Town-bred youths romanticized wilderness manual labor without being able to perform it.

Evidence

We were very much amazed, in truth, at his coming here. He is evidently a shallow, arrogant youth. We have decided that to-day is November 26th; to-morrow is Thanksgiving Day, and we are planning a feast, though Mr. K. said to me again this morning, with a doleful face, “You see there’s another mouth to feed.” This “mouth” has come up to try the panacea of manual labor, but he is town bred, and I see that he will do nothing. He is writing poetry, and while I was busy to-day began to read it aloud to me, asking for my criticism. He is just at the age when everything literary has a fascination, and every literary person is a hero, specially Dr. Holland. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 238

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A would-be poet who flees the city to try ‘the panacea of manual labor’ and reads his verse aloud to a woman shoveling mud out of her room is a ready-made comic-tragic character arc.
• FICTION: A comic-tragic figure — the soft city aesthete apprenticed to a life he cannot survive, unaware he is an extra mouth in a starving household.
• CANDY: The diarist’s disdain for the poetry-writing city boy who showed up uninvited to a mountaintop cabin is pure elevator material.