31 August 1853 • New York, N.Y. (Hannibal Journal , 10 Sept 53, UCCL 02712)
New York is at present overstocked with printers; and I suppose they are from the South, driven North by the yellow fever.1explanatory note I got a permanent situation on Monday morning, in a book and job office, and went to work. The printers here are badly organized, and therefore have to work for various prices. These prices are 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, and 35 cents per 1,000 ems. The price I get is 23 cents; but ⒶemendationI did very well to get a place at all, for there are thirty or forty—yes, fifty good printers in the city with no work at all; besides, my situation is permanent, and I shall keep it till I can get a better one.2explanatory note The office I work in is John A. Gray’s, 97 Cliff street, and, next to Harper’s, is the most extensive in the city. In the room in which I work I have forty compositors for company. Taking compositors, pressmen, stereotypers, and all, there are about two hundred persons employed in the concern.3explanatory note The “Knickerbocker,” “New York Recorder,” “Choral Advocate,” “Jewish Chronicle,” “Littell’s Living Age,” “Irish ——,” and half a dozen other papers and periodicals are printed here, besides an immense number of books.4explanatory note They are very particular about spacing, justification, proofs, etc., and even if I do not make much money, I will learn a great deal. I thought Ustick was particular enough, but acknowledge now that he was not old-maidish.5explanatory note Why, you must put exactly the same space between every two words, and every line must be spaced alike. They think it dreadful to space one line with three em spaces, and the next one with five ems. However, I expected this, and worked accordingly from the beginning; and out of all the proofs I saw, without boasting, I can say mine was by far the cleanest. In St. Louis, Mr. Baird said my proofs were the cleanest that were ever set in his office. The foreman of the Anzeiger told me the same—foreman of the Watchman the same; and with all this evidence, I believe I do set a clean proof.6explanatory note
My boarding house is more than a mile from the office;7explanatory note and I can hear the signal calling the hands to work before I start down; they use a steam whistle for that purpose. I work in the fifth story; and from one window I have a pretty good view of the city, while another commands a view of the shipping beyond the Battery; and the “forest of masts,” with all sorts of flags flying, is no mean sight. You have everything in the shape of water craft, from a fishing smack to the steamships and men-of-war; but packed so closely together for miles, that when close to them you can scarcely distinguish one from another.
Of all the commodities, manufactures—or whatever you please to call it—in New York, trundle-bed trash—children I mean—take the lead. Why, from Cliff street, up Frankfort to Nassau street, six or seven squares—my road to dinner—I think I could count two hundred brats. Niggers, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese, and some the Lord no doubt originally intended to be white, but the dirt on whose faces leaves one uncertain as to that fact, block up the little, narrow street; and to wade through this mass of human vermin, would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived. In going to and from my meals, I go by the way of Broadway—and to cross Broadway is the rub—but once across, it is the rub for two or three squares. My plan—and how could I choose another, when there is no other—is to get into the crowd; and when I get in, I am borne, and rubbed, and crowded along, and need scarcely trouble myself about using my own legs; and when I get out, it seems like I had been pulled to pieces and very badly put together again.8explanatory note
Last night I was in what is known as one of the finest fruit saloons in the world. The whole length of the huge, glittering hall is filled with beautiful ornamented marble slab tables, covered with the finest fruit I ever saw in my life. I suppose the fruit could not be mentioned with which they could not supply you. It is a perfect palace. The gas lamps hang in clusters of half a dozen together—representing grapes, I suppose—all over the hall.9explanatory note
closing and signature missing
P.S. The printers have two libraries in town, entirely free to the craft; and in these I can spend my evenings most pleasantly. If books are not good company, where will I find it?10explanatory note
The disease had become epidemic in New Orleans, where it caused more than five thousand deaths in the next eighteen months. While Clemens was in New York, the city’s printers raised money to assist sick and destitute printers in New Orleans.
“Monday morning” was 29 August. In January 1873, Clemens recalled that after his apprenticeship in Hannibal he worked as a printer “in St Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia & New York while yet a boy—& belonged to the Typographical Unions in those cities, by a courtesy which forebore to enforce the rule requiring 21 years of age for eligibility” (SLC 1873, 1–2). St. Louis Typographical Union No. 8, a charter member of the National Typographical Union founded in May 1852, represented a significant number of that city’s printers, including some of Clemens’s friends at this time. (Its membership records for 1853–55 have been lost.) By contrast, New York printers were split between two unions: New York Typographical Union No. 6 (also a charter member of the National) and the New York Printers’ Co-operative Union, founded on 13 April 1853 to represent book and job printers. This division of loyalties had inhibited the printers’ ability to establish uniform wage rates in keeping with rates paid elsewhere. In 1906 Clemens remembered the rate of pay he received in New York as “villainous” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:287; see George A. Stevens, 2:206, 245–75; Morgan, 47–55).
John A. Gray’s five-story book and job printing house was at 95–97 Cliff Street on the corner of Frankfort Street; Harper and Brothers was nearby, with five buildings fronting on Cliff Street and five more behind them on Pearl Street. Twenty-six of Gray’s employees were members of the Printers’ Co-operative Union (for book and job printers) in May 1853 (Rode 1853 [bib10359], 267; “Destructive Fire,” New York Times, 12 Dec 53, 1; George A. Stevens, 2:267).
