Lucretia Peabody Hale

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Lucretia Peabody Hale (1820-1900) was an American author.

She was the daughter of Nathan Hale, owner and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser which he founded in 1813, and of Sarah Preston Everett Hale, sister of Edward Everett. She was also the sister of Edward Everett Hale. She is best known as the author of a series of stories about a family named Peterkin, the first of which appeared in 1867 in a magazine named Our Young Folks, later named St. Nicholas Magazine. The series continued for nine years, and made the Peterkins a household word.

The collected stories were published in 1880 under the title The Peterkin Papers, and reprinted in 1960.

The Peterkins were a lovable but comically inept family that possess ingenuity, logic, resourcefulness, and energy—but not common sense. The general formula is that the family tries to solve some problem in an appealingly roundabout way, fails, and is eventually rescued by "the wise old lady from Philadelphia" who always cuts the Gordian knot with some effective but prosaic solution. The charm of the story is not in the plot, but in the telling, with the building up of layers of complication, and the affectionate fun poked at the not-quite-cartoonish characters. The "wise old lady's" solution is usually obvious to the reader, or even the young listener, from the start.

The very first story exemplifies the formula. Mrs. Peterkin accidentally puts salt in her coffee. In an effort to solve the problem, the whole family first visits the chemist, who tries to counteract the salt: "First he put in a little chlorate of potassium, and the family tried it all round, but it tasted no better." He adds bichlorate of magnesia and tartaric acid:

"I have it!" exclaimed the chemist,—"a little ammonia is just the thing." No, it wasn't the thing at all.

They then visit "the herb-woman" who tries a long list of herbs including flagroot, snakeroot, spruce gum, oppermint and sappermint, all to no avail. In desperation they visit the wise old lady from Philadelphia who says "Why doesn't your mother make a fresh cup of coffee?" They all shout with joy, "Why didn't we think of that?"

Another stories finds one of the Peterkin girls sitting on the porch, playing their piano through the living-room window because the "carters" had delivered it facing that way. Being the Peterkins, they devise ingenious ways of using it in the position in which it was delivered;and it takes the wise old lady from Philadelphia to suggest that they could turn the piano around. Another has them remodelling their house to raise a portion of the living-room ceiling to accommodate a Christmas tree that is too tall.

The stories are also charming to modern readers for the details they give of life in the 1870s as lived by an upper-middle-class family in a small village about an hour's train ride from Boston.