Lizzie Abbott Dane Lucy Sturtevant Gardner Frances Fern Douglass
Charles Felton Pidgin (November 11, 1844 – June 3, 1923) was an American author, statistician, and inventor.[1] He is best known for his 1900 novelQuincy Adams Sawyer, which became successful largely due to a big marketing campaign, and was adapted for the stage and silent film.
He was born on November 11, 1844, inRoxbury, Massachusetts, to Mary E. Felton and Benjamin Gordon Pidgin.
As a young child, Pidgin was rendered lame by an accident to his hip, and he was also partially blind for a number of years. He graduated fromThe English High School in Boston in 1863, and worked for ten years in the mercantile business. He was appointed chief clerk of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1873. In 1888 he independently published a book titledPractical Statistics. He was appointed as chief of the bureau in 1903, and remained there until 1907, leaving to focus on his writing work.[2][3]
In addition to serving as a state statistician, Pidgin remained busy in many other pursuits. He invented statistical tabulating machines,[4] and wrote songs and musical comedies. And he also became a fairly prolific author, for which he became best known.[5]
On the stage, Pidgin's musical comedy adaptation ofPeck's Bad Boy was first produced in 1883 and ran for many years.[3]
His first and most popular novelQuincy Adams Sawyer was published in 1900 and sold over 250,000 copies.[6][7][8] It was aggressively marketed by his publisher, C.M. Clark Publishing, run byCarro Clark, the wife of Pidgin's friend Charles Atkinson.[9] It was adapted into a popular stage play in 1902, which toured widely and played at theAcademy of Music in New York.[10][11][12][13][14][15] The book was adapted tosilent films of the same name in 1912 (by Puritan Special Features Company, of which little is known),[16] and again in1922 starringJohn Bowers,Blanche Sweet,Lon Chaney, andBarbara La Marr. Both films are considered lost.
Pidgin's next novel,Blennerhassett (1901), sold over 60,000 copies before even appearing in print.[17]
Pidgin's 1902 novelThe Climax: or, What Might Have Been: A Romance of the Great Republic envisioned analternate history whereAaron Burr did not killAlexander Hamilton, and later became president.[18][19] Pidgin was an avid enthusiast of Burr, who he felt was wronged by history, and a number of his novels involve Burr.[20]
Illustration from 1916 U.S. Patent application showing Pidgin's proposal to display silent film dialogue using balloons
In 1916, Pidgin filed a patent application to display dialogue in silent films, proposing that actors inflate balloons or party favor-like objects with text on them to recreate the act of speaking.[21] The idea never took off, and this proposal has only received modern attention as being a rather ludicrous idea.[22][23][24]
Pidgin married three times. He married his first wife Lizzie Abbott Dane in 1867, and she died the following year. In 1873 he married Lucy Sturtevant Gardner, who became a doctor and practiced medicine until her death in 1896.[25][26] His third wife, married in 1897, was Frances Fern Douglas.[27][28] Pidgin died at his home inMelrose Highlands, Massachusetts, on June 3, 1923.[2][29][30]
^(3 February 1917).Has the United States More than 118 Notable Composers?,Musical America (letter to editor where Pidgin combines his statistical skills with his musical interests to report how many composers appear inWho's Who in America and their ages)
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