Plan of this autobiography—Satire on CaptainⒶtextual note Sellers—Mr. Clemens published no literature until forty yearsⒶtextual note ago—Two letters from Mr. Alden and one from Mr. Rees in regard to “Snodgrass” papers—Mr. Clemens’s comments on same.
I have not yet finished about the British Premier and his seventieth birthday, but I will let that go over until another dayⒺexplanatory note and talk about a matter of immediate interest—Ⓐtextual notean interest born of Saturday’s mail.
As I have several times remarked before, in the course of these dictations, it is the foundation principle of this autobiography that it shall drop a subject, whether it be finished or not, the moment a subject of warmer interest shall intrude itself. I think I have also said that the foundation plan or principle of this autobiography is that no subject shall ever be continued after one of a sharper and fresher interest for me has come clamoringⒶtextual note into my mind. In fact, this autobiography is substantially a conversation, albeit I do all the conversing myself. In a conversation of two hours’ duration,Ⓐtextual note subject after subject is touched upon andⒶtextual note discussed for a few minutes, butⒶtextual note is never completed;Ⓐtextual note itⒶtextual note is always dropped in the middle to make way, in turn, for a subject of newer interest which has been suggested by a remark dropped by the talker who for the moment has the floor. The other autobiographies patiently and dutifully follow a planned and undivergentⒶtextual note course through gardens and deserts and interesting cities and dreary solitudes, and when at lastⒶtextual note they reach their appointed goal they are pretty tired—and they have been frequently tired during the journey, too. But this is not that kind of autobiographyⒶtextual note. This one is only a pleasure excursion, and itⒶtextual note sidetracks itself anywhere that there is a circus,Ⓐtextual note or a fresh excitement of any kind, and seldom waits until the show is over, but packs up and goes on again as soon as a fresher one is advertised.
[begin page 230]In a chapter which I dictated five months ago,I made a little outline-sketch, in which I strung together certain facts of my life and named the dates of their occurrenceⒺexplanatory note. I stated that in 1849, in Hannibal, MissouriⒶtextual note, when I was a child of fourteen, my brother went away on a journey, and I edited one issue of his weekly newspaper for him without invitation, andⒶtextual note when he got back it took him several weeks to quiet down and pacify the people whom my writings had excitedⒺexplanatory note. That was fifty-seven years ago. I did not meddle with a pen again, so far as I can remember,Ⓐtextual note until ten years later—1859Ⓔexplanatory note. I was a cub pilot on the Mississippi River then, and one day I wrote a rude and crude satire which was leveled at Captain Isaiah Sellers, the oldest steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River,Ⓐtextual note and the most respected, esteemed, and revered. For many years he had occasionally written brief paragraphs concerning the river and the changes which it had undergoneⒶtextual note under his observationⒶtextual note during fifty years, and hadⒶtextual note signed these paragraphs “Mark Twain” and published them in the St. Louis and New Orleans journals. In my satire I made rude game of his reminiscences. It was a shabbyⒶtextual note poor performance, but I didn’t know it, and the pilots didn’t know it. The pilots thought it was brilliant. TheyⒶtextual note were jealous of Sellers,Ⓐtextual note because when the gray-headsⒶtextual note among them pleased their vanity by detailing in the hearing of the younger craftsmen marvels which they had seen in the long agoⒶtextual note on the river, Sellers was always likely to step in at the psychological moment and snuff them out with wonders of his own which made their smallⒶtextual note marvels look pale and sick. However, I have told all about this in “Old Times on the Mississippi.”
The pilots handed my extravagant satire to a river reporter, and it was published in the New Orleans True Delta. That poor old Captain Sellers was deeply wounded. He had never been held up to ridicule before; he was sensitive, and he never got over the hurt which I had wantonly and stupidly inflicted upon his dignity. I was proud of my performance for a while, and considered it quite wonderful, but I have changed my opinion of it long ago. Sellers never published another paragraph nor ever used his nom de guerreⒶtextual note againⒺexplanatory note.
Between 1859 and the summer of 1862 I left the pen strictly alone. I then became a newspaper reporter in Nevada, but I wrote no literature. I confined myself to writing up the inconsequential happenings of Virginia City for the Territorial Enterprise. I wrote no literature until 1866, when a little sketch of mine called “The Jumping Frog” was published in a perishing literary journal in New YorkⒺexplanatory note and killed it on the spot.
Now then, if I know my own history, I never wrote and never published a line of literature until forty years ago. If I know my own history, I never had any leaning toward literature, nor any desire to meddle with it, norⒶtextual note had everⒶtextual note flourished a literaryⒶtextual note pen save by accident—and then only twice—up to forty years ago.
Now then I have arrived at that subject whose fresh new interest has sidetracked my reminiscences of the British Premier and postponed their completion—Ⓐtextual notefor the present—Ⓐtextual notewhile I consider this new and delicious matter furnished by Saturday’s mail. First in order come the following letters, two by Mr. Alden, editor of Harper’s Monthly, Ⓔexplanatory note and one by a Mr. Thomas ReesⒺexplanatory note:
[begin page 231]Editorial Rooms, Harper’s Magazine
Harper & Brothers
Franklin Square, New York
September 6, 1906.
