Books with title Stories from The Peterkin papers

Meet the Peterkins, a lovable crew with a notable lack of common sense. These comic tales chronicle their roundabout attempts to solve simple, everyday problems. Cheerful and energetic, the close-knit family of eight resides in a village near Boston. They play their piano from the front porch because the movers left it with the keyboard facing the parlor window, and they're ready to raise the ceiling to make way for a towering Christmas tree. Only the timely intervention of "the wise old lady from Philadelphia" keeps them from acting on their more elaborate madcap schemes.Author Lucretia Hale, sister to writer and cleric Edward Everett Hale, helped break new ground in children's literature by writing stories to amuse young people rather than instruct or uplift them. These tales first appeared in 1867 in a popular children's magazine of the era, and in the course of a decade, the Peterkins became a household word. "The years pass them along to every new generation," noted Harper's Bazaar, "with the hint that human nature is about the same everywhere and all the time." Hailed by The New York Times as "a masterpiece" and graced with 153 delightful black-and-white illustrations, this book offers a glimpse of nineteenth-century New England life that charms readers of all ages

The Peterkins were a lovable but comically inept family that possess ingenuity, logic, resourcefulness, and energy--but not common sense. The general formula is that the family tries to solve some problem in an appealingly roundabout way, fails, and is eventually rescued by "the wise old lady from Philadelphia" who always cuts the Gordian knot with some effective but prosaic solution. The charm of the story is not in the plot, but in the telling, with the building up of 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, or even the young listener, from the start.

Before Amelia Bedelia and the Stupids there were the Peterkins. The Peterkin Papers collects all of Lucretia Hale’s beloved tales of a thoroughly silly family.The Peterkin Papers record the antics of the most memorably and hopelessly bumbling of respectable American families. Confronted by the endless challenges of daily life, the Peterkins rise to every occasion with misguided aplomb: they sit out in the sun for hours and fail to go for a ride because they’ve forgotten to unhitch the horse, they play the piano from the porch through the parlor window because the movers left the keyboard turned that way, they decide to raise the ceiling to accommodate a too-tall Christmas tree. Only the timely intervention of their great and good friend, the Lady from Philadelphia, can be counted on to get the Peterkins out of their latest scrape.A classic of American children’s literature and a masterpiece of deadpan drollery, The Peterkin Papers restore our astonishment at the ordinary, finding a rich vein of humor and happy surprise in the mere fact of our surviving the trivialities and tribulations of family life.

Meet the Peterkins, a lovable crew with a notable lack of common sense. These comic tales chronicle their roundabout attempts to solve simple, everyday problems. Cheerful and energetic, the close-knit family of eight resides in a village near Boston. They play their piano from the front porch because the movers left it with the keyboard facing the parlor window, and they're ready to raise the ceiling to make way for a towering Christmas tree. Only the timely intervention of "the wise old lady from Philadelphia" keeps them from acting on their more elaborate madcap schemes.Author Lucretia Hale, sister to writer and cleric Edward Everett Hale, helped break new ground in children's literature by writing stories to amuse young people rather than instruct or uplift them. These tales first appeared in 1867 in a popular children's magazine of the era, and in the course of a decade, the Peterkins became a household word. "The years pass them along to every new generation," noted Harper's Bazaar, "with the hint that human nature is about the same everywhere and all the time." Hailed by The New York Times as "a masterpiece" and graced with 153 delightful black-and-white illustrations, this book offers a glimpse of nineteenth-century New England life that charms readers of all ages