Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 01 Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great — Reading Companion

Anecdote as Argument

Hubbard rarely states a subject's importance directly. Instead, he selects a single incident that he implies shaped the person's character or work. In the Hugo sketch, the arrest of General Lahorie is given more space than any summary of Hugo's literary career. The reader learns about the general's hiding place, the children's frantic attempt to rescue him, and the mother's pointed instruction to read the execution notice. Hubbard trusts that this story conveys something essential about Hugo's later preoccupations with justice, exile, and the outcast. The same technique appears in the sketch of Walt Whitman, where Hubbard describes the poet as a man who becomes for others 'aliment and dew'—a metaphor that replaces any chronological account of Whitman's life. These anecdotes function as compressed arguments about what matters most in a life.

The Voice of the Biographer

Hubbard's own personality intrudes frequently, and the prose is marked by aphoristic asides and moral judgments. He writes that 'Man is neither master of his life nor of his fate' before quoting Hugo, and he compares his own project to Plutarch's Lives, claiming that Hubbard's work 'has not been equaled since Plutarch wrote his forty-six parallel lives.' The publisher's preface, written after Hubbard's death, adopts an even more elevated tone, describing the author's 'magic wand of genius' and the 'geyser of inspiration' that flows from his subjects. This self-conscious framing makes the volume as much about Hubbard's own philosophy—his belief in the power of individual genius and moral example—as about the figures he profiles. The reader is constantly aware of a mediating consciousness shaping each portrait.

Setting as Character

Hubbard devotes considerable attention to physical spaces, describing houses, gardens, and landscapes in detail that often exceeds what is strictly biographical. The Hugo family's Parisian residence is rendered as 'a mosaic—a sample of the Sixteenth Century inlaid in this; solitary as the woods; quiet as a convent; sacred as a forest; a place for dreams, and reverie, and rest.' This language transforms the setting into a symbolic environment that mirrors the subject's inner life. The dilapidated chapel, the high stone wall, the tangled shrubbery—all contribute to an atmosphere of seclusion and contemplation. Hubbard uses similar descriptive passages for other subjects, though the excerpts provide only glimpses. The effect is to make each 'little journey' a physical as well as a mental pilgrimage, grounding abstract ideas in concrete places.

The Shape of a Life

Because the excerpts are incomplete, it is impossible to know how Hubbard structures each full sketch. The Hugo section begins in medias res with the childhood incident, then moves to the mother's letter and the general's fate. There is no birth date, no list of works, no chronological march from youth to death. Instead, Hubbard selects a few vivid scenes and lets them stand for the whole. The publisher's preface notes that fourteen years were spent on the series, with one 'little pilgrimage' issued per month. This serial origin may explain the episodic quality: each sketch is designed to be read in a single sitting, leaving the reader with a dominant impression rather than a comprehensive record. The volume's subtitle—'Good Men and Great'—signals Hubbard's moral framework: these are lives offered as examples, not merely as data.

Readers approaching this volume should expect neither neutral biography nor academic history. Hubbard writes as a moralist and a storyteller, selecting details for their symbolic weight rather than their factual completeness. The pleasure of the text lies in its confident voice, its vivid scenes, and its willingness to judge. Treat each sketch as an essay in character, not a definitive life. The 'little journey' is Hubbard's own journey as much as the reader's, and the homes he visits are as much states of mind as physical places.

Over decades at this desk, I’ve watched Little Journeys find readers, its brisk kindness warming pages like Hubbard’s own hearth. Yet sometimes I think of Portraits of Children of the Mobility — Story, Setting & Ideas, where dignity rests in quieter corners—not great homes, but small ones. Both whisper the same gentle truth: character needs no grand address to be remembered.