Our Charley, and What to Do with Him.
(Stowe, Harriet Beecher). Stowe, Mrs. H.B. Our Charley. And what to do with him. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., (1858).
12mo.; frontispiece illustration with tissue-guard; five other illustrations throughout with tissue-guards; endpapers browned; blue cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; spine bumped.
First edition of Stowe’s volume of short stories named after her youngest child, Charles Edward Stowe (1850-1934). As a child, “Charley” was apparently quite a handful, and in “What Is to be Done with Our Charley?” Stowe writes lovingly of his youthful escapades and penchant for causing mischief:
While [Charley] is asleep, our souls have rest; we know where he is and what he is about and sleep is a gracious state; but then he wakes up bright and early, and begins tooting, pounding, hammering, singing, meddling, asking questions, and, in short, overturning the peace of society generally, for about thirteen hours out of the twenty-four. (p. 17)
The first two stories in the volume, “Our Charley” and “What to Do With Our Charley?” are solely about Charles Stowe and are narrated from a first-person perspective. The remaining six stories, also geared towards a young audience, involve other children getting into various adventures involving animals and sometimes fantastical creatures such as fairies.
Stowe sent Charley to a progressive boarding school in Washington, CT called The Gunnery, but in 1864 he ran away to become a sailor at the age of 14. After less than a month at sea, however, he returned home to Connecticut. Eventually, he decided to join the clergy and was ordained as a minister in 1878. With his wife and three children, he finally settled in Simsbury, CT, not far from his parents’ home in Hartford.
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