30 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 00570)
I may talk a little (only in New England) next fall, but all the chances are in favor of my not doing anything of the kind. We’ll see.
I suppose that article of mine on Rev. Sabine will be made to damage me a good deal, through the manipulations of these religious editors. Do Ⓐemendationnot you think so?1explanatory note
I have g just received the enclosed from Cleveland (Herald.) You must alter the authorship of the other ones to “lec “reformed lecturESS”—be otherwise the whole thing will be saddled on to me by these fair f Ⓐemendationvictims.2explanatory note
I stumbled in awkwardly & unexpectedly enough or on ⒶemendationKate Field at a private house yesterday, & Ⓐemendationintroduction followed.3explanatory note
I don’t know anything about the lecture-capacities of towns east of Nevada—never tried them.
☞ I hope to drop in on you in 2 or 3 weeks. months.
P. S. The Cleveland Herald wants the next one rushed along—send it to me.
letter docketed: boston lyceum bureau. redpath & fall. feb 6 1871 and L | rule and Mark Twain | Buffalo N.Y. Jan. 30 ’71 and boston lyceum bureau. redpath & fall. feb 20 1871
William T. Sabine (1838–1913), rector of New York’s fashionable Episcopal Church of the Atonement and later bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church, had refused to perform funeral services for George Holland (b. 1791), a popular comic actor who died on 20 December 1870 “without a stain on his name.” Sabine explained that he “did not care to be mixed up” in Holland’s funeral since theaters did not teach “moral lessons.” Public outcry against Sabine was widespread and severe. The New York Times called him “only a strippling in years” who “has through his short course of life nursed only the most intolerant of principles associated with insolence, bigotry and ignorance” (New York Times: “Mr. George Holland,” 22 Dec 70, 4; “Pharisaical Delicacy,” 29 Dec 70, 1; “Rev. Sabine and Public Opinion,” 31 Dec 70, 2). In the February 1871 Galaxy, Mark Twain joined the attack, calling Sabine a “crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile” and noting that:
It is almost fair and just to aver (although it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people to-day, got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and not from the drowsy pulpit! (SLC 1871, 320–21)
The actual enclosure does not survive, but it was certainly a clipping of Redpath’s article in the Cleveland Herald (transcribed in Enclosure with 30 January 1871 to James Redpathclick to open link). Redpath was a former lecturer, having performed for two years “exclusively under the management of Irish land leagues, Irish benevolent societies, or of Catholic Churches” (Eubank, 290). No further articles by him have been found, however, very likely because he published none, fearing that if his authorship were discovered it would undermine his Boston Lyceum Bureau. In fact, Olive Logan, one of the “fair victims,” and her husband-to-be, Wirt Sikes, both of whom had been represented by the bureau in 1869–70 and 1870–71, severed their connection with it before the 1871–72 season was announced (Eubank, 295–97). By late 1871, Logan had taken out the following public notice:
“NICE YOUNG MEN.”
I am forced, by the continued impertinent intermeddling of unscrupulous so-called “Bureaux,” to announce that I shall in future refuse to answer any letters or applications which come to me through these obtrusive “middle-men.” Committees must apply directly to me, or be met with silence.
OLIVE LOGAN,
(Chicago Evening Post, 16 Dec 71, 4)
Kate Field (Mary Katherine Keemle Field, 1838–96), the well-known journalist and the author of Adelaide Ristori (1867), Planchette’s Diary (1868), and Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings (1868), had made her platform debut in 1869 (Whiting, 211). She was evidently one of the lecturers alluded to in Redpath’s first article and probably the intended subject of a later one. Field appeared in Buffalo on 30 January 1871. The next day the Buffalo Express reported:
Miss Field delivered her lecture on Charles Dickens, last evening, at St. James Hall, to a fair audience—to an audience larger in fact than is often obtained by an independent lecturer [that is, one not sponsored by the local lyceum society]. Of the merits of the lecture we shall only say that our criticism of it, if we undertook one, would hardly be as unstinted praise as we have found lavished upon Miss Field’s discourse in many of our exchanges. (“Miss Kate Field’s Lecture,” 31 Jan 71, 4)
Clemens may have written, or at least inspired these remarks, for he was consistently contemptuous of Kate Field’s platform abilities, even though he was not unsympathetic to her. In an autobiographical sketch about his lecture days, written in 1898, he recalled:
Kate Field had made a wide spasmodic notoriety in 1867 by some letters which she sent from Boston—by telegraph—to the Tribune about Dickens’s readings there in the beginning of his triumphant American tour. . . . By & by she went on the platform; but two or three years had elapsed & her subject—Dickens—had now lost its freshness & its interest. For a while people went to see her, because of her name; but her lecture was poor & her delivery repellantly artificial; consequently when the country’s desire to look at her had been appeased, the platform forsook her.
She was a good creature, & the acquisition of a perishable & fleeting notoriety was the disaster of her life. (SLC 1898, 8–9)
MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H).
L4 , 322–324.
bequeathed to MH in 1918 by Evert J. Wendell.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.