To Tom Hood and George Routledge and Sons
10 March 1873 • Hartford, Conn.
(Pike, 14–15, UCCL 00886)

[Hartford, March] 10.

To [Tom Hood], [Esq., &] [Messrs. George Routledge & Sons], London:

Gentlemen:

The Jubilee Singers are to appear in London, [&] I am requested to say in their behalf what I know about them—& I most cheerfully do it.1

I heard them sing once, & I would walk seven miles to hear them sing again.2 You will recognize that this is strong language for me to use, when you remember that I never was fond of pedestrianism, & got tired of walking, that Sunday afternoon, in twenty minutes, after making up my mind to see for myself & at my own leisure how much ground his grace the Duke of Bedford’s property covered.3

I think these gentlemen & ladies make eloquent music—& what is as much to the point, they reproduce the true melody of the plantations, & are the only persons I ever heard accomplish this on the public platform. The so-called “negro minstrels” simply mis-represent the thing; I do not think they ever saw a plantation or ever heard a slave sing.

I was reared in the South, & my father owned slaves,4 & I do not know when anything has so moved me as did the plaintive melodies of the Jubilee Singers. It was the first time for twenty-five or thirty years that I had heard such songs, or heard them sung in the genuine old way—& it is a way, I think, that white people cannot imitate—& never can, for that matter, for one must have been a slave himself in order to feel what that life was & so convey the pathos of it in the music. Do not fail to hear the Jubilee Singers. I am very well satisfied that you will not regret it.

Yours faithfully,

[Saml. L. Clemens.
Mark Twain.]

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, had undertaken an extended singing tour in 1871 to raise money for their school. The third year of their tour took them to Great Britain, where they performed from May 1873 until May 1874, raising nearly ten thousand pounds. According to their agent, Gustavus Pike, the eleven singers—eight of them former slaves—won acclaim for the “spiritual and religious power of the songs of the slaves of the South, and thus touched the hearts of the Christian people everywhere and secured their sympathy and liberal aid” (Pike, vi–viii, 31, 38, 193). Tom Hood, the editor of Fun, published extracts from Clemens’s letter on 26 April, explaining that it had been “brought over by the agent in advance” of the arrival of the Jubilee Singers (Hood 1873). Several other prominent men supplied similar endorsements, including Henry Ward Beecher and George MacDonald (Pike, 13). Pike retained the letter and published it in his account of the 1873–74 tour. Clemens probably addressed his letter to the Routledges, as well as to Hood, to increase its chances for publication. Perhaps he hoped they would print it in their magazine, the Broadway—which, however, ceased publication in early 1873.

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2 It is not known for certain when Clemens first heard the Jubilee Singers, but it may have been on the afternoon of 28 January 1872, when they performed at a Sunday school concert at Joseph Twichell’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church and, according to the Hartford Courant, created “a sensation rarely equalled”:

It is the first time that we at the north have heard the genuine songs of their race, executed with their faith and their feeling. It was like a revelation. ... One heard in those strange and plaintive melodies the sadness and the hope of a trusting and a really joyous race. (“The Jubilee Singers,” 29 Jan 72, 2)

Clemens had another opportunity to hear the singers in Hartford on 17 December 1872 (“Brief Mention,” Hartford Courant, 13 Dec 72, 2). In any case, it is certain that he heard them twice during his stay in England. Samuel C. Thompson recalled going with him to purchase tickets for one of their London concerts:

He felt in all his pockets and got the money. But just as the clerk was sweeping it into the drawer some one called out “Don’t take that money.” “Isn’t it the right amount?” said Clemens. “Isn’t this Mr. Clemens?” said the manager. “You can’t pay any money to go to this concert. Give him the best seats in the hall.” Going out Clemens explained that he had written an article in a London paper drawing attention to the fact that now the public would have an opportunity to compare the conventional “negro minstrels” with the genuine negroes of the South and their singing. After the concert Clemens said he had never before seen a cultured English audience so enthusiastic in applause. (Thompson, 85–86)

On 16 July Clemens heard the singers again at a private garden party (see 11 July 73 to Smith, n. 2). Nearly two years later, on 8 March 1875, Clemens recalled one of these London performances in a letter to Theodore F. Seward, then the Jubilee Singers’ musical director (“Mark Twain and the Jubilee Singers,” Boston Evening Journal, 13 Mar 75, 4, in Martin, 2–3):

UCCL01205a

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Clemens’s letter to Seward (UCCL 01205) is edited in L6, pp. 406–8.

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3 Sometime during his 1872 trip to England, Clemens had evidently accompanied Hood on a visit to Woburn Abbey, the principal seat of the duke of Bedford. The present duke, Francis Charles Hastings Russell (1819–91), had succeeded his cousin in May 1872. The house, built in 1747 on the foundations of a Cistercian abbey, was near the village of Woburn in Bedford County. Its sixty acres of gardens and pleasure grounds and thirty-five hundred acres of deer park, one of the largest in England, were open to the public (Burke 1904, 137–38; Murray, 459–60).

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4 For Clemens’s recollections of the slaves his father owned, see Inds, 89, 104, 327, 346.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

Pike, 14–15.

Previous publication: L5, 315–17; Fun, 26 Apr 73, 172, excerpts. The letter was probably also printed in the first edition of Pike (London: 1874), but the editors were unable to examine a copy.

Emendations and textual notes:

Hartford, March • Hartford, March

Tom Hood • Tom Hood

Esq., & • Esq., and

Messrs. George Routledge & Sons • Messrs. George Routledge & Sons

& • and [here and hereafter]

Saml. L. Clemens. | Mark Twain. • Saml. L. Clemens. Mark Twain.