’s Bad Boy between 1920 and 1952. Several modern publishers have also released contemporary reprint editions, ensuring that the Bad Boy can continue to entertain readers. Besides the Bad Boy’s appearance on stage, he was also to be seen on the silver screen three times (1921, 1934, and 1938) and was, along with Austin’s unauthorized sequel, the inspiration for a short-lived comedy television series in 1959, Peck’s Bad Girl, which ran for only 14 episodes.

In his own day, Peck made quite a name for himself beyond his humorous stories. Born in New York, he moved to Wisconsin at a very young age and stayed there the rest of his life. He took to the newspaper life and founded his own papers in Ripon and later La Crosse. In 1878, the La Crosse paper -- The Sun -- moved with Peck to Milwaukee and became Peck’s Sun. Peck’s love of his new hometown led him to run for mayor on the Democratic ticket and win -- despite the fact the majority of voters in Milwaukee were Republican. His electoral success in the metropolis was then translated by the Party into a successful bid for governor in 1890, a position he held until 1894.

The book is hardback bound in red cloth, with an illustration of the titular character smoking a cigarette and chatting with an older man; a closer look at the Bad Boy’s grinning face appears on the spine. The pages are, with the exception of the photographic plate of the author, unfortunately printed on an old acid-based paper. The stock of this paper was quite flimsy to begin with and it has since faded over time -- though the illustrations and text are still clear. Beside this fading and some chipping to some pages, though, the book is in good shape. It was printed in small octavo format, but there are no signatures to mark the gatherings so I’ll spare us all the trouble of jotting down a collational formula for this one. 

As noted above, the book actually consists of two parts. The first is Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa, which is itself divided into two volumes (36 chapters in the first; 27 in the second). The second part of the books is Peck’s Sunshine: A Collection of Articles Generally Calculated to Throw Sunshine Instead of Clouds on the Faces of Those Who Read Them, consisting of 59 chapters and a number of additional illustrations as well. These stories are not about the Bad Boy but are in the same vein of anecdotal humor, all of the tales -- some true, some fictional -- first appeared at various times in Peck’s newspapers. The illustrations for this volume were done by “Hopkins” (whomever that might be). Peck’s Sunshine was originally published by Belford, Clarke, & Co. in 1882, followed by later editions in 1892, 1893, and 1900 by other publishers and has also been more recently reprinted by modern publishers as well.

The preliminaries of the first volume are paginated [i]-[xvii], with a blank flyleaf and the photographic plate inserted between the first [i-ii] and second [iii-iv] leaves of the gathering. The first volume’s contents are paginated 23-347 and I’m not sure why the numbering starts so oddly. The pagination in the second volume is equally inexplicable; the preliminaries run [i]-iv, followed by an author’s note (“Not Guilty”) numbered 23 in the lower inside corner and then the contents of the volume, which run 1, 8-124. The final page is a blank fly made of heavier stock. One intriguing feature of the table of contents in the second part and the lists of illustrations in both parts is that they are provided in alphabetical order, rather than in sequence. This likely points to the episodic nature of the book: it was intended for readers (many of whom may have already been familiar with many of the stories and may have deliberately sought out certain titles) to pick through the stories intermittently and selectively, rather than to read straight through the chapters consecutively.

The only indications of previous readership are an owner’s name illegibly inscribed on the recto of the front fly (“D. Je<   >l<>”) and a folded piece of old lined paper used to mark a reader’s place between pages 60 and 61 of the second volume (the story that starts on page 61 being “Woman-Dozing a Democrat”).

At the head of both volumes are author’s notes that put the book into its proper context and thus deserve quoting in full. The first, “A Card from the Author”, states:

Gents—If you have made up your minds that the world will cease to move unless these "Bad Boy" articles are given to the public in book form, why go ahead, and peace to your ashes. The "Bad Boy" is not a "myth," though there may be some stretches of imagination in the articles. The counterpart of this boy is located in every city, village and country hamlet throughout the land. He is wide awake, full of vinegar and is ready to crawl under- the canvas of a circus or repeat a hundred verses of the New Testament in Sunday School He knows where every melon patch in the neighborhood is located, and at what hours the dog is chained up. He will tie an oyster can to a dog's tail to give the dog exercise, or will fight at the drop of the hat to protect the smaller boy or a school girl. He gets in his work everywhere there is a fair prospect of fun, and his heart is easily touched by an appeal in the right way, though his coat-tail is oftener touched with a boot than his heart is by kindness. But he shuffles through life until the time comes for him to make a mark in the world, and then he buckles on the harness and goes to the front, and becomes successful, and then those who said he would bring up in State Prison, remember that he always was a mighty smart lad, and they never tire of telling of some of his deviltry when he was a boy, though they thought he was pretty tough at the time. This book is respectfully dedicated to boys, to the men who have been boys themselves, to the girls who like the boys, and to the mothers, bless them, who like both the boys and the girls.

