Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To James Redpath
24 October 1871 • Washington, D.C.
(MS: Axelrod, UCCL 00666)

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‸Washington, Tuesday.‸
ARLINGTON Hotel

(The only hotel in this town.) {Willard’s—O, my!—seventh-rate [ hash-house ].}1

Dear Red—

I have come square out, thrown “r Reminiscences” overboard & taken “Artemus Ward, Humorist,” for my subject. Wrote it here on Friday & Saturday, & read it from MSS2 last night to enormous house. It suits me, & so I’ll never deliver the nasty, nauseous “Reminiscences” any more.3

Please give make appointments for me at Red Reading & Easton Pa (between 5th & 10th of Feb., or sooner if it interferes with nothing,) for I am to talk for them for nothing—I threw them off, you know—telegram saying my folks were sick4 —(it came just in the nick of time, I may say, for I wanted to go to Washington & write a new lecture—which I’ve done it.

[MARK ]

[on the back of page 1:] 5

[1 ]

Slow Railroad.

cowcatcher on wrong ‸end‸ 6

heated journal.

—prisoners time expired fore they got there 7

Courting scene—56—Book 1. 8

$10 in Jeff’s pocket 9

188–9–90. Soldier Co 10

Besides, it improves a comic paper to put in a joke once in a while 11

poetry—200 12

[on the back of page 2:]

erence in his nature” (He was full of sentiment—but dared not express (voice) it lest he be thought spooney.)—61-1 13

14—Source of his gift 14

L. L. 15 great success,

—biggest he ever had.

15—Pathetic

17–16—English who “couldn’t see” the fun.

17—Last hours.

(On the nip—horse attached to a wagon. 16

Self-reliant. 17

[letter docketed:] boston lyceum bureau. redpath & fall. oct 27 1871 [and] “Twain Mark” | Wash. D. C. | Oct. ”71. 18

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The Arlington Hotel on Vermont Avenue near H Street had opened in December 1869 and had been “entirely refitted and redecorated” by January 1871 (“‘The Arlington,’” Washington Globe, 24 Jan 71, 7; Boyd 1872, 56). Clemens stayed there, perhaps for the first time, in early September (8 Sept 71 to OLC). He could also speak knowledgeably about the fare at once-fashionable Willard’s Hotel, at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street West, because he had boarded there while rooming with Senator William M. Stewart in the winter of 1867–68 (L2, 116–17). Since 1869 Willard’s had not been profitable; it was at present closed while its owners disputed plans for its future. Clemens’s friend Hiram J. Ramsdell remarked in one of his Cincinnati Commercial letters that the Arlington was “the only first-class hotel in the city” and applauded the Willard’s eclipse:

Well, Willard’s hotel has been dismantled, tore up, vacated. It is left to its own vile smells, its rats, its bed bugs, its intrigues, its amours, its damnation. . . .

If there is any one who has ever stopped at Willard’s, under the proprietorship of Sykes & Chadwick, who is not glad that the hell-hole is shut up, I shall be glad to be furnished with his name. (Ramsdell 1871)

Willard’s disappeared from the Washington directory in 1872, reappeared in 1873, and was able to advertise itself in the 1874 directory as the largest hotel in the city, “REHABILITATED and refitted throughout in the most elegant manner. . . . bedding, upholstery, furniture and equipment are entirely new, . . . costing over $200,000” (Boyd: 1873, 49; 1874, 121).

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2 Only a single page of the manuscript is known to survive:

[in ink, canceled in pencil:]

5 90

of those quaint ferocities which poor Artemus used to put in his programmes—something like this, you remember—“N. B. Audiences declining ‸ negl ‸ to retire ‸from the hall‸ when the lecture is done, will be put out ‸dispersed‸ by the police.” G. N.

[on verso in pencil:]

He left a good deal of pr money, but as far as we can learn, no good came

90.

In his will he advised his page to become a printer, believing that the best way to acquire a good practical education—& he left his library to the best boy in his native village.

He left a good deal of money, but as o far as we can learn, no good came of it. He appointed too many executors, & there wasn’t enough to go round, perhaps.

