Thomas Bailey Aldrich

1836 - 1907  (70 years)

• Name	Thomas Bailey Aldrich
  Born	11 Nov 1836	Portsmouth, New Hampshire
  Gender	Male
  Died	19 Mar 1907	Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States
  Person ID	P44562086	My Genealogy
  Last Modified	10 Feb 2010

  
  

  Father	Elias Taft Aldrich,   b. 30 Nov 1807, Swansey, New Hampshire
  Mother	Sarah Abra Bailey,   b. Abt 1811
  Family ID	F3073	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Notes

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a poet, novelist, traveler, and editor, born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. When he was but a child his father moved to New Orleans, but after ten years the boy was sent back to Portsmouth?the "Rivermouth" of several of his stories?to prepare for college. This period of his life is partly described in his semi-autobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), of which "Tom Bailey" is the juvenile hero. Critics have said that this novel contains the first realistic depiction of childhood in American fiction and prepared the ground for Huckleberry Finn. His father's death in 1849 compelled Aldrich to abandon the idea of college and he entered his uncle's business office in New York at age 16 in 1852. Here he soon became a constant contributor to the newspapers and magazines, and the intimate friend of the young poets, artists and wits of the metropolitan Bohemia of the early sixties, among whom were EC Stedman, RH Stoddard, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman. From 1856 to 1859 he was on the staff of the Home Journal, then edited by NP Willis, while during the Civil War he was himself editor of the New York Illustrated News. In 1865 he moved to Boston and was editor for ten years for Ticknor and Fields ? then at the height of their prestige ? of the eclectic weekly Every Saturday, discontinued in 1875. From 1881 to 1890 he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Meanwhile Aldrich had written much, both in prose and verse. His genius was many-sided, and it is surprising that so busy an editor and so prolific a writer should have attained the perfection of form for which he was remarkable. His successivive volumes of verse, chiefly The Ballad of Babie Bell (1856), Pampinea, and Other Poems (1861), Cloth of Gold (1874), Flower and Thorn (1876), Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book (1881), Mercedes and Later Lyrics (18S}), Wyndham Towers (1889), and the collected editions of 1865, 1882, 1897 and 1900, showed him to be a poet of lyrical skill, dainty touch and felicitous conceit, the influence of Robert Herrick being constantly apparent. He repeatedly essayed the long narrative or dramatic poem, but seldom with success, save in such earlier work as Garnaut Hall. But no American poet has shown more skill in describing some single picture, mood, conceit or episode. His best thingngs are such lyrics as "Hesperides," "When the Sultan goes to Ispahan," "Before the Rain," "Nameless Pain," "The Tragedy," "Seadrift," "Tiger Lilies," "The One White Rose," "Palabras Cari?osas," "Destiny," or the eight-line poem "Identity," which did more to spread Aldrich's reputation than any of his writing after Babie Bell. Beginning with the collection of stories entitled Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873), Aldrich applied to his later prose work that minute care in composition which had previously characterized his verse?taking a near, new or salient situation, and setting it before the reader in a pretty combination of kindly realism and reticent humour. In the novels, Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877), and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880), there is more rapid action; but the Portsmoutth pictures in the first are elaborated with the affectionate touch shown in the shorter humorous tale, A Rivermouth Romance (1877). In An Old Town by the Sea (1893) the author's birthplace was once more commemorated, while travel and description are the theme of From Ponkapog to Pesth (1883). Aldrich died at Boston on 19 March 1907. His last words were "In spite of it all, I'm going to sleep." From the Strawberry Banke Museum website: Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 in Portsmouth just a short distance down Court Street from the home of his grandfather, Thomas D. Bailey. Most of his youth was spent elsewhere, first in the South where his father had business, and later in New York City where he reached manhood. Between these two periods, Aldrich returned to Portsmouth to live for several years, from 1849 to 1852, with his grandfather in this house facing Court Street. Thomas Bailey Aldrich married Lilian Woodman in 1865, and they moved to Boston the same year. Aldrich quickly attained the friendship of such notables as William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, James T. Fields (another Portsmouth son), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. He was recognized as a man of ability and accomplishment, and in time he succeeded Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the most important literary magazine of the time. It was shortly after the move to Boston that Aldrich, aware of approaching fatherhood, began to record some thoughts on his own child hood. The result was The Story of a Bad Boy , a barely fictionalized recollection of adventures and impressions of his years spent in Portsmouth at his grandfather's house on Court Street. Aldrich's idea for this children's story was new. While others wrote to instruct, his purpose was to entertain. "Tom Bailey" as he called himself, was no "faultless young gentleman," but rather "a real human boy such as you may meet anywhere." Among their exuberant adventures Tom and his friends set off some old cannons on the wharf at midnight, rousing the entire town, stole an old mail coach and pushed it into the Fourth of July bonfire, and spend a night "shipwrecked" on a river island. Aldrich's Bad Boy is significant as the first realistic treatment of a boy in American literature. It had great influence on other writers including the author's close friend Mark Twain, who six years later wrote a similar story about a similar boy, also named Tom. Thomas Bailey Aldrich died in 1907 at the age of 70. The house had passed out of the family by then and had in the 1880s served as Portsmouth's first hospital. It was repurchased by the Aldrich family and under the direction of Lilian Aldrich, tthe author's widow, the home was restored as a memorial to him. This was the first house in Portsmouth and one of the first in the country to be restored to a specific period in its past. Mark Twain was among those who journeyed to Portsmouth for the dedication. For seventy-one years the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial Association opened the house to the public. In 1979 it became part of Strawbery Banke.