4 August 1873 • Edinburgh, Scotland (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 10703)
I am sincerely grieved to see that the Herald people have added a paragraph to one of my letters which puts me in a bad light. They describe me & the London correspondents as cheering the Shah at Ostend & conducting ourselves in anything but a proper way. It was a careless thing in the Herald people to do, after the kindly & gentlemanly way in which those correspondents treatedⒶemendation me on board the Lively.2explanatory note
Whenever you meet one of those correspondents, I would wish you would do me the real kindness to explain this thing to him & say that I am as sincerely grieved about it as if I had done the deed myself. AndⒶemendation in truth it has worried me more than I could tell in many pages of manuscript.
I don’t think Hosmer could have done that. His im Ⓐemendation instincts would have been truer, I think.3explanatory note
See 17 or 18 June 73 to Young, n. 1click to open link. After seeing Clemens at Ostend in June, Yates had reported for the Herald on the shah’s July visit to Paris, then made a quick trip to England: on 2 August he was in London. Shortly thereafter he returned to Vienna to report on the rewarding of prizes in the International Exhibition (Yates: 1885, 412; 1873, 10).
The offensive remark was inserted into Clemens’s first letter on the shah, which was published in the New York Herald on 1 July, but which he had only just seen in print (see 2 Aug 73 to Bliss [2nd] click to open link):
The Shah walked back alongside his fine cabin, looking at the assemblage of silent, solemn Flounders; the correspondent of the London Telegraph, was hurrying along the pier and took off his hat and bowed to the “King of Kings,” and the King of Kings gave a polite military salute in return. This was the commencement of the excitement. The success of the breathless Telegraph man made all the other London correspondents mad, every man of whom flourished his stovepipe recklessly and cheered lustily, some of the more enthusiastic varying the exercise by lowering their heads and elevating their coattails. Seeing all this, and feeling that if I was to “impress the Shah” at all, now was my time, I ventured a little squeaky yell, quite distinct from the other shouts, but just as hearty. His Shah ship heard and saw and saluted me in a manner that was, I considered, an acknowledgement of my superior importance. I do not know that I ever felt so ostentatious and absurd before. (SLC 1873)
George W. Hosmer (1830–1914), a practicing physician as well as a noted journalist, reported for the New York Herald during the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. As the London correspondent for the Herald he had supervised Clemens’s assignment to report on the shah’s visit (Joseph J. Mathews, 80; “Dr. George W. Hosmer Is Dead,” New York Times, 14 June 1914, 11; see 2 Aug 73 to Bliss [2nd], n. 1click to open link).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L5 , 430–431; Waiting for Godot Books, item 6, with omissions.
The MS, owned at an unknown date by Raphael King (London) and in 1969 by Paul H. North of Second Life Books (Columbus, Ohio), was purchased by CU-MARK in January 1995 from Waiting for Godot Books through the James F. and Agnes R. Robb Memorial Fund.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.