Queed by Henry Sydnor Harrison

I’m always curious about old books I find all by themselves at tag sales held by people who are manifestly not bookish.I once found a volume of Yeats in a driveway littered with things ordered from TV ads – vegetable dicers, sandwich makers and nordic traks. It was in a box with Babysitters Club books — obviously a bookish daughter had moved away.

I found a copy of Queed at a tag sale like that, and something about it caught my eye. What was it doing there? Must have belonged to Grandpa.

Queed was actually quite popular in its day, back in 1911. It tells the story of a young man of unknown parentage who is raised by the New York City policemen by the name of Queed. The young man becomes a brilliant, self-educated scholar, who achieves success as a writer and embarks on a grand work of evolutionary sociology.

He moves to an unspecified Southern city. I first guessed Baltimore, but then it became the site of a grand review of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the author mentioned it had battlements all over the place, so I concluded it had to be Richmond, rightly as it turns out.

Anyway Queed, at first devoted to intellectual pursuits, learns the value of, in no particular order, exercise, friendship, and public service. At first he grudgingly takes precious minutes away from his great work to help his landlady’s daughter Fifi with her homework. Fifi has a cough, so you know she’s going to die tragically.

H.L. Mencken called Harrison a “merchant of mush,” but I’m much more tolerant of sentimentality. Indeed, I opine that sentiment, and more specifically love, is the only thing worth writing about.

Anyway , Queed, the overly intellectual 98-pound weakling becomes a robust, compassionate guy with lots of friends, and I found the process edudicating. It would spoil everything to say he also finds his father and gets the girl, but I have the feeling that the chances of any of my readers actually reading it are slim to none.

If my grandfather had left me a book of this kind, I wouldn’t be selling it at a tag sale with veg-o-matics and craft supplies.

And Miss Charlotte Lee (Sharlee) Weyland, the girl he gets in the end, is really something, a trailblazing feminist character, who founds a reformatory for young women who have been led astray.