Jerry

Jerry by Walter Aimwell (1863)

Jerry*, by Walter Aimwell, is the seventh and unfinished volume in the Aimwell Stories series, published posthumously following the author's death in July 1859. The story centers on Jerry Preston, a teenage boy from the small Maine farming town of Brookdale who, during his father's absence at a winter logging camp, stole the family's household money and ran away to sea. The narrative opens with Jerry's sudden return home after fifteen months, during which he had been presumed dead. He arrives tanned and weathered, delivered to his doorstep in the local doctor's wagon, to the tearful joy of his mother and sisters. His homecoming is shadowed by the revelation that his younger sister Mary died shortly after he left, and by his deep anxiety about how his stern, unforgiving father will receive him when he finally returns from the logging camp. Jerry recounts his adventures to his assembled family in a lengthy sailor's yarn. He had shipped aboard the brig Susan bound for Valparaiso, Chile, enduring seasickness, harsh treatment from officers and crew, brutal weather, and tedious work. The voyage took him around Cape Horn and through the storms of the South Atlantic. On the return voyage, laden with hides for Boston, the Susan was destroyed in a catastrophic pampero storm off the Río de la Plata. Two crewmen were swept overboard and lost. The survivors abandoned ship in two small boats. Jerry's boat, carrying five men under the mate's command, became separated from the captain's boat and lost its compass in the continuing storm. For eight days the five survivors drifted and rowed through brutal conditions, near-starving, exhausted, and burned by the sun. They watched a distant sail disappear without rescuing them. Eventually they made landfall on a small, barren, rocky island where they camped for six weeks, subsisting on crabs, mussels, seabirds, and eggs, and maintaining a signal fire to attract passing vessels. At last a large ship, the May Queen bound for the Sandwich Islands, spotted their smoke and rescued them. Conveyed eventually to the barque Bride, Jerry and his shipmates completed the passage home around Cape Horn and across the Atlantic, enduring the equatorial doldrums before reaching New York. From there Jerry traveled to Boston, called on his uncle, collected just enough money for his fare home, and walked the final miles to Brookdale, where the doctor's wagon gave him a lift. Back in Brookdale, Jerry becomes the talk of the town, celebrated as one returned from the dead. He is followed everywhere by his admiring sisters Emily and Harriet and visited by neighbors eager to hear his adventures. His closest friend is Clinton Davenport, a neighboring boy of the same age who stands in strong contrast to Jerry. While Jerry has spent fifteen months in hardship and returned penniless, Clinton has stayed home, worked diligently on his family's farm, tended his poultry, and banked fifty dollars in a single year toward his ambition of attending the Scientific School at Cambridge. Clinton studies algebra, chemistry, natural philosophy, and composition at home in the evenings, having long since outgrown the village school. The contrast between the two boys is the moral engine of the narrative. Jerry has genuine good intentions and has resolved firmly to settle down, work on the farm, and lead a sober, steady life. He acknowledges freely to his mother that running away was the worst thing he ever did. Yet old habits resurface immediately: he is reluctant to begin farm work the very next morning, preferring to remain the celebrated returning hero a little longer, and he deflects Clinton's generous offer of help with the spring planting. The novel breaks off before the return of the stern Mr. Preston, whose reception of his prodigal son had been established as the central dramatic tension of the story. A publisher's note explains that the author died before completing the manuscript, and that no other hand could credibly continue what he had begun. The fragment is accompanied in the published volume by a substantial memoir of Walter Aimwell, the pen name of William Simonds, detailing his life from his 1822 birth in Charlestown, Massachusetts, through his years as a printer's apprentice, his early religious awakening, his career as editor and publisher, and his steady production of morally instructive books for young readers until his death from pulmonary disease at age thirty-six.

By Walter Aimwell · First published 1863 · Genre: Bildungsroman (Coming-of-Age Novel), Adventure Fiction, Domestic/Family Fiction · 17 chapters · 58,405 words

First lines

"I wish I could look out and see father coming; here it is the tenth of / the month, and he ought to have got home a week ago. February, March, / April, May,-it's over three months since father went off, and he said he / should be back by the first of May. I can't imagine what has become of / him. There's the doctor coming, I believe. Yes, that's his wagon. He's / got a man with him-who knows but it's father? No, it's a young fellow. / I wonder who it is. He's as black as an Indian; and he's casting up / sheep's-eyes at me, too. Well, I don't care for you, whoever you are."

What this Textopian page supports

Jerry is listed on Textopian as a novella by Walter Aimwell, dated 1863 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

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Genres

Tags

maritime-adventure · coming-of-age · moral-redemption · Victorian-literature · children's-fiction · runaway-protagonist · family-relationships · survival-at-sea · shipwreck · 19th-century-setting · nautical-fiction · character-development

Contents

More by Walter Aimwell