He began his career as a publisher in partnership with Sheldon whose early death terminated that enterprise. Goodrich himself, however, here published by subscription the poems of John Trumbull, whom he knew well, eight volumes of the Waverly novels, then arousing intense interest, and several school books and "toy books," as he calls them, for children. He was a leading member of a literary club which included Bishop J. M. Wainwright, Isaac Toucey, William M. Stone, Jonathan Law and S. H. Huntington.
Another literary "cotery," of which Mrs. Sigourney was the presiding genius, met generally at Daniel Wadsworth's home. Some of the poems and papers read at the first of these clubs were published by Goodrich in a short-lived periodical called "The Round Table."
We find gossipy sketches of Jeremiah Wadsworth, Dr. Cogswell and his deaf and dumb daughter Alice, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Theodore Dwight, the poets Brainard and Percival, Dr. Strong, pastor of the "Middle Brick" (the Center) Church, Colonel John Trumbull, the artist and his beautiful wife, who was supposed to be the daughter of an English earl but about whose lineage there was an impenetrable mystery. Many others of the old Hartford characters live again in these pages which furnish us what is doubtless a very accurate, as well as a very charming impression of the social life of the old town one hundred years ago.
But the great world called the future "Peter Parley" and his ambitions and love of variety drew him away from the place of his earliest literary experience to foreign residence and travel and to the little brown house that he afterward built at Jamaica Plain. Later in life he returned again to Europe and for two years was American Consul at Paris.
He had his failures as well as his successes, his days of financial losses, as well as of affluence. He experienced, too, his periods of feeble health. But he possessed the courage that ancestry like his often seems to breed and one cannot fail to accord a hearty tribute to the resolution with which, in an impaired physical condition, he set himself, like Mr. Clemens, to overcome adversity with hard work, with his pen.
His Parley books were the outgrowth of two impulses or characteristics—his innate love of children and his personal rebellion on the one hand against the dull school books of his boyhood and on the other against what he considered such ridiculous and deleterious old fairy stories as "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Jack the Giant Killer." He did not think the climax of "Little Red Riding Hood" was healthy reading for children and he did not at all approve of Jack the Giant Killer's morals. In his opinion there was no particular sense in the Mother Goose jingles.
And so he tried to give children, in the guise of perfectly proper but at the same time interesting stories and verses, the information and a good deal of the education they required. He may have carried his theory to some extremes, but he was one of the first among us to realize that with children effective educational methods must take into consideration the securing at the outset of interest and attention.
What extraordinary success he achieved has already been intimated. Yet it is pathetic to note that he himself was the first to acknowledge the fact that his fame would be temporary. "I have written too much," he says at the height of his reputation, "and have done nothing really well. You need not whisper it to the public, at least until I am gone; but I know, better than anyone can tell me, that there is nothing in this long catalogue [of his books] that will give me a permanent place in literature."
Yet it is safe to say that as long as the human mind loves to dip into the past and to re-create in familiar surroundings the scenes and people of long ago his "Recollections of a Life Time" will have its readers. And many of us would cheerfully relinquish any hope of immortal memory could we be assured of the love of the countless children to whom "Peter Parley" was a dear friend and companion.