Thanking you very kindly for your attention, & for your presence here likewise, I will close this lecture with— ——well, I’ll tell it. (SLC 1871)

The eccentric will drawn up by Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne) in fact

provided first that the library of books bequeathed him by his uncle, Calvin Farrar, should be given the Waterford [Maine] boy or girl who passed the best school examination between the first day of January and that of April following his decease. . . . Second, that George H. Stephens, his personal attendant, should work as a printer’s apprentice for two years in the Riverside Press at Cambridge, at the end of which time, if his record was good, he was to be sent to the Academy at North Bridgton, . . . the estate to pay the cost of his education. (Seitz, 220–21)

Two trustees were appointed, as well as four literary executors, in England and America. The residue of Browne’s estate, after various bequests, was to go toward the founding of “an asylum for worn-out printers in the United States,” at the direction of Horace Greeley (Seitz, 220–21).

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3 The Artemus Ward talk attracted “the largest audience ever assembled in Lincoln Hall”—2,000 people, 150 of them crowded on stage. The Washington Evening Star liked the “pleasant talk,” but deplored the confusion of Mark Twain’s jokes with Artemus Ward’s and concluded: “No lecturer has a right to trifle with his audience in that kind of style” (“Mark Ward on Artemus Twain,” 24 Oct 71, 1; OC to MEC, 26 Oct 71, CU-MARK). And the Washington Morning Chronicle—which had heralded the coming of this “very rare and a very singular human being” who “is never tiresome; never a bore; never offers worn-out jokes; . . . he is at once charming, entertaining, and more than acceptable—the pride and the boast of our people”—was “disappointed” with the performance. It criticized Clemens’s “Unfit habits of speech,” called his “eccentricities of bearing” the “outward form of the inner peculiarity,” and found his gestures “simply outré when tried by rules” (“Amusements,” 23 Oct 71, 4; “Mark Twain’s Lecture at Lincoln Hall,” 24 Oct 71, 4). Despite these and subsequent poor reviews, however, Clemens delivered “Artemus Ward, Humorist” exclusively through 6 December. He then delivered it intermittently until the end of the month as he tinkered with and perfected yet another lecture, drawn from Roughing It.

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4 See 18 Oct 71 to OLC. The lectures at Easton and Reading were rescheduled for 23 and 24 November, respectively (Redpath and Fall 1871–72, 5).

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5 Clemens wrote this letter on the backs of two pages of his Artemus Ward lecture notes. As these notes indicate, and newspaper reports confirm, the lecture was a mélange of biographical information, anecdotes taken from Ward’s works, and Clemens’s own anecdotes (see Inds, 280, Fatout 1976, 41–48). The Genial Showman: Being Reminiscences of the Life of Artemus Ward (1870), by Ward’s manager, Edward P. Hingston, seems to have been Clemens’s chief biographical source.

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6 Supposedly while traveling

from Waterford to Portland on the Grand Trunk, then and now a rather deliberate railroad, Artemus was annoyed at the slow progress, and, hailing the conductor, said:

“Dear friend, it is plain from the speed of this train that it could never catch a cow if one chanced to travel on the track in front of it. Therefore, the cow-catcher is a useless protection where it is. But there is nothing to prevent a cow from catching up with us in case she should choose to follow. I beseech you, therefore, to remove the cow-catcher from the locomotive and place it on the rear car and so save us from disaster!” (Seitz, 172–73)

Clemens used the story in his lecture, but sharpened the punch line: “‘You can’t,’ said he, ‘overtake a cow, but what’s to hinder one walking in the back door and biting the passengers’” (“Artemus Ward. By Mark Twain,” Gold Hill {Nev.} News, 8 Dec 71, 2, reprinting unidentified paper; Fatout 1976, 44). In 1874 he used an abbreviated version of it—with appropriate illustrations and without attributing it to Ward—in chapter 43 of The Gilded Age (Pullen, 90–91).

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7 Another complaint about the “Slow Railroad” that Clemens attributed to Ward (“Artemus Ward. By Mark Twain,” Gold Hill {Nev.} News, 8 Dec 71, 2, reprinting unidentified paper; Fatout 1976, 44).

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8 These page citations (see also notes 10 and 12) establish that Clemens was using George W. Carleton’s 1867 edition of Artemus Ward; His Book (Charles Farrar Browne 1867). In this case the allusion is to “The Showman’s Courtship” (57–61). The 1867 edition was sold as part of a set that also included Artemus Ward; His Travels and Artemus Ward in London, and Other Papers (Charles Farrar Browne 1865 and 1867).

