Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  I have noticed comments at various times upon the fact that Scott in Ivanhoe and Lessing in Nathan the Wise were the first authors in their respective countries, who in modern times had represented a Jew in other than the most contemptible light. Now, to me it seems that what under the circumstances you failed to do, is equally as noteworthy as what they did do. (CU-MARK)

  350.23–32 once the ladies of a orphans home wrote him . . . everything that was needed to make it comfortable] Clemens delivered his “American Vandal Abroad” lecture on 22 January 1869 for the Cleveland Protestant Orphan Asylum, earning $564 for a bathtub and other expenses. In a pitch for further contributions, Clemens said at the end of his speech:

  Don’t be afraid of giving too much to the orphans, for however much you give you have the easiest end of the bargain. Some persons have to take care of those sixty orphans and they have to wash them. [Prolonged laughter.] Orphans have to be washed! And it’s no small job either for they have only one wash tub and it’s slow business! They can’t wash but one orphan at a time! They have to be washed in the most elaborate detail, and by the time they get through with the sixty, the original orphan has to be washed again. Orphans won’t stay washed! I’ve been an orphan myself for twenty-five years and I know this to be true. (“Mark Twain,” Cleveland Leader, 23 Jan 1869, 4)

  The asylum, founded in 1853, was located on Woodland Avenue near Cleveland’s Jewish Orphan Asylum for the orphans of Jewish Civil War veterans, which opened in 1868, underwritten by the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith (L3: 7 Jan 1869 to Fairbanks et al., 15–17; 23 Jan 1869 to Twichell and family, 68 n. 5; 5 Feb 1869 to Fairbanks, 87–88 n. 4; Cleveland Directory 1871, 542; Rose 1950, 246, 351).

  352.13 Many years have gone by, and the pegs have disappeared] Clemens devised the history game at Quarry Farm in Elmira in July 1883, first setting pegs on the road on 18 July. Two days later he wrote Howells that he had also figured out a way to play it indoors with a cribbage board (NN-BGC, in MTHL, 1:435–36).

  352.33–34 one of the first two written by me . . . twelve or fifteen years old] Probably The Innocents Abroad (1869) or Roughing It (1872). It seems unlikely that Clemens counted The Celebrated Jumping Frog (1867) as his first book, since he had been at some pains to destroy its plates and prevent its being reprinted (see AD, 23 May 1906, note at 49.31–33).

  353.10–19 I did not want the authorship to be known . . . they put my name to it, with my consent] “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,” ostensibly translated by “the Sieur Louis de Conte . . . out of the ancient French into modern English from the original unpublished manuscript in the National Archives of France, by Jean François Alden,” was serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1895–96. After the first installment was published in April 1895, Clemens’s authorship was almost immediately suspected and confirmed. On 11 April the Hartford Courant wrote, “It is now known for a fact that Mr. Clemens is the author” (“Those ‘Personal Recollections,’” 8). Although his name was never attached to the serial version, “Mark Twain” is on both the cover and the spine of the 1896 book edition (SLC 1895–96, 1896; Rood 1895; “News Notes,” Bookman, Apr 1895, 145).

  353.24–26 Two years ago, I wrote in a carefully disguised fashion . . . anybody would know me by] On 21 August 1905 Clemens wrote to George Harvey, “I am publishing anonymously an article in an outside paper, in the hope that the authorship will not be detected” (Willis F. Johnson 1929, 81). The “outside paper” was Collier’s Weekly, and the article was “Christian Citizenship,” a brief plea for the voter to heed “his Christian code of morals” in the upcoming civic elections and to reject New York’s Tammany Hall government. The article appeared in the issue of 2 September, credited to “a great creative artist whose reasons for anonymity seem sufficient to us as to himself “(SLC 1905f; Lee to SLC, 13 Sept 1905, CU-MARK; Louis J. Budd, unpublished TS in CU-MARK).

  353.30–38 when Thomas Bailey Aldrich succeeded Mr. Howells . . . I did write the article, and I’ll cash the check] Aldrich, who succeeded Howells at the Atlantic Monthly in early 1881, published the untitled and unsigned piece, about a western obituary with “rhetorical blemishes,” in the November 1881 “Contributors’ Club.” Clemens wrote him on 2 November, “I did write that article, after all. The check for it has come; so I know I wrote it” (MH-H; SLC 1881).

