Literature / Penrod

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Penrod (1914), Penrod and Sam (1916), and Penrod Jashber (1929) are a series of children's books by American writer Booth Tarkington, featuring the comedic adventures and misadventures — mostly misadventures — of Penrod Schofield and his friends. Penrod, a boy nearing the important milestone of his twelfth birthday, hates school and tends to be baffled by the incomprehensible demands of adults, but is quite imaginative and (underneath it all) an apparently intelligent and basically goodhearted boy. Penrod's family includes his father and mother, and also his nineteen-year-old sister, Margaret, who is being actively wooed by Robert Williams (himself the older brother of Penrod's best friend, Sam). The stories are set in an unnamed city in the American Midwest which is universally assumed to be Indianapolis; Tarkington was born in that city and spent most of his life there. In terms of their historical era, this is The Edwardian Era — as the opening chapter of Penrod notes, the Schofield family's last horse has died, but Penrod's father is still "thinking" about buying an automobile. Automobiles are, however, definitely a thing; a boy of Penrod's acquaintance boasts of riding in his mother's "sixty-horse powder [sic] limousine automobile". (The sawdust box of the old stable, in the meantime, serves as "Penrod's stronghold", a private refuge and hideout that serves him "brilliantly in war and peace".)

All three books are very episodic, and read more as collections of short stories than as novels (and Penrod Jashber was initially published in serial form in Cosmopolitan magazine), though there are multi-chapter storylines. (The three books have been published in omnibus editions, sometimes with the "chapters" from the different books at least somewhat re-arranged into internal chronology — the last few chapters of the original "novel" concern Penrod's own twelfth birthday.) The stories are fundamentally sentimental and the humor warm and sympathetic rather than cynical or mean-spirited.

Penrod and Penrod and Sam are now in the public domain and are freely available in multiple formats at Project Gutenberg. Penrod Jashber is in the public domain in Canada, and is likewise available at Fadedpage.com.

The Penrod stories provide examples of:

• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Ultimately, this seems to be the case with Marjorie Jones. While she is outwardly scornful of "bad boy" Penrod, her reaction to a particularly notorious episode of juvenile hell-raising is to be "fond and proud, yet almost awed". (Ironically, on this particular occasion Penrod isn't even actually guilty of what he's been accused of.)
  But Penrod remained by the gate to wait for Sam, and the burden of his sorrows was beginning to lift. In fact, he felt a great deal better, in spite of his having just discovered why Marjorie loved him.
• Annoying Younger Sibling:
  • Penrod's older sister Margaret frequently finds him to be thus. On one occasion, when Penrod is making a pest of himself, Margaret's boyfriend Robert (himself the older brother of Sam Williams, Penrod's best friend) bribes Penrod into going away by giving him his last remaining dollar. This winds up causing a great deal of trouble, as Penrod uses the dollar both to purchase a second-hand accordion and to go on a monumental junk-food bender, winding up with "the acutest case of indigestion" the family doctor has ever seen. In an ironic juxtaposition, when Penrod is trying to woo his love interest, Marjorie Jones, her four-year-old "baby brother" Mitchell (AKA "Mitchy-Mitch") is the one making a pest of himself; Penrod gives the toddler the last remnants of his fortune (a two-cent piece) as a bribe...which Mitchy-Mitch subsequently swallows.
    The serious poetry of all languages has omitted the little brother; and yet he is one of the great trials of love—the immemorial burden of courtship.
  • In a later incident Penrod is assigned to produce "A Model Letter to a Friend" for school; not having completed the assignment, Penrod filches a letter Margaret has written to Robert. This winds up causing more trouble for Penrod than for anyone else: His teacher orders him to read it aloud in class, but when he confidently begins to read "his" letter he finds — to his horror — that the letter is full of phrases like "You call me beautiful" and references to eyes being compared to "blue stars in heaven", to the vast amusement of all his classmates. He also does not get any credit for the assignment, and has to stay after school to actually complete it.
