A Little Book of Western Verse was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1889 and was the collection that made Eugene Field famous beyond the newspaper columns where he had built his initial reputation. The book contains some of the most beloved poems of the late nineteenth century — “Little Boy Blue,” “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” “Dutch Lullaby” — alongside Western dialect pieces, humorous verses, and sentimental ballads that captured the emotional range of Field’s peculiar genius.
Field was a newspaper columnist in Chicago (for the Daily News), and his poetry retains the accessibility and immediacy of journalism while achieving effects that transcend it. “Little Boy Blue” — about a child’s toys waiting faithfully for a boy who has died — remains one of the most affecting poems in American popular verse, its power deriving from absolute simplicity of diction and the restraint with which Field handles potentially maudlin material. “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” — a lullaby about three fishermen sailing in a wooden shoe — has achieved the status of folk literature, known to millions who have no idea who wrote it.
The “Western” of the title refers not to cowboys and Indians but to the Middle West — Chicago, the prairies, the culture of the inland cities that Field championed against Eastern literary establishment. The dialect poems and frontier humor pieces locate Field firmly in the tradition of Mark Twain and the newspaper humorists, while the sentimental poems about childhood and death connect him to the genteel tradition he both belonged to and subverted.
Collecting A Little Book of Western Verse
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1889): Small octavo, cloth binding with gilt decoration. Several binding variants exist.
Market values:
- First edition, first state: $75–$200
- Later printings (1890s): $15–$40
- Illustrated editions (various): $20–$60