Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 40

1878 · 16 pages

Catalog Note "Roving Ben: A Story of a Young American Who Wanted to See the World" by John J. Marshall, serialized in this Beadle and Adams dime novel (copyright 1878), concerns Benjamin Perry, a nineteen-year-old farm boy in rural New York near the Catskills. Dissatisfied with agricultural labor and humiliated when his father strikes him with an ox-gad in front of Annie Anderson, a girl he admires, Ben resolves to run away. After assembling meager possessions—a Bible, watch worth twenty-two dollars, and six dollars cash—he escapes via apple-tree bough at two in the morning, pausing to gaze at Annie's moonlit house before departing for the wider world. This opening chapter establishes the adventure-romance narrative of a restless young man seeking to escape parental authority and rural constraint for travel and independence.

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