As a Boston writer and editor, Benjamin Shillaber adapted the popular Yankee traditions of the country bumpkin and crackerbox philosopher to a new urban environment. In the mid nineteenth century, his short-lived journal The Carpet-Bag was a landmark in the transition from regional vernacular humor to a national comedy of manners and characters, owing to contributors such as Charles Farrar Browne and Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). A shrewd ignoramus but a benevolent successor to Benjamin Franklin's Silence Dogood, Shillaber's Mrs. Partington represented the central figure of his little world of hilarious though resilient misfits at odds with the many "Apostles of the Newness," so named by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who dominated New England culture at midcentury.

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber was one of six children of William and Sarah Leonard Sawyer Shillaber. Both of his grandfathers had served in the Revolutionary War. He...