A Boy’s Town

The question of the identity of ‘A Boy’s Town’, has excited almost as much interest, in a certain section of our country, as the long-discussed question of the birthplace of Homer. That Mr. Howells is his own Boy there can be no doubt. But Mr. Howells, according to the biographies, was born at Martin’s Ferry in 1837. The family moved to Hamilton when he was three years of age, to Dayton when he was nine, and to Columbus—probably the scene of the opening chapters of «The Shadow of a Dream»—when he was fourteen. Each of these Western cities now claims the honor of being immortalized by the Boy, although the Dayton Herald declared, that if Dayton was pictured it was Dayton with a halo of poetry about it; not the commonplace Dayton which the unimaginative citizen of Dayton now beholds. Wherever the Town maybe, and whoever may be the Boy, the tale is one which will appeal to all the boys of all the towns in the land, notwithstanding the curious fact that the Boy does not seem to be called «Tom» — a name to which all the best boys in all the standard boys’ books of the present day invariably answer, from Tom Brown of Rugby and Oxford, in England, to Tom Bailey of Rivermouth, in New Hampshire, and to Tom Sawyer of Hannibal, in Missouri. Mr. Howells’ Boy, whose name is not mentioned at all, was quite as much of a boy as any of these — a thorough boy, from the top of his bare head to the soles of his bare feet—»a Boy from Boy Town»—and every grown-up boy among his readers will find some one of his own peculiar characteristics, and many of his own particular tastes, embodied in this Boy of Mr. Howells’, and will wonder how Mr. Howells found him out.