Since Clemens reveals in his second paragraph that he was at work in Philadelphia by Sunday, 23 October, his further statement that he received the “last number” of Orion’s Hannibal Journal “at least two weeks before I left New York,” together with his earlier comment that he had received it “the other day” (8 Oct 53 to PAMclick to open link), suggests that he made the trip by steamboat and rail on the afternoon of 19, 20, or 21 October. See also note 20.

Clemens presumably enclosed a “Liberty Head” gold dollar, the only such coin then in circulation. Between 1849 and 1854 the United States Treasury minted more than 12.6 million of these dollars, which each weighed about one-twentieth of an ounce and measured one-half inch in diameter (Reed, 195).

Jesper Harding’s Pennsylvania Inquirer and National Gazette was the city’s largest morning newspaper, located at 57 South Third Street in the heart of the newspaper district between Market and Chestnut streets (McElroy, 112). In contrast with Clemens’s “permanent situation” in New York (see 31 Aug 53 to JLCclick to open link), his employment in Philadelphia consisted of substituting temporarily for one or another of the Inquirer’s regular compositors (“subbing”). Under this system, which was used only on newspapers, he was paid on a piecework basis, although probably at somewhat higher rates than a compositor could earn in a book and job office.

Of the three type sizes that Clemens names, agate was the smallest and bourgeois the largest. His comment about a “good agate take,” or assignment of copy, implies that somewhat higher wages were paid for work done in the smallest type sizes: agate, pearl, and (the smallest) diamond.

Twenty-nine omnibus routes (utilizing 275 four- and six-horse coaches) radiated from the Merchants’ Exchange and Post Office Building at Walnut, Dock, and Third streets, near the Camden and Amboy ferry slip (“Omnibus Travel,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 17 July 54, 2).

“Fip” was a local term meaning “fippenny,” or fivepenny, bit (called a “sixpence” in New York). This silver coin, actually a Spanish half real, circulated in the United States until 1857; it was the equivalent of about six cents (one-sixteenth of a Spanish dollar).

The building under construction has not been identified. Clemens compares the height of its pillars to George W. Caplinger’s Hannibal grocery store, on Main Street, between Bird and Centre streets (“Mr. G. W. Caplinger . . .,” Hannibal Journal, 16 Sept 52, 3; Hannibal Census, 311). When Orion published this letter in the Muscatine Journal, he substituted the phrase “25 or 30 feet high” for “about as high as Caplinger’s second story front windows.”

Compare Exodus 10:21–22. “Egyptian darkness” or “Egyptian night,” meaning unrelieved, impenetrable blackness, was one of Clemens’s favorite metaphors.

Fairmount Bridge, about three hundred and fifty feet long, spanned the Schuylkill, not the Delaware. It was the first cable suspension bridge in the United States. Designed and built by Col. Charles Ellet, Jr. (1810–62), it served the city from 1842 to 1875 (Jackson, 4:1200–1201). Orion omitted Clemens’s parenthetical comment here, as well as one a few lines further on—“(is that proper?).” Both were presumably too personal to be published in the Muscatine Journal.

Clemens probably refers not to a description proper, but to an engraving, captioned “Schuylkill Water Works,” that appeared as a frontispiece in the September 1840 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Ladies’ American Magazine, published in Philadelphia and edited by Sarah J. Hale, Lydia H. Sigourney, and Louis A. Godey. The engraving was intended to illustrate a poem published in the same issue, “Fairmount,” by Catherine L. Brooke (142). Philadelphia’s famous waterworks at Fairmount had been constructed in 1812–15. By 1822 the Schuylkill had been dammed to provide the necessary power (replacing the original use of steam) to raise the river water to the reservoirs atop Fairmount, about one hundred feet. Clemens mentions this dam and the building which housed the waterwheels and pumps. At the foot of the hill was Fairmount Gardens, where the city had placed an elaborate cenotaph containing the white marble bust of Frederick Graff (1774–1847), superintendent and chief designer and engineer of the water-supply system. The monument was engraved on one side, “To the Memory of Frederick Graff Who Designed and Executed the Fairmount Water Works”; and on the other side, “Erected by the City Councils of Philadelphia June 1 1848” (R. A. Smith, 45–51; Jackson, 3:733–35).

Germantown was just north of the city proper, adjacent to Manayunk, a small manufacturing town on the east bank of the Schuylkill, a source of ample water power. Just below Manayunk, picturesque Wissahickon Creek flowed into the Schuylkill. Philadelphia journalist, author of romances, and visionary George Lippard (1822–54) was particularly enamored of the Wissahickon: he was married on its banks, he lived for a time near it, and he used it as a setting in several of his books. Legends of the American Revolution; or, Washington and His Generals (1847) was, according to its dedication, “an earnest attempt to embody the scenes of the Past, in a series of Historical pictures” (iii). Lippard died in Philadelphia on 9 February 1854, shortly before Clemens left the city (“George Lippard . . .,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 10 Feb 54, 2).

