The Story of a Bad Boy

The Story of a Bad Boy (1870) is a semi-autobiographical novel by American writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich, fictionalizing his experiences as a boy in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The book is considered the first in the "bad boy" genre of literature, though the text's opening lines admit that he was "not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy".

"Tom Bailey" is born in the fictitious town of Rivermouth, New Hampshire, but moves to New Orleans with his family when he is 18 months old. In his boyhood, his father wants his to be educated in the North and sent him back to Rivermouth to live with his grandfather, Captain Nutter. Nutter lives with his sister and an Irish servant. There, Tom becomes a member of a boys' club called the Centipedes. Together, the boys become involved in a series of adventures. In one prank, the boys steal an old carriage and push it into a bonfire for the Fourth of July. During the winter, several boys build a snow fort on Slatter's Hill, inciting rival boys into a battle of snowballs. Later, Tom and three other boys combine their money to buy a boat named Dolphin and sneak away to an island. Tom also befriends a man nicknamed Sailor Ben, whom Tom originally meets on the ship that took him away from New Orleans. Revealed as the long-lost husband of Captain Nutter's Irish servant, Ben settles in Rivermouth in a boat-like cabin. Sailor Ben helps the boys fire off a series of old cannon at the pier, much to the confusion of the local townspeople. When his father's banking job fails, Tom is invited by an uncle to work in a counting-house in New York.

The Story of a Bad Boy was first published in 1869 by Ticknor and Fields in their juvenile magazine Our Young Folks. It was published in book form a year later.

The fictional town of Rivermouth is based on Portsmouth, New Hampshire. After Aldrich's death in 1907, the author's widow purchased the home where the book takes place and restored it to look as it did in 1850. It has been a house museum open to the public since 1909, now part of Strawbery Banke.

The book is considered the foundational text in a genre of "bad boy" literature which also includes Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Charles Dudley Warner's Being a Boy (1877), William Dean Howells's A Boy's Town (1877),James Otis Kaler's Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus (1877),Hamlin Garland's Boy Life on the Prairie (1899), and Booth Tarkington's Penrod (1913). A precursor was Horatio Alger, Jr.'s "Ragged Dick" series beginning in 1868, though scholar Kenneth B. Kidd says his works are generally excluded from the list. Aldrich also owed inspiration to the popular British book Tom Brown's School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes. The bad boy genre, intended to be read by both children and adults, shows boys as irrational, primitive, and masculine.

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