Dear SirⒶemendation: Remembering Mr. Curtis’s great speech, &Ⓐemendation other great & enjoyable features of the New-England Society’s last annual banquet,1explanatory note it is with very real regret that
I am obliged to deny myself the privilege of being present at this year’s dinner;
but I have an offensive
business engagement for that day in Hartford.2explanatory note Most people would shirk this, under the temptation which your invitation
offers, but I have young George Washington’s disease (which is much rarer now than
Bright’s),
& my word is the one unfracturable thing about me. ⟦I do not know what Bright’s disease
is, but anyway, I do not feel bright enough this morning to be afraid I have got it.⟧3explanatory note
Still, I shall not be without my share in the pleasures of the occasion for my private
telephone
will be connected with your banqueting hall, if my plans & purposes succeed.4explanatory note It has an improvement of my own invention which I call the Olfactorium,
& I shall sit by my own firesideⒶemendation, with a few friends whom I have taken the liberty to invite to your celebration,
& we will smoke our pipes & sip our lemonade, applaud your speeches judiciously, &
refresh ourselves with a fragrant sniff of each of your courses as it comes on your
table. We shall also have one
privilege which will be denied to your (otherwise) more fortunate guests: for if an
orator ventures to spread himself
out over the edges of the regulation ten minutes, he must be proportionately interesting,
or we will shut down the lid on him & wait for the next speaker. Since we shall necessarily not be in the list
of guests appointed to respond to
toasts, we shall sorrow to be unable to contribute a sentiment or two to the general
entertainment, but there is a new
song here which you may not have heard, & if you care for music we shall be very glad
indeed to sing it for you, by telephone. I am not right sure of the
name of it, but I think it is called “In the Sweet By-& Bye.”5explanatory note
Again thanking the Committee for the compliment of their invitation, I am, with great
respect,
1 Daniel F. Appleton (1826–1904), co-owner of the American Waltham Watch Company in
Waltham, Massachusetts, was president of the New England Society in the City of New
York (for the society see 20 Dec 1876 to Perkins, n. 1). At the last annual banquet,
on 22 December 1876 at Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York, author and orator George
William Curtis (1824–92) had responded to the toast “Forefathers’ Day” with a stirring
and patriotic political speech. For Clemens’s remarks on that occasion see the Appendix
“Speech to the New England Societyclick to open link.”
2 The “offensive business engagement” that prevented Clemens from attending the society’s
1877 banquet, again on 22 December at Delmonico’s, has not been identified and may
have been a convenient fiction. He clearly wrote this letter expecting it to be published;
it appeared in the society’s report of the dinner (New England Society 1877, 3–4, 84).
3 Richard Bright (1789–1858) gave his name to the kidney disease that he first described
in 1827. The term is no longer used because it is too generic.
4 Clemens was planning to install a telephone, an invention first patented by Alexander
Graham Bell in March 1876. By the end of 1877 it was in use by some three thousand
businesses. In late December 1877 or early January 1878, Clemens had an instrument
installed in his Hartford house, connecting him with the Hartford Courant—possibly the first one in private use (AutoMT2, 491; Hubbard to SLC, 17 Dec 1877, CU-MARK).
5 The popular hymn “The Sweet By-and-By” was composed in 1868 by Joseph P. Webster to
lyrics by Sanford F. Bennett. In a notebook entry of 3 November 1878, Clemens categorized
it as one of the songs that “were sweet & pretty & were able to move one—at first;
but when everybody & everything persecuted you with them you learned to loathe the
originals as well as the copies” (N&J2, 240). And in 1889, in chapter 17 of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Hank Morgan describes a band performing “what seemed to be the crude first-draft
or original agony of the wail known to later centuries as ‘In the Sweet By and By.’
It was new, and ought to have been rehearsed a little more. For some reason or other
the queen had the composer hanged, after dinner” (CY, 196).
New-England Society 1877, 84.