The Honorable Peter Stirling

by Paul Leicester Ford

Paul Leicester Ford (1865-1902) was an American novelist and biographer. He wrote lives of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and others, edited the works of Thomas Jefferson, and wrote a number of novels, which had considerable success.

424 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1894

About the author

Paul Leicester Ford was an American editor, novelist and biographer. He was the great-grandson (on his mother's side) of Noah Webster Jr. and the brother of historian Worthington C. Ford. He was murdered by his other brother, Malcolm Webster Ford, a famous amateur athlete in the United States.

Reviews

[Robert Miller]

Peter Stirling is a man who becomes a political boss in New York City, and the novel follows his career and love-life. The New York Times review at the time said: "If not to-day in time to come "Peter Stirling" will be remembered as a truthful representation of political conditions in a large city of the Union in the year 1894."

This book is mostly interesting to me as a look into how wealthy New Yorkers viewed the world in 1894, but it has some clever writing and lots of now-archaic references to articles of clothing and such. There are two or three incidental black characters in it, who are treated with the racist dismissal of the times (they're "Darkies"). And the story involves a man who, failing to successfully woo a woman his own age as a young man, falls in love with the same woman's daughter when the girl is 17 and he's 40-ish. Ewwwww. Nobody in the novel thinks that's anything out of the ordinary, including her mother, and it probably wasn't.