Peter Parley's Own Story From the Personal Narrative of the Late Samuel G. Goodrich, ("Peter Parley") — Key Ideas to Explore

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Authors: Goodrich, Samuel G. (Samuel Griswold), 1793-1860 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2014 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Historians -- United States -- Biography; Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Goodrich, Samuel G. (Samuel Griswold), 1793-1860; Ridgefield (Conn. : Town) Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 90,781

Reading time 395 min

Text sections 9

Before opening Peter Parley's Own Story From the Personal Narrative of the Late Samuel G. Goodrich, ("Peter Parley") — Key Ideas to Explore, the edition data offers a quick orientation: 90,781 words, 6 hr 35 min estimated reading time, and 9 detected text sections.

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #45165

Samuel G. Goodrich, writing as Peter Parley, recounts his Connecticut childhood and editorial career through vivid, anecdotal scenes. The narrative dwells on local character sketches, domestic economy, and the author's own procrastination, revealing a self-aware memoirist who treats memory as a series of sharply observed vignettes rather than a continuous arc.

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Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

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File: pg45165

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Birth and Parentage--The Old House--Ridgefield--The Meeting-house--Parson Mead--Keeler's Tavern--The Cannon-ball--Lieutenant Smith 9

The New House--High Ridge--Nathan Kellogg's Spy-glass--The Shovel--The Black Patch in the Road--Distrust of British Influence--Old Chich-es-ter--Aunt Delight--Return after Twenty Years 16

Ridgefield Society--Trades and Professions--Chimney-Corner Courtships--Domestic Economy--Dram-drinking--Family Products--Molly Gregory and Church Music--Travelling Artisans--Festival of the Quilts--Clerical Patronage--Raising a Church--The Retired Tailor and His Farm 30

Habits of the People--Their Costume--Amusements--Festivals-- Marriages--Funerals--Dancing--Winter Sports--My Two Grandmothers--Mechanical Genius--Importance of Whittling--Pigeons--Sporting Adventures 45

Death of Washington--Jerome Bonaparte and Miss Patterson--Sunday Travelling--Oliver Wolcott--Timothy Pickering--American Politeness quite natural--Locomotion--Public Conveyances--My Father's Chaise 58

The Upper and Lower Classes of Ridgefield--Master Stebbins and his School--What is a Noun?--Deacon Benedict and his Man Abijah--My Latin Acquirements--Family Worship--Widow Bennett--The Temple of Dagon 65

The Clergy of Fairfield--A Laughing Parson--The Three Deacons 79

Mat Olmstead, the Town Wit--The Salamander Hat--Solar Eclipse--The Old Hen and the Philosopher--Lieutenant Smith--Extraordinary Meteor--Fulton and his Steam-boat--Granther Baldwin and his Wife--Sarah Bishop and her Cave 87

Farewell to Home--Danbury--My New Vocation--My Brother-in-law-- His Conversations with Lawyer Hatch--Clerical Anecdotes 108

New Haven--Distinguished Men--Whitney's Cotton-gin--Durham--My Grandmother's Indian Puddings--In Search of a Doctor--Return to Danbury--The Cold Friday--Factory Workmen--Mathematics 117

Arrival at Hartford--My Occupation There--Restlessness--My Friend George Sheldon 129

War with England--In the Army--My Uncle's Advice-- Campaigning--On the March--Our Military Costume--My first Soldier's Supper 134

New London--Our Military Reputation--Sent with a Letter--British Cannon-balls--Out of Harm's Way--An Alarm--On Guard--Take a Prisoner--Strange Emotions--My Left-hand Chum--A Grateful Country 138

Effects of War in New England--Personal Experience--News of Peace--Illuminations--Confessions 145

Evil Effects of Night Study--Commencement of a Literary Career--Thoughts on Dancing--New York--Saratoga--Death of my Uncle--Become a Bookseller--Cold Summer--T'other Side of Ohio 149

Marriage--Walter Scott--Byron--Sidney Smith's Taunt--Publication of Original American Works--Mrs. Sigourney 159

Domestic Troubles--Sketch of Brainard--Aunt Lucy's Back-Parlor--The Fall of Niagara--Death of Brainard 164

My First Visit to Europe--Hurricane--Arrival at Liverpool-- London--Travel on the Continent--Return to Bristol--Interview with Hannah More--Design in Travelling--Visit to Ireland and Scotland 172