Very respectfully,

GEO. W. PECK.

Peck's Sunshine begins with the following address:

Gentlemen of the Jury:

I stand before you charged with an attempt to "remove" the people of America by the publication of a new book, and I enter a plea of "Not Guilty." While admitting that the case looks strong against me, there are extenuating circumstances, which, if you will weigh them carefully, will go far towards acquitting me of this dreadful charge. The facts are that I am not responsible. I was sane enough up to the day that I decided to publish this book and have been since; but on that particular day I was taken possession of by an unseen power—a Chicago publisher—who filled my alleged mind with the belief that the country demanded the sacrifice, and that there would be money in it. If the thing is a failure, I want it understood that I was instigated by the Chicago man; but if it is a success, then, of course, it was an inspiration of my own.

The book contains nothing but good nature, pleasantly told yarns, jokes on my friends ; and, through it all, there is not intended to be a line or a word can cause pain or sorrow—nothing but happiness.

Laughter is the best medicine known to the world for the cure of many diseases that mankind is subject to, and it has been prescribed with success by some of our best practitioners. It opens up the pores, and restores the circulation of the blood and the despondent patient that smiles is in a fair way to recovery. While this book is not recommended as an infallible cure for consumption, if I can throw the patient into the blues by the pictures, I can knock the blues out by vaccinating with the reading matter.

To those who are inclined to look upon the bright side of life, this book is most respectfully dedicated by the author.

GEO. W. PECK.

The book is, of course, a product of its day and contains some language that modern readers would find offensive (racial epithets, for example) and some situational humor that modern readers would find distasteful (a running thread throughout the Bad Boy’s early adventures are his attempts -- sometimes malicious, sometimes guileless -- to catch his Pa in the old man’s attempts to engage in extramarital romantic escapades...attempts that often succeed spectacularly but that also almost always end with Pa giving the boy a sound beating out in the woodshed and the boy speculating on a life on the road, in the circus, in a hotel, etc.). Equally dated is Peck’s manner of telling the Bad Boy stories in what he took to be the dialect of young boys of the time and place (the stories are told in the first person from the Bad Boy’s point of view), an informing detail in revealing how an older man heard and interpreted the slang and speech-patterns of boys of his day.

The nature of some of the narratives can be suggested by reference to some of the more telling chapter titles and their under-headings, such as the title of this post. For example, chapter four of the first part of the book, “The Bad Boy’s Fourth of July”:

Pa is a Pointer, not a Setter -- Special Arrangements for the Fourth of July -- A Grand Supply of Fireworks -- The Explosion -- The Air Full of Pa and Dog and Rockets -- The New Hell -- A Scene that Beggar’s Description

Or chapter five, “The Bad Boy’s Ma Comes Home”:

No Deviltry, Only a Little Fun -- The Boy’s Chum -- A Lady’s Wardrobe in the Old Man’s Room -- Ma’s Unexpected Arrival -- Where is the Hussy? -- Damfino! -- The Bad Boy Wants to Travel with a Circus

Or chapter twenty-three of the second volume, in which the Bad Boy, his Pa, and the Grocer and Minister (both also targets of the Bad Boy’s shenanigans) get involved with amateur dramatics in “The Grocery Man and the Ghost”:

Ghosts Don’t Steal Wormy Figs -- A Grand Rehearsal -- The Minister Murders Hamlet -- The Watermelon Knife -- The Old Man Wanted to Rehearse the Drunken Scene in Rip Van Winkle -- No Hugging Allowed -- Hamlet Wouldn’t Have Two Ghosts -- “How Would You Like to be an Idiot?”

The chapter headings of the second part of the book are also revealing and include such gems as “A Bald-Headed Man Most Crazy”, “An Aesthetic Female Club Busted”, “Female Doctors Will Never Do”, “Fooling with the Bible”, “Shall There Be Hugging in the Parks”, and “The Naughty but Nice Church Choir”.

Overall, the stories glorify the eccentric and sometimes cruel nature of boyhood in late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century middle America -- a tradition from which emerged not just Peck’s Bad Boy but those other iconic rapscallions who embodied our nation’s own larger transition from the whimsical fantasies and devious pranks of childhood to the dark humor and often frustrating inequalities one becomes aware of in the process of maturing to adulthood, the immortal Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, and How Good Writers Don't Necessarily Make Good Scholars

This week’s entry is for a book whose title jumped out at me from my bookcase.

