Mr. Clemens becomes his own publisher and makes Webster general agent in firm of Webster and Company,Ⓐtextual note Publishers—Webster publishes “Huckleberry Finn” successfully—Whitford of firm of Alexander and Green draws theⒶtextual note contract—Lecture tour with George Cable—Farewell address on 19th of April.
As I have already remarked, I had imported my nephew-in-law, Webster, from the village of Dunkirk, New YorkⒺexplanatory note, to conduct that original first patent-right business for me, at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. That enterprise had lost forty-twoⒶtextual note thousand dollars for me, so I thought this a favorable time to close it up. I proposed to be my own publisher now, and let young Webster do the work. He thought he ought to have twenty-five hundred dollars a year while he was learning the trade. I took a day or two to consider the matter and study it out searchingly. So far as I could see, this was a new idea. I remembered that printers’ apprentices got no Ⓐtextual note salary. Upon inquiry I found that this was the case with stone masons,Ⓐtextual note brick masons, tinners, and the rest. I found that not even lawyers or apprenticed doctors got any salary for learning the trade. I remembered [begin page 58] that on the river an apprentice pilot not only got nothing in the way of salary but he also had to pay some pilot a sum in cash which he didn’t have—a large sum. It was what I had done myself. I had paid Bixby aⒶtextual note hundred dollars, and it was borrowed moneyⒺexplanatory note. I was told by a person who said he was studying for the ministry that even Noah got no salary for the first six months—partly on account of the weather and partly because he was learning navigation.
The upshot of these thinkings and searchings of mine was that I believed I had secured something entirely new to history in Webster. And also I believed that a young backwoodsman who was starting life in New York without any equipment of any kind, without proved value of any kind, without prospective value of any kind, yet able without blinking an eye to propose to learn a trade at another man’s expense and charge for this benefaction an annual sum greater than any PresidentⒶtextual note of the United States had ever been able to save out of his pay for running the most difficult country on the planet, after Ireland, must surely be worth securing—and instantly—lest he get away. I believed that if some of his gigantic interest in No. 1 could be diverted to the protection of No. 2, the result would be fortune enough for me.
I erected Webster into a firm—a firm entitled Webster and Company, Publishers—and installed him in a couple of offices at a modest rental, on the second floor of a building somewhere below Union Square, I don’t remember where. For assistants he had a girl, and perhaps a masculine clerk of about eight-hundred-dollarⒶtextual note size. For a while Webster had another helper. This was a man who had long been in the subscription-book business, knew all about it, and was able to teach it to Webster—which he did—I paying the cost of tuition.Ⓐtextual note I am talking about the early part of 1884 now. I handed Webster a competent capital and along with it I handed him the manuscriptⒶtextual note of “Huckleberry Finn.” Webster’s function was general agent. It was his business to appoint sub-agents throughout the country. At that time there were sixteen of these sub-agencies. They had canvassers under them who did the canvassing. In New York City Webster was his own sub-agentⒺexplanatory note.
Before ever any of these minor details that I am talking about had entered into being,Ⓐtextual note the careful Webster had suggested that a contract be drawn and signed and sealed before we made any real move. That seemed sane, though I should not have thought of it myself—I mean it was sane because Ⓐtextual note I had not thought of it myself. So Webster got his friend WhitfordⒺexplanatory note to draw the contract. I was coming to admire Webster very much, and at this point in the proceedings I had one of those gushing generosities surge up in my system;Ⓐtextual note and before I had thought, I had tried to confer upon Webster a tenth interest in the business in addition to his salary, free of chargeⒺexplanatory note. Webster declined promptly—with thanks, of course, the usual kind. That raised him another step in my admiration. I knew perfectly well that I was offering him a partnership interest which would pay him two or three times his salary within the next nine months, but he didn’t know that. He was coldly and wisely discounting all my prophecies about “Huckleberry Finn’s” high commercial value. And here was this new evidence that in Webster I had found a jewel, a man who would not get excited; a man who would not lose his head; a cautious [begin page 59] man; a man who would not take a risk of any kind in fields unknown to him. Except at somebody else’s expense, I mean.
