The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him

by Paul Leicester Ford

The Shelf2Life Literature and Fiction Collection is a unique set of short stories, poems and novels from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. From tales of love, life and heartbreaking loss to humorous stories of ghost encounters, these volumes captivate the imaginations of readers young and old. Included in this collection are a variety of dramatic and spirited poems that contemplate the mysteries of life and celebrate the wild beauty of nature. The Shelf2Life Literature and Fiction Collection provides readers with an opportunity to enjoy and study these iconic literary works, many of which were written during a period of remarkable creativity.

508 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1894

About the author

Paul Leicester Ford was an American editor, novelist and biographer. He was the great-grandson (on his mother's side) of Noah Webster Jr. and the brother of historian Worthington C. Ford. He was murdered by his other brother, Malcolm Webster Ford, a famous amateur athlete in the United States.

Reviews

[Robert Miller]

Peter Stirling is a man who becomes a political boss in New York City, and the novel follows his career and love-life. The New York Times review at the time said: "If not to-day in time to come "Peter Stirling" will be remembered as a truthful representation of political conditions in a large city of the Union in the year 1894."

This book is mostly interesting to me as a look into how wealthy New Yorkers viewed the world in 1894, but it has some clever writing and lots of now-archaic references to articles of clothing and such. There are two or three incidental black characters in it, who are treated with the racist dismissal of the times (they're "Darkies"). And the story involves a man who, failing to successfully woo a woman his own age as a young man, falls in love with the same woman's daughter when the girl is 17 and he's 40-ish. Ewwwww. Nobody in the novel thinks that's anything out of the ordinary, including her mother, and it probably wasn't.