The Edinburgh Lions--Literary Celebrities--Jeffrey in the Forum--Sir Walter at the Desk--Riding with Scotch Ladies--Beautiful Scenery--A Scotch Mist 179

Blackwood--The General Assembly--Sir Walter Scott--Mr. and Mrs. Lockhart--Origin of "Tam O'Shanter"--Last Words of Scott 187

En Route for London--"The Laird o'Cockpen"--Localities of Legendary Fame--Difference between English and American Scenery 195

London again--Jacob Perkins and his Steam-gun--Dukes of Wellington, Sussex, and York--British Ladies at a Review--House of Commons and its Orators--Catalani--Distinguished Foreigners--Edward Irving compared to Edmund Kean--Byron lying in State 202

Return to the United States--Boston and its Worthies--Business Operations--Ackermann's Forget-Me-Not the Parent of all other Annuals--The American Species--Their Decline 216

"The Token"--N. P. Willis and Nathaniel Hawthorne--Comparison between them--Lady Authors--Publishers' Profits--Authors and Publishers 222

I become an Author--His real Name a profound Secret--How it was divulged--Great Success--Illness--The Doctors disagree--English Imitations--Conduct of a London Bookseller--Objections to Parley's Tales--Mother Goose 232

Children my first Patrons--A Visit to New Orleans--Feelings of Humiliation--The Mice eat my Papers--A Wrong Calculation 251

I make a Speech--Lecture on Ireland--Politics--Personal Attacks--Become a Senator--The "Fifteen Gallon Law"--A Pamphlet in its Favor--"My Neighbor Smith"--A Political Career unprofitable 257

Am appointed U. S. Consul to Paris--Louis XVIII.--A few Jottings upon French Notabilities--Cure for Hydrocephalus--Unsettled State of Things in Paris 266

Louis Philippe and the Revolution--List of Grievances--The Mob at the Madeleine--Barricades--"Down with Guizot!"--The Fight commenced--Flight of the King and Queen--Scene in the Chamber of Deputies--Sack of the Tuileries 274

After the Revolution--"Funeral of the Victims"--The Constituent Assembly--Paris in a State of Siege--Cavaignac--Louis Napoleon chosen President 296

The Author's Duties as Consul--Aspect of Things in Paris--Louis Napoleon's Designs--The 2nd of December, 1852--The New Reign of Terror complete--Louis Napoleon as Emperor--Out of Office--Return to New York--Conclusion 301

The Death of Peter Parley 313

AUNT DELIGHT (_Frontispiece_)

MAKING MAPLE SUGAR 37

FIRST ADVENTURE ON THE SEA 119

PETER PARLEY'S OWN STORY.

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE--THE OLD HOUSE--RIDGEFIELD--THE MEETING-HOUSE--PARSON MEAD--KEELER'S TAVERN--THE CANNON-BALL--LIEUTENANT SMITH.

In the western part of the State of Connecticut is a small town named Ridgefield. This title is descriptive, and indicates the general form and position of the place. It is, in fact, a collection of hills, rolled into one general and commanding elevation. On the west is a ridge of mountains, forming the boundary between the States of Connecticut and New York; to the south the land spreads out in wooded undulations to Long Island Sound; east and north, a succession of hills, some rising up against the sky and others fading away in the distance, bound the horizon. In this town, in an antiquated and rather dilapidated house of shingles and clapboards, I was born on the 19th of August, 1793.

My father, Samuel Goodrich, was minister of the Congregational Church of that place, and there was no other religious society and no other clergyman in the town. He was the son of Elizur Goodrich, a distinguished minister of the same persuasion at Durham, Connecticut. Two of his brothers were men of eminence--the late Chauncey Goodrich of Hartford, and Elizur Goodrich of New Haven. My mother was a daughter of John Ely, a physician of Saybrook, whose name figures, not unworthily, in the annals of the revolutionary war.

