THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

Born: November 11, 1836

Birthplace: Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Died: March 19, 1907

Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Other literary forms

In addition to short stories, Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote poems, essays, and novels. His best-known novel is The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). He was one of the most prominent men of letters in America in the 1880’s, serving as editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890.

Achievements

A great popular success during his lifetime, with his collected poems being published in a highly respected series while he was still in his late twenties, Thomas Bailey Aldrich was one of the most influential editors and men of letters of late nineteenth century America. His short story “Marjorie Daw” was one of the most famous stories of his era, earning him an international reputation.

Biography

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on November 11, 1836, Thomas Bailey Aldrich spent his early years in New York City and New Orleans. Although he returned to Portsmouth in 1849 to prepare for Harvard University, the death of his father made it necessary for him to go to work as a clerk for his uncle in New York instead. During this period, he wrote poetry, became a member of a group of writers that included Walt Whitman, and took a job as a reporter for the Home Journal. The popularity of his sentimental verse, “The Ballad of Babie Bell” (1854), encouraged him to quit his clerkship and to devote himself to writing full time.

Aldrich got a job as a literary critic for the Evening Mirror in 1855, after which he was soon made an editor. He lived in New York for ten years and was part of a bohemian literary circle that centered on the aestheticism of Fitz-James O’Brien. He was invited to Boston after the publication of his popular collection Marjorie Daw and Other People in 1873 to assume the editorship of Every Saturday, which reprinted European fiction and poetry for American audiences.

Aldrich published a number of stories and poems in The Atlantic Monthly, including his widely popular story “Marjorie Daw,” and eventually succeeded William Dean Howells as its editor in 1881, a position he held until 1890. In the last years of his life, he traveled and wrote travel literature, sketches, poems, and short prose. He died in Boston on March 19, 1907.

Analysis

Thomas Bailey Aldrich is primarily remembered in literary histories because of the effect of one story; however, that one story, “Marjorie Daw,” like those of other “one-story” writers—such as Frank Stockton, who wrote “The Lady or the Tiger,” and Shirley Jackson, who wrote “The Lottery”—brilliantly manages to exploit a basic human fascination with the blurring of fiction and reality. Often called a masterpiece of its type, “Marjorie Daw” clearly epitomizes the kind of story that O. Henry popularized more than half a century later—a story that seduces the reader into believing that a purely fictional creation is actually reality, only to reveal the ruse in a striking surprise reversal at the end.

Aldrich’s remaining stories, like much of his vers de société, are lightweight and romantic. Generally, they are witty and amusing sketches and tales that do not pretend to have any submerged meaning or symbolic significance. They are so unremarkable, in fact, that Aldrich’s restrained and self-consciously literary creation of “Marjorie Daw” seems like a fortunate inspirational accident. It is so well crafted, so controlled, and so aware of itself as a self-reflexive play with the basic nature of fiction that it will always remain a favorite anthology piece to represent the surprise-ending story so widely popular during the last half of the nineteenth century.

“Marjorie Daw”

This story achieved its initial popularity and has remained a representative of the well-made, surprise-ending story because Aldrich so masterfully manipulates reader fascination with imaginative creation taken as reality. Aldrich achieves this deception, which lies at the heart of all fictional creation, by setting up a situation in which the fictional “reader,” Flemming, cannot test the reality of the story his friend Delaney sends him via letters because of a broken leg.

Throughout the story, Aldrich makes use of various conventions of fiction-making, beginning with Delaney’s first letter apologizing that there is nothing to write about because he is living out in the country with no one around. Claiming he wishes he were a novelist so he could write Flemming a “summer romance,” Delaney then begins composing by asking Flemming to “imagine” the reality he recounts. After beginning a description of the house across the road from him, Delaney shifts to present tense, as if describing something he sees in reality: “A young woman appears on the piazza with some mysterious Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a book.” Although the description begins generally, it is enough to catch Flemming, who writes back wanting to know more about the girl, telling Delaney he has “a graphic descriptive touch.”

Delaney begins then to create a family for the girl and a name—Marjorie Daw. Although he provides various clues that what he is describing does not exist in the real world, such as noting that it was like “seeing a picture” to see Marjorie hovering around her invented father, Flemming is already convinced. Echoing the experience of many readers who encounter the objectification of a fantasy, Flemming writes back to Delaney, “You seem to be describing a woman I have known in some previous state of existence, or dreamed of in this,” claiming that if he saw a photo of her he would recognize her at once. When Delaney writes that, if he himself were on a desert island with Marjorie, he would be like a brother to her, he once again provides a clue to the imaginative nature of the story by saying, “Let me suggest a tropical island, for it costs no more to be picturesque.”

Throughout the story Delaney is baffled and fascinated by the strange obsessive effect his account is having on his friend, asking, “Do you mean to say that you are seriously half in love with a woman whom you have never seen—with a shadow, a chimera? for what else can Miss Daw be to you? I do not understand it at all.” Later Delaney makes another oblique reference to fiction-making by noting that he accepts things “as people do in dreams.” When Flemming insists on writing to Marjorie, Delaney reverses the fictional process by reminding him that because she knows Flemming only through him he is an abstraction to her, a figure in a dream—a dream from which the faintest shock would awaken her. When Flemming threatens to come to see Marjorie, Delaney’s letters become increasingly urgent, urging Flemming to stay where he is, for his presence would only “complicate matters.”

