Clinton

Clinton by Walter Aimwell (1853)

Clinton*, by Walter Aimwell, is a didactic novel for young readers set in the rural Maine village of Brookdale, following the moral development of thirteen-year-old Clinton Davenport over the course of a formative year. Clinton lives with his parents and young sister Annie on a farm near Brookdale. He is industrious, mechanically gifted, and enterprising, having built birdhouses, trellises, and a duck pond, while also managing a profitable poultry business since the age of nine. His parents are educated and attentive, requiring him to study daily and to share in farm labor. Clinton is fundamentally well-intentioned but possesses one significant weakness: he cannot say no when pressured by peers, and he dreads ridicule more than wrongdoing. This flaw is exposed through his friendship with Jerry Preston, the poorly supervised son of a lumberman, and Jerry's city cousin Oscar, who visits Brookdale for the summer. Oscar is bold, idle, and morally dissolute, wielding influence over the village boys through his daring manner and tales of city life. Under their influence, Clinton abandons his post at home to swim at the pond, breaking a tacit trust with his father. He later accompanies the boys to a secluded waterfall, smokes his first cigar against his better judgment, and delays an errand his father needed completed promptly. He returns home ill from the tobacco, misleads his parents about the cause of his sickness, and quietly suffers a guilty conscience rather than confess. Oscar and Jerry meanwhile descend into open delinquency. They steal choice pears from a neighbor, Mr. Upham, and are caught and physically punished. Nursing resentment, they burn Upham's woodlot in deliberate revenge. The arson leads to a formal examination before the local justice of the peace, Squire Walcott. Clinton testifies honestly about a conversation in which Oscar had inquired about the woodlot's location. Jerry, overwhelmed by guilt, confesses and implicates Oscar, who is committed to the county jail pending trial. Oscar's father eventually secures his release by compensating Upham and removing his son from the state. Oscar's story ends there, a cautionary portrait of unchecked willfulness. Jerry, left without his cousin's company and increasingly ungovernable at home, begins playing truant from the winter school. He pressures Clinton to forge written excuses signed with Jerry's mother's name. Clinton resists initially but capitulates through a combination of moral weakness and social anxiety, allowing Jerry to take a draft note from his hand rather than making a firm refusal. The forgeries multiply. Jerry eventually escalates his threats, warning Clinton that exposure will implicate them both. Clinton finds himself trapped by a single false step compounded repeatedly. The scheme unravels when Jerry's mother, in a chance conversation with the schoolmaster, reveals she has written no excuses. The teacher investigates, identifies Clinton's handwriting, and confronts him privately. Clinton breaks down and confesses fully. The schoolmaster, recognizing genuine penitence, refrains from public punishment but insists Clinton confess to his parents. Clinton does so that same evening in a scene of honest reckoning, and his parents respond with sorrow and measured discipline, canceling a long-anticipated trip to Boston as his punishment while affirming their love and offering guidance. Jerry, learning that discovery is imminent, runs away from home the following Sunday, stealing thirty dollars from his mother's bureau before departing. He makes his way to Portland by coach and train and then to Boston, where he ships aboard a brig bound for Valparaiso. His first days at sea expose the wide gap between his romantic expectations of sailor life and its brutal reality: harsh discipline, poor food, grinding labor, seasickness, and the coarse moral atmosphere of the forecastle. The narrative follows him through his initiation with sympathy but without illusion, showing that his lifelong habits of disobedience and idleness make his suffering worse than it need be. Back in Brookdale, Jerry's youngest sister Mary falls gravely ill with fever. She endures delirium and decline, calling out in her confusion for Jerry and for the snow figure Clinton had built to amuse her. She dies peacefully, expressing a childlike certainty of heaven. Her death deepens the sorrow in the Preston household and underscores the cost of Jerry's absence. As spring approaches, Clinton's conduct has been exemplary since his confession. His parents reward him with a journey to a logging camp in the northern forests, accompanied by his father. The excursion takes them through wilderness, past the homestead of a self-made pioneer called Uncle Tim, and ultimately to the loggers' encampment, where Clinton observes the life of choppers, swampers, and teamsters and hears firsthand accounts of the dangerous work of driving logs downriver. The journey serves both as earned reward and as practical education, reinforcing the book's consistent message that honest labor, curiosity, and sound character form the proper foundation of a boy's life. Throughout, the narrator addresses young readers directly, drawing explicit moral lessons from each episode: that every temptation resisted strengthens the will, that yielding once makes yielding again easier, that half-truths are lies, and that a boy who cannot say no is as much at risk as one who actively chooses wrong.

By Walter Aimwell · First published 1853 · Genre: Coming-of-age fiction, Moral/didactic fiction, Family drama · 19 chapters · 70,031 words

First lines

Most people on entering the little village of Brookdale for the first / time, are struck with the beauty of its location. Those who were born / there, and who have always lived in sight of its green hills, and / pleasant valleys, and frolicsome rivulets, probably do not think so / much of these things as does the stranger who happens to come among / them, and who has an eye for the beauty of nature. Beautiful objects / often lose their attractions when they become familiar to us. If a man / were permitted to behold the splendors of a clear evening firmament / but once in his life-time, he would be almost enraptured with the / sight; but give him the opportunity of gazing at the stars every / cloudless night in the year, and he will seldom notice them.

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Clinton is listed on Textopian as a novella by Walter Aimwell, dated 1853 CE.

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Genres

Tags

coming of age · juvenile fiction · moral instruction · rural setting · adventure · character development · boy protagonist · 19th century · friendship · nature · personal growth · victorian era

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