26 January 1872 • Hartford, Conn. (AAA 1924 [bib11609], lot 98, UCCL 00721)
Oh, no, they couldn’t afford more than $150,Ⓐemendation so we’ve done ’em a charitable good deed. The statements in this notice were made to me on the platform at the close of the lecture, by the President of the Mercantile Library Asso’n, while trying to have me repeat the lecture;1explanatory note andⒶemendation as Col. John Hay was the only other person listening, he necessarily wrote this notice & besides he is the only man in New York who can speak so authoritativelyⒶemendation about “the true Pike accent.”2explanatory note I outdrew Dickinson & Gough everywhere3explanatory note
enclosure:
MARK TWAIN AT STEINWAY HALL.
If there are those who fondly think that the popularity of the American humoristic school is on the decline, they would have been bravely undeceived by a visit to Steinway Hall last night. The most enormous audience ever collected at any lecture in New-York came together to listen to “Mark Twain’s” talk on “Roughing it.” Before the doors were opened $1,300 worth of tickets had been sold, and for some time before Mr. Clemens appeared the house was crammed in every part by an audience of over 2,000. A large number were turned away from the door, and after the close of the evening’s entertainment the officers of the Library Association warmly urged Mr. Clemens to repeat his lecture for the benefit of those who were disappointed.
It was not only financially that the lecture was successful. There was never seen in New-York an audience so obstinately determined to be amused. There was hardly a minute of silence during the hour. Peals of laughter followed every phrase, the solemn asseverations of the lecturer that his object was purely instructive and the investigation of the truth increasing the merriment. At several points of the lecture, especially the description of Mr. Twain’s Mexican Plug, the Chamois of Nevada, and the Washoe Duel, the enjoyment of the audience was intemperate.4explanatory note A singular force and effectiveness was added to the discourse by the inimitable drawl and portentous gravity of the speaker. He is the finest living delineator of the true Pike accent, and his hesitating stammer on the eve of critical passages is always a prophecy—and hence, perhaps, a cause—of a burst of laughter and applause. He is a true humorist, endowed with that indefinable power to make men laugh which is worth, in current funds, more than the highest genius or the greatest learning.
Clemens probably telegraphed Redpath about his New York success soon after the lecture, on 24 or 25 January. Redpath evidently replied that Clemens’s fee ought to have been higher than $150, which was only $15 more than his average fee for the season (his fees ranged from $100 to $250, with about half at $125). Clemens’s lecture was the final one in a series of six sponsored by the Mercantile Library Association: he had been preceded by Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell, Olive Logan, Senator Carl Schurz, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips. The association’s president in 1871–72, Arthur W. Sherman, may have been the source for Clemens’s information that, until his lecture, the course had been losing money. In an essay written later in the year but wisely left unpublished (see 18 July 72 to Redpath, n. 5click to open link), Clemens said:
The New York Mercantile Library Association got up a “good old-fashioned” course that was perfectly saturated with morals & instruction, & at the end of it came out wise & holy, but—in debt. I went there with my “degrading influence,” & with a single stalwart effort cleared off the debt & left twelve or fifteen hundred dollars in the committee’s coffers. (SLC 1872 [MT01079], 11–12, first inscription, all revisions here suppressed)
The association’s annual report stated that the lectures “were in the main well attended, and one of them (that by Mr. Clemens) attracted one of the largest audiences ever assembled at a lecture in New York City. The net proceeds of the lectures, $816.31, . . . were used in the purchase of books” (Mercantile Library, 15, “Officers . . . for 1871–72”; Redpath and Fall, 1–14).