In the only bit of straight narrative in the story, Flemming arrives to find Delaney gone to Boston and no Marjorie Daw to be found. In the final letter, Delaney, filled with horror at what he has done, says he just wanted to make a little romance to interest Flemming and is regretful that he did it all too well. The story ends with these famous lines: “There isn’t any colonial mansion on the other side of the road, there isn’t any piazza, there isn’t any hammock—there isn’t any Marjorie Daw!”

The story is a classic one about the power of fiction to create a convincing sense of reality. Emulating the method of composition described by Edgar Allan Poe, Aldrich once said that he wrote the last paragraph of the story first and then worked up to it, avoiding digressions and side issues. Indeed, “Marjorie Daw” is solely dependent on its final, single effect: surprising and delighting the reader, who has been taken in as completely as Flemming has.

“A Struggle for Life”

This is the only other Aldrich story that has received continued reading and commentary. It depends on a surprise ending, the manipulation of time, and gothic conventions more successfully exploited later by Ambrose Bierce; it also capitalizes on the power of fiction-making, although not in as complex a way as “Marjorie Daw.” The frame of this story-within-a-story focuses on an external narrator who, passing a man on the street whose body looks thirty while his face looks sixty, says, half-aloud, “That man has a story, and I should like to know it.” When a voice at his side says he knows the man’s story, the inner story begins.

The story-within-the-story is about an American in Paris, Philip Wentworth, in love with a young French woman, who is found dead in her bed chamber. During her burial in the family vault, Wentworth faints and is locked in the tomb. The remainder of the story focuses on his efforts to remain alive by dividing his single candle into bite-sized pieces which he portions out to himself to eat until he can be rescued. The minutes pass like hours in the total darkness of the tomb, until two days later when Wentworth is down to his last piece of candle. The door of the tomb is flung open and he is led out, his hair gray and his eyes dimmed like an old man’s. The storyteller concludes by revealing that Wentworth had been in the tomb for only an hour and twenty minutes.

However, this is not Aldrich’s final surprise. The story so haunts the listener that a few days later, he approaches the old-faced man he thinks is Philip Wentworth. When the man says his name is Jones, the narrator realizes he has been duped by the teller, a gentleman of “literary proclivities” who is trying to write the Great American Novel.

Bibliography

Bellman, Samuel I. “Riding on Wishes: Ritual Make-Believe Patterns in Three Nineteenth-Century American Authors: Aldrich, Hale, Bunner.” In Ritual in the United States: Acts and Representations. Tampa, Fla.: American Studies Press, 1985. Discusses Aldrich’s creation of an imaginary individual in three stories, “A Struggle for Life,” “Marjorie Daw,” and “Miss Mehetabel’s Son.” Argues that “things are not what they seem” is the principle of these three stories, which are presented ritualistically in the form of a hoax or tall tale intended to trap the unwary.

Cohoon, Lorinda B. “Necessary Badness: Reconstructing Post-bellum Boyhood Citizenships in Our Young Folks and The Story Of a Bad Boy.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 29 (Spring, 2004): 5-31. Analyzes Aldrich’s novel The Story of a Bad Boy and Our Young Folks, a nineteenth century children’s magazine, to demonstrate how post-Civil War children’s literature began promoting the idea that American boyhood was a time when boys rebelled and rejected contemporary concepts of citizenship by engaging in pranks or taking trips into the wilderness.

Canby, Henry Seidel. The Short Story in English. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909. Canby discusses Aldrich, Frank R. Stockton, and H. C. Bunner as the masters of the short story of the “absurd situation” and incongruity. Calls Aldrich a stylist who infused his personality into tales of trivia and made them delightful. Argues Says that in “Marjorie Daw,” Aldrich was the first American to duplicate the French conte of Guy de Maupassant.

Cowie, Alexander. The Rise of the American Novel. New York: American Book, 1951. Although Cowie discusses Aldrich’s novels, his comments on narrative style apply equally well to Aldrich’s short stories. Calls Aldrich a vital writer whose contribution to American literature can be measured in terms of authenticity.

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Comprehensive history of American fiction, including a chapter on nineteenth century Gothic fiction and individualism. Extremely useful for contextualizing Aldrich’s work. Bibliographic references and index.

Greenslet, Ferris. Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. This is the official Aldrich biography; it contains numerous letters not available anywhere else. Describes Aldrich’s friendship with William Dean Howells, his influence on American literary life in the last half of the nineteenth century, and his editorship of The Atlantic Monthly. Makes passing remarks about his short stories throughout, noting how “Marjorie Daw” was the basis of Aldrich’s international reputation as a humorist.

O’Brien, Edward J. The Advance of the American Short Story. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1931. The originator of The Best American Short Stories series discusses Aldrich’s responsibility for the vogue of the surprise-ending story in the early twentieth century. Maintains that although “Marjorie Daw” is flawless, many of Aldrich’s stories are “pure sleight of hand.” Discusses Aldrich’s relationship to Frank Stockton and H. C. Bunner and how all three learned their tricks from Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Prosper Mérimée.

Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923. In this important early history of the American short story, Pattee summarizes Aldrich’s career and discusses the importance of “Marjorie Daw” in establishing an influential short-story type. Maintains that the story stood for art that is artless and that it has a Daudet-like grace and brilliance with the air of careless improvisation.

Samuels, Charles E. Thomas Bailey Aldrich. New York: Twayne, 1965. A general introduction to Aldrich’s life and art. Includes a chapter on his short stories and sketches in which “Marjorie Daw” is described as a masterpiece of compression that won Aldrich an instant international reputation. Discusses Aldrich’s stories of the fanciful gothic and his taste for the macabre.

Charles E. May