Ingersoll Lockwood

Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger Ingersoll Lockwood

Lockwood published the first novel, Travels, and adventures of Little Baron Trump and his wonderful dog Bulger, in 1889, and its sequel, Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey, in 1893. The novels recount the adventures of the German boy Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Von Troomp, who goes by "Baron Trump", as he discovers weird underground civilizations, offends the natives, flees from his entanglements with local women, and repeats this pattern until arriving back home at Castle Trump.




The novels were part of a trend in U. S. children's literature that responded to the demand for fantastic adventure stories triggered by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). They were, however, indifferently received and did not enter the canon of children's literature. An 1891 reviewer wrote about one of Lockwood's novels: "The author labors through three hundred pages of fantastic and grotesque narrative, now and then striking a spark of wit; but the sparks emit little light and no warmth, and one has to fumble for the story."