The Peterkin Papers

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

Publication history

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.

Analysis

The Peterkins were a large family who were extremely intelligent, but didn't have a lick of common sense among them. Whenever they were confronted with a problem that had a simple solution and a complex one, they unerringly went for the complex one--the simple one never occurred to them. They were usually rescued by their neighbor, the Lady from Philadelphia, known for her wisdom; which usually amounted to the plain, commonsense solution that had been staring them in the face and which any normal person would have seized on immediately.

External links

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