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The Token, for 1832
A collection of poetry, stories, and essays, with 16 steel engravings and two small vignettes. Includes "The Gentle Boy," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "The Wives of the Dead," and "Roger Malvin's Burial," by Nathaniel Hawthorne; "David Whicher," by John Neal; "Nimrod Buckskin, Esq.," by Timothy Flint; and "A Sketch of a Blue-Stocking," by Catherine Maria Sedgwick. Essays include "The Garden of Graves," by John Pierpont. Poetry includes "The Indian Summer" and "La Doncella," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and poems by Lydia Sigourney, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, and B. B. Thatcher.
Steel engravings include reproductions of works by Joshua Reynolds and Alvan Fisher.
Steel engravings include reproductions of works by Joshua Reynolds and Alvan Fisher.
392 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1831
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About the author
Samuel Griswold Goodrich
1,478 books7 followersSamuel Griswold Goodrich was an American author, better known under the pseudonym Peter Parley.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 15, 2020
(Read as I transcribed it for merrycoz.org) Better than some other volumes I've seen, but with some weird stuff in it. Poetry is unmemorable, except for "Frost," by Hannah F. Gould, which is a chipper little poem describing a winter scene and ending with the effects of cold weather on the average uninsulated pantry of the 1830s.
The stories are ... more memorable. This volume includes four stories by Hawthorne, all of which are the antithesis of the sentimental stuff usually found in these gift books. "The Wives of the Dead" is tragic and open-ended; "The Gentle Boy" is tragic; "Roger Malvin's Burial" is ... tragic; and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" is just weird. There's also "David Whicher"--attributed to John Neal--which features a certain amount of racism, the brutal death of a small child, and a humorous and cringe-worthy ending. "My Cousin Lucy" is a rather charming story in which a teenager has to deal with jealousy. Catherine Maria Sedgwick supplies a sort of story: it starts as a story, but it appears that she had no real ending, so she calls it a "sketch." Timothy Flint contrasts Southerners and New Englanders in a humorous little bit of satiric melodrama involving the pairing-off of two Southerners and a New Englander. "The Indian Summer" appears to be by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (I may have this wrong) and is a weird little piece of melodrama.
And, oh, how I wish I could find out the author of "My Wife's Novel," which is a rather delicious and funny story about the perils of publishing: having achieved success writing for gift annuals (surprise!), Lucinda Azureton writes a novel that fails to find an audience; Lucinda is so crushed, she wants to hear nothing more about the book, but the family can't seem to get away from it, and her husband goes bankrupt buying up all the copies and squelching publication of a second edition by booksellers who noticed that the first edition had sold out (so, it must be popular! They'll republish it and make oodles of money! Hurrah!). It's an entertaining look at publishing in the 1830s--from the author underwriting publication of the book to the ways in which publishers got rid of unsold copies (pages turn up used to line a trunk).
Essay-wise, we get a discussion of why New Englanders are so superior (it's the weather! I kid you not!) in "New England Climate." I do wish Samuel Goodrich hadn't been so fond of John Pierpont and included something by him in more than one volume of The Token. Here, it's "The Garden of Graves," which is just about as wince-inducing as it sounds. The ideal of the lush, green, pleasant cemetery was just getting traction, and Pierpont takes the opportunity to gush about how this kind of cemetery is great because it's just so pleasant, and it's just so wonderful to be reminded of death and then be buried in the "fresh" earth. Pierpont's sermons are long and boring, and I hate transcribing them. But they were popular.
Not quite as much bigotry as I've seen in other volumes. One of Neal's characters is vicious on the subject of Native Americans; and there's a nasty little comment about the Inuit in a piece on the weather, but that's pretty much it. Unless, of course, you count Hawthorne's expose of Puritan nastiness in "The Gentle Boy." Sedgwick explores the stereotypes people had of intellectual women in "Sketch of a Blue Stocking"; it's a pretty standard little story, with the intellectual woman turning out to be more domestic than expected. (This shouldn't be a spoiler for anyone who reads; much as I enjoy her work, Sedgwick trots down some pretty well-trodden lanes when it comes to plots.) Given that the wife of "My Wife's Novel" fails pretty spectacularly as a writer, there's an unpleasant undercurrent in The Token that women shouldn't be intellectually ambitious unless they can also be perfect little housewives, too.
All in all, an interesting volume with--thank goodness!--not as much faux-European glurge as in some other volumes.
The stories are ... more memorable. This volume includes four stories by Hawthorne, all of which are the antithesis of the sentimental stuff usually found in these gift books. "The Wives of the Dead" is tragic and open-ended; "The Gentle Boy" is tragic; "Roger Malvin's Burial" is ... tragic; and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" is just weird. There's also "David Whicher"--attributed to John Neal--which features a certain amount of racism, the brutal death of a small child, and a humorous and cringe-worthy ending. "My Cousin Lucy" is a rather charming story in which a teenager has to deal with jealousy. Catherine Maria Sedgwick supplies a sort of story: it starts as a story, but it appears that she had no real ending, so she calls it a "sketch." Timothy Flint contrasts Southerners and New Englanders in a humorous little bit of satiric melodrama involving the pairing-off of two Southerners and a New Englander. "The Indian Summer" appears to be by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (I may have this wrong) and is a weird little piece of melodrama.
And, oh, how I wish I could find out the author of "My Wife's Novel," which is a rather delicious and funny story about the perils of publishing: having achieved success writing for gift annuals (surprise!), Lucinda Azureton writes a novel that fails to find an audience; Lucinda is so crushed, she wants to hear nothing more about the book, but the family can't seem to get away from it, and her husband goes bankrupt buying up all the copies and squelching publication of a second edition by booksellers who noticed that the first edition had sold out (so, it must be popular! They'll republish it and make oodles of money! Hurrah!). It's an entertaining look at publishing in the 1830s--from the author underwriting publication of the book to the ways in which publishers got rid of unsold copies (pages turn up used to line a trunk).
Essay-wise, we get a discussion of why New Englanders are so superior (it's the weather! I kid you not!) in "New England Climate." I do wish Samuel Goodrich hadn't been so fond of John Pierpont and included something by him in more than one volume of The Token. Here, it's "The Garden of Graves," which is just about as wince-inducing as it sounds. The ideal of the lush, green, pleasant cemetery was just getting traction, and Pierpont takes the opportunity to gush about how this kind of cemetery is great because it's just so pleasant, and it's just so wonderful to be reminded of death and then be buried in the "fresh" earth. Pierpont's sermons are long and boring, and I hate transcribing them. But they were popular.
Not quite as much bigotry as I've seen in other volumes. One of Neal's characters is vicious on the subject of Native Americans; and there's a nasty little comment about the Inuit in a piece on the weather, but that's pretty much it. Unless, of course, you count Hawthorne's expose of Puritan nastiness in "The Gentle Boy." Sedgwick explores the stereotypes people had of intellectual women in "Sketch of a Blue Stocking"; it's a pretty standard little story, with the intellectual woman turning out to be more domestic than expected. (This shouldn't be a spoiler for anyone who reads; much as I enjoy her work, Sedgwick trots down some pretty well-trodden lanes when it comes to plots.) Given that the wife of "My Wife's Novel" fails pretty spectacularly as a writer, there's an unpleasant undercurrent in The Token that women shouldn't be intellectually ambitious unless they can also be perfect little housewives, too.
All in all, an interesting volume with--thank goodness!--not as much faux-European glurge as in some other volumes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review