20 September 1872 • London, England (London Spectator, 21 Sept 72, UCCL 00809)
To the Editor of the “Spectator.Ⓐemendation”
Sir,—I only venture to intrude upon you because I come, in some sense, in the interest of public morality, &Ⓐemendation this makes my mission respectable. Mr. John Camden Hotten, of London,1explanatory note has, of his own individual motion, republished several of my books in England. I do not protest against this, for there is no law that could give effect to the protest;2explanatory note &, besides, publishers are not accountable to the laws of heaven or earth in any country, as I understand it. But my little grievance is this: My books are bad enough just as they are written; then what must they be after Mr. John Camden Hotten has composed half-a-dozen chapters & added the same to them? I feel that all true hearts will bleed for an author whose volumes have fallen under such a dispensation as this. If a friend of yours, or if even you yourself, were to write a book & set it adrift among the people, with the gravest apprehensions that it was not up to what it ought to be intellectually, how would you like to have John Camden Hotten sit down & stimulate his powers, & drool two or three original chapters on to the end of that book? Would not the world seem cold & hollow to you? Would you not feel that you wanted to die & be at rest? Little the world knows of true suffering. And suppose he should entitle these chapters “Holiday Literature,” “True Story of Chicago,” “On Children,” “Train up a Child, & Away he Goes,” & “Vengeance,” & then, on the strength of having evolved these marvels from his own consciousness, go & “copyright” the entire book, & put in the title-page a picture of a man with his hand in another man’s pocket, & the legend “All Rights Reserved.” (I only suppose the picture; still it would be a rather neat thing.) And, further, suppose that in the kindness of his heart & the exuberance of his untaught fancy, this thoroughly well-meaning innocent should expunge the modest title which you had given your book, & replace it with so foul an invention as this, “Screamers & Eye-Openers,” & went & got that copyrighted, too.3explanatory note And suppose that on top of all this, he continually & persistently forgot to offer you a single penny or even send you a copy of your mutilated book to burn. Let one suppose all this. Let him suppose it with strength enough, & then he will know something about woe. Sometimes when I read one of those additional chapters constructed by John Camden Hotten, I feel as if I wanted to take a broom-straw & go & knock that man’s brains out. Not in anger, for I feel none. Oh! not in anger; but only to see, that is all. Mere idle curiosity.
And Mr. Hotten says that one nom de plume of mine is “Carl Byng.” I hold that there is no affliction in this world that makes a man feel so down-trodden & abused as the giving him a name that does not belong to him.4explanatory note How would this sinful aborigine feel if I were to call him John Camden Hottentot, & come out in the papers & say he was entitled to it by divine right?5explanatory note I do honestly believe it would throw him into a brain fever, if there were not an insuperable obstacle in the way.
Yes—to come back to the original subject, which is the sorrow that is slowly but surely undermining my health—Mr. Hotten prints unrevised, uncorrected, & in some respects, spurious books, with my name to them as author, & thus embitters his customers against one of the most innocent of men.6explanatory note Messrs. George Routledge & Sons are the only English publishers who pay me any copyright, & therefore, if my books are to disseminate either suffering or crime among readers of our language, I would ever so much rather they did it through that house, & then I could contemplate the spectacle calmly as the dividends came in.7explanatory note—I am, Sir, &c.,
London, September 20, 1872.
John Camden Hotten (1832–73) went to work for a bookseller at age fourteen and developed an abiding interest in books. After spending several years in the United States, he returned to England in 1856 and became a bookseller and publisher. He was soon one of London’s best-known publishers, with an extensive list that included Dickens, Swinburne, and Blake, works of antiquarianism, popular histories, cheap editions of standard works, humor, and poetry. He compiled and issued his own Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words in 1859, and wrote, compiled, or translated many other works. He also published erotica, some of which he sold in limited or subscription editions, and some, like James Glass Bertram’s Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in All Countries (1869), through his regular list (Marcus, 69–70; advertisements at end of SLC 1871 [MT01018] and Hingston 1871). In the 1860s, in the absence of any international copyright convention, Hotten began reprinting the works of popular American writers, like Emerson, Lowell, Whitman, Holmes, Artemus Ward, and Hans Breitmann. In the early 1870s he expanded his American list to include Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Ambrose Bierce. Most of these writers were reprinted without their consent, and of course without payment. In an unpublished diatribe against Hotten, written sometime between late November 1872 and June 1873, Clemens set down his own version of the publisher’s career:
He began life as a bookseller’s clerk in London, under the name of John Hotten. By & by his employer discovered a sign up a back street with this legend on it:
“John Hotten, Bookseller.”