Dear Mark:
I received a few weeks ago from Mr. Thomas Rees some manuscripts offered for sale to us, purporting to be copies of “Snodgrass” papers contributed by you some fifty years ago to a newspaper published by his father. I returned them with a letter of which I send you a copy—also a copy of a letter I have just received from him. I think you should have cognizance of this correspondence.
The offer of the manuscripts was accompanied by an affidavit sworn to by Mr. Rees, Sr.Ⓔexplanatory note, attesting to your authorship.
Yours faithfully,
H. M. AldenⒶtextual note
COPY of Mr. Alden’s letter to Mr. Thomas Rees.
August 27, 1906.
Dear Mr. Rees:
We cannot publish the “Snodgrass” letters you send us, as they have no interest to our readers as the productions of “Snodgrass,” and we could not put them forth as the productions of “Mark Twain” because that would be untrue. Even the suggestion that “Snodgrass” died and was buried and arose again as “Mark Twain” would be a distinct injury to Mr. Clemens, after he had so utterly and deliberately discarded the earlier pen-name. It certainly would be a manifest impropriety. In any case I venture to suggest that Mr. Clemens should be consulted before any attempt is made to publish these things.
Very truly yours,
(Signed) H. M. Alden.
Mr. Thomas Rees,
Illinois State Register,
Springfield, Illinois.
COPY of Mr. ThomasⒶtextual note Rees’s letter, managerⒶtextual note of the
Illinois State Register.
Ⓐtextual note
Springfield, Ill., Sept. 4, 1906.
H. M. Alden,
C/o Harper Bros., Pubs.,
New York City.
Dear Sir:
I acknowledge hereby the receipt of the manuscripts of the Clemens “Snodgrass” articles. Please accept my thanks for their prompt return. I notice you advise at the close of your letter reading, “In any case I venture to suggest that Mr. Clemens should be consulted before any attempt is made to publish these things.” While as a matter of courtesy, in case I should conclude to publish the same, I might communicate with Mr. Clemens, I do not know that he has any rights in the premises, nor that there is anything in the ethics of the situation that call for a compliance with your advice.
[begin page 232]Mr. Clemens wrote these articles under contract with my father and my elder brother more than half a century ago. He was paid for the same and thereby parted entirely with any right that he might have had in them at that time. They were published in a daily newspaper without being copyrighted, and thereby became public property. The only rights that I have in the premises that are not possessed by the general public, is the fact that I know where to find the text and have an affidavit of their genuineness. If I should lay the matter of the publication of these articles before Mr. Clemens and he should request or forbid that I should publish the same, it would in no way protect him against the other eighty million people in the United States that might be disposed to take up the work. And no history of Mr. Clemens’s life will be complete without at least reference to these particular articles and his former pen name.
However, I am under lasting obligations for your kind advice.
Yours respectfully,
(Signed) Thomas Rees.
To me this is a most interesting thing, because it is such a naïveⒶtextual note exposure of certain traits in human nature—traits which are in everybody, no doubt, but which only aboutⒶtextual note one man in fifty millions is willing to lay bare to the public view. The rest of the fifty millions are restrained by pride from making the exposure. Did I write the rubbish with which Mr. Rees charges me? I suppose not. I have no reason to suppose that I wrote it, but I can’t say, andⒶtextual note I don’t say, that I didn’t write it. I can only say that since by Mr. Rees’s count I was only eighteen or nineteen years old at the time, it must have been a colossal event in my life, and one likely to be remembered by me for a century.Ⓐtextual note I am astonished that it has left no impression, nor any sign of an impression, upon my memory. If a Far-WesternⒶtextual note lad of eighteen or nineteen had, all by himself and in his own name, entered into a solemn contract Ⓐtextual note—a contract to do or suffer anything, little or big—he would have put aside all other concerns, temporal and eternal, and made a house-to-houseⒶtextual note visitation throughout the village and told everybody, even to the cats and dogs, about it, and it would have made him celebrated. Celebrity is what a boy or a youth longs for more than for any other thing. He would be a clown in a circus; he would be a pirate, he would sell himself to Satan,Ⓐtextual note in order to attract attention and be talked about and envied. True, itⒶtextual note is the same with every grown-up person;Ⓐtextual note I am not meaning to confine this trait to the boys. But there is a distinction between the boy and the grown person—the boys are all Reeses. That is to say, theyⒶtextual note lack caution; they lack wisdom; they are innocent; they are frank; and when they have an opportunity to expose traits which they ought to hide they don’t know enough to resist.
Up to the time that I was eighteen or nineteen years old, no Far-WesternⒶtextual note boy of that age had ever achieved the glory of making a contract Ⓐtextual note about something or other and signing it. If I did it I was the only one. I hope I did it, because I would like to know, even at seventy-one,Ⓐtextual note that I was not commonplace even when I was a child—that I was not only not commonplace, but was the only lad in the Far WestⒶtextual note that wasn’t. I cannot understand why it is that if I did it, it has left no impression upon my memory. Every boy and girl in the townⒶtextual note would have pointed me out, daily, and said with envