Judge Aldrich was descended from the 19th century author Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
As editor, he created tension with his publisher Henry Houghton by refusing to publish commissioned articles by his friends, including Woodrow Wilson and Marion Crawford.
Toby Tyler is a "bad boy" novel, meant to teach a lesson what happens to boys who do bad things; other examples include George W. Peck's Peck's Bad Boy (1883), Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), and Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
According to the Penkapog Papers by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the reference is to Thomas Rawlinson (1681-1725),nicknamed Tom Folio, a lawyer and bibliophile whose accumulation of books at his residence in Gray's Inn was said to have compelled him to sleep in a passageway.
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