  • Margaret is not above weaponizing this trope when it suits her. Confronted with an annoying suitor who is not Robert Williams, Margaret gleefully (if covertly) encourages all of her little brother's most annoying behaviors in order to run off "the GOOSE" with his "silly, soft talk". Penrod is quite aggrieved when he finds this out, considering it bitterly unfair to be thus used.
• Apathetic Student: Penrod is clearly an intelligent boy, but he is a terrible student. He regards education as a "dreadful burden" and, when in school, he does absolutely nothing. He doesn't study, or pay attention to the teacher. He just...exists, being roused from his "perfect apathy" only by the occasional distraction from outside the classroom (or by the opportunity to dip the hair of the girl who sits in front of him into an inkwell).
• Badass Longcoat: Penrod's imaginary detective, "George P. Jashber", habitually wears "a long overcoat with the collar turned up", thus (with the "hat with the brim turned down" he naturally also wears) somewhat concealing the detective's face; a coat sufficient to conceal the private detective agency badge he wears — but allowing said badge to be quickly and easily "flashed" simply by briefly pulling the coat back — and with outer pockets roomy enough to carry a pistol in. Penrod himself is soon habitually wearing such an outfit...in his imagination.
• "Begone" Bribe: Penrod's older sister's suitor gives him an entire dollar in exchange for his absence, which he promptly spends on enough junk food to make himself sick.
• Berserk Button: Penrod is provoked beyond all endurance — to violence, not to mention tar fights — by being addressed by the unforgivably insulting phrase..."little gentleman". None of the adults around him understand why. Penrod himself can't really explain why.
• Boring Religious Service: Penrod tends to find church, like school, to be a chore at best. He yawns, he slumps in his seat, he scratches (and is told, in a stern parental whisper, to "Stop that!"), and his eyes glaze over. His boredom is alleviated only by the occasional sneezing fit, and by a fair amount of superstitious awe he feels connected with the Schofield family's church, especially with the large stained glass Eye which forms part of the church's decor.
• The Bully: Penrod himself has some tendencies in this direction, as do nearly all of the boys (excepting Georgie Bassett), being very willing to insult or ostracize boys who are perceived as being "outsiders" and given to a regular (though nearly always purely verbal) belligerence in his relations with his peers, even his close friends. Rupe Collins, however, is a pure example of the type. A physically larger boy (somewhat older — "twelve or thirteen" — who nonetheless chooses to associate for a time with eleven-year-old Penrod) from a different school who turns up in Penrod's neighborhood, Collins is much giving to sneering, bragging, mean-spirited jokes and sarcasm, and unprovoked acts of physical violence against other boys. As is often the case with bullies, Collins also turns out to be a bit of a coward; when confronted with serious opposition to his bullying, Collins turns tail and runs, never to be seen again.
• Chew-Out Fake-Out: After Penrod and Sam spread a wholly false (and probably defamatory) story that the Magsworth Bitts family are related to Rena Magsworth (a notorious murderess who has just been sentenced to hang for the fatal poisoning of a family of eight), the boys fully expect very dire punishment from their fathers as they are marched away from the scene of their crime. However, the Magsworth Bitts family are absolutely insufferably self-important, and "had for years terrorized the community" through their pompous snobbery. Instead of being punished, the boys are each quite startled to receive a quarter from their respective fathers.
• Cluster *Bleep*-Bomb: The stories begin with Penrod working on a picaresque adventure novel. When the bandit hero gets the better of the police detectives who tried to ambush him, a flurry of colorful metaphors ensues (as the narration notes, "The dashes are Penrod's" — as are the numerous spelling errors):
  Soon Mr. Wilson and the wonded detective managed to bind up their wonds and got up off the floor ___ ___ it I will have that dasstads life now sneered they if we have to swing for it. ___ ___ ___ ___ him he shall not escape us again the low down ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
• Cowboys and Indians: Although never literally "cowboys and Indians", the boys' games do very frequently involve playing "detectives and robbers", as well as the more amorphous "bonded prisoner" (in which the two sides are just...two sides).
