Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on November 11, 1836.^[3] When Aldrich was a child, his father moved to New Orleans. After 10 years, Aldrich was sent back to Portsmouth to get ready for college. This time in his life is talked about in his semi-autobiographical story The Story of a Bad Boy (1870). This means that it is based partially on his life and partially on a fictional character. In this book, "Tom Bailey" is the young hero.

Aldrich gave up on going to college after his father's death in 1849. At age 16, he joined his uncle's business office in New York in 1852 and started working on the newspapers and magazines. Aldrich made friends with other young poets, artists and wits of New York's "bohemia" of the early 1860s, including Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Henry Stoddard, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman. From 1856 to 1859, Aldrich worked for the Home Journal, which was edited by Nathaniel Parker Willis at that time. During the Civil War, he was the editor of the New York Illustrated News.

In 1865 Aldrich went back to New England, where he was editor in Boston for ten years for a publishing company called Ticknor and Fields — at the time they were very well thought of — of the eclectic weekly Every Saturday. It stopped being made in 1875. From 1881 to 1890, Aldrich was editor of the important Atlantic Monthly. As editor, he made tension with his publisher Henry Houghton by not agreeing to publish commissioned articles (ones that had been paid for) by his friends, including Woodrow Wilson and Marion Crawford. When Houghton argued with Aldrich for refusing articles from his friend Daniel Coit Gilman, Aldrich threatened to quit his job and finally did so in June 1890.^[4]

Meanwhile Aldrich carried on with his private writing, both in prose (the sort of writing found in most books) and verse (poetry, songs, etc). He had many skills. He was well known for his form in poetry. His many books of verse, mainly 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 (1883), Wyndham Towers (1889), and the collected editions of 1865, 1882, 1897 and 1900, showed him to be a poet of lyrical skill and light touch. Critics said that his work was like Robert Herrick's.

Aldrich's longer narrative or dramatic poems did not do as well. His important works include "Hesperides," "When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan," "Before the Rain," "Nameless Pain," "The Tragedy," "Seadrift," "Tiger Lilies," "The One White Rose," "Palabras Cariñosas," "Destiny," or the eight-line poem "Identity."

 

Beginning with the collection of stories called Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873), Aldrich wrote works of realism and quiet humour. His books Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877), and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880) had more dramatic action. The first showed Portsmouth with the loving touch shown in the shorter funny tale, A Rivermouth Romance (1877). In An Old Town by the Sea (1893), Aldrich wrote about his place of birth again. Travel and description are the theme of From Ponkapog to Pesth (1883).

Aldrich married and had two sons.^[5] Mark Twain is said to hated Aldrich's wife Lilian. He wrote in 1893: "Lord, I loathe that woman so! She is an idiot—an absolute idiot—and does not know it ... and her husband, the sincerest man that walks ... tied for life to this vacant hellion, this clothes-rack, this twaddling, blethering, driveling blatherskite!"^[6]

The Aldrich family were close friends of Henry L. Pierce, a man who had made a lot of money from working with chocolate. Pierce had also been known for being Mayor of Boston. When Pierce died in 1896, he said in his will that the Aldriches could own his home in Canton, Massachusetts.

In 1901, Aldrich's son Charles, who had gotten married the year before, was found to have a disease called tuberculosis. Aldrich built two houses, one for his son and one for him and his family, in Saranac Lake, New York, which was the leading treatment centre for the disease at the time. On March 6, 1904, Charles Aldrich died of tuberculosis, at the age of thirty-four. The family left Saranac Lake and never went back.^[7]

Aldrich died in Boston on March 19, 1907. The last thing he was known to have said was, "In spite of it all, I am going to sleep; put out the lights."^[8] His Life was written by Ferris Greenslet (1908).

 

• List of poets from North America

•   This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Aldrich, Thomas Bailey". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 536–537.

•   Works written by or about Thomas Bailey Aldrich at Wikisource
• 1918 Biographical Sketch
• Works by Thomas Bailey Aldrich at Project Gutenberg
• Guide to Thomas Bailey Aldrich papers at Houghton Library Archived 2011-11-21 at the Wayback Machine, Harvard University