Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

17. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Guardian at the Gate

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Guardian at the Gate thomas bailey aldrich published his Story of a Bad Boy (1869) in a Ticknor and Fields publication for children called Our Young Folks, meant to compete with Youth’s Companion and cultivate a new generation of Atlantic readers. His book about Tom Bailey’s childhood growing up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, owed a debt to Thomas Hughes’s immensely popular book set in Victorian Britain, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). Both return to a time of life when a boy’s first loyalty belongs to other boys. Tom Bailey’s world extends just a few blocks, but those blocks offer endless opportunity for mischief. Told by Tom himself, the novel assures young readers that the terrors of childhood have a natural way of righting themselves and that soon a scapegrace like Tom will become a wellrespected Thomas like his author—an ending that Mark Twain rejected for Huck Finn. Aldrich came to the editorship of the Atlantic by way of its eclectic sister- publication, Every Saturday. Devoted to publishing the best of foreign literatures, the Ticknor and Fields weekly had almost gone up in flames with the Great Boston Fire of 1872, yet managed to limp on until, three years later, the cost of illustrations in a harsh recession sealed its fate. The reciprocal relationship between the publishing house, which needed to appeal to a broader audience than the Atlantic, and the Atlantic itself, which fed the house and its authors, would de17 This is the story of a bad boy. Well, not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy; and I ought to know, for I am, or rather I was, that boy myself. thomas bailey aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy, 1869 Thomas Bailey Aldrich [ 143 ] termine to some extent Aldrich’s unwillingness to take risks. The Atlantic had changed hands a number of times when, in 1880, it became the property of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. and moved into the former parlors of the Woman’s Club at No. 4 Park Street. In September, Aldrich took over a little back room overlooking the Old Granary Burying Ground, “where, as he liked to joke, lay those who would never submit any more manuscripts .” Aldrich worked as his dog Trip drifted in and out of sleep before the coal fire. When Trip ate a dropped sonnet, his master wondered how he could have developed an appetite for doggerel.1 Often, Aldrich’s jokes had a target. This one reflects his dislike for poets like James Whitcomb Riley (sometimes called “the children’s poet”), whom Aldrich was not above parodying with doggerel of his own: Ma and me’s asked out to dine And I have dot a sickly spine, But I don’t mind a sickly spine ’S long as I am asked out to dine.2 Distancing himself from Howells, Aldrich weighed his scales in favor of poetry like his own, or perhaps any poetry that realistic fiction had overshadowed. At the same time, he intended to cultivate more foreign contributors, whom Every Saturday had profitably pirated. In the fall of 1881, after he assumed the editorship, Houghton Mifflin signed an agreement with Mssr. Ward, Lock & Co. to distribute the Atlantic in England. Aldrich spent six hours a day in his office, whereas Howells, who preferred to work at home, had allotted himself one afternoon a week. The men also differed in style. Henry James voiced the general feeling that the Atlantic had “bought,” in the slight, golden-haired Aldrich, a “gilded youth.” He was considered—and apparently considered himself—the most handsome of literary men, “having a well-proportioned figure, a delicately florid complexion, a finely molded rather square face with a moustache and strong intellectual features. In dress he was always biensoigné, even fastidious.”3 Aldrich had grown up almost as poor as Howells, yet he appeared to know practically nothing of “the domestic tribulations . . . of the usual householder in this ill-served land” and cared little about bringing them into the homes of Atlantic readers.4 His wife, Lilian, whom Mark Twain called a “strange and vanity-devoured, detestable woman,” added force to those who thought him a frightful snob. Twain’s dislike of r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 144 ] Mrs. Aldrich went back to the time Aldrich brought him home for dinner , and Lilian, thinking...