  355.2–3 Mrs. Clemens’s instinct had been correct; Jean had been dangerously ill] This incident took place in late November 1890, when Olivia was called to Elmira to be with her dying mother, Olivia Lewis Langdon. Clemens and Olivia both went, leaving Clara and Jean with the servants. Jean was ten years old. Susy was at Bryn Mawr (26–27 Nov 1890 to OLC, Twainian 35 (Sept–Oct 1976): 2–3; 27 Nov 1890 to Howells, MH-H, in MTHL, 2:633–34).

  356.3–6 Bessie Stone said . . . it must be on account of those pleadings that Mary came to be a child of prayer] Bessie Stone’s first letter to Clemens, of 1870 or 1871, is not known to survive, but she wrote again in 1883 that Jesus “has just come to several of my friends, and found an entrance; and I, who have not ceased to pray for you these twelve years, am expecting Him to come to you now.” Clemens wrote on the envelope “D—d fool.” In 1890 she sent birthday greetings to Clemens, alluding to Mary Jane Wilks’s vow to Huckleberry Finn in chapter 28 that she would pray for him, and adding, “As you sent that extraordinary passage out into the world, weren’t you hiding in it a hint to your small friend that you still cared for my prayers?” (Stone to SLC, 13 Feb 1883 and 30? Nov 1890, CU-MARK; HF 2003, 244).

  Autobiographical Dictation, 29 December 1906

  357.31–32 I went West to attend my mother’s funeral] Jane Lampton Clemens died on 27 October 1890; she “was borne by her children to Hannibal and laid to rest” beside her husband (MTB, 2:901). In his moving tribute to her, “Jane Lampton Clemens,” Clemens concluded, “She always had the heart of a young girl; and in the sweetness and serenity of death she seemed somehow young again. She was always beautiful” (Inds, 82–92).

  358.4–19 a Medical Convention took place in a river town . . . a secret which she had carried in her heart for more than sixty years] Clemens apparently heard his mother’s “secret” in 1886 from Pamela Moffett, who had visited Jane, Orion, and Mollie in Keokuk in April, then stopped over in New York and Hartford on her way back to Fredonia. Jane Clemens had first told Orion, then Pamela during her April visit, and finally Mollie, enjoining each to secrecy. The doctor (whose name both Clemens and Mollie reported as “Barrett”—not “Gwynn”—at the time) was Richard Ferril Barret (1804–60), who had lived in nearby Green County, Kentucky, when Jane married John Clemens in 1823. He studied medicine in Cincinnati and at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, between 1824 and 1827, and married Maria Buckner in 1832. In 1840 he was a cofounder, with Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, of the Medical Department at Kemper College (later Missouri Medical College) in St. Louis. He was later described as “eminently noble and engaging,—a figure tall, graceful, and courtly, and a countenance of the Roman model . . . . His pride of race and scholarly habits made him appear exclusive and aristocratic, but his impulses were ardent, and his manners polite and engaging” (Scharf 1883, 1:677). His son, Richard Aylett Barret (b. 1834), who became a successful doctor, lawyer, and journalist, lived much of his life in St. Louis. Clemens told a somewhat different—and probably more accurate—version of his mother’s story to Howells in May 1886. He said that Orion had accompanied Jane to “a convention of old settlers of the Mississippi Valley in an Iowa town” (not a “Medical Convention,” as he recalls here); when she was told that Dr. Barret had “returned to St. Louis,” they “went straight back to Keokuk” (19 May 1886, NN-BGC, in MTHL, 2:566–68). The event may have been the “Tri-State Old Settlers’ Reunion,” which was held in Keokuk in September 1885; no convention in Burlington, or another “Iowa town,” has been documented. And if there was a Dr. Barret at the reunion, it was the son of the one Jane had known, who had died in 1860 (letters in CU-MARK: PAM to Samuel Moffett, 2 Apr 188
6 and 21 May 1886; MEC to SLC and OLC, 3 Feb 1887; and OC and MEC to SLC and OLC, 23 Feb 1887; Inds, 300–301; Conard 1901, 1:160–63; Scharf 1883, 1:676–77; Carolyn D. Palmgreen, personal communication, 30 Dec 1985, CU-MARK; Varble 1964, 113–14, 351–52).

