(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
Life and sayings of Mrs. Partington and others of the family (1854)
(This book, "Life and sayings of Mrs. Partington : and oth...)
This book, "Life and sayings of Mrs. Partington : and others of the family", by Shillaber, B. P. (Benjamin Penhallow), 1814-1890, is a replication of a book originally published before 1854. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible. This book was created using print-on-demand technology. Thank you for supporting classic literature.
Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber was an American humorist, newspaperman, and poet.
Background
Benjamin was born on July 12, 1814 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, United States, one of six children of William and Sarah Leonard (Sawyer) Shillaber. He was a descendant of John Shillaber who emigrated from Devonshire to Salem, Massachussets, toward the end of the seventeenth century.
Education
Educated in the district schools, he served his apprenticeship years as printer's devil in the Dover offices, 1829-31, and in the Portsmouth offices of the Portsmouth Courier and the Christian Herald.
Career
In the spring of 1833 Shillaber became a book-compositor with the printing firm of Tuttle & Weeks on School Street, Boston, who printed the popular Peter Parley tales of Samuel Griswold Goodrich, the New England Farmer, and some of the anti-slavery poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier.
In October 1835 violent nasal hemorrhages forced him to the tropics, where for about two years he served as compositor on the Royal Gazette of British Guiana (Demerara). Restored to health, he returned to Boston in July 1838. Shortly thereafter he joined the Boston Post, then under the editorship of Charles Gordon Greene, an outstanding journalistic figure of the forties.
Until 1847 he was a "manipulator of the stick and rule" without any aspirations for a literary career, when a squib he set up in the Post chanced to make a great hit. In this a certain imaginary Mrs. Partington, who had been described by Sydney Smith as vainly mopping back the ocean, was reported to have said that it "made no difference to her whether flour was dear or cheap, as she always had to pay just so much for a half-dollar's worth. " The sayings and doings of the old lady soon made her a national figure and Shillaber an outstanding American humorist.
In 1850 he became editor of the Pathfinder and Railway Guide, distributed by "news-butchers" on railroads and steamboats; a year later he began to edit a humorous weekly, the Carpet-Bag, through whose columns the nationally popular sayings of Mrs. Partington continued. Although the Carpet-Bag boasted the best humorous writers of the day, including in addition to the older established men the youthful Charles Farrar Browne, S. L. Clemens, Charles Bertrand Lewis, , it died prematurely in 1853 after two years' struggle.
To the Boston Post Shillaber returned that year as local reporter, remaining until 1856; from 1856 to 1866 he was on the staff of the Saturday Evening Gazette, and subsequently he spent two years on the lyceum circuits giving humorous lectures.
Later he retired to his home in Chelsea, Massachussets. Although he abandoned direct connection with the press, he was an occasional correspondent and contributor, wrote his Ike Partington juveniles, and continued the writing of poems, always referring to them as "rhymes" and to himself as a "rhymist. "