ALDRICH'S TOM: Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad
Boy first appeared serially, in 1869 in Our Young Folks magazine. The "bad boy" is
named Tom Bailey, and is, as Alrich's adult narrator says at the outset, "not such a very bad, but a
pretty bad boy." The title makes it clear that Aldrich, like MT, intends his story as a kind of
counter-narrative: neither Tom is a "model boy." Aldrich's book is an account of his childhood in
"Rivermouth," New Hampshire, and focuses on various adventures as remembered and retold by
the man he grew into. I picked the selection below because it helps suggest how much a fiction
like this one, or Tom Sawyer, or even Little Women, although ostensibly written
for children, appeals to the generation of contemporary grown ups as an act of nostalgia. Here, as
the narrator describes heroism in combat, what is obviously being evoked and nostalgically elided
at the same time is the Civil War (which was when Americans learned to read "order of battle
maps" like the one Aldrich includes). In the simpler times being remembered, young men from
the "North" and "South" fight bravely — and no one dies or is permanently disfigured. Neither
Bailey nor MT fought in the War, but I'm sure their accounts of ante-bellum innocence helped
contemporaries struggling to digest the trauma of the War.