• Deadpan Snarker: Penrod's father, upon hearing Penrod play a second-hand accordion, asks him where he got the instrument, and when Penrod claims a mysterious stranger simply gave it to him Mr. Schofield remarks "I suppose every family has its secret enemies and this was one of ours" and leaves the area.
• Debating Names: In Perod Jashber, Sam Williams obtains a new half-grown puppy. Sam decides to name the new dog "John Carmichael" (after the man he got him from), but Penrod insists the dog should be named "Walter". After considerable debate, the young dog eventually winds up being referred to as "Walter-John Carmichael" — "Walter-John" for short. (Penrod's own dog — elderly and quite unimpressive to look at — is named "Duke".)
• Dreadful Musician: Penrod sings and plays musical instruments with great...enthusiasm. At one point, Penrod walks down the street "singing his way into the heart's deepest hatred of all who heard him". Then he purchases an accordion from a junk dealer; an instrument "quite beyond the sacrilegious reach of the restorer" but still able to produce "loud, strange, compelling sounds, which could be heard for a remarkable distance in all directions".
• Dry Crusader: Parodied. Penrod watches a movie depicting "the drunkard's progress", starting with beer and culminating with wife-beating, child abuse, and finally the drunkard's entrance into a "madhouse". This film makes "a lasting impression" on the boy, and by an unfortunate coincidence, his Aunt Clara and her baby daughter happen to show up for an unplanned stay with the Schofields (due to a measles outbreak in their home town). As it happens, Penrod's Uncle John is a devout Baptist who "won't even allow grape juice or ginger ale in his house" which does not stop Penrod from making up a wild story to explain some serious misbehavior at school^note blurting out "Can't you keep still a MINUTE?" to his teacher when she interrupts a daydream as having been the result of exhaustion from the boy's heroic attempts to comfort his distraught Aunt, supposedly a refugee from the vicious behavior of his Uncle (who — according to Penrod — having taken up "the company of loose travelling men" has succumbed to the evils of drink). While this absurd fabrication is initially entirely successful, Penrod's teacher is an acquaintance of his Aunt Clara, and the entire house of lies predictably soon collapses on Penrod.
• Extreme Omnivore: Penrod and Sam mix up a vile concoction they dub "smallpox medicine" (based on licorice water, but also containing some preserves that had gone bad, old hair oil and mouthwash, the dregs from old ketchup bottles, and the remains of a number of discarded prescription or over-the-counter medicines). When Maurice Levy (a sometime playmate, but also Penrod's rival for the affections of Marjorie Jones) shows up, Penrod tricks Maurice Levy into drinking the entire bottle with some sleight-of-hand with the original bottle of licorice water and some careful maneuvering ("You can have all you can drink at one pull, M'rice"). To Penrod and Sam's utter astonishment, Maurice is totally unaffected. As a later chapter notes, "As a digester, Maurice Levy would have disappointed a Borgia".
  And Maurice had really drained—to the dregs—the bottle of old hair tonics, dead catsups, syrups of undesirable preserves, condemned extracts of vanilla and lemon, decayed chocolate, ex-essence of beef, mixed dental preparations, aromatic spirits of ammonia, spirits of nitre, alcohol, arnica, quinine, ipecac, sal volatile, nux vomica and licorice water—with traces of arsenic, belladonna and strychnine.
• Fille Fatale: Eleven-year-old Fanchon has spent far too much time living with her parents in apartments and hotels in New York City, with occasional trips to Paris. (As the narration notes, her mother, Mrs. Gelbraith, must apparently be quite the flirt herself.) At a child's birthday party, young Fanchon persuades just about every boy there to dance with her (while doing the distinctly not normal act — for an eleven-year-old — of gazing directly into their eyes, and with her own eyes enhanced with improvised make-up: "a burnt match" in lieu of eye-shadow).
  In years she was eleven, in manner about sixty-five...
• For Your Own Good: When Penrod's mother tells him that she's "got something for you" he is immediately pleased. His mother has just returned from an out-of-town trip, and he thinks maybe he's going to get a gift of some kind. As soon as his mother says "It's something that's going to do you lots of good, Penrod" his mood immediately changes "for experience had taught him that when predictions of this character were made, nothing pleasant need be expected". He turns out to be entirely correct in this assessment; his mother has convinced herself that Penrod is deathly ill, and needs to take a really vile-tasting "tonic" several times a day.
