Collection of stories about a family named Peterkin which made the Peterkins a household word. The collected stories were published in 1880 under the title The Peterkin Papers. The Peterkins were a lovable but comically inept family that possess ingenuity, logic, resourcefulness, and energy-but not common sense. The stories are charming to modern readers for the details they give of life in the 1870s as lived by an upper-middle-class family in a small village about an hours train ride from Boston.