Book Review: A Boy’s Town
Jul. 26th, 2022 09:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWilliam Dean Howells’ A Boy’s Town is a memoir about his boyhood in a small Ohio town in the 1840s and early 1850s, written for “Harper’s Young People” (presumably the youth branch of Harper’s Magazine?) in 1890 and chock full of fascinating detail not only about boyhood in antebellum America, but also about American society generally at that time.
Howells notes, for instance, that his grandfather “brought shame to his grandson's soul by being an abolitionist in days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free. My boy's father restored his self-respect in a measure by being a Henry Clay Whig, or a constitutional anti-slavery man.”
(Throughout the book he writes about himself in the third person as “my boy.” Why? Who can say. I’m almost certain I’ve seen other 19th century autobiographical writing take on this gossamer gloss of non-autobiography, although of course I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head.)
Howells grew up in southern Ohio, which, like southern Indiana and southern Illinois, was settled mostly by southerners crossing the Ohio River, hence the intense local disfavor toward abolitionists. Howells’ father later sold his Whig newspaper in outrage when the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican-American War and presumed pro-slavery man, although he had to eat humble pie and return to the Whigs when Taylor turned out to be an anti-slavery man after all…
In some ways, the boys’ world was quite separate from the adult world, with its own strange exacting codes more scrupulously observed than any written law. For instance, one of the ways the boys showed affection was by throwing rocks at each other: “They came out of their houses, or front-yards, and began to throw stones, when they were on perfectly good terms, and they usually threw stones in parting for the day.”
And yet the boys’ world also reflected the adult world, as in this example of stone-throwing as an act of hostility (it could be either! Totally context-dependent!): “There was a family of German boys living across the street, that you could stone whenever they came out of their front gate, for the simple and sufficient reason that they were Dutchmen, and without going to the trouble of a quarrel with them. My boy was not allowed to stone them; but when he was with the other fellows, and his elder brother was not along, he could not help stoning them.”
The Howells family seems to have worked hard to imbue their children with respect for people regardless of race, creed, nationality, etc., but they were fighting an uphill battle against the tides of the time - hence young Howells’ embarrassment about Grandpa’s abolitionism, joining in when the other boys throw stones at the Germans, etc. In the long run, however, the home training seems to have stuck: Howells later on took a deeply unpopular stand against the Haymarket Riot trials, joined the Anti-Imperialist League with his friend Mark Twain in 1898, marched in favor of votes for women, and so forth and so on.
Lastly, two examples of the nineteenth century usage of “in love”:
“The son of one of the tavern-keepers was skilled in catching [frogs],...and while my boy shuddered at him for his way of catching frogs, he was in love with him for his laughing eyes and the kindly ways he had, especially with the little boys.”
Then, in the very next chapter, Howells informs us that “he was in love with the girl who caught her hand on the meat-hook, and secretly suffered much on account of her. She had black eyes, and her name long seemed to him the most beautiful name for a girl; he said it to himself with flushes from his ridiculous little heart.”
Are these the same kind of being in love? Who could say! Perhaps, as with throwing rocks at people, the exact meaning of “in love” is context-dependent. Either way, Howells definitely informed the entire 1890 readership of Harper’s Young People that as a child he was in love with the tavern-keeper’s son, and nobody batted an eye.
Howells notes, for instance, that his grandfather “brought shame to his grandson's soul by being an abolitionist in days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free. My boy's father restored his self-respect in a measure by being a Henry Clay Whig, or a constitutional anti-slavery man.”
(Throughout the book he writes about himself in the third person as “my boy.” Why? Who can say. I’m almost certain I’ve seen other 19th century autobiographical writing take on this gossamer gloss of non-autobiography, although of course I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head.)
Howells grew up in southern Ohio, which, like southern Indiana and southern Illinois, was settled mostly by southerners crossing the Ohio River, hence the intense local disfavor toward abolitionists. Howells’ father later sold his Whig newspaper in outrage when the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican-American War and presumed pro-slavery man, although he had to eat humble pie and return to the Whigs when Taylor turned out to be an anti-slavery man after all…
In some ways, the boys’ world was quite separate from the adult world, with its own strange exacting codes more scrupulously observed than any written law. For instance, one of the ways the boys showed affection was by throwing rocks at each other: “They came out of their houses, or front-yards, and began to throw stones, when they were on perfectly good terms, and they usually threw stones in parting for the day.”
And yet the boys’ world also reflected the adult world, as in this example of stone-throwing as an act of hostility (it could be either! Totally context-dependent!): “There was a family of German boys living across the street, that you could stone whenever they came out of their front gate, for the simple and sufficient reason that they were Dutchmen, and without going to the trouble of a quarrel with them. My boy was not allowed to stone them; but when he was with the other fellows, and his elder brother was not along, he could not help stoning them.”
The Howells family seems to have worked hard to imbue their children with respect for people regardless of race, creed, nationality, etc., but they were fighting an uphill battle against the tides of the time - hence young Howells’ embarrassment about Grandpa’s abolitionism, joining in when the other boys throw stones at the Germans, etc. In the long run, however, the home training seems to have stuck: Howells later on took a deeply unpopular stand against the Haymarket Riot trials, joined the Anti-Imperialist League with his friend Mark Twain in 1898, marched in favor of votes for women, and so forth and so on.
Lastly, two examples of the nineteenth century usage of “in love”:
“The son of one of the tavern-keepers was skilled in catching [frogs],...and while my boy shuddered at him for his way of catching frogs, he was in love with him for his laughing eyes and the kindly ways he had, especially with the little boys.”
Then, in the very next chapter, Howells informs us that “he was in love with the girl who caught her hand on the meat-hook, and secretly suffered much on account of her. She had black eyes, and her name long seemed to him the most beautiful name for a girl; he said it to himself with flushes from his ridiculous little heart.”
Are these the same kind of being in love? Who could say! Perhaps, as with throwing rocks at people, the exact meaning of “in love” is context-dependent. Either way, Howells definitely informed the entire 1890 readership of Harper’s Young People that as a child he was in love with the tavern-keeper’s son, and nobody batted an eye.
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