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Add to My Citations To William Dean Howells
27 October 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: MH-H, UCCL 01277)
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Oct. 27

Say, boss

Say, boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with?1 [I suppose] you won’t, but then it won’t take you long to say [so. I] do not enclose stamps for re-mailing because I have hardly enough to see me through the day, & neither is there a shinplaster in the house.

I shall run up to you very early in November—the md madam, too, if she is strong enough—& go with you to see some of the literary big guns about the copyright project.2 Shall want to abide with you 3 or 4 days.

Mrs. Clemens is dejected, despondent, discouraged. She gets up at 9, & by 11 is clear broken down & tired out. If this were May in place of October I would have her on board a Cunard steamer inside of 48 hours.

Yrs Ever

Mark.

P. S. Mrs. Howells’s letter has just come & Mrs. Perkins & I have almost persuaded Mrs Clemens to go right off tomorrow to Cambridge & leave the children here. Mrs. Perkins says she will visit them every day & look after them. Mrs. C. has gone with Mrs. P. to luncheon, & I do hope they’ll come to the right decision in this matter—in which case I will [tellegraph] you.3

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 Clemens enclosed the manuscript (now lost) for “A Literary Nightmare”—not, as previously thought, an unidentified “companion piece” (see MTHL, 1:108–9, and 4 Nov 75 to Howells, n. 7). Published in the Atlantic Monthly for February 1876, it professed to represent the debilitating effects of a contagious streetcar jingle eventually known by its chorus, “Punch, brothers, punch” (SLC 1876). In the April 1876 Scribner’s Monthly, Winkelried Wolfgang Brown alluded to Clemens’s article and explained that the jingle was composed by Isaac Bromley, of the New York Tribune, and Noah Brooks, of the Times. While riding on a streetcar in the Fourth Avenue line, they were struck by a notice that described a procedure adopted to prevent embezzling, whereby conductors were required to use a “bell punch” to audibly record each fare:

The conductor, when he receives a fare, will immediately punch in the presence of the passenger,

A blue trip slip for an 8 cent fare,

A buff trip slip for a 6 cent fare,

A pink trip slip for a 3 cent fare.

Haunted by the rhythm of this notice, they made only slight alterations (deleting the word “immediately” and adding a final catchy line, “All in the presence of the passenjare”). The “poem” was then

introduced as a hymn in the editorial rooms of “The Tribune,” and Mr. =William C.] Wyckoff, the scientific editor, assisted by Mr. Moses P. Handy, then of “The Tribune” staff, now editor of “The Richmond Enquirer,” added to them the following chorus:

“Punch, boys, punch! punch with care!

Punch in the presence of the passenjare. . . .”

It was not intended to give the poem to the public; but one night it was taken down in shorthand from the lips of the choir, and the next day printed on an inside page of “The Tribune.”

After the Tribune’s 27 September 1875 printing, “the trouble began. . . . The continent was one vast eruption of verse” (Brown, 910–11; “Horse-Car Poetry,” New York Tribune, 27 Sept 75, 5; “City Railroad Frauds: A Conductor and a Maker of Imitation Bell Punches Held to Answer,” New York Times, 29 Nov 74, 2).

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2 See 18 Sept 75 to Howells and 19 Oct 75 to Howells, n. 1.

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3 Neither Elinor Howells’s letter nor a telegram from Clemens to Howells has been recovered, but the Clemenses did go to Cambridge, on 29 October. Lucy Perkins, the wife of Clemens’s lawyer, was a neighbor and close friend.



glyphglyphSource text(s):glyph
MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).

glyphglyphPrevious publication:glyph L6, 576–578; MTHL, 1:108–9.

glyphglyphProvenance:glyphsee Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

glyphglyphEmendations and textual notes:glyph


I suppose • I I suppose [corrected miswriting]

so. I • so.—|I

tellegraph • [l partly formed]