Probably “Spirit of the Schuylkill,” one of several works by the American sculptor William Rush (1756–1833) which stood in Fairmount Gardens.

Clemens appears to have mistaken Eastern Penitentiary, on Coates Street between Schuylkill Front and Schuylkill Third streets, for the distributing branch of the waterworks. No such building is described in his own guidebook to Philadelphia, but (as its map shows) the penitentiary was just four or five blocks along Coates. This was a very large structure. “The front is in the castellated style of architecture, having heavy square towers sixty-five feet high, and a splendid arched gateway, with portcullis and central tower” (Scharf and Westcott, 3:1834–35), easily mistaken for “the style of an ancient feudal Castle.” The House of Refuge was just another six blocks along Coates, between Schuylkill Seventh and Eighth streets, near the intersection with Ridge Road. It was a reform school for white juveniles, which received its first inmate in December 1828. The school had recently expanded, building anew at the corner of Parrish and William streets, to accommodate blacks, but Clemens appears to have seen only the older building (R. A. Smith, 141–43). If he then turned northwest on Ridge Road, he was within five blocks of Girard College. Founded by the American shipping magnate and financier Stephen Girard (1750–1831), who provided $3 million for construction and an endowment, the college had offered free education to white, male orphans since 1848. An engraving of the college’s main building, designed after a Greek temple, with thirty-four Corinthian columns each fifty-five feet high, was the frontispiece for Clemens’s guidebook, R. A. Smith’s Philadelphia as It Is, in 1852, which also gave a very full description in the text (Scharf and Westcott, 3:1944–48; R. A. Smith, 119–31; Jackson, 3:726).

X

Schuylkill Water Works, engraving by W. H. Bartlett (frontispiece, Godey’s Lady’s Book, September 1840; see p. 25, n. 10).

Neither “Jim” nor Jim Robinson has been identified.

Clemens’s abbreviation for “Hannibal” (“H—l”) was calculated to remind Orion of the time he had gone to St. Louis, leaving his brother in charge of the Hannibal Journal for the week of 6–13 May 1853. Clemens had seized this opportunity to generate a mock feud over the ambiguity of a dedication, “To Miss Katie of H—l,” to the poem entitled “Love Concealed.” Upon his return to Hannibal, Orion publicly dismissed the fuss as “a great bore to us, and doubtless to the public generally” (ET&S1 , 7, 91–102).

Beginning with this sentence (and barring the final postscript, which is in manuscript) the only surviving text is in the Muscatine Journal, where Orion published what he described as an “extract from a private letter to the senior editor.” The extant manuscript shows that he omitted the first three paragraphs of the letter (indicating the omission with asterisks), as well as the two paragraphs immediately preceding the signature, the signature itself, and an unknown amount of text following it. The exact status of these two paragraphs following the signature remains problematic, but there is no decisive evidence to refute Orion’s statement that he published an extract from a single letter. Since the paragraphs report further sightseeing performed “yesterday,” they must have been written at least one or two days after the part of the letter written on 26 October. Although these passages do not mention either the mint or the navy yard, which Clemens had earlier promised to visit, they do mention the State House (within a few blocks of the mint), and they allude directly to Clemens’s recent trip from New York to Philadelphia. Presumably Clemens added a postscript to the original letter (which ends with a blank verso) by starting on a fresh sheet with a new date: but Orion omitted this part of the text along with the concluding paragraphs of the first section, making the two parts read continuously as a letter written on 26 October. It is conceivable that Clemens actually sent two letters, but the sole documentary basis for this part of the letter (or letters) represents it as a single document.

The inscription is from Leviticus 25:10: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof.” Originally cast in 1752, and then recast twice in 1753, the bell hung for many years in the tower of the State House. It was rung on 8 July 1776 at the first reading of the Declaration of Independence in Independence Square. The bell cracked in 1835, and again in 1846.

The Right Reverend William White (1748–1836), rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia for most of his life, became a chaplain of Congress during the Revolution and numbered many of its leaders among his congregation. In 1786 he was elected the first bishop of the new diocese of Pennsylvania, and in 1796 he became the Protestant Episcopal church’s presiding bishop.

Thomas Paine in The American Crisis (1776–83): “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Clemens presumably took the 2:00 p.m. Express Line (cost, three dollars) to Philadelphia. This trip lasted four and a half hours: by steamboat from New York to South Amboy, New Jersey, and from there by rail to Camden, and by ferry across the Delaware River to the wharf at Walnut Street (advertisement, New York Tribune, 6 Oct 53, 3; R. A. Smith, 411). The collision Clemens recalls was one between two passenger trains on the Camden and Amboy line which occurred on 9 August 1853. Four passengers were killed, and several others seriously injured, when the trains collided head on on a curve near Old Bridge, New Jersey (“Another Railroad Tragedy,” New York Times, 10 Aug 53, 1; “The Camden and Amboy Railroad Accident—Verdict of the Jury,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 13 Aug 53, 1).