  359.5–8 Aaron Burr, old, gray, forlorn, forsaken . . . ship that bore all his treasure, his daughter] Theodosia Burr Alston (1783–1813), daughter of former Vice-President Aaron Burr, was a child prodigy who knew several languages, including Latin and Greek. After her mother’s death, when she was eleven, she served as hostess in her father’s house. In 1801 she married Joseph Alston (1779–1816) of South Carolina, who was elected governor in 1812. In 1807 Aaron Burr was arrested for what came to be known as the Burr Conspiracy, but was acquitted on a technicality and retreated to Europe for four years before resuming his legal career in New York. In December 1812, in ill health and depressed over the death of her ten-year-old son, Theodosia boarded the schooner Patriot in Georgetown, South Carolina, bound for New York. For weeks, Burr daily walked the Manhattan pier watching in vain for the ship, whose fate remains unknown (Lomask 1982, 361–63; Parmet and Hecht 1967, 56, 67, 88–90, 163, 300–304, 328–30; Côté 2012).

  Autobiographical Dictation, 6 January 1907

  359.27–28 Reverend Joseph H. Twichell is with me . . . my last visit to Bermuda] Clemens, Twichell, and Isabel Lyon left New York for Bermuda aboard the RMS Bermudian on 2 January; they arrived in Hamilton two days later and registered at the Princess Hotel. They departed for New York, again on the Bermudian, on 7 January. Miss Hobby did not accompany them (Lyon 1907, entries for 2, 4, 7, and 9 Jan; Hoffmann 2006, 69–78). For this dictation and probably the first part of the next (9 January), Lyon took down Clemens’s words in longhand (she did not know shorthand), and Hobby subsequently created the typescript from Lyon’s notes, which have not survived. Clemens, accompanied by Twichell, had last visited Bermuda from 20 to 24 May 1877. His account of the trip, “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” appeared in four installments in the Atlantic Monthly, from October 1877 through January 1878 (SLC 1877–78; for the notebook he kept during the trip, see N&J2, 8–36).

  360.3–8 Twichell’s school days in Hartford . . . “Olney’s Geography”] A Practical System of Modern Geography, by Jesse Olney (1798–1872), was first published in 1828. Innovative in its presentation of world geography, and far from neutral in its characterization of ethnic groups, for thirty years it was used in virtually every school in the United States. Revised and enlarged many times, it ran through ninety-eight editions. Olney was a teacher in New York State, and from 1821 to 1831 served as a school principal in Hartford. In 1834 he moved to Southington, where Twichell was born (in 1838) and spent his boyhood. Although Olney thereafter devoted much of his time to writing textbooks, he worked to establish a system of public schools in Connecticut and opened his own “select school” (Timlow 1875, 450; Baker 1996; Courtney 2008, 8–17).

  360.13 “Kirkham’s Grammar!”] English Grammar in Familiar Lectures, by Samuel Kirkham, first published in 1824, was issued in dozens of editions by several publishers. An 1835 Baltimore edition, designated the “one hundred and fifth,” is now in the Mark Twain Papers, and may have belonged to Clemens during his Hannibal youth (Kirkham 1835; for a discussion of its provenance and authenticity, see Gribben 1980, 1:383–84).

  360.17–18 Miss Kirkham . . . was still keeping boarders] Emily Kirkham and her widowed mother, Mary Ann (d. 1894), had run the boardinghouse where Clemens and Twichell stayed in 1877. Emily was then twenty-five (Hoffmann 2006, 35, 74).

  360.21–22 the day on which her only nephew was born] Clemens had recorded the birth in his 1877 notebook: “Mrs. Kirkham had a grandchild born to her in the middle of the night—that is, 1 Thursday morning, the Queen’s birthday, May 24” (N&J2, 32).

  360.24–31 Twichell (bearing the assumed name of Peters) . . . name is not Wilkinson—that’s Mark Twain] Twichell traveled on the ship to and from Bermuda under his own name. A “Reverend Mr. Peters” figures in the second installment of “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” but he is not Twichell, who is referred to throughout the series as “the Reverend.” Clemens used his middle name, Langhorne, as his alias during most of the trip (Bermuda Royal Gazette [photocopies in CU-MARK, courtesy of Donald Hoffmann]: “Passengers Arrived,” 22 May 1877, 2; “Passengers Sailed,” 29 May 1877, 2; “‘Mark Twain,’ the very amusing author . . . ,” 29 May 1877, 2; Twichell 1874–1916, entry for 28 May 1877; Hoffmann 2006, 26, 72).

