Aldrich, Thomas Bailey
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Thomas Bailey (1836-1909), an American writer. He was born at Portsmouth, New Hampshire . He passed part of his boyhood in Louisiana. He prepared for Harvard College, but was prevented by his father's death from taking a course. Instead he entered the counting house of a New York uncle, but not enjoying the work he turned his attention to literature. He was encouraged by Halleck, Holmes, and other literary men. He wrote for Putnam's, the Knickerbocker Magazine, the New York Evening Mirror, edited Every Saturday, and, in 1881, he succeeded Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In later years both Harvard and Yale conferred honorary degrees upon him. Aldrich is known best as the author of the famous Story of a Bad Boy, a wholesome and charming tale of a real boy who, while he is not exactly a model, is by no means so very "bad." Lowell said of it that he wished the book "had been twice as large." One of Mr. Aldrich's most humorous short stories is Marjorie Daw. He has written two volumes of poems, of which the ballad, Babie Bell, may be regarded as the gem. His blank verse has won high praise, but Aldrich himself frankly owned that he preferred The lyric, Ever on the lip, Rather than the epic Memory lets slip. Other quotations are: See where at intervals the firefly's spark Glimmers and melts into the fragrant dark; Gilds a leaf's edge one happy instant, then Leaves darkness all a mystery again. Who lacks the art to shape his thought, I hold Were little poorer if he lacked the thought. If my best wine mislikes thy taste And my best service wins thy frown, Then tarry not, I bid thee haste; There's many another Inn in town. Mr. Aldrich's verse is as faultless in technique as Tennyson's, and shows a Keats-like love of sensuous beauty; but it lacks originality and largeness of imagination.--Bronson. Aldrich is our master miniature painter in verse. No other American poet has imposed upon himself such rigid restraints of perfect workmanship.--Abernethy. Aldrich has produced the only uniformly artistic body of verse in the course of American literature .--Albert Phelps.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's in 1910 could quote critics calling Aldrich "our master miniature painter in verse" and the author of "the only uniformly artistic body of verse in the course of American literature." That verdict has not held: his poems, including the once-anthologized "Babie Bell," have almost entirely dropped out of print and out of the classroom, and the honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale count for little now. What survives is The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), read today less for itself than as the model that pointed Mark Twain toward Tom Sawyer (1876) and helped invent the American boyhood story. His nine years editing the Atlantic Monthly, which the 1910 account mentions almost in passing, now looms larger in his reputation than any of his verse.
Written for this edition, 2026.