Clemens mentions: the Knickerbocker; or, New-York Monthly Magazine, a well-known literary, humor, travel, and arts journal, published 1833–65; the New York Recorder, a Baptist weekly, published 1845–55; the Musical Review and Choral Advocate; A Companion for the Choir, the Singing School, and the Fireside, a New York monthly published 1850–73 under various titles; The Jewish Chronicle, a New York monthly published 1844–55 “under the direction of the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews” (i.e., converting them), one of whose directors was Clemens’s employer, John A. Gray; Littell’s Living Age, published 1844–1941, a Boston weekly that reprinted poetry, fiction, and political and social commentary from British journals, edited at this time by its founder, Eliakim Littell; and, probably, the Irish-American, a New York political and religious weekly, published 1849–1916. The ellipsis here is presumed to be in the original manuscript, but it may have been imposed by Orion Clemens when he printed the letter in the Hannibal Journal. Since both Clemens brothers had strong nativist views at this time, either of them might have regarded the conjunction of “American” with “Irish” as a sort of blasphemy (Mott 1939, 606–14, 747–49; Mott 1938, 76 n. 134, 197; Titus, 3:2164, 2448, 2802, 4:3039, 3051; Winifred Gregory, 470).
Clemens refers to his recent experience as a journeyman in the book and job office of Thomas Watt Ustick (b. 1800 or 1801), a prominent St. Louis printer with offices on Main Street between Olive and Pine streets (Montague, 109). Ustick’s office set type for the St. Louis Evening News and probably for other journals on which Clemens worked in June, July, and August 1853. Orion Clemens had also had first-hand experience of Ustick’s exacting standards, for, as Clemens recalled in 1897, Orion had gone “to St. L to learn to be a printer, in Ustick’s job office” in about 1842 (“Villagers of 1840–3,” Inds, 105). In introducing this letter in the Journal, Orion expressed some pride at the training he had helped give his brother in Hannibal: “The following letter is some encouragement to apprentices in country printing offices, as it shows that it is practicable to acquire enough knowledge of the business in a Western country office, to command the best situations, West or East. There are a great many who suppose that no mechanical business can be learned well in the West.”
The Reverend E. Thompson Baird was editor of the St. Louis Presbyterian, a struggling religious weekly, from September 1852, when he arrived in St. Louis, until October 1854, when he departed to become agent of the Board of Domestic Missions of the Presbyterian Church. In June of 1853 Baird claimed that he was his “own editor, foreman, compositor, clerk, and man of all work,” but Clemens evidently set type for him later that summer (“Circular,” St. Louis Presbyterian, 23 June 53, 2–3). Clemens indicates here that he also set type for the Anzeiger des Westens, the city’s leading German language daily, edited by Henry Boernstein, and for the Western Watchman, a weekly Baptist family journal, edited by William Crowell and the Reverend S. B. Johnson. The printing foremen of these journals have not been identified (“The St. Louis Presbyterian,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 7 Oct 54, 2; Montague, 121, 122).
“I found board in a sufficiently villainous mechanics’ boarding-house in Duane Street,” Clemens said in 1906 (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:287). There were, in fact, numerous boardinghouses on Duane Street (Rode 1853 [bib10360], 9–11). Paine reported that Clemens “did not like the board. He had been accustomed to the Southern mode of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have ‘hot-bread’ or biscuits, but ate ‘light-bread,’ which they allowed to get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way” (MTB , 1:96). If Clemens made his complaint in a letter, as Paine asserts, it is not known to survive.
From John A. Gray’s establishment on the East River side of lower Manhattan, it was about a ten-block walk across town to Duane Street near Broadway on the West Side, where Clemens lived and boarded. Broadway was notably wider than the typical “little, narrow street” of lower Manhattan; it was also packed with carts, hacks, coaches, and omnibuses, not to mention pedestrians.
Possibly the Washington Market, on Washington Street between Vesey and Fulton streets on the Hudson River, which in 1852 grossed $28.4 million, including $2.8 million for the sale of fruit (Saunders, 125).
The Printers’ Free Library and Reading Room was founded by the New York Typographical Society, whose “members commenced making donations of books to establish a library in 1823. . . . Many valuable donations of books have been received from publishers and others” (Jewett, 96–97). Sometime in 1853 the society moved its headquarters from 300 Broadway to 3 Chambers Street, just a few blocks from Clemens’s boardinghouse. Its library was open from 6:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M. “for the use of Printers, Stereotypers, Bookbinders, Engravers, and all others connected with the book and newspaper business. All the principal papers are on file, and the Library contains 3,000 vols. There is no charge made, except where persons take books from the Library, for which privilege $1 a year only is charged” (H. Wilson, appendix, 56; Rode 1852, appendix, 36; Rode 1853 [bib10360], appendix, 74). The second library Clemens mentions has not been identified.
Hannibal Journal, 10 Sept 53, 2, at the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia (MoHi). A reimpression from the same type in the Hannibal Journal (weekly), 15 Sept 53, 2 (MoHi) is textually identical.
L1 , 9–12; Minnie M. Brashear, “An Early Mark Twain Letter,” Modern Language Notes 44 (April 1929): 257–58; Armstrong, 498–99; Brashear 1934, 155–57.
see the previous letter.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.