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Samuel G. Goodrich, better known by his pen name Peter Parley, opens his personal narrative not with a sweeping declaration but with a precise inventory of his birthplace: the old house in Ridgefield, the meeting-house, Parson Mead, and Keeler's Tavern with its embedded cannon-ball. This attention to material detail—a spy-glass, a shovel, a black patch in the road—announces a memoirist who trusts the evocative power of objects and places over abstract reflection. The excerpts reveal a writer who arranges his past as a series of discrete, almost ethnographic sketches: the chimney-corner courtships, the festival of the quilts, the travelling artisans who brought news and goods to a self-sufficient community. Goodrich's voice is that of a collector of curiosities, and his own story becomes a cabinet of New England life at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The Texture of Daily Life

Goodrich devotes several chapters to the habits, costume, amusements, and domestic economy of Ridgefield society. He catalogs trades and professions, describes dram-drinking and family products, and notes the role of clerical patronage in raising a church. The prose is thick with specific nouns—Molly Gregory and church music, the retired tailor and his farm—that ground the narrative in a world where a man's worth might be measured by his skill at whittling. One anecdote tells of a father who refused his daughter's suitor because the young man "whittles and whittles, and never makes nothing!" This concern with productive versus idle handiwork recurs throughout the excerpts, suggesting that Goodrich sees character expressed in the smallest manual acts.

The Editor at Work and at Play

A remarkable passage describes a week in which the editor Brainard—and by extension Goodrich himself—struggles to write. He reads Byron, pores over a Waverly novel, visits friends, and delays until the last moment. When he finally reaches his office, he falls into a "curious train of reflections, half comic and half serious," wishing he were a slave so that responsibility would be lifted from him. "After all," he muses, "liberty is the greatest possible slavery." The scene is rendered with novelistic immediacy: the dim fire, the small Franklin stove, the boy who demands copy, the scrap of coarse paper on which Brainard scribbles "The Falls of Niagara." Goodrich presents authorship not as inspiration but as a grim, comic negotiation with obligation.

Voices and Characters

The excerpts are populated by figures who speak in distinctive cadences. There is Mat Olmstead, the town wit; Lieutenant Smith; Granther Baldwin and his wife; Sarah Bishop and her cave. Goodrich does not simply name them but allows them to emerge through reported speech and anecdote. The dialogue attributed to Brainard—"Would to Heaven," he says, "I were a slave!"—is rendered with a droll mixture of fun and despair that feels authentic. Even the minor characters, like the boy with a "touselled head and inky countenance," are given a single line of curt dialogue: "Copy, Mr. Brainard!" These voices, preserved in the amber of Goodrich's memory, give the narrative a choral quality, as if the past speaks through many mouths.

Objects as Anchors

Throughout the excerpts, physical objects serve as prompts for memory and reflection. The old house, the meeting-house, the cannon-ball at Keeler's Tavern, the spy-glass, the shovel, the black patch in the road—each is a node around which a story gathers. Goodrich describes Brainard's table as "hacked along edges with many a restless penknife," and this image of accumulated, idle carving becomes a metaphor for the writer's own method: he whittles at memory, shaping it into anecdote. The narrative itself is a kind of whittling—a patient, repetitive shaping of raw experience into something that, if not always useful, is at least telling. The reader is invited to see the world through these notched surfaces.

The Self as Subject and Object

Goodrich's narrative stance is that of a man observing his own younger self with a mixture of affection and irony. He does not claim heroic consistency; instead, he presents himself as a creature of impulse and delay, subject to colds, procrastination, and the lure of a rocking chair by the fire. The passage in which he accompanies Brainard to the office is written in the first person but with a curious detachment: "As was not uncommon, I go with him." This doubling—the older narrator shadowing the younger man—creates a subtle tension between the self who acted and the self who remembers. The memoir becomes a dialogue between these two figures, each regarding the other with a knowing, half-amused eye.

Readers approaching Peter Parley's Own Story should expect not a continuous autobiography but a mosaic of scenes, each polished to a hard, clear surface. Goodrich's method is associative rather than chronological; he follows the grain of memory rather than the line of a timeline. The pleasure of the text lies in its particulars—the taste of a grandmother's Indian pudding, the feel of a spy-glass, the sound of a parson's laugh. To read it is to sit beside the author as he turns over the relics of his past, holding each one up to the light.

I keep thinking about how Parley lingers over small moments—the household economy, a neighbor’s odd habit—without rushing to a moral. It’s the same quietness I felt reading The Life and Labors of Elias Hicks — Context and Discussion, where a life unfolds in deliberate, unhurried details rather than grand arcs. Some memories just sit with you, like a porch step in late afternoon.