  360.40 swiftly developing possibilities of aerial navigation] Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their first powered flights on 17 December 1903. In early 1908 the War Department awarded them a contract to produce a biplane for $25,000 which could fly a distance of 125 miles at 40 miles per hour.

  360.41–361.1 those striking verses of Tennyson’s which forecast a future when airborne vessels of war shall meet and fight] These lines from “Locksley Hall,” first published in 1842, were frequently quoted in the first years of the twentieth century when aerial navigation was becoming a practical reality (Tennyson 1842, 2:104):

  For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

  Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

  Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

  Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

  Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

  From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.

  At the time of this dictation, George Harvey had just quoted these lines in his “Editor’s Diary” in the North American Review for 21 December 1906 (Harvey 1906, 1330–33).

  361.2–5 something which I had read . . . kill 10,000 persons outright and injure 80,000] These figures derive ultimately from the annual report by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which had been submitted to Congress on 19 December 1906. When revising this dictation, Clemens increased his original number of people injured; he evidently made the change sometime after 10 January, when he “bought a world almanac & read Railroad accidents in the U.S. for the past nine years.” He repeats the original number—60,000—in his Autobiographical Dictation of 25 February, and although he revised that dictation, he did not correct the number there (“Commerce Commission Reports,” Wall Street Journal, 20 Dec 1906, 7; Thompson 1907, 3–8, 44–45; Lyon 1907, entry for 10 Jan).

  Autobiographical Dictation, 9 January 1907

  362.13 no Tammany] The Democratic political machine in New York City, named for the Delaware Indian chief Tamanend. Incorporated in 1789, it reached its height of power, and corruption, in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and remained a factor in New York politics into the 1960s.

  362.16 W.C.T.U.] The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in 1874 to oppose the use of alcohol, particularly because of its destructive effects on families. Today, as “the oldest voluntary, non-sectarian woman’s organization in continuous existence in the world,” it has a wider agenda of social concerns, including women’s rights (W.C.T.U. 2011). Clemens’s mother and sister were among the earliest members of the organization, and he was initially supportive of its temperance efforts, but soon repudiated the goal of total abstinence (see L6: 12 Mar 1874 to the Editor of the London Standard, 66–73; 23 July 1875 to PAM, 515–16).

  363.13 As concerns interpreting the Deity] The ultimate source of the remainder of this day’s dictation is “Interpreting the Deity,” a manuscript that Clemens had written in June 1905. Jean Clemens typed a copy of the manuscript, probably by the end of August 1905, and her typescript is the immediate source of the text here (SLC 1905e; Lyon 1905a, entries for 17 Sept, 23 Sept, 1 Oct, and 21 Oct).

  363.14–15 Rosetta stone . . . Champollion] This basalt slab, found in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops in northern Egypt, was inscribed by priests affirming the cult of Ptolemy V, king of Egypt (205–180 B.C.). Their text was in the three scripts then in use: hieroglyphi
c (used for priestly documents), demotic (the ordinary native script), and Greek (used by the government). The Greek inscription provided the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphics by pioneer Egyptologist Jean François Champollion (1790–1832), who published his first translation in 1822–24. The hieroglyphs reproduced here (like the demotic characters and the “Dighton” petroglyphs on page 364) are in Clemens’s own hand. Although most of them appear on the Rosetta stone, his actual source is not known. He evidently selected a variety of signs and arranged them in a random order.

  363.21–24 Grünfeldt . . . Gospodin] Both names are fictitious. “Gospodin” is Russian for “sir” or “Mr.”

  363.29 Rawlinson] Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–95) was a distinguished British soldier, diplomat, and scholar, best known for his decipherment, in 1844–46, of Akkadian cuneiform writing, not hieroglyphics.

  364.2 Flight from Elba] Napoleon Bonaparte escaped in February 1815 from the island of Elba, where he had been exiled in May 1814 after his defeat in the Peninsular War.

  364.16–17 two little lines of hieroglyphs among the figures grouped upon the Dighton Rocks] The Dighton Rock is a forty-ton boulder in the Taunton River near Berkley, Massachusetts, probably deposited during the last Ice Age, some ten thousand years ago. For over three hundred years scholars and the general public have been studying the mysterious inscriptions on it, which at various times have been thought to be Phoenician, Roman, Norse, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, or Native American. Clemens’s drawings of petroglyphs are not copies of these inscriptions. In 1963 the rock was moved from the riverbed, and a museum was built around it (Massachusetts Historical Society 2011).