Was Whittier His Own “Barefoot Boy”?

In Colorful Characters: Hans Peter Bertelsen, I wrote about how Hans Peter Bertelsen was considered the inspiration for John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “The Barefoot Boy”. However, in a comment to that, it was suggested that Whittier himself was the barefoot boy.

What’s the real scoop?

The comment says

John Townsend Trowbridge apparently assumed that the Barefoot Boy was Whittier, himself, when he wrote his poem based on a story about Whittier’s childhood, told to him by Whittier’s brother, “A Story of the Barefoot Boy.”

First, let’s take a look at the poem that John Townsend Trowbridge wrote. It was written for John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday.

On Haverhill’s pleasant hills there played,
   Some sixty years ago,
In turned-up trousers, tattered hat,
Patches and freckles, and all that,
   The Barefoot Boy we know.

He roamed his berry-fields content;
   But while, from bush and brier
The nimble feet got many a scratch,
His wit, beneath its homely thatch,
   Aspired to something higher.

Over his dog-eared spelling-book,
   Or school-boy composition,
Puzzling his head with some hard sum,
Going for nuts, or gathering gum,
   He cherished his ambition.

He found the turtles’ eggs, and watched
   To see the warm sun hatch ’em;
Hunted, with sling, or bow and arrow,
Or salt, to trap the unwary sparrow;
   Caught fish, or tried to catch ’em.

But more and more, to rise, to soar —
   This hope his bosom fired.
He shot his shaft, he sailed his kite,
Let out the string and watched its flight,
   And smiled, while he aspired.

“Now I’ve a plan — I know we can!”
   He said to Mat — another
Small shaver of the barefoot sort:
His name was Matthew; Mat, for short;
   Our barefoot’s younger brother.

“What! fly?” says Mat. “Well, not just that.”
   John thought: “No, we can’t fly;
But we can go right up,” says he,
“Oh, higher than the highest tree!
   Away up in the sky!”

“Oh do!” says Mat; “I’ll hold thy hat,
   And watch while thee is gone.”
For these were Quaker lads, and each
Lisped in his pretty Quaker speech.
   “No, that won’t do,” says John.

“For thee must help; then we can float,
   As light as any feather.
We both can lift; now don’t thee see?
If thee’ll lift me while I lift thee,
   We shall go up together!”

An autumn evening; early dusk;
   A few stars faintly twinkled;
The crickets chirped; the chores were done;
‘T was just the time to have some fun,
   Before the tea-bell tinkled.

They spat upon their hands, and clinched,
   Firm under-hold and upper.
“Don’t lift too hard, or lift too far,”
Says Mat, “or we may hit a star,
   And not get back to supper!”

“Oh no!” says John; “we’ll only lift
   A few rods up, that’s all,
To see the river and the town.
Now don’t let go till we come down,
   Or we shall catch a fall!

“Hold fast to me! now; one, two, three!
   And up we go!” They jerk,
They pull and strain, but all in vain!
A bright idea, and yet, ‘t was plain,
   It somehow would n’t work.

John gave it up; ah, many a John
   Has tried and failed, as he did!
‘T was a shrewd notion, none the less,
And still, in spite of ill success,
   It somehow has succeeded.

Kind nature smiled on that wise child,
   Nor could her love deny him
The large fulfillment of his plan;
Since he who lifts his brother man
   In turn is lifted by him.

He reached the starry heights of peace
   Before his head was hoary;
And now, at threescore years and ten,
The blessings of his fellow-men
   Waft him a crown of glory.

Okay. So what’s the story behind the Trowbridge poem? How much of it was inspired by what John’s brother Matthew told Trowbridge?

We find the answer to that in Trowbridge’s autobiography, “My Own Story”. In it (in a footnote), he says that the poem

was founded on an incident of the poet’s boyhood, which I had from his younger brother Matthew, and which I told very much as it was told to me, except that I put it into rhyme, and transferred the scene to the open air from the bedroom and bed where it actually occurred.

So it turns out that the incident took place in John Greenleaf Whittier’s bedroom, not outdoors at all. Pretty clearly (to me at least), Trowbridge used poetic license to meld the childhood story told by Matthew with John’s “Barefoot Boy” poem, and used general tropes about going barefoot in so doing. But that doesn’t make John Greenleaf Whittier THE barefoot boy.

Did John Greenleaf Whittier go barefoot, outdoors, as a child? It is quite likely. He was born in 1807, and back then a lot of kids went barefoot the entire summer long.

But that doesn’t mean that Bertelsen couldn’t be the inspiration for the poem. Whittier could have seen him and recalled his own days of being barefoot, using that information to add life and versimilitude to the poem. After all, the poem is a paeon to barefoot boys in general, not any particular one (including himself).

And then, one could also ask if anybody else claimed to be the “barefoot boy”. Stay tuned for another candidate.

The Haverhill Library “Barefoot Boy”

[Photo from Pinterest, of the winner of the Barefoot Boy Contest at the Haverhill Public Library, which, by the way, has a rule against bare feet in their library, which I wrote about in It’s Safety! Unless . . .”.]