• Foul Medicine: Penrod's mother, feeling guilty after taking an out-of-town trip to visit her sister — having been gone for three whole days — manages to convince herself that her dearest little boy is deathly ill. This results in a number of "remedies" being applied to him (some sort of unspecified medicine in pill form, hot-water bottles for his feet in bed at night) culminating in regular doses of an herbal "tonic" ("a quart bottle containing what appeared to be a section of grassy swamp immersed in a cloudy brown liquor") the taste of which even an adult would likely find "virulently repulsive". Penrod at first violently resists the regular doses he is required to take, but finally outsmarts his mother by replacing the contents of the bottle with a mixture of ordinary grass mixed with muddy water, which he clearly finds more congenial than the actual tonic, and Mrs. Schofield's bout of hypochondria-by-proxy eventually passes.
• Free-Range Children: While Penrod is sometimes corralled into doing family-related or "good for you" activities (school, church, dance lessons, supper), or must simply spend time in the company of some relative, most of his free time is spent either off on his own (in the old stable) or else playing with his similarly-aged friends (with no adult supervision, and certainly not as part of any sort of organized activity). The lives of his friends are much the same (barring family obligations or chores); Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Jr., when first introduced, leads a much more cloistered life, but even he seems to escape parental supervision more often in later chapters.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Georgie Bassett is "a really angelic boy", doted upon by all the adults, who likes being referred to as a "little gentleman". The narration claims "Naturally he had no friends" although in truth he is a frequent playmate of Penrod and his circle. This sometimes gets poor Georgie in a great deal of trouble.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Not actually directed at Penrod himself, but at his father: On one occasion when Penrod's misbehavior has been exceptionally severe (and caused considerable social embarrassment to his mother) she announces this fact to the household by addressing her husband (otherwise invariably known simply as "Mr. Schofield" or "Papa") as "Henry Passloe Schofield":
  Penrod's Mother: "Henry Passloe Schofield, I don't know what IS to be done with that boy; I do NOT!...Henry Passloe Schofield, you've got to take this matter in your hands—it's beyond me!"
• Goody Two-Shoes: Poor Georgie Bassett! Georgie is a "really angelic boy", noted for his "perfect conduct" and considered by all the adults to be "the Best Boy in Town". Naturally, all the other boys despise him (although he is a member of Penrod's social circle; even Georgie Bassett isn't completely ostracized).
• Hardboiled Detective: "George P. Jashber" (with whom Penrod increasingly comes to identify over the course of Penrod Jashber) is very much one of these — or rather, an eleven-year-old boy's imagination of a hardboiled detective, after that boy has seen a few too many detective movies (and read a few Dime Novels as well). "Jashber" is a private detective (albeit one who is a member of a "detective agency", complete with numbered badge, rather than a "lone wolf") who wears the requisite "hat with the brim turned down" along with the "long overcoat with the collar turned up", always carries a semi-automatic pistol in his pocket (what Penrod refers to as an "ottomatick"), and coolly deals with dangerous "crooks".
• Have a Gay Old Time: As one would expect in a series of books written between 1914 and 1929. After his mother refers to Fanchon as "a strange little girl", Penrod asks "What makes her so queer?" Penrod of course merely means "odd" or "eccentric" rather than LGBT; furthermore, when Mrs. Schofield referred to Fanchon as a "strange little girl" she only meant that the girl is a stranger, from out of town.
• Insult to Rocks: "Gipsy" is a ferocious alley cat, and it is reported that the father of his original owner (a little girl) had once declared the cat to be "half broncho and half Malay pirate"...but the narrator notes "in the light of Gipsy's later career, this seems bitterly unfair to even the lowest orders of bronchos and Malay pirates".
• Interquel: The original Penrod ends with Penrod's twelfth birthday (a very important milestone in a boy's life), yet in the sequels he seems to be back to "going on twelve"; that is, to being eleven again. Omnibus editions often reflect this by moving the chapters about Penrod's twelfth birthday to the end of the Penrod Jashber section.