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9 In his “Fourth of July Oration” Artemus Ward declares: “I tell you, feller‐citizens, it would have bin ten dollars in Jeff Davis’s pocket if he’d never bin born!” (Charles Farrar Browne 1867, 182). Clemens cited Ward’s “celebrated expression” in his lecture as an example of unconscious plagiarism, claiming to have come across the saying “in an English author, who wrote some fifty years ago. Pounds were substituted for dollars, and some other name appeared in the place of Jeff. Davis” (“Mark Twain on Artemus Ward,” Albany Evening Journal, 29 Nov 71, 2).

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10 “The War Fever in Baldinsville,” from Artemus Ward; His Book (Charles Farrar Browne 1867, 185–90).

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11 A paraphrase of the last line of “Interview with the Prince Napoleon,” from Artemus Ward; His Book (Charles Farrar Browne 1867, 199). In his lecture, Clemens identified it as a comment on the demise of the comic weekly Vanity Fair (“The Institute Lectures,” Hartford Times, 9 Nov 71, 2).

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12 Ward’s “Some Verses Sugestid by 2 of My Uncles” (Charles Farrar Browne 1867, 200): “Uncle Simon he / Clum up a tree / To see what he could see / When presentlee / Uncle Jim / Clum up beside of him / And squatted down by he.”

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13 Unidentified.

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14 This allusion and the next five lines derive from T. W. Robertson’s introduction to Artemus Ward’s Lecture (Charles Farrar Browne 1869, 14–17).

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15 Ward’s London lecture.

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16 Clemens told audiences that “Ward used to say that to be attached to anything did not argue good feeling toward it, for he knew of a horse being attached to a dray and yet being down on that dray” and cited the observation as another example of unconscious plagiarism: “A Western journalist told me that this witticism was not original with Artemus Ward, but that he himself was the author of it” (“Mark Twain on Artemus Ward,” Albany Evening Journal, 29 Nov 71, 2).

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17 In his prefatory note to Artemus Ward’s Lecture, Hingston remarked on Ward’s “self-reliant” nature (Charles Farrar Browne 1869, 23).

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18 By the time this letter reached Redpath, Clemens had given “Artemus Ward, Humorist” in Wilmington, Delaware, on 24 October, and in Norristown, Pennsylvania, on 25 October. Two of the Wilmington papers reacted politely, calling the lecture “exceedingly pleasant” and “interesting” (“The Lecture Last Evening,” Wilmington Every Evening, 25 Oct 71, 4; “The Lecture Field,” Wilmington Commercial, 25 Oct 71, 1). A third expressed its dissatisfaction, however, and concluded: “On the whole it is safe to say that there are few more unsatisfactory efforts to be chronicled in the lecture field” (“Mark Twain’s Lecture,” Wilmington Delaware Gazette, 27 Oct 71, 3). En route to Norristown, Clemens stopped in Philadelphia to see T. B. Pugh, in whose Star Course he was to lecture on 20 November. “This morning,” wrote Susan Dickinson on 25 October to her sister, lecturer Anna, “I came across Mr. Pugh with an individual whom he introduced as Mr. Clemens. I can’t say that I admire his personal appearance, tone, or manner” (Dickinson Papers, DLC; for Anna Dickinson’s even harsher characterization of Clemens for her mother, see L3, 66 n. 2, which misidentifies Dickinson’s correspondent as her sister). The Norristown performance was unsuccessful: reviewers called Clemens “a fraud as a lecturer” and were insulted by his departure immediately after the lecture (Norristown Independent, Norristown Herald and Free Press, excerpted in Fatout 1960, 154–55). No lecture was scheduled for 26 October, which Clemens apparently spent mostly in travel, arriving that evening in Hartford. He left early the next morning for his engagement in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (OC to MEC, 23 Oct 71, 26 Oct 71, both in CU-MARK).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, collection of Todd M. Axelrod.

glyph Previous publication: L4, 478–482; excerpts in Bangs, lot 81; Will M. Clemens 1900, 28; MTL, 1:193; Horner, 169–70; “Letters to James Redpath,” Mark Twain Quarterly 5 (Winter–Spring 1942): 20; and Chester L. Davis 1978, 3.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

hash-house • hash-hashouse

MARK. • [capitals simulated, not underscored]

1 • [possibly ‘7’]