Johnny Tremain

Plot summary

Johnny Tremain is a promising but prideful 14-year-old apprentice at the Boston silversmith shop of elderly Ephraim Lapham. The date is on July 23, 1773. It is understood that someday Johnny will marry Mr. Lapham's granddaughter Priscilla to keep the shop within the Lapham family. The shop receives a challenging and urgent order from wealthy merchant John Hancock to make a silver dish to replace one that Mr. Lapham fashioned decades before. While preparing Hancock's order, Johnny's hand is badly burned when Dove, another apprentice resentful of Johnny, deliberately gives him a cracked crucible that leaks molten silver. Johnny's hand is burned and crippled beyond use, and he can no longer be a silversmith. Johnny's youthful pride is crushed by the injury. He is relegated to work as an unskilled errand boy. He goes to find a new job that will accept his crippled hand.

After a series of rejections, Johnny reaches the low point of his young life. While searching for jobs, he encounters in a printshop Rab Silsbee, a young typesetter who is friendly to him. He then decides to turn to Mr. Lyte, a wealthy Boston merchant. Johnny explains that his mother told him that he and Mr. Lyte are related and as a last resort, to turn to him for help. Lyte requests the proof, and Johnny shows him a silver cup with the Lyte family's crest. Lyte says it was stolen from him in a burglary, and Johnny is accused of the theft and arrested. Eventually, Johnny is freed by the court after Rab brings Cilla to court and she testifies that Johnny showed her his cup before the burglary ever took place.

Johnny settles into a job delivering a weekly newspaper, the Boston Observer. The Observer is a Whig publication, and Johnny is introduced to the larger world of pre-revolutionary Boston politics by Rab. Johnny learns to ride and care for Goblin, a beautiful but skittish horse used to make deliveries. He moves in with Rab in the attic of the newspaper's shop.

As months pass and tension between Whigs and Tories rises, Johnny becomes a dedicated Whig. He matures and re-evaluates many personal relationships, including that with Cilla, who becomes a trusted friend and fellow Whig. Johnny and Rab participate in the Boston Tea Party, in which patriot colonists throw a shipload of tea into the harbor rather than allow the ship's owner to unload the tea and pay a tax imposed by Parliament without the consent of the people of Britain's American colonies. In retaliation, Britain sends an army of Redcoats to occupy Boston and closes the port, inflicting hardship upon the inhabitants of this commercial and trading town. Rab decides to leave the Observer and become a soldier, taking with him a musket that Johnny acquired for him. At the end of the book, Johnny meets and talks briefly with his friend one last time: Facing the British, Rab is mortally wounded in battle. No longer needing the musket, Rab returns it to Johnny with a stoic smile. A Patriot doctor offers to perform surgery to fix Johnny's hand so he can fire the gun against the Redcoats, and the story ends with Johnny's acceptance of the offer.


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