To David G. Croly
17 April 1873 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS facsimile: New York Graphic, 22 Apr 73, UCCL 00901)

. . . .

Hartford, Apl. 17.

Ed. Graphic:1

Your note is received. If the following two lines which I have cut from it are your h natural hand-writing, then I understand you to ask me

“for a farewell letter

in the name of the American

people.” 2 Bless you, the joy of the American people is just a little premature; I haven’t gone yet. And what is more, I am not going to stay, when I do go.

Yes, it is too true. I am only going to remain beyond the seas six months—that is all. I love stir & excitement; & so the moment the spring birds begin to sing, the zephyrs to sigh, the flowers to bloom, & the stagnation, the pensive melancholy, the lagging weariness of summer to threaten, I grow restless, I get the fidgets; I want to pack off somewhere where there’s something going on. But you know how that is—you must have felt that way. This very day I saw the signs in the air of the coming dulness, & I said to myself, “How glad I am that I have already chartered the steamer Batavia ‸a steamship‸ to tow me & my party over on my life-raft.”3 There was absolutely nothing in the morning papers. You can see for yourself what the [ tell telegraphic ]headings were:

BY TELEGRAPH

A Colored Congressman in Trouble.

Excitement at Albany.

Five Years Imprisonment.

Wall Street Panicky.

Two Failures and Money at 150 Per Cent.

Two Criminal Cases.

Arrested for Highway Robbery.

The Assault on the Gas Collector.

A Striker Held for Murder in the Second Degree.

The Murderer King Dangerously Sick.

Lusignani, the Wife Murderer, to be Hung.

Two would-be Murderers to be Hung.

Incendiarism in a Baptist Flock.

A Fatal Mistake.

Washing Away of a Railroad.

Ku-Klux Murders.

a shocking disaster.

A Chimney Falls and Buries Five Children—Two of them Already Dead.

The Modoc Massacre.

riddle’s warning .

A Father Killed By His Son.

A Bloody Fight in Kentucky.

An Eight-Year Old Murderer.

A Grave-Yard Floating Off.

a louisiana massacre.

A Court House Fired, and Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping.

Two to Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive!

A Lively Skirmish in Indiana.

a town in a state of general riot.

a party of miners besieged in a boarding house.

troops and police from indianapolis asked for.

bloody work expected.

Furious Amazon Leaders.

A HORRIBLE STORY.

a negro’s outrage.

a suffering and murdered woman terribly avenged.

A Man 24 Hours Burning, and Carved Piece-meal.

The items under those headings all bear date yesterday, Apl. 16 ‸(refer to your own paper,)‸ 4 —I & I give you my word of honor that that string of [commonplace ] stuff was everything there was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; there don’t appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this progressive nation gone to sleep? Have I got to stand another month of this torpidity before I can begin to browse among the lively capitals of Europe?

‸But never mind—things may revive while I am away.‸

During the last two months my next-door neighbor, Chas. Dudley Warner, has dropped his “Back-Log Studies,”5 & he & I have written a bulky novel in partnership. He has worked up the fiction & I have shoveled ‸hurled‸ in the facts. I consider it one of the most astonishing novels that ever was written. Night after night I sit up reading it over & over again & crying. It will be published early in the fall, with plenty of pictures. Do you consider this an advertisement?—& if so, do you charge for such things, when a man is your friend & is an orphan?

Drooping, now, under the solemn peacefulness, the general stagnation, the profound lethargy that broods over the land, I am

Ys Truly

Samℓ. L. Clemens
‸Mark Twain.‸

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens’s letter survives only as a photolithograph of the original manuscript, published on 22 April 1873 in the New York Graphic, a new illustrated daily newspaper of eight pages which had begun publication on 4 March. The original probably included a personal salutation and message to Croly, not reproduced in the Graphic (see Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles). Founded by a Canadian firm of engravers who invented and patented a photolithographic process (which, as the term implies, used photochemical means to transfer images to lithographic plates), the Graphic was able to produce accurate illustrations of newsworthy events as quickly as typeset text, without the time and expense previously required to make engravings by hand. David Goodman Croly (1829–89), the editor of the Graphic, had been managing editor of the New York World until his resignation in late 1872. Clemens knew him, as did their mutual acquaintance Charles Wingate, who had recently tried to set up an appointment with Clemens. All three had attended the Greeley birthday dinner in February 1872 (2 Apr 73 to Wingate; 3 Feb 72 to Johnson, n. 1). Croly was born in Ireland but grew up in New York. In 1855 he became a reporter for the New York Evening Post, but soon took a job on the Herald. In 1858 he moved to Illinois, where he founded the Rockford News. Returning to New York in 1860, he joined the staff of the World and two years later became its managing editor. From March 1873 until 1878 he edited the Graphic. Croly was an unusual journalist who had already written several books, including Miscegenation (1864), in which he advocated interracial marriage as the best means to advance civilization, and The Truth about Love: A Proposed Sexual Morality Based upon the Doctrine of Evolution, and Recent Discoveries in Medical Science (1872), in which he defended the Oneida Community (Mott 1950, 502; “The Daily Graphic . . . ,” New York Tribune, 5 Mar 73, 4; Eder, 627–28; “Personal,” Buffalo Courier, 21 Dec 72, 1; Wingate 1875, 325).

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2 The Graphic’s facsimile (reproduced in Photographs and Manuscript Facsimiles) confirms that Clemens cut these words out of Croly’s “note” (now lost) and pasted them into his own manuscript, adding the quotation marks.

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3 Evidently an allusion to Clemens’s crusade to supply ships with life rafts (see 9 Apr 73 to Reid).

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4 Clemens cut these newspaper headlines from page 3 of the Hartford Evening Post for 16 April 1873. He chose only the most sensational—ignoring, for example, “Educational Question in Brooklyn” and “Delayed Mail for Europe.” He evidently pasted these snippets to his letter manuscript in an order largely of his own choosing, omitting the intervening text to heighten the comic effect. The Graphic did not reproduce this part of his letter as a photofacsimile, but instead prepared a type facsimile of it, perhaps to make it more legible than the original. Comparison with the Post headlines shows that the Graphic’s typesetters introduced minor errors in punctuation. Since the actual document Clemens sent has not been found, the headlines as he actually pasted them in place cannot be exactly reproduced here. The Graphic’s type facsimile is not reproduced because of its several errors. This transcription therefore supplies a new type facsimile, based on the real Post headlines and the arrangement of them as published in the Graphic, correcting its errors but not simulating the Post typography quite as well as the Graphic typesetters were able to do in 1873.

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5 In December 1872 Warner published Backlog Studies (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co.), a collection of essays, many of which had first appeared in Scribner’s Monthly (“Jas. R. Osgood & Co.’s New Holiday Books,” Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular 2 [5 Dec 72]: 635; 22 Apr 72 to the Warners, n. 1).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS facsimile, “‘Mark Twain’ to the Editor of ‘The Daily Graphic.’ An Autograph Letter,” New York Graphic, 22 Apr 73, 8, is copy-text, except for the headlines at 342.1–43. These headlines, which Clemens cut from the Hartford Evening Post for 16 Apr 73 (3) and pasted into his letter, were not photographically reproduced in the Graphic as the letter was, but were retypeset, with slight alterations in punctuation and lineation. For the headlines, therefore, copy-text is a photograph of a page of the original Evening Post at the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford (CtHi).

Previous publication: L5, 341–344; MTL, 1:204–5, with omissions; Johnson, 20–22.

Emendations and textual notes:

tell telegraphic • tellegraphic [canceled ‘l’ partly formed]

commonplace • common-|place