This is a first edition of Samuel Clemens’s (a.k.a. Mark Twain’s) provocatively named book Is Shakespeare Dead ???? (yes, the cover title does include four question marks, though the histrionic punctuation is muted to only one everywhere else the title appears in the book). The text of the book was first part of Twain’s so-called Autobiography, which was actually not published in book-format until after his death; instead, during his life he published various “chapters” as articles, serial-style, in twenty-five issues of The American Review between 1906 and 1907.

Evidently Twain thought this “chapter” worthy of full book-format publication and in April 1909, one year before the author’s death, Harper & Brothers Publishers of New York and London released the first edition in at least three issues (see below). Twain took the opportunity also to add some material and expand on some original material in the original serial version of the essay, but it is largely the same as the The American Review version. Since then it has reappeared in many editions, both bibliographically independent and as part of anthologies or collections of Twain’s works.

The book is hard-bound in green cloth with gilt lettering on the front board and spine. I do not believe that it was released with a dust-jacket, though some dealers online specify that their copy is “without dust-jacket”, which may indicate that it was. My copy has a slight scuffed stain on the lower outside corner of the front board and the corners are bumped slightly; otherwise it is in very good condition, with no marks inside the book itself. The binding is stitched and still quite tight.

The pages measure 13.5cm x 21cm and are of a heavy cream stock. The fore-edges are rough, indicating that the book was sold uncut originally and it was opened by an early owner. The top-edge of the pages is gilded, though whether this was original to the edition or added later I cannot determine.

As far as the book’s printing goes, the signatures are signed numerically (see photo) and its collation may be expressed as crown 8^o: [#] [1⁸]-10⁸ [π]; $1. The pagination begins on the first page of the book’s content (1⁴r) and runs 1-[150]. Inserted between the blank 1¹ and the title page (1²) are two facing black-and-white photographic plates, one of a drawing of William Shakespeare on the verso and one of a statue of Francis Bacon (Twain’s favored son regarding the “authorship question” -- see below) on the recto. As usual, the initial leaf and ultimate leaf are blank flies conjugate to the front and rear paste-downs respectively. The verso of the title page -- facing the recto half-title -- is an advertising list of other books by Twain, with their prices and options for binding. Some printing tricks had to be employed to make the content stretch to fill an entire book and there is much white space throughout, mostly in the form of very wide margins (especially the lower margin) which consume at least one-third of each page.

Judging from copies currently being offered by dealers online, the first edition of the book appears in two distinct states. The true first included two pages of publisher’s advertisements at the back and a telling typographic error on p. 55 (the word “equipped” was erroneously set as “epuipped”). The second issue does not include the advertisements and has corrected the p. 55 error (see photo). Based on this evidence, my copy is of the first edition’s second issue and thus is valued at between $30 and $50. There is no table of contents, but the text is broken up into thirteen chapters

Twain’s book is a digressive and largely unscholarly tangent defending his personal take on the so-called “authorship question” regarding the plays of William Shakespeare. The start of the book provides some connection to the putative objective of “autobiography” that the essay was originally part of by explaining how Twain came to be concerned with the authorship issue. As a young man, undergoing steamboat pilot training on the Mississippi, he would regularly fall into intense arguments with an older pilot about the issue. The remainder of the book follows this up with what Twain takes to be evidence against “the man from Stratford” and generally in favor of Francis Bacon. His evidence, while wittily presented (as one would expect from Twain), is quite shallow.

First, he contends that little is actually known with any reliability about Shakespeare’s life and that most biographies written about him are purely speculative. In response, see Sam Schoenbaum’s magisterial William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, which brings together nearly all of the extant documentary evidence about the man (all of which, it is immediately obvious to even a casual reader, supports the fact that the man from Stratford wrote the plays). It should also be noted that, contrary to popular mythology, we actually know quite a bit more about Shakespeare than we do about many of his contemporaries. As evidence that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare, of course, our lack of biographical evidence is largely irrelevant, particularly given the absolute wealth of bibliographical evidence that shows that he did. And against Bacon we might also urge the volumes of evidence, derived from what we know about the London theatre industry of the day, that would render his candidacy considerably more improbable than that of Shakespeare’s.

