The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses / holding

As David Faflik, an assistant professor at South Dakota State University, explains in an introduction to the Rutgers edition, Gunn was an Englishman with genteel manners who abandoned a career in architecture to draw comic illustrations.
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At the “Serious” Boardinghouse (Gunn’s scare quotes), Gunn meets a precocious, morally rigorous 12-year-old who “dabbled in entomology, didn’t approve of Shakespeare and objected to story-books, ‘as he had heard of persons becoming insane from the pernicious habit of novel-reading.’ ” A fan of temperance, the boy “had a little dressing-gown, and a special costume for gardening.” He once gave a lecture titled “On Sea-Weed and the Moral Lessons Inculcated by It,” and Gunn writes that the men in the house liked to imagine “the offensively virtuous life he would lead” when he grew up, “merging all minor peccadilloes into one ineradicable cancer of spiritual self-conceit. And furthermore, when removed to a sphere worthy of his manifold perfections, we thought what an unpleasant angel he’d make.”