Charles Felton Pidgin (November 11, 1844 – June 3, 1923) was an American author, statistician, and inventor. He is best known for his 1900 novel Quincy Adams Sawyer, which became successful largely due to a big marketing campaign, and was adapted for the stage and silent film.
Biography
He was born on November 11, 1844, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, to Mary E. Felton and Benjamin Gordon Pidgin.
As a young child, Pidgin was rendered lame by an accident to his hip, and he was also partially blind for a number of years. He graduated from The English High School in Boston in 1863, and worked for ten years in the mercantile business. He was appointed chief clerk of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1873. In 1888 he independently published a book titled Practical Statistics. He was appointed as chief of the bureau in 1903, and remained there until 1907, leaving to focus on his writing work.
In addition to serving as a state statistician, Pidgin remained busy in many other pursuits. He invented statistical tabulating machines, and wrote songs and musical comedies. And he also became a fairly prolific author, for which he became best known.
On the stage, Pidgin's musical comedy adaptation of Peck's Bad Boy was first produced in 1883 and ran for many years.
His first and most popular novel Quincy Adams Sawyer was published in 1900 and sold over 250,000 copies. It was aggressively marketed by his publisher, C.M. Clark Publishing, run by Carro Clark, the wife of Pidgin's friend Charles Atkinson. It was adapted into a popular stage play in 1902, which toured widely and played at the Academy of Music in New York. The book was adapted to silent films of the same name in 1912 (by Puritan Special Features Company, of which little is known), and again in 1922 starring John Bowers, Blanche Sweet, Lon Chaney, and Barbara La Marr. Both films are considered lost.
