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Farm Boy Stories
12019-07-16T10:07:39+00:00Carlson Given13c557169bb9d07ac213dc352b3e613ee6aa4bc816Sanchez-Eppler Page 6plain2022-09-06T20:22:51+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141The question of what lives are worthy of narration underlies The Hidden Literacies Project as a whole. While Youth’s Companion sought a wide demographic in terms of class and region, the magazine’s founding had largely been motivated by cultural anxieties about the children of a more leisured and urban middle class, deprived of the physical activity, intimacy with nature, and productive labor characteristic of farm boys like the Nelsons. The lead serial in the 1892 Youth’s Companion, “A Tale of the Tow-Path,”tells a didactic tale about a rural boy who, tiring of the labor of haying, goes fishing and is caught and punished by his father. Angry at what feels like injustice, Joe runs away and so learns to value his strict moral home and the honest work of farming. For the city boys reading about Joe’s trials and transformation, the farm becomes a symbolic space of virtue. The Nelsons generally do not write such didactic tales—a quick perusal of the serial stories included in this issue of Chit Chat will reveal far more of violence and dime novel adventure than can be found in the pages of Youth’s Companion. But the brothers do seem to recognize the role that their rural lives played in the national imaginary of boyhood. One of the stories in the January Chit Chat narrates the pleasures of a group of city children sent to the country for the summer. In this tale there is no haying, and the boys get to spend all their time in a mix of fun, angler knowledge and skill, and lazy, lyrical beauty: “soon they began to fish the farmer caught lots and Tom and Roy a few what fun it was now and then they saw a pickrel go skimming along or a black bass laying near the top of the water sunning him self and Tom and Roy was sorry when the farmer said they must go in to dinner.”
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12019-07-16T10:15:28+00:00Carlson Given13c557169bb9d07ac213dc352b3e613ee6aa4bc8Commentary: Essay and PodcastJoelle Thomas12Karen Sánchez-Eppler Commentaryplain2022-09-06T14:56:18+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141