Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  227.25–26 British Premier Campbell-Bannerman celebrates seventieth birthday to-morrow] Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) was born Henry Campbell in Kelvinside, near Glasgow, Scotland, on 7 September. He reluctantly changed his surname to Campbell-Bannerman after a conditional inheritance of property in 1871 (Wilson 1973, 46–47). See the note at 227.34–37.

  227.28–33 To His Excellency . . . Mark Twain] Clemens sent this telegram to the London Tribune’s New York correspondent, Luther E. Price, who had made the request (Price to SLC, 6 Sept 1906, VtMiM).

  227.34–37 A great and brave statesman . . . we lived in the same hotel for a time] Clemens probably first met Campbell-Bannerman at Marienbad in August 1891. In October 1898 they could have met “daily” at Vienna’s Hotel Krantz, where he and his wife, Sarah Charlotte Bruce (d. 1906), often stayed after their annual six-week visit to Marienbad. Campbell-Bannerman began his career in the House of Commons in 1868 as the Liberal member for Stirling Burghs. He became known as an advocate of universal elementary education, free trade, Irish home rule, anti-imperialism, and improved social conditions. Although not a compelling speaker, he was famously principled in dealing with provocative opposition even within his own party. He served as secretary of state for war in 1886 and again in 1892–95. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1895, and in 1905 King Edward VII appointed him premier (the first to be called prime minister) and first lord of the treasury, a position he resigned in early April 1908, about two weeks before his death (John Wilson 1973, 137, 140, 149, 446, 634–42; “Premier’s Wife Dead,” New York Times, 31 Aug 1906, 9).

  228.5–6 Labouchere . . . that picturesque personality] After two years at Trinity College, adventures in South America and Mexico, six months in an Ojibwe Indian camp, ten years as an attaché in Washington, D.C., and Europe, and two short stints in Parliament as a Liberal member for Windsor and Middlesex in the late 1860s, Henry du Pré Labouchere (1831–1912) worked as a theater owner, theatrical producer, journalist, editor, and publisher. He was known for his cynical wit, his brilliance, his combativeness, and his adventurous life. His magazine, Truth, which regularly exposed fraud and reported inside information about the court and prominent politicians, was several times sued for libel. In 1880 Labouchere returned to Parliament as a Liberal member for Northampton and served until 1906.

  228.8–11 his wife, in the throng of medicinal-water drinkers . . . had been a great actress in her time] Actress Henrietta Hodson (1841–1910) lived with Labouchere, served as his hostess, bore him a child, and eventually married him, after the death of her estranged husband, Richard Walter Pigeon, in 1887. Ellen Terry said she was “a brilliant burlesque actress, a good singer, and a capital dancer” with “great personal charm” (Terry 1908, 47). She had a very successful career, primarily in comic roles, in Bristol and London, where she became manager of the Royalty Theatre, introducing the innovation of having the orchestra in a pit below the stage. In 1877 she had a public feud with W. S. Gilbert, whose dictatorial behavior when she was part of the cast for his Pygmalion and Galatea prompted her to attack him in a pamphlet addressed to the profession, and in 1878 she retired from acting. Clemens probably saw her in Bad Homburg in August 1892, possibly on the same day he met the Prince of Wales (23 Aug 1892 to OC and MEC, CU-MARK; see AD, 27 Aug 1906, note at 181.31–36).

  228.20–21 the Nestor of Parliament of that day] Unidentified.

  228.21–22 Sir William Vernon Harcourt, leader of the Opposition] Harcourt (1827–1904), a lawyer, journalist, and Liberal member of Parliament, served as home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer under Gladstone before becoming Leader of the Opposition in 1896–98, when a Conservative-Unionist government was in power.

  228.31 death of William IV] On 20 June 1837.

  228.38–39 the Prince of Wales . . . was to receive in state the deed of a vast property which had been conferred upon the nation by a wealthy citizen] A manuscript fragment in the Mark Twain Papers reads in part, “tell about lost deed to the new national gallery”; this note’s proximity to notes on Sir William Harcourt makes it probable that the opening of the Tate Gallery is meant, and that it was Harcourt himself who told the story. He was a prime mover in the foundation of the gallery, and assisted at the ceremony on 21 July 1897 at which Henry Tate presented the Prince of Wales with the deeds to the property and the building (Autobiographical Fragment #148, CU-MARK; “The Prince of Wales and the Tate Gallery,” London Times, 22 July 1897, 7).