These four words appear seven lines from the end of the review that Clemens enclosed, probably as a clipping from page 5 of the New York Tribune for 25 January (but see the textual commentary). John Hay and Clemens had probably known each other since 1867; they had certainly become well acquainted since Hay joined the New York Tribune editorial staff in the fall of 1870. Like Clemens, Hay could claim thorough familiarity with the native Pike speech pattern and character: he had grown up in Warsaw, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River, just upriver from Clemens’s own Hannibal and from the Pike County areas of Missouri and Illinois. By the late 1860s, the “Pike” was already established in American literature as a distinct type—the unlettered, unorthodox, “uncouth Westerner, the antithesis of the man of the East” (Pattee, 84)—but the sudden vogue for Pike literature in the early 1870s grew out of one poem, Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James,” first published in the Overland Monthly in September 1870 and widely reprinted. Hay’s Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces was published in May 1871, just four months after Harte’s collected Poems, and included the immensely popular “Little-Breeches” and “Jim Bludso.” Hay would later say that the ballads were unique among his works, his only literary exploitation of the Pike dialect and the “peculiar Pike county mind,” and he would claim that they were all written “within a week” in November 1870 (Eggleston 1902)—a claim somewhat belied by his letters of the period. Both Hay and Clemens had chafed at being accused of imitating Harte’s dialect verses, so Hay’s praise of Clemens as the “finest” delineator of the “true” accent probably carried with it an implied judgment of Harte, who was a native of Albany, New York (see L4 , 269–70, 299–300 n. 1, 303–5). Indeed, according to an account written by Hay’s close friend Clarence King, Hay had written the ballads in reaction to Harte’s unsatisfactory attempts at Pike dialect—“to see how a genuine Western feeling, expressed in genuine Western language, would impress Western people” (Clarence King, 737). In July 1873, in the notebook he dictated in London, Clemens called Bret Harte’s dialect sketches “underwrought,” claiming that Harte, despite being “called the great master of dialect,” was ignorant of the Pike dialect, in one sketch mixing “about 7 dialects . . . all in the one unhappy Missouri mouth” ( N&J1 , 553; MacMinn; L4 , 250 n. 7, 338; Hay 1870 [bib00707]; 1871 [bib12730]; 1871 [bib00709]; 1908, 2:5, 7–8; Harte 1870 [bib01085], 1871 [bib12725]; “Notes on Books and Booksellers,” American Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular 16 2 Jan 71: 61; Clarence King; “Hay and Harte,” Boston Evening Transcript, 16 May 71, Supplement, 1; Pattee, 83–91; Carkeet, 325–26; for the genesis of Clemens’s friendship with Hay and their interest in vernacular writing see L4 , 292–93 n. 3, and RI 1993 , 804, 825, 828–30).
John Bartholomew Gough, famed for his temperance lectures, and Anna E. Dickinson were top performers on the lecture circuit. Gough’s lecture schedule has not been reconstructed in detail, but at this point in the 1871–72 season Dickinson is known to have lectured in the same city or town as Clemens some twenty-four times, preceding Clemens in eighteen cases. In New York City, Dickinson had preceded Clemens on 9 January, delivering her popular “Joan of Arc” lecture; Gough preceded Clemens on 15 January, lecturing on “Eloquence and Orators.” Dickinson had been a client of Redpath’s in 1870–71; Gough was to become one in July 1872 (Chester, 86, 101–3; “Amusements,” New York Tribune, 8 Jan 72, 7; “Lectures,” New York Times, 15 Jan 72, 7; Lyceum: 1870, 2; 1871, 21; 1872, 3).
For the Mexican Plug, see chapter 24 of Roughing It. The “Chamois of Nevada” was not used in the book, but can be recovered from a synopsis of an earlier lecture performance, published in the Lansing (Mich.) State Republican on 21 December:
It’s the noblest hunting ground on earth. You can hunt there a year and never find anything—except mountain sheep; but you can’t get near enough to them to shoot one. You can see plenty of them with a spyglass. Of course you can’t shoot mountain sheep with a spyglass. It is our American Shamwah (I believe that is the way that word is pronounced—I don’t know), with enormous horns, inhabiting the roughest mountain fastnesses, so exceedingly wild that it is impossible to get within rifleshot of it. (Lorch, 313)
The “Washoe Duel” was also left out of the book, but Clemens reprised it in “How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel,” published in England in December 1872 (SLC 1872 [MT01062]; 11 Sept 72 to OLC, n. 10click to open link).
AAA 1924 [bib11609], lot 98, which describes the letter as an “Autograph Letter Signed, ‘Mark,’ 2pp. 12mo, ‘Home, 26th’ 1872. To James Redpath,” and states that it was accompanied by a “portrait of Mark Twain.” The portrait was almost certainly not enclosed with the original letter, but furnished by a dealer or collector as an adornment. There undoubtedly was, however, an enclosure not mentioned by the catalog, yet clearly implied by the text, which refers to “this notice.” The notice referred to appeared originally in the New York Tribune (25 Jan 72, 5), and was reprinted verbatim in the Hartford Courant (26 Jan 72, 2), attributed to the Tribune. The text here is a line-for-line resetting of the Tribune notice. Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Newspaper and Microcopy Division, University of California, Berkeley (CU-NEWS).
L5 , 33–36.
When offered for sale in 1924 the MS was part of the collection of businessman William F. Gable (1856–1921).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.