Little by Little

Little by Little is one of Oliver Optic’s many novels for boys, with the title pointing to the kind of slow steady progress framework that the wider Optic catalogue treated as the path to genuine respectability. The little by little framing positions the central character’s progress as the result of patient cumulative effort rather than any sudden dramatic transformation, with the standard moral and economic uplift of the wider catalogue unfolding through the patient process.

Oliver Optic was the pen name of William Taylor Adams, a Massachusetts writer who became one of the most prolific producers of boys’ fiction in mid to late nineteenth century America with more than a hundred novels.

For scholars of nineteenth century American children’s literature or of the wider career of Oliver Optic, the various novels in his catalogue are essential. Many are now in the public domain.