  Autobiographical Dictation, 10 September 1906

  229.17–18 not yet finished about the British Premier and his seventieth birthday, but I will let that go over until another day] Clemens again mentions Campbell-Bannerman in the Autobiographical Dictation of 1 October 1907, but does not return to the subject of his birthday.

  230.1–2 In a chapter which I dictated five months ago . . . dates of their occurrence] See the Autobiographical Dictation of 29 March 1906 (AutoMT1, 455–62).

  230.4–6 I edited one issue . . . several weeks to quiet down and pacify the people whom my writings had excited] When in September 1852 Orion was obliged to be out of town, he asked his brother to edit one issue of the Hannibal Journal, a weekly. Clemens, aged sixteen, took on the 16 September issue and part of the following week’s as well. In three of the five sketches he wrote he signed himself “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab“ or “W.E.A.B.”: “Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse” (about a humiliating hoax perpetrated by a local merchant); “Editorial Agility” (aimed at Joseph P. Ament, editor of the rival Hannibal Missouri Courier, under whom he had served an apprenticeship from May 1848 to January 1851); and “Blabbing Government Secrets!” (satirizing the debate in the Missouri legislature over the allocation of land grants to the railroads). But the article that caused a real commotion was “‘Local’ Resolves to Commit Suicide,” which he signed “A Dog-be-Deviled-Citizen.” It ridiculed (without naming him) the local editor, J. T. Hinton, of the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger, who it was rumored had tried and failed to drown himself because he had been jilted. Clemens illustrated his brief article with a woodcut he carved himself, showing the local editor holding a lantern and walking into the stream, intent on “feeding his carcass to the fishes of Bear Creek. . . . Fearing, however, that he may get out of his depth, he sounds the stream with his walking-stick.” Hinton protested such rough treatment in his own local column, but Clemens followed up on 23 September with “Pictur’ Department,” also signed “A Dog-be-Deviled-Citizen,” containing two more woodcuts and further ridicule. Orion tried to defuse the situation in the same issue, saying the work was “perpetrated in a spirit of fun, and without a serious thought, no attention was expected to be paid to them, beyond a smile at the local editor’s expense.” But Hinton the same day responded at some length, dismissing the articles as “the feeble eminations of a puppy’s brain.” In 1871 Clemens published a sketch describing, and no doubt embroidering, these events, “My First Literary Venture,” in the Galaxy (ET&S1, 71–75, 78; 4 Mar 1870 to Walden, L4, 86 n. 1; SLC 1852a, 1852b, 1852c, 1852d, 1852e, 1871).

  230.6–7 I did not meddle with a pen again, so far as I can remember, until ten years later—1859] Texts of more than seventy newspaper letters and sketches by Clemens written between 1849 and 1859 have been recovered. Most were published in his brother’s various small-town newspapers: the Hannibal Western Union, the Hannibal Journal, and the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal. But a handful were published in journals like the Boston Carpet-Bag, the Philadelphia American Courier, the Hannibal Missouri Courier, the St. Louis Missouri Republican, and the New Orleans Crescent, while still other writings, like “Jul’us Caesar” (SLC 1855–56) and various poems for his friends’ albums, remained unpublished.

  230.21–27 The pilots handed my extravagant satire . . . nor ever used his nom de guerre again] Clemens’s satire was an untitled sketch made up of an “editor’s” introduction and a letter giving river information signed “Sergeant Fathom.” It was published in the daily “River Intelligence” colum
n of the New Orleans Crescent on 17 May 1859, less than six weeks after he got his pilot’s license (SLC 1859). Two days after it appeared the editor wrote that “the letter which appeared in the river column of the Crescent of Tuesday morning was handed to us by Mr. B. W. S. Bowen, pilot of the steamer A. T. Lacey” (ET&S1, 128 n. 10). At the time Barton S. Bowen was copilot with Clemens on the Lacey (“Steamboat Calendar: Clemens’s Piloting Assignments, 1857–1861,” L1, 389). Clemens “told all about this” in chapter 50 of Life on the Mississippi. No evidence has yet been found that Isaiah Sellers (1803?–64) ever used “Mark Twain” to sign his contributions to newspapers (24 June 1874 to Unidentified, L6, 166–67 n. 1; Kruse 1992, 2–25).