So his clerk had hired clerks of his own, & was driving a private trade without his employer’s knowledge. Right enough, perhaps. But when it transpired that John Hotten had stolen his stock of books from his employer, he made a sudden journey to America to escape the consequences. He was in exile here for some time. Then he turned up in England again & chose a new victim. Who? A former benefactor, of course. This was a benefactor who had an excellent business location, & John Camden Hotten (he had added the “Camden,” now) wanted it. He found that the lease was almost out, & he entered into a secret treaty for it with the owners. And he came near getting it, too, before the occupant found it out. . . .
At the present day Hotten is an extensive publisher of cheap literature, at 74 Piccadilly, London, & has & yet, large as his business really is, the man has not a speaking acquaintance personal friend whom a respectable person could dare to associate with. There are so many people who desire to pull his nose that it is next to impossible to find him in his shop. (SLC 1872–73, 5–7)
Clemens had himself recently visited Hotten’s office. On 7 September Hotten wrote Ambrose Bierce, “Tom Hood has just been here with ‘Mark Twain.’ Mark was introduced to me as ‘Mr Bryce,’ & he looked as glum and as stern as any member of the Bryce family I ever saw.”
I suppose the joke wd have succeeded, but I at once brought out my portrait of Mark Twain, & this did the business, altho “Bryce” intensified his sternness & swore—at least he asseverated—he was of that ilk to the last. But the likeness! My goodness me, I never saw anything like it! (CU-BANC)
Hood also mentioned the failed ruse in a letter to Bierce of 9 September: “Hotten was too sharp for he twigged Mark, and not sharp enough because he said so before we had time to commit ourselves” (CU-BANC). Bierce was at this time on the staff of Hood’s comic newspaper, Fun; by his consent, Hotten was his English publisher (see Grenander 1978, 459–60).
Hotten was not legally required to obtain an author’s permission or pay a royalty when reprinting works first published in the United States. He had published unauthorized editions of The Innocents Abroad, the Jumping Frog book, and the (Burlesque) Autobiography (SLC 1870 [MT00863], 1870 [MT00866], 1870 [MT00865], 1871 [MT01016], 1871 [MT01019]); compiled two collections of Mark Twain’s newspaper pieces, Eye Openers and Screamers (SLC 1871 [MT01020], 1871 [MT01018]); and included several selections by Mark Twain in humor anthologies, like Practical Jokes with Artemus Ward (Hotten 1870 [bib12767], 1870 [bib12768], 1872 [bib12770]; ET&S1 , 549–55, 586–89).
In his edition of Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography, Hotten had included a two-part piece entitled “On Children,” comprising two sketches printed in the Buffalo Express over the pseudonym “Carl Byng” (see the next note): “How to Train up a Child” and “‘Train up a Child, and Away He Goes’” (SLC 1871 [MT01016]; Byng 1870 [bib11712], 1871). He then reprinted the two pieces in Screamers, together with another Byng piece, “Holiday Literature” (Byng 1870 [bib11712]). Also included in Screamers were “Almost Incredible—True Story of Chicago” (whose author is unidentified) and “Vengeance.” In June 1872 Hotten claimed to have belatedly learned that “Vengeance” was the work of the “editor of Cassell’s Magazine” (George Manville Fenn, 1831–1909), who had “announced himself as the author” after seeing the book in print. Hotten thereupon “withdrew it from my collection,” removing it from later printings of Screamers (Hotten 1872 [bib12771]; BAL 3333). Neither Hotten nor Clemens had true British copyright on this reprinted material. The title pages of Screamers and Eye Openers did include the words “All Rights Reserved”—a “conventional device to reserve right of translation and republication in countries that shared an international copyright agreement with Great Britain” ( ET&S1 , 597 n. 143).
Between November 1870 and late January 1871 several sketches signed “Carl Byng” appeared in the Buffalo Express. A study of these texts indicates that Clemens did not write them, and that they may have been the work of Josephus N. Larned, Clemens’s editorial colleague on the newspaper ( L4 , 306 n. 3). Hotten introduced the sketch “Holiday Literature” in Screamers: “The following criticism of Mother Goose, by Carl Byng—which is another name for Mark Twain, we imagine—will repay perusal” (Hotten 1871). And in his letter published in the London Spectator on 8 June 1872 he reiterated the claim that “Carl Byng” was “another nom de plume” of Clemens’s (Hotten 1872 [bib12771]; see also note 6). Clemens consistently rejected as “spurious” all sketches by Carl Byng, regardless of how Hotten identified them (London Spectator, 8 June 72, 722, in ET&S1 , 594).