The contract was drawn, as I say, by Whitford. Dunkirk, New York, produced Whitford as well as Webster, and has not yet gotten over the strain. Whitford was privileged to sign himself “of the firm of Alexander and Green.” Alexander and Green had a great and lucrative business and not enough conscience to damage it—a fact which came out rather prominently last year when the earthquake came which shook the entrails out of the three great Life Insurance CompaniesⒺexplanatory note. Alexander and Green had their offices in the Mutual Building. They kept a job lot of twenty-five lawyers on salary, and Whitford was one of these. He was good-natured, obliging, and immensely ignorant, and was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.
That first contract was all right. There was nothing the matter with it. It placed all obligations, all expenses, all liability, all responsibilities upon me, where they belonged.
It was a happy combination, Webster and Whitford. The amount that the two together didn’t know about anything was to me a much more awful and paralysingⒶtextual note spectacle than it would be to see theⒶtextual note Milky Way get wrecked and drift off in rags and patches through the sky. When it came to courage, moral or physical, they hadn’t any. Webster was afraid to venture anything in the way of business without first getting a lawyer’s assurance that there was nothing jailable about it. Whitford was consulted so nearly constantly that he was about as much a member of the staff as was the girl and the subscription expert. But as neither Webster nor Whitford had had any personal experience of money,Ⓐtextual note Whitford was not an expensive incumbent, though he probably thought he was.
At the break of the autumn I went off with George W. Cable on a four months’ reading-campaignⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note in the East and West—the last platform work which I was ever to do in this life in my own country. I resolved at the time that I would never rob the public from the platform again unless driven to it by pecuniaryⒶtextual note compulsions. After eleven years the pecuniaryⒶtextual note compulsions came, and I lectured all around the globeⒺexplanatory note.
Ten years have since lapsed, during which time I have only lectured for public charities and without pay. On the 19th of last month I took a public and formal leave of the platform—a thing which I had not done before—in a lecture on Robert Fulton for the benefit of the Robert Fulton MemorialⒶtextual note FundⒺexplanatory note.
I seem to be getting pretty far away from Webster and Whitford,Ⓐtextual note but it’s no matter. It is one of those cases where distance lends enchantmentⒶtextual note to the view. Webster was successful with “Huckleberry Finn,”Ⓐtextual note and a year laterⒶtextual note handed me the firm’s check for fifty-four thousand five hundred dollars, which included the fifteen thousand dollars capitalⒶtextual note which I had originally handed to him.Ⓐtextual note
Once more I experienced a new birth. I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna, I suppose.
Webster, from the village of Dunkirk, New York] Charles L. Webster was actually from Fredonia, New York, where in early 1870 Clemens had relocated his mother, sister, niece, and nephew (Jane Clemens, Pamela Moffett, and her children, Annie and Samuel) from St. Louis. Dunkirk, a busy port and railroad terminus on Lake Erie, was three miles north of Fredonia (21 Apr 1870 to OC, L4, 115 n. 2; MTBus, 239).
I had paid Bixby a hundred dollars, and it was borrowed money] Horace E. Bixby agreed to take on Clemens as an apprentice pilot in 1857 for a fee of $500. Clemens borrowed $100 from his brother-in-law, William A. Moffett, for a down payment; it is not clear how much of the total he ultimately paid (link note following 5 Aug 1856 to HC, L1, 70–71).
I erected Webster into a firm . . . Webster was his own sub-agent] Clemens has jumped ahead in his chronology by a year, skipping the events of late 1882 and 1883 entirely. In the fall of 1882, Clemens expanded Webster’s duties to include acting as the New York general agent for subscription sales of his forthcoming book, Life on the Mississippi, which Osgood planned to publish the following spring. On 9 September Clemens told Webster, “Go to studying up the methods & mysteries of General-Agency right away,” and Webster made plans to visit several agencies to learn the trade. On 19 September Clemens suggested that Osgood could “probably get some chap or girl for you who has served a General Agent in Boston—somebody who can help you, for wages, in New York, & teach you the methods,” but no office staff has been identified (9 Sept 1882 and 19 Sept 1882 to Webster [1st], NPV, in MTBus, 195–96, 199). The man who “knew all about” subscription book sales may have been Howard N. Hinckley, a former general agent for the American Publishing Company who was now operating in Chicago. Hinckley was willing to give advice, and in addition—because he planned to leave the book business—he offered to sell the “lists of agents who have been employed on all the Twain books in this section for the past seven to ten years.” Clemens agreed to buy the list for $500 (Hinckley to Webster, 2 Oct 1882, on verso of Webster to SLC, 5 Oct 1882, CU-MARK; Webster to SLC, 11 Oct 1882 and 24 Oct 1882, CU-MARK; 18 Oct 1882 to Osgood, ViU, in MTLP, 159 nn. 1–2). By October 1882 Webster had moved his office from Fulton Street to 658 Broadway, at the corner of Bond Street. Although over the next months he occasionally used stationery headed “Charles L. Webster, Publisher,” he was in fact only a general agent. In early March he expanded his business by arranging to take charge of the New York sales of all of Osgood’s publications. In 1883 Clemens grew dissatisfied with Osgood’s handling of the sales of Life on the Mississippi, and wanted to publish his next book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, elsewhere. Although he briefly considered giving it to the American Publishing Company, by the end of February 1884 he had decided to establish his own company, with Webster as its titular head. Webster, no longer just a “general agent,” was entrusted with managing the entire production of the book (Webster to American Publishing Co., 26 Oct 1882, ViU; Webster to PAM, 2 Mar 1883, CU-MARK; HF 2003, 697–98).
his friend Whitford] Like Webster, Daniel Whitford (1840–1923) was from Fredonia, where the two men had been friends. He practiced law in Buffalo, Chicago, and Fredonia before joining the New York firm of Alexander and Green in 1873. Webster hired him in May 1881 to help him investigate the Kaolatype business, and he remained Clemens’s attorney for over a decade. In 1894, however, when Charles L. Webster and Company declared bankruptcy, Clemens concluded that Whitford was disloyal and untrustworthy (“Died,” New York Times, 19 May 1923, 13; Chautauqua County 1904, 2:1130–32; Webster to SLC, 5 May 1881, CU-MARK; Harrison to SLC, 1 June 1894, CU-MARK, in HHR, 63 n. 3; MTLP, 365; see also AD, 29 May 1906).
I had tried to confer upon Webster a tenth interest in the business in addition to his salary, free of charge] The establishment of Charles L. Webster and Company was formalized by a contract drawn on 10 April 1884, which granted Webster a salary of $2,500 a year but no share of the profits (NPV).
Alexander and Green had a great and lucrative business . . . Life Insurance Companies] Charles B. Alexander was head of the law firm Alexander and Green and counsel for—and a director of—the Equitable Life Assurance Society. During the 1905 investigation into unethical practices in the insurance industry he was accused of using the society’s assets for personal gain. Several other insurance company directors, including members of the Alexander family, were also implicated ( AutoMT1 , 549 n. 257.6–9; Chicago Tribune: “Loot Equitable Policy Holders,” 14 Apr 1905, 5; “49 Defendants in Equitable Suit,” 31 July 1905, 1).
I went off with George W. Cable on a four months’ reading-campaign] Clemens toured with Cable, known for his stories of Creole life, from November 1884 through February 1885 (see AutoMT1 , 488 n. 86.12).
Source documents.
TS1 Typescript, leaves numbered 760–67 (altered in pencil to 769–76), made from Hobby’s notes and revised.TS2 Typescript, leaves numbered 915–21, made from the revised TS1.
Hobby incorporated Clemens’s TS1 revisions into TS2, which was not further revised. Clemens noted at the top of the first page of TS2, ‘Not usable yet’.