  230.30–32 I wrote no literature until 1866, when . . . “The Jumping Frog” was published in a perishing literary journal in New York] Clemens is distinguishing between journalism and literature. But much of his writing for the Enterprise must be considered something other than reportage—“Ye Sentimental Law Student,” written in 1863, for instance—and even before he was hired as a local reporter in 1862 he had volunteered the so-called “Josh” letters (no longer extant), which included at least one memorable burlesque. In addition, he wrote dozens of newspaper letters containing humorous sketches, as well as several literary articles for the Californian and the Golden Era, before “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the New York Saturday Press for 18 November 1865 (SLC 1863b, 1865e; ET&S1, 13–14, 16–17; see AD, 21 May 1906, especially the note at 47.3–5).

  230.40 Mr. Alden, editor of Harper’s Monthly] Called the “true genius of the magazine,” Henry Mills Alden (1836–1919), first hired by Harpers in 1862, was made editor of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1869, a position he held for fifty years, although he retired from active management some years before his death. He insisted from the beginning of his tenure that he be “first reader” of submitted manuscripts, and although he worked closely with writers and wrote numerous editorials as well as “The Editor’s Study,” his contribution was little known outside of the magazine, in part because the editorship was mostly associated in the public’s mind with William Dean Howells and George William Curtis, authors, at different times, of “The Editor’s Easy Chair.” On Alden’s seventieth birthday, Clemens said of his “dear and ancient friend”: “You bear a kind heart in your breast, and the sweet and winning spirit that charms away all hostilities and animosities, and makes of your enemy your friend and keeps him so” (“Henry Mills Alden’s 70th Birthday,” Harper’s Weekly 50 [15 Dec 1906]: 1813–14; Howells 1919; New York Times: “Henry Mills Alden” and “Henry Mills Alden of Harper’s, Dies,” 8 Oct 1919, 18, 19).

  230.41 Mr. Thomas Rees] Thomas Rees (1850–1933) was the publisher of the Springfield (Ill.) State Register and the son of William S. Rees (d. 1859), publisher of the Keokuk Post (“Death of William S. Rees, the Street Preacher,” New York Times, 12 Oct 1859, 8).

  231.11–12 an affidavit sworn to by Mr. Rees, Sr.] The affidavit may have been in the hand of Thomas Rees’s elder brother, George, who was assistant editor of the Post until their father’s death in 1859, when he became editor (Keokuk City Directory 1859; MTB, 1:112; Rees 1908, 399–401).

  233.40–41 a few columns of solid bourgeois] That is, text that is typeset in a font of medium size (9 point) with no additional line spacing.

  234.2–3 a Philadelphian, Homer C. Wilbur, a regular and acceptable contributor to Sartain’s Magazine] Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art was published in Philadelphia between 1849 and 1852 by John Sartain (1808–97), a “master” of mezzotint engraving and a colleague and friend of Edgar Allan Poe’s. Among its prominent contributors were Poe, Longfellow, Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor, Harriet Martineau, William Gilmore Simms, Richard H. Stoddard, and George W. Bethune (Nichols 2004, 1, 12, 15). No contributions to the magazine by Homer C. Wilbur have been found.

  235.7 Burkes and Hares] William Burke and William Hare were convicted of entrapping and murdering seventeen victims in Edinburgh in 1827–28 and selling their corpses for dissection to Dr. Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer, who taught students of the Edinburgh Medical College.

  235.20–22 when the affidaviter says that there was a contract, and that I was paid for the work, those two statements are plain straightforward falsehoods] Clemens wrote three Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass travel letters and published them in the Keokuk Post in 1856 and 1857: “Correspondence,” “Snodgrass’ Ride on the Railroad,” and “Snodgrass, in a Adventure” (SLC 1856a, 1856b, 1857). He may have been correct that there was no written contract, but clearly there had been an agreement, if only verbal, to publish the letters. Thomas Rees, who knew of only two of the three letters, wrote his version of events in 1908, asserting that Clemens had indeed been paid:

  The firm of Rees & Son arranged with the young man to write some articles for publication in the Keokuk Post, which they mutually agreed would be worth five dollars each. . . . After writing the first, he concluded that he ought to have seven dollars and a half apiece for his articles, and the publishers met him at that price, so he wrote the second article, which was published, after which he thought his talent was worth ten dollars per article. As the publishers had reached the limit, having already invested twelve dollars and a half, which I am certain was the first money ever paid Mr. Clemens for writing, and which represented the profits of about two years’ publication of that daily paper, the negotiations were broken off and the series of articles ended at that point. . . .

