Victorian Wit

by Charles Labrizzi

Best known for writing The Story of A Bad Boy, Thomas Bailey Aldrich was also a noted poet, playwright, and editor. His friends and contemporaries included Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Celia Thaxter.

260 pages, Paperback

Published May 12, 2018

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a labor of love by the author, a Portsmouth resident and actor-interpreter at the Aldrich Museum residence at living history museum Strawbery Banke there. He has a long history in journalism. He's also 84 (this book was published when he was 82). I would have given this one star, but Librizzi introduced me to his subject, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who I formerly knew nothing about (and might never have known anything about). Aldrich is an example of a highly known author who is lost to changing taste. To paraphrase a common theme, authors may be famous for a reason, for a season, or well beyond their lifetime. Aldrich was famous for a season (a top-ranked writer in his lifetime), and his most famous work, "The Story of a Bad Boy" is still available and read, if not in print and is most well known as an inspiration for Twain's Tom Sawyer. And if you go on Amazon to reviews of Aldrich's Bad Boy, you'll find many references to inspiration from a visit to Strawbery Banke and this very interpreter. The book was a gift from my child, who also worked at Strawbery Banke and was at one of the book launch events and met the author.

Unfortunately the book is a complete mess. The research is likely impeccable. But the book spirals back and forth across time and content areas like no other. One minute Aldrich is a child, and then an adult, and then a child or a young man or married and then surprise, we are back in his childhood. Subject and meaning are lost within individual sentences, and sentences might join together in paragraphs or be left floating on their own. Antecedents of pronouns are lost, while Aldrich's contemporaries and family are introduced for the first time again and again. Chapter headings are mere starting points to further drift. I read it cover to cover, because I'm masochistic like that. There are asides to the reader, critiques of other books about Aldrich, and suppositions about motivations of one historical person or another tossed in at random. To read this book you'd need to have a strong curiosity about Aldrich as a fan or academic, masochism, a terrific sense of humor, or all three. You might be better off traveling to Portsmouth (or visiting virtually https://www.strawberybanke.org/) and if you are lucky meeting the author and taking advantage of his knowledge in person.

[Beth Schmitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bravo Charles on your labor of love. I can hear your voice telling these stories.