• Lonely Rich Kid: It's far from clear that the Magsworth Bitts family are actually rich ("The Magsworth Bittses were important because they were impressive; there was no other reason. And they were impressive because they believed themselves important"). Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Jr., nonetheless very strongly gives this impression: Young Roderick is "a home-sheltered lad, tutored privately and preserved against the coarsening influences of rude comradeship and miscellaneous information" and has clearly absorbed his family's arrogance and snobbery, though the other boys his age tend to treat him as "negligible", and deep down he longs for the approval of his peers. (The whole family gets a very sharp comeuppance, courtesy of Penrod's wild imagination, and Roddy thereafter does seem to join in with the other boys in their games and play to at least some extent.)
• Mr. Imagination: Penrod spends a lot of time lost in his own head. In school, rather than actually pay attention, he blithely imagines himself flying through the air (and winds up getting himself in a heap of trouble). He does play with his friends (which also involves a lot of uses of their imagination) but when he's first introduced, he's in the process of writing an interminable (and very badly spelled) "novel"; much later (after an abrupt shift in the protagonist of his story) Penrod becomes the "notted" detective, George P. Jashber:
  He became less and less conscious of the actual Penrod, and, when his far-away eye glanced downward, what it physically saw—his knickerbockers and stockings and stubby shoes—bore no meaning. Penrod thought that he was wearing long trousers, rubber-soled shoes, a soft hat with the brim turned down, a long overcoat with the collar turned up, and that he had an automatic pistol in one of the outer pockets of that coat always ready to be taken forth and leveled at (or pressed against) a crook’s abdomen.
• My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad: Under the unfortunate influence of Rupe Collins, Penrod begins to strongly manifest this. Penrod had always "talked by the code" — a boy "must champion his father and his dog, and, ever, ready to pit either against any challenger, must picture both as ravening for battle and absolutely unconquerable" — but while under the spell of Rupe Collins, Penrod's claims regarding the elder Schofield — who from what we actually see of him, is a rather mild-mannered family man — become especially hyperbolic.
  As for Penrod's father, that gladiator was painted as of sentiments and dimensions suitable to a super-demon composed of equal parts of Goliath, Jack Johnson and the Emperor Nero.
• Naked People Are Funny: Penrod isn't actually naked under the cape of his costume in "The Children's Pageant of the Table Round"; this is merely a misunderstanding, after the desperate boy, with feigned nonchalance, replies "Oh, nothin'" when asked what homemade horrors he's hiding under the shelter of his older sister's old golf cape. The suggestion is nonetheless enough to send all the other children in the room into chants of "Penrod Schofield's nakid [sic]!" and gales of laughter, to Penrod's utter mortification.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Just before Penrod's tale of "Harold Ramorez" makes its abrupt shift in protagonists, the outlaw Ramorez is grazed on his scalp by a bullet, but Ramorez merely smiles and remarks "O said he a flech wond is nothing and will soon heal up". Characters in the story also tend to shrug off such injuries as being bitten hard enough that the biter's teeth "met in the flech".
• Parental Bonus: Although children's stories, with an eleven-year-old protagonist and his similarly aged friends, the books have many more subtle jokes and sly asides to appeal to older readers (Maurice Levy's digestion, which "would have disappointed a Borgia") and (in spite of all the misspellings and solecisms of Penrod and his friends) a noticeably high-level vocabulary and sentence structure throughout the series.
• Power Fantasy: Penrod often has vivid daydreams of "thrashing" various imaginary enemies, especially if he's being subjected to something (school, a haircut) which he hates, but has absolutely no power to avoid. In other cases, rather than doing violence, Penrod is simply the center of attention from large, adoring crowds.
  [Penrod imagines himself flying] In the street an enormous crowd had gathered, headed by Miss Spence and a brass band; and a cheer from a hundred thousand throats shook the very ground as Penrod swam overhead.