  At the present time I have, locked up in the safe in my office, typewritten copies of these two articles, taken from the files of my father’s paper. Each one has an affidavit attached showing the genuineness of the publication and the circumstances under which it was written by Mr. Clemens. . . .

  I thought that I would insert these two articles in this letter, but they are such crude attempts at humor and are of such inferior composition as compared with Mr. Clemens’ more recent writings, that, notwithstanding the affidavits, some persons might imagine that I had written them myself, and after all these long years even Mr. Clemens himself would, perhaps, doubt that he was the author of them. (Rees 1908, 400–401)

  Autobiographical Dictation, 2 October 1906

  235.33–34 banquet-speech in New York on the 19th of September] Clemens’s speech, at the annual dinner of the Associated Press in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, was “an appeal to the nations in behalf of the simplified spelling” (“Spelling and Pictures and Twain at Dinner,” New York Times, 20 Sept 1906, 4). The text is included in the Autobiographical Dictation of 19 November 1906. According to Isabel Lyon, Clemens originally began to prepare a different speech, on a topic suggested by Melville Stone, the general manager of the Associated Press:

  When I went to my study later, on the desk I found 8 closely written pages of Ms. A speech—Mr. Clemens explained to me a[t] dinner—a speech to be given at a press banquet sometime in Sept. A speech in which he is taking up cudgels for the Standard Oil. It seems that when he was in N.Y. Mr. Melville Stone asked him to do just this thing & as Mr. Rogers’s intimate friend Mr. Clemens felt that he could not do it, and brought forward many sane reasons for not doing it, but Mr. Stone could see only the fact that he wanted Mr. Clemens to make that speech & make it so that it would attack the press for “muckraking” every corporation. (Lyon 1906, entry for 28 July)

  235.34–35 visit to Norfolk, Connecticut, to witness my daughter Clara’s début as a singer] Clemens returns to this topic at greater length in the Autobiographical Dictations of 3 October and 4 October 1906.

  236.1–6 young woman in New York . . . what she regarded as a great service] Clemens alludes to Charlotte Teller (1876–1953), a writer and socialist who had earned a degree from the University of Chicago. (Teller used her maiden name as a nom de plume; she had separated from her first husband, Frank Minitree Johnson, when she met Clemens, but continued to call herself “Mrs. Johnson”; in 1912 she married Gilbert Hirsch and adopted his surname.) S
he lived with her grandmother and a group of fellow writers at 3 Fifth Avenue, and was therefore a close neighbor of Clemens’s. In his Autobiographical Dictation of 30 March 1906 Clemens recalled their meeting, when she brought Nikolai Chaykovsky, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, to seek support for his cause (AutoMT1, 462, 647 n. 462.12). One of her works in progress, a play about Joan of Arc, caught his interest, and the two soon formed a warm friendship. Clemens was so impressed with her talent that he offered to read her manuscripts. On 13 April he wrote her, “If you yourself have had any doubts, brush them away; for there is greatness in you, Charlotte,—more of it than you suspect, I think. You are going to surpass your utmost anticipations” (NN-BGC). While on a trip to New York in late September he met with Joseph H. Sears to discuss a novel she had written, The Cage:

  Mrs. Johnson was one of the happiest persons in America last night. I sent for Sears, (President & Manager of Appletons) yesterday afternoon, & he came here at once & we talked an hour. He likes her book & is going to publish it; & I asked him to sell the serial rights for her, & he said he would do it with pleasure & give it to the magazine that offers the most. He also said it is his policy to secure a dozen authors permanently—a new book per year—& he believed she was going to be one of them. (25 Sept 1906 to Lyon and JC, photocopy in CU-MARK)

  The “great service” was Clemens’s offer to endorse The Cage, in the form of a letter addressed to the actress Maude Adams (famous for her role in Peter Pan). He described the novel as

  the story of the heart of a woman so big that all worldly forms are gladly ignored for the love of one man. That is what a real woman would do; & in so doing she would really make the man, too, if he had character to start with. And all of this takes place amidst the familiar surroundings of the Chicago of to-day. It is a strong book, Peter Pan, & if you once begin it you will not be able to leave this man & woman until you have finished the story. (24? Sept 1906 to Adams, draft not sent, CU-MARK)