Square and Compasses

Square and Compasses is one of Oliver Optic’s many novels for boys, with the title drawing from the trade tools that the central character’s path involves. Optic used trade and craft setting titles across multiple of his novels, with the carpenter and architect tools of the square and compasses pointing to a particular trade focused setting that the protagonist’s adventures unfold within.

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. The standard plot beats of the wider Optic catalogue follow. The protagonist enters a particular trade or profession, faces the various challenges and moral tests that the work involves, demonstrates the courage and integrity that the genre required, and earns the respectability that the wider series is built around.

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.