Second, Twain notes the number of legal professionals who have suggested, based on legal references in the plays, the dramatist must have been familiar with the law -- something that, Twain states, the man from Stratford was largely inexperienced in but that Bacon had in spades. This argument neglects one of the most important qualities of Shakespeare’s writing -- its ability to be all things to all people. We know that Shakespeare read very widely and that he was able to incorporate ideas and language from dozens upon dozens of different sources into his work. The result has been that members of various professions (soldiers, lawyers, doctors, scholars, actors, etc.) have all claimed Shakespeare as their own, even though there is no external evidence of the fact (except, of course, for claimants who assign him to the ranks of glove-maker or actor). A tally of imagery in Shakespeare’s plays shows that he uses, for example, military language as much as legal language, but Twain does not use this fact to suggest the plays were written by Walter Morgan Wolff.

Third, and most ridiculous, is Twain’s suggestion that small communities, like Stratford, would never given up on celebrating a famous son. To support this argument he draws evidence from his own life and his continued celebrity in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. He suggests that if Shakespeare from Stratford were really so famous, he would have been as well-known in modern day Stratford as Twain was in modern day Hannibal. Setting aside the fact that Twain was alive when he wrote this and Shakespeare had been dead for two-hundred and ninety-three years, and the fact that applying standards of modern social conduct to an early modern community is grossly ahistorical and thus irrelevant, anyone who has been to Stratford-upon-Avon today will find little evidence that the town has forgotten (or at any point since 1616 did forget) its most famous resident.

Besides the weakness of the evidence underlying his arguments, Twain’s book is also marked by a high degree of personal vitriol and ad hominem attacks upon Stratfordians. In particular, he chastises his opponents as mindless slaves and draws direct comparisons between them and the followers of cultic prophets and messianic religious figures. Ironically, what particularly irritates him is how Stratfordians employed the very same terms of condescension and disregard against Bacon’s supporters; that he was tarring himself with the same brush was either of no great concern to him (some commentators suggest the entire book is meant to be satirical) or something he was simply too blind with polemicism to realize.

Although my copy does not have any of the usual marginalia that I enjoy, it does have an intriguing news clipping inserted that reveals a previous owner possessed the book because he or she was a Twain fan and not, like me, interested in Shakespeare. The clipping is a television review written by Lawrence Laurent, an extremely influential media critic who helped define the field when he wrote both reviews and industry news for The Washington Post in the 1960s and 1970s. His prerequisites for effective criticism were formative for writers, both then and now; as James A. Brown of the Museum of Broadcast Communications summarizes it, Laurent demanded, “sensitivity and reasoned judgment, a renaissance knowledge, coupled with exposure to a broad range of art, culture, technology, business, law, economics, ethics, and social studies all fused with an incisive writing style causing commentary to leap off the page into the reader's consciousness, possibly influencing their TV behavior as viewers or as professional practitioners.”

The review is a glowing account of Emmy- and Tony-winning performer Hal Holbrook’s “long overdue” performance of his ninety-minute one-man play Mark Twain Tonight!, which aired on CBS on March 6, 1967 (Holbrook is shown to the right; Clemens, in 1909 when Is Shakespeare Dead? came out, is below). Directed by Paul Bogart and produced by David Susskind, the play was written by Holbrook using published and archival material from the estate of Samuel Clemens. It was one of the staples of Holbrook’s development as an actor, a part he had been playing and constantly refining since 1947, when he was twenty-two (the depiction of Clemens, in his play, is at the age of seventy!). In 1966, his Broadway revival of the play won him a Tony and ushered in a new popular genre of one-person biographical drama. For the CBS performance, Holbrook took the liberty of adding even more material, particularly content that highlighted Twain’s eloquent disapproval of war -- something that directly reflected the actor’s own outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. After the broadcast, Holbrook continued to play the role, logging more than 2,000 performances after 1967. For those who don’t know him, Holbrook is known to fans (including this blogger) of Aaron Sorkin’s celebrated television series The West Wing as the curmudgeonly but avuncular Assistant Secretary of State Albie Duncan, from the 2001 and 2002 seasons.

To whomever it was that owned this book in 1967, Holbrook’s performance as Twain merited preservation in the form of a small reminder -- Laurent’s Washington Post review -- tucked safely within the covers of Is Shakespeare Dead... a book that ended up in Tarquin Tar’s Bookcase for an entirely different reason: namely, the book’s topic, and not so much its author (though I must admit that, since I have little patience for “authorship” controversy books, the only reason I can stomach owning this particular one is because of its author). This little discordance in the book’s ownership history comforts me to a certain degree -- a reminder that all literature, whether a play by a sixteenth-century English icon or a close-minded harangue by a nineteenth-century American icon, can mean different things to different people. Indeed, I would argue that that is the very definition of literature.