  [in a later chapter, a more belligerent fantasy] ...Penrod saw himself in staggering zigzag pictures, destroying large, screaming, fragmentary boys who had insulted him.
• Puppy Love: Penrod is of an age where he tends to feel obliged to put on elaborate displays of indifference concerning the beautiful Marjorie Jones, but he nonetheless is completely smitten with her and ardently desires to be her "beau" (or "bow", as both Penrod and Marjorie would spell it). Marjorie for her part is often outwardly scornful of "the Worst Boy in Town" Penrod...except that she finds herself liking him for his bad behavior.
• Rummage Sale Reject: Penrod is forced to perform in a hilariously awful children's pageant wearing an outfit made by his mother out of one of his older sister's old dresses and, even more mortifyingly to Penrod, a cast-off pair of his father's long underwear. That in itself probably qualifies already, but to avoid appearing in public in his father's long johns, he sneaks into an unlocked janitor's closet and dons a pair of overalls he finds in there just before going onto the stage.
• School Play: Penrod has an (entirely unwilling) starring role in a dramatic performance written by one of his mother's friends with the name of "The Children's Round Table"; Penrod is slated to play "the Child Sir Lancelot". It's in verse, and the few samples we get are as dismal as might be expected, but that's only part of Penrod's problem... he's much more concerned that his mother and sister used his father's old long johns as the base of the costume, and Penrod considers them still eminently recognizable in the final result. He goes on a desperate last minute search for something to cover them up with before he's forced to parade across the stage in his dad's underwear.
• Show Within a Show: We see bits and pieces of Penrod's elaborate stories of the dashing and heroic bandit "Harold Ramorez, the Roadagent" (which later morph quite abruptly into stories of the dashing and heroic "George P. Jashber, the notted detective") from the first chapter of Penrod right on through Penrod Jashber. As one might expect from a bright and imaginative eleven-year-old boy who also pays no attention whatsoever in school, they are hilariously awful, with egregiously bad spelling, no discernible plot, and a tendency to suddenly change protagonists from one paragraph to the next depending on what kind of movies Penrod has been watching lately.
• Sneaking Snacks: Penrod returns home for lunch and — "after a bit of simple technique" — finds himself alone with an entire box ("about two-thirds of a peck") of freshly-made doughnuts. He doesn't quite manage to eat the entire box (by the time he's done there are still a few doughnuts in the box, along with a couple of doughnuts lying next to the box with a single bite taken out of each one). Needless to say, Penrod's appetite for lunch is entirely ruined, and he is quite sick until the next morning.
  For several hours the consequences continued to be more or less demonstrative; then they verged from physical to mental, as the thoughts of Penrod and the thoughts of his insides merged into one. Their decision was unanimous—a conclusive horror of doughnuts.
• Spoiled Brat: Penrod and his friends can certainly be quite self-centered, but young Ronald Passloe (a nine-year-old cousin of Penrod's) has learned (been taught, really) that if he wants something from his father (a widower) all he has to do is beg and plead and whine, and maybe cry a bit, and beg and whine some more...and he'll get it. Naturally, young Ronald is almost unbearable to be around, as he has effectively been trained to treat everyone else with a total lack of regard for their own rights or feelings.
• Villain Protagonist: From the very beginning of Penrod, Penrod is depicted as writing vividly imaginative, cheerfully bloodthirsty, terribly spelled, and completely meandering stories, with his current magnum opus being the adventures of "Harold Ramorez", a "road agent" (that is, a bandit in the Old West). "Ramorez", although an outlaw, is the hero of the stories...at least before being very abruptly replaced in that role by "George B. Jashber, the notted [sic] detective", who dominates much of Penrod Jashber. (Up to that point, detectives — being the sworn enemies of the outlaw Ramorez — were the villains of the tale, but then Penrod went and saw some detective movies.)
• Vitriolic Best Buds: This tends to be Penrod's default mode of interaction with all his friends, including his best friend, Sam Williams. Verbal arguments are a constant, although they don't usually escalate to physical violence.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Penrod agrees that he certainly wouldn't hit a girl...though he might drench her dress in tar, if sufficiently provoked.