The Peterkin Papers

The Peterkin Papers is a book-length collection of humorous stories by Lucretia Peabody Hale, and is her best-known work.

The first of the Peterkin stories appeared in 1867 in a magazine named "Our Young Folks," later named "St. Nicholas Magazine." The series continued for nine years, and made the Peterkins a household word.

The collected stories were published in 1880 under the title "The Peterkin Papers," and reprinted in 1960.

The Peterkins are a lovable but comically inept family with ingenuity, logic, resourcefulness, and energy—but not common sense. Many chapters show the family trying to solve some problem in a roundabout way, failing, and eventually being rescued by "the wise old lady from Philadelphia," who cuts the Gordian knot with an effective but prosaic solution. The charm of the story is not in the plot, but in the telling, building up layers of complication, and the affectionate fun poked at the not-quite-cartoonish characters. The "wise old lady's" solution is usually obvious to the reader, even the young listener, from the start.

The very first story exemplifies the formula. Mrs. Peterkin accidentally puts salt in her coffee. Trying to solve the problem, the family first visits the chemist, who tries to counteract the salt: "First he put in a little chlorate of potassium, and the family tried it all round, but it tasted no better." He adds bichlorate of magnesia and tartaric acid::"I have it!" exclaimed the chemist,—"a little ammonia is just the thing." No, it wasn't the thing at all.

They then visit "the herb-woman" who tries a long list of herbs including flagroot, snakeroot, spruce gum, oppermint and sappermint, all to no avail. In desperation they visit the wise old lady from Philadelphia who says "Why doesn't your mother make a fresh cup of coffee?" They all shout with joy, "Why didn't we think of that?"

Another story finds one of the Peterkin girls sitting on the porch and playing the piano through the living-room window because the "carters" had delivered it facing that way. Being the Peterkins, they devise ingenious ways of using it in the position in which it was delivered; and it takes the lady from Philadelphia to suggest that they could turn the piano around. Yet another has them remodeling their house to raise a portion of the living-room ceiling to accommodate a Christmas tree that is too tall.

In one story, Mr. Peterkin purchases a camera so that the family can pose for a portrait. But when Mr. Peterkin looks through the lens, the family is upside-down. (All cameras invert the image, but the inversion is visible only when using a view camera of the sort Mr. Peterkin had.) In order for the photograph to come out correctly, the Peterkin family must pose upside-down while standing on their heads, so that they are the right way up when viewed through the lens.

One of the Peterkin sons, Agamemnon, is bookish and very well-read, but in all practical matters he is as useless as the rest of his family. The author may have intended Agamemnon Peterkin as a satire on intellectuals who have little or no practical knowledge.

The stories charm modern readers for the details of life in the 1870s as lived by an upper-middle-class family in a small village about an hour's train ride from Boston.