14 May 1867 • New York, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00129)
Dear Sir—I am to deliver a lecture in Brooklyn, shortly, at the Academy of Music, & if you will be so obliging to a brother member of the press as to appear on the stage on the evening in question & introduce me to your fellow citizens, I shall be very grateful indeed.
Hoping that this request may meet with a favorable consideration at your hands,1explanatory note
John Stanton (1826–71) began his newspaper career in Brooklyn, serving as a reporter for the Williamsburg Times and then as city editor of the City News. He was now on the staff of the Eagle, where he had “acquired some local celebrity by the fresh and original mode of his police reporting” before becoming city editor, a position he still held. Under the pen name “Corry O’Lanus” he also wrote a humorous weekly “epistle,” which enjoyed great local popularity. A writer for the Brooklyn Programme commented:
As a writer Mr. Stanton is forcible, rather than elegant, and in those of his contributions to newspapers which do not profess to be humorous, there is a sameness which sufficiently stamps their authorship. But as a humorous writer he has no equal in New York or Brooklyn. While his fun is not so boisterous as Artemus Ward’s, or so cutting and sarcastic as Orpheus C. Kerr’s, or so wildly burlesque as John Phoenix’s, there is a gentle ripple of pure fun about it—humor, in fact—which makes one hug himself with pleasure to read. Outside the reading circle of the Eagle many of his good points would be necessarily lost, for it is in the local application of his genius at nickname that most of his power resides. We hope, therefore, to see Mr. Stanton address his humorous powers to some matter of more than local importance, and to greater extent than a simple “epistle,” and we feel sure that his effort must be successful in placing his name by the side of the best of the latterday American wits. (“Brooklyn Newspaper People,” Brooklyn Eagle, 11 July 67, 2, reprinting the Brooklyn Programme)
Toward the end of 1867, Stanton published Corry O’Lanus: His Views and Experiences through George W. Carleton. The Nation said: “The author, whoever he is, hardly deserves a place in Mr. Carleton’s humorous library with Josh Billings, Artemus Ward, John Phoenix, and Orpheus C. Kerr. He now and then says a sharp thing.... But most of the book is a thing to be delivered from” (“Corry O’Lanus ...,” Nation 5 12 Dec 67: 479). The lecture for which Clemens solicited (and received) Stanton’s agreement to introduce him would have been his fourth, but did not occur.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L2 , 44–45.
see Stanton Collection, p. 517.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.