To Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings)
March? 1873 • Hartford, Conn.
(Shaw 1873, 4, UCCL 00877)

[Dear Josh.]—[I] think a very great deal of you, as a personal friend, of long standing; I admire you as a philosopher; I actually revere you as almost the only specimen remaining with us, of a species of being that used to be common enough—I mean an honest man.

[Therefore] you can easily [believe] that if I [don’t] write the paragraphs you desire for your department of the paper, it is not because [there] is any lack in me of either the will or the willingness to do it.1

No, it is only because my present literary contracts, [&] understandings, debar me.

I am thus [debarred] for three years to come.2

But after that—however, you wouldn’t want to wait, perhaps.

I wish we could compromise; I wish it would answer for you to write one of these books, for me, while I write an almanac for you.3

But this will not do, because I cannot abide your spelling.

It does seem to me that you spell worse every day.

Sometimes your orthography makes me frantic.

It is out of all reason that a man, seventy-five years of age, should spell as you do.4

Why do you not attend a night-school?

You might at least get the hang of the easy words.

I am sending you a primer by this mail which I know will help you, if you will study it hard.

Now is the most favorable time you have had in seventy years, now that you are just entering your second childhood.

It ought to come really easy to you.

Many people believe that in the dominion of natural history, you stand without a peer.

It is acknowledged on all sides that you have thrown new light on the mule, & also on other birds of the same family; that you have notably augmented the world’s admiration of the splendid plumage of the kangaroo—or possibly it might have been the cockatoo—but I know it was one of those bivalves, or the other; that you have uplifted the hornet, & given him his just place among the flora of our country; & that you have aroused an interest never felt before, in every fur-bearing animal, from the occult rhinoceros clear down to the domestic cow of the present geologic period.5

These researches ought not to die; but what can you expect?

Yale University desires to use them as text books in the natural history department of that institution, but they cannot stand the spelling.

You will take kindly what I am saying; I only wish to make you understand that even the profoundest science must perish & be lost to the world, when it is couched in such inhuman orthography as yours.

Even the very first word in your annual is an atrocity; “Allminax” is no way to build that word.

I can spell better than that with my left hand.

In answer to your other inquiry I say no, decidedly.

You can’t lecture on “Light” with any success.

Tyndall has used up that subject.6

And I think you ought not to lecture on “Nitro-Glycerine, with Experiments”—the cost of keeping a coroner under salary would eat up all the profits.

Try “Readings”—they are all the rage now. And yet how can you read acceptably when you cannot even spell right?

An ignorance so shining & conspicuous as yours— Now I have it—go on a jury.7

That is your place.

Your friend,

[Mark Twain].

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Shaw had apparently asked Clemens to contribute something to his column in the New York Weekly, “Spice-Box,” which had first appeared in the May 1867 issue. He printed Clemens’s “refusal” (the present letter) instead, in his column for 28 July, introducing it as follows:

Among the most valued of our private correspondents is Mark Twain.

We received a letter of love from him lately, and we see no harm in making some extracts from it, and laying them before our readers.

The letter is strictly a private one, but we admire Mark so much that we don’t think he will be angry at us if we make public property of a portion of it. (Shaw 1873; Kesterson, 24)

Shaw did not mention the date of the letter, which is conjecturally assigned to March: see note 8. Several peculiar spellings have been emended—for example, “Tharefore” and “beleave”—on the assumption that they were errors, or even deliberate revisions by Billings, who relied on phonetic spelling for comic effect. (The style of one-sentence paragraphs, also characteristic of Billings but not of Clemens, cannot be remedied.) The possibility remains, however, that Clemens himself introduced the misspellings to burlesque his friend’s method.

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2 Clemens clearly expected his letter to appear in print. His claim of being “debarred” from writing “paragraphs” had little basis in fact. His Roughing It contract, drawn up in July 1870, merely stipulated that during the book’s “preparation and sale” he was “not to write or furnish manuscript for any other book,” unless it was for the American Publishing Company (L4, 565). Nevertheless, Elisha Bliss preferred Clemens to write exclusively for that company.

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3 Shaw’s series of comic annuals, Josh Billings’ Farmer’s Allminax, had sold hundreds of thousands of copies since 1869. Clemens had hoped to rival these with “Mark Twain’s Annual—1871,” but Bliss opposed the scheme (L4, 209, 212, 213–14 n. 2, 218).

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4 Shaw was born in April 1818.

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5 Nature was among Billings’s favorite topics. His essay “Sum Natral History” was a comic discussion of insects. In “Josh Billings on the Muel” he wrote, “The mule is haf hoss, and haf Jackass, and then kums tu a full stop, natur diskovering her mistake. ... Tha are like sum men, very korrupt at harte” (Shaw: 1866, 13–14; 1868, 14–19; see also Kesterson, 58–59). Billings had lectured frequently on “Milk and Natral Histry” (though playfully avoiding the nominal topic), and for the 1872–73 season “The Pensiv Cockroach” was one of his advertised lectures (L4, 227 n. 1 bottom; Lyceum 1872, 2).

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6 John Tyndall (1820–93) was a British physicist and well-known popularizer of modern science. He made major contributions to the understanding of magnetism and diamagnetism, heat, sound, and light. In the winter of 1872–73 he delivered a series of lectures in the United States, renowned for their lucidity and ingenious experimental illustrations. The lectures were published in the “Tribune Lecture Extra No. 1” in mid-January 1873 and, in mid-March, were collected in book form as Lectures on Light (New York: D. Appleton and Co.) (New York Tribune: “Lectures and Meetings,” 15 Jan 73, 7; “New Publications,” 14 Mar 73, 6).

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7 This comment suggests that Clemens wrote the present letter in March, when developments in a prominent murder case led him to suggest publicly that ignorance was a prerequisite for jury duty: see the enclosure with 7 Mar 73 to Reid (2nd).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

Shaw 1873, 4. Copy-text is a microfilm edition of Street and Smith’s New York Weekly for 28 July 1873 in The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN).

Previous publication: L5, 304–306.

Provenance: Shaw 1874, 573–75; Cyril Clemens 1932, 124–27; Brownell 1944, 3.

Emendations and textual notes:

Dear Josh • Dear Josh

I • “I

Therefore • Tharefore

believe • beleave

don’t • dont

there • thare

& • and [here and hereafter]

debarred • debared

Mark Twain • Mark Twain