In an unpublished manuscript that Clemens probably wrote in mid-September 1872, “To the Superintendent of the Zoological Gardens,” he pretended to offer
for your inspection & purchase one of the most remarkable creatures which nature has yet produced. For the sake of convenience I call it the John Camden Hottentot. It is not a bird, it is not a man, it is not a fish, it does not seem to be in all respects a reptile. It has a the body & features of a man, but none of the ins scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure. It will answer to its name, & come with the greatest alacrity to do a mean thing, but will hide away in its lair, with every indication of distress, if it is required to be in any wise accessory to a virtuous action. (SLC 1872 [MT01085], 1–2)
Although Clemens did not publish this fulmination, the Hottentot conceit appeared again in an anonymous burlesque review on 23 November in the London Figaro, a satiric semiweekly journal. Purporting to be a notice of John Camden Hotten: The Story of His Life, a (fictive) biography by Henry M. Stanley, the article revealed that Hotten was the son of a “famous Hottentot chieftain,” and that he had run away to England and “dropped the ‘tot’ at the end of his name.” Hotten’s career was also discussed, “especially his famous discoveries of American humorists,”
which he commenced a few years ago, and continues to the present day, with such great success. The story of Hotten’s discovery of Bret Harte is now as familiar as a household word, and the persistent way in which he unearthed Mark Twain, who disguised himself under all manner of aliases, is equally well known. . . . Mr. Stanley gives Mr. Hotten full credit for his discoveries in this direction; but complains that the Piccadilly publisher does not pay his humorists for discovering them. . . . It costs Mr. Hotten time and labour and money to discover the Transatlantic humorists; and we do not see why he is so indebted to them. If they would discover themselves, it would be a very different matter; but they do not. (“Stanley on Hotten,” clipping in CU-MARK)
Clemens’s assessment of Hotten’s publishing practices would be echoed in the succinct obituary included in the Annual Cyclopaedia for 1873:
June 14.—Hotten, John Camden, an enterprising but somewhat notorious publisher of London, who republished American novels very largely, altering them, without notice to the authors, to suit his ideas, and often announcing anonymous books of inferior merit, as by popular authors; died in London. ( Annual Cyclopaedia 1873 , 597–98)
Clemens’s struggle to retain control of the contents of his English sketch-books had first become public in May of 1872, when the Routledges wrote the London Spectator to protest a negative review of Hotten’s Screamers, which “singled out half of the nonauthorial pieces for its dispraise” ( ET&S1 , 591–92; “Mark Twain,” London Spectator, 18 May 72, 633–34). On 1 June the Spectator retracted its assertion that Clemens had authored the sketches in question, and announced that the Routledges would soon issue “a volume of sketches . . . authenticated and revised by the author himself,” Mark Twain’s Sketches (London Spectator, 1 June 72, 698; SLC 1872 [MT01064]). Hotten responded, pointing to the curious fact that the sketches in the new Routledge collection had derived from his own Eye Openers and Screamers: Clemens had revised Hotten’s edited texts for the Routledges, in effect “pirating his own pirate” ( ET&S1 , 593–96). In his unpublished attack on Hotten, Clemens admitted that “Hotten cleanses me carefully before spreading me before the British public, but I suppose it rather benefits me than otherwise I doubt I suspect he leaves more dirt by contact of his person than he removes from me by his labor” (SLC 1872–73, 18–19). This may account for his willingness to accept some of Hotten’s otherwise unwelcome changes. After the present letter was published, Hotten again defended himself against Clemens’s accusations, in a letter which appeared in the Spectator on 28 September (Hotten 1872 [bib12772]):
Sir,—It was unkind of “Mark Twain” to write you that note last week concerning myself. You may, perhaps, remember that in June last you permitted me to say in your journal that a so-called “revised edition” of “Mark Twain’s” sketches, recently issued here by another publisher “consisted simply of my own revised editions transposed; in fact, my little books seem to have been sent to some one in New York who returned the sketches intact, but with the arrangement a little altered;” and in proof, I further stated that certain very forcible expressions which I left out as unnecessary were also curiously left out in the “revised edition,” and certain new titles given by me turned up in a most unaccountable manner in the new “author’s revised edition”; and the punctuation, English orthography, and even our printer’s errors all appeared in the new “author’s revised edition” in a way that was simply marvellous—in a way the like of which I never before remember as occurring to an “author’s revised edition.” As no denial of my statement has ever appeared in your journal, I suppose its truth will not now be challenged.
