Explanatory Notes        Apparatus Notes (Ⓐ)

Source: Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass ([MH-H])

Cue: "We implore the"

Source format: "MS"

Letter type: "[standard letter]"

Notes:

Last modified:

Revision History: AB

Published on MTPO: 2007

Print Publication: v6

MTPDocEd
To Thomas Bailey Aldrich
31 December 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01171)
slc                        farmington avenue, hartford.
Dec. 31./74.

We implore the Indignant Subscriber to bear with us yet a little while. We are really only just today getting things fairly going. Please acknowledge receipt of today’s edition. It is unusually full & complete.

The Publisher 1explanatory note

T. B. Aldrich, Esq2explanatory note

Textual Commentary
Source text(s):

MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, Autograph File). Clemens’s drawing is photographically reproduced

Previous Publication:

L6 , 336–38; Greenslet 1908, facing 114, MS facsimile; Bookman 31 (June 1910): 372, MS facsimile.

Provenance:

Donated by Talbot Aldrich in June 1943.

More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.

Explanatory Notes
1 

The self-portrait is on page 1, and this note on page 4, of a monogram letterhead folder, with pages 2 and 3 left blank. Clemens wrote “over” to make sure that Aldrich did not miss the letter.

2 

Aldrich’s response, dated 1 January 1875, was postmarked 4 January (CU-MARK). On the front of its envelope Clemens made this notation:

After sending Aldrich one photograph of myself a day for a week, he discovered the joke & protested against the infliction. So on New Year’s eve I sent him 45 envelops of all possible sizes, containing an aggregate of near seventy differing pictures of myself, house & family. It loaded the postman down.

A few days after, came this letter from Aldrich.

S. L. C.

On the back of the envelope, Aldrich wrote a note to be read before the letter itself:

It is no use for that person to send any more letters here. The post-office at this point is to be blown up. Forty-eight hogsheads of nitro-glycyrrhirine have been surreptitiously introduced into the cellar of the building, and more is expected. R. W. E., H. W. L., O. W. H and other conspirators in masks, have been seen flitting about the town for several days passed. The greatest excitement combined with the most intense quietness reigns at Ponkapog.

T. Bayleigh.

In facetiously casting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes as masked conspirators, Aldrich may have planted the seed for Clemens’s playful depiction of them as tramps in his famous Whittier dinner speech of 17 December 1877 (see MTHL , 1:212; Fatout 1976, 110–15). Aldrich’s letter read:

UCLC32091
Police Headquarters.

Ponkapog Mass.

Jany 1st, 1875.

Sir:

At 4 P.M. this day, the entire Constabulary force of Ponkapog—consisting of two men and a resolute boy—broke camp on the border of Wampumsoagg Pond, and took up its march in four columns to the scene of action—the Post Office. There they formed in a hollow square, and moved upon the Postmaster. The mail had already arrived, but the post agent refused to deliver it to the force. The truculent official was twice run through a mince-meat machine before he would disclose the place where he had secreted the mail-bag. The mail-bag was then unstitched with the aid of one of Wheeler & Wilson’s sewing-machines, and the contents examined. The bag, as was suspected, contained additional evidence of the dreadful persecution that is going on in our midst. There were found no fewer than 20 (twenty) of those seditious, iniquitous, diabolical and highly objectionable prints, engravings and photographs, which have lately been showered—perhaps hurled would be the better word—upon Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a respectable and inoffensive citizen of Ponkapog.

The perpetrator of the outrage is known to the police, and they are on his track—in your city. An engraving with a green background, on which was a sprawling yellow figure, leaves us no room to doubt. This figure was at once recognized by several in the crowd as an admirable likeness of one Mark Twain, alias “The Jumping Frog”, a well-known Californian desperado, and formerly the chief of Henry Plumer’s Band of Road Agents in Montana, who has recently been “doing” the public not only in the Northern states of America, but in the realm of Queen Victoria. That he will be speedily arrested and brought to Ponkapog to face his victim, is the hope of every one here. If you could slyly entice him to come into the neighborhood, you would be doing a favor to the community. Would n’t the inducement of regular meals, and fishing through the ice, fetch him? Do something. In the meanwhile the post office is closely watched.

Yours Respectfully

T. Bayleigh, Chief of Police

Ponkapog.

Mass.

Samuel Leghorn Clements, Esq.

Of the “near seventy” pictures Clemens claimed to have sent on 31 December, and the twenty Aldrich acknowledged receiving, only the present inscribed drawing is known to survive. Aldrich may have alluded to the cover of Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One. Its engraving, which depicted a bespectacled frog reclining under a toadstool, smoking, and reading the pamphlet, was printed in at least two different background colors, orange and green, both on gray-green paper; in neither one, however, was the frog yellow (copies in CU-MARK and DLC; 7 May 74 to Spoffordclick to open link). He also alluded to chapters 10 and 11 of Roughing It, in which Clemens cited Thomas J. Dimsdale’s The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Fustice in the Rocky Mountains. Being a Correct and Impartial Narrative of the Chase, Trial, Capture and Execution of Henry Plummer’s Road Agent Band (1866) (see RI 1993 , 64, 69, 585–88, 811, 1034).

Top