Up for auction a RARE! “Neighbor Jackwood” John Townsend Trowbridge Hand Written Envelope Dated 1907 Mounted to a 5.75X9 Card. Trowbridge signatures rarely come to auction as most of his original works and documents are housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
ES-9246E
John
Townsend Trowbridge (September
18, 1827 – February 12, 1916) was an American author. Trowbridge was born
in Ogden, New York, to
Windsor Stone Trowbridge and Rebecca Willey. His birthplace was a log cabin his
father constructed through the use of wooden pegs. Trowbridge received an unremarkable education,
but had an early interest in literature. He recalled in his autobiography that
he wrote his first poem at age 13. His first published work was published
anonymously in the Rochester Republican when he was 16. He
started working as a teacher and on a farm for one year in Illinois. In 1847, at age 19, he moved to New York City to become an author and, with the
assistance of Mordecai Manuel Noah,
began publishing in periodicals while also working at a pencil case engraving
factory. He moved to Boston in August 1848, and in 1850,
during the absence of Benjamin Perley Poore in
Washington, D.C., edited Poore's paper, the Sentinel, but his
editorial on the fugitive-slave law nearly
destroyed the paper's popularity. He married Cornelia Warren (May 1, 1834 –
March 23, 1864) in 1860. After her death, he remarried to Sarah Adelaide Newton
in 1873. In June 1867 Trowbridge bought a house at 152 Pleasant Street,
Arlington, Massachusetts where he lived until his death on February 12, 1916. Trowbridge also spent much time in Kennebunkport, Maine,
where he built Spouting Rock Cottage, near to Spouting Rock and Blowing
Cave, both of which he named. His novels include Neighbor Jackwood (1857),
an antislavery novel; The Old Battle-Ground (1859); Cudjo's
Cave (1864); The Three Scouts (1865); Lucy
Arlyn (1866); Neighbors' Wives (1867); Coupon
Bonds, and Other Stories (1873); and Farnell's Folly.
Another is Evening At The Farm. Trowbridge wrote numerous works
under the pseudonym of Paul Creyton, including The Midshipman's Revenge (1849), Kate
the Accomplice, or, The Preacher and the Burglar (1849), The
Deserted Family, or, Wanderings of an Outcast (1853), Father
Brighthopes, or, An Old Clergyman's Vacation (1853), Burr
Cliff: its Sunshine and its Clouds (1853); Martin Merrivale:
His X Mark (1854), Iron Thorpe (1855), Neighbor
Jackwood (1857). Among his very many juvenile tales are The
Drummer Boy, The Prize Cup, The Lottery Ticket, The
Tide-Mill Stories, The Toby Trafford Series, The Little
Master, and the Jack Hazard series. His published volumes
of verse include: The Vagabonds, and Other Poems; The
Emigrant's Story, and Other Poems; A Home Idyl, and Other Poems; The
Lost Earl; and The Book of Gold, and Other Poems. The
Vagabonds, At Sea, and Midsummer are among his
best-known poems. His long poem Guy Vernon: A Novelette in Verse was
first published anonymously in the compilation A Masque of Poets (1878). In Darius Green and
his Flying Machine, Trowbridge penned the following prophetic verse:
"Darius was clearly of the opinion / That the air is also man's dominion /
And that with paddle or fin or pinion, / We soon or late shall navigate / The
azure as now we sail the sea. He is today perhaps best remembered for his
study The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities (1867, republished two years later with
additions by another author as A Picture of the Desolated States and
the Work of Reconstruction, 1865-1868). Trowbridge toured much of the
defeated Confederacy during the summer of 1865 and the following winter. He
observed carefully, and talked with a wide variety of people of both sexes,
including freedmen, die-hard Rebels, Unionists, farmers, businessmen, refugees,
and Northern entrepreneurs. In his book, he lets these people speak in their
own voices, often adding his own comments. His book can profitably be read with
those of John Richard Dennett (The South As It Is: 1865-1866) and Whitelaw Reid (After the War: A Tour of the Southern
States, 1865-1866). All three accounts are written from the perspective of
a loyal and fair Northerner genuinely concerned about conditions in the South
and the evolving policies of the United States towards that section. From 1865
to 1873 Trowbridge was co-editor with Lucy Larcom of Our Young Folks. Since his death he has been well known as
a friend of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Trowbridge's papers are located at Houghton Library at Harvard University.