This blog is named for a line in Charles F. Briggs’s novel The Trippings of Tom Pepper, and over at his new blog, LeavesofGrass, independent scholar Mitch Gould has identified the real-life person who may have been Briggs’s model for the character Friend Goodwill. Gould also has a fascinating
interview with scholar Olive Hoogenboom, who speculates that two Unitarian businessmen who took the same last name and lived together in Brooklyn in the early 19th century may have been a gay couple. One of the two, Augustus Graham, founded an apprentices’ library that evolved into today’s Brooklyn Museum.