But “in the interest of public morality,” “Mark Twain” complains that I have “composed half-a-dozen chapters and added the same to his books.” Perhaps, in the interest of common-sense, you will allow me to say that I have done nothing of the kind. “Mark Twain” instances five papers as my composition. Whether American humourists as fathers are different from other men I cannot say, but in this instance “Mark Twain” has forgotten his own children. Three of these stories appeared in his own paper, the Buffalo Express, and the others were very generally circulated under his name, without a single denial appearing. Any one interested in the authorship can see the American originals at my office.
“Mark Twain” says that the name “Carl Byng” does not belong to him. I can only say that his brother journalists in New York State must be labouring under an extraordinary delusion, seeing that they always treat “Carl Byng” as “Mark Twain,” and “Mark” himself has never once corrected them, although the statement that the two names refer to one man must have come before him some hundreds of times. The articles signed “Carl Byng,” I may just mention, invariably appear in Mr. Clemens’ paper, the Buffalo Express. But his taste for many noms de plume was curiously displayed only the other day. When Mark Twain called upon me with one of the greatest humourists of Fleet Street, I gave the former a hearty welcome as “Mr. Clemens, the famous ‘Mark Twain,’” but observing that he looked glumpy, his companion took me on one side, and in a hurried manner explained to me that “Mr. Twain” would be much better pleased if addressed as “Mr. Bryce.” I did so, and he seemed greatly cheered up. We talked of the old and modern schools of humour, and after accepting a little book as a present, “Mr. Bryce” left me, and made his way back to Fleet Street.
There is one misapprehension I trust you will allow me to clear up. I have in three years written thrice to Mr. Clemens, but never received one answer. As late as January last I wrote, offering equitable payment for any work he might do for me; and the editor of my English edition of the “Innocents Abroad” Edward P. Hingston has also, I believe, been unable to get an answer. To any American author who may either write or edit for me, I will make payment to the best of my ability; but if it is left for me to gather up newspaper trifles, trifles cast off and forgotten, and left to me to obtain a market for their sale in a collected form, with the cheerful probability of another edition appearing at one-sixth of my price,—for such non-copyright raw material, liable to such a contingency, I am not prepared to pay anything, and I do not think any man in his senses would pay.
When “Bret Harte’s” agent called upon me a few days since with a new copyright story, we at once came to terms.—I am, Sir, &c.,
John Camden Hotten.
(See also Hotten to SLC, 3 Feb 72, Letterbook 6:18, Chatto and Windus.) Hotten was already in the process of producing yet another unauthorized collection of Mark Twain’s sketches, which he began to advertise in October or early November. Clemens was now so exasperated by the appearance of spurious works credited to him that he paid Hotten another visit on 8 November, with an offer to revise the new sketchbook. Hotten cordially accepted, but Clemens, suddenly called home, was unable to carry out his revisions. Hotten issued The Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain, an “immense volume,” in March 1873 ( ET&S1 , 600–601). By the fall of 1873, however, when Clemens returned to England for his December lecture series, Hotten had died, and his successor, Andrew Chatto (now in partnership with W. E. Windus), again offered Clemens the chance to revise his sketches. In a letter of 25 November 1873, Chatto wrote:
I am sincerely anxious to establish more cordial relations as between Author & Publisher, than have hitherto existed, between you and our firm, and I beg to submit to you a set of the sheets of a volume of your writings, in order that you may (as I understand you expressed a desire to do) correct certain portions of the contents. (Letter-book 6:707, Chatto and Windus)
The volume in question was Choice Humorous Works, which Clemens agreed to revise, using a set of folded and gathered sheets. In addition to deleting seventeen sketches (including all those by Carl Byng), he made extensive corrections on many more (for a full description of these revisions, see ET&S1 , 603–7). The corrected sheets, which Clemens completed before returning home in January 1874, served as printer’s copy for altering the plates of Choice Humorous Works to produce a new edition of that title, issued in April. The sheets are preserved in the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library (SLC 1873, 1874).
“Mark Twain and His English Editor,” London Spectator, 21 Sept 72, 1201–2.
L5 , 163–168; Every Saturday, n.s. 3 (2 Nov 72): 504; Kozlay, 48–51; Johnson, 160–62; Neider 1961, 157–58; Grenander 1975, 2, brief excerpt.