Boston Saturday Rambler at twenty-three. Like many upwardly mobile young men in the period, he persistently used a journal to quantify his accomplishments in year-end “Summar[ies]” that tallied the number of events attended, books read, dollars accumulated, and even, in an obsessively reflexive turn, the sum of notebook pages occupied by each of these entries.4 As a teenager, he invented code languages and established a set of self-governing rules that closed with the instruction to “ask [himself] each day a set of questions to be answered in writing.”5 Discussed at greater depth in what follows, this fill-in-the-blanks ethos was pervasive in Simonds’s professional practice, present both in his assessments of self-advancement upon taking over the Boston Saturday Rambler (“I have been looking forward to just such a situation as the one I am now to fill”) and in his draft sketches for book titles, which all follow a common form: “Ettie; _____ _____,” “Ronald; or, the Adopted Son,” “Annie _____ _____.”6 Though he may not have originated the mechanism that drove the story of his most enduring character, there is no doubt that he found it an incredibly useful compositional principle, weaving it deeply into the fabric of his literary labors.7
As the final novel Simonds would complete before succumbing to a chronic lung hemorrhage in July 1859, Jessie provokes an expansion and diversification of my argument about nineteenth-century character into less individually centered territory—into the realm of “contact” and interplay suggested by the epigraph to this chapter.8 Like many children’s authors of the time, Simonds frequently engaged in metanarrational play, using the congenial voice of “Aimwell” to explain answers to riddles, gesture at the physicality of the book, and generally break the fourth wall in order to address his young readers. Though such asides were hardly a rare practice in the novel genre, Simonds-as-Aimwell often pushed beyond the simple performance of conspiratorial intimacy and into moments that broke down a neat division of textual insides and readerly outsides: to “read” these books is not to lose oneself in the reading but to persistently have the threshold of inside and outside put at issue.9 Even beyond directly pedagogical asides in a Christian reformist mode, narrative inventions like the protagonist Jessie Hapley and the narratorial Walter Aimwell offer detailed outlines of games that can be played by readers—sometimes presented through dialogue, sometimes in letters, and sometimes via other intranarrative media stagings (Figure 8). They then demonstrate the playing of these games in ways that become part of the narrative world, as rules and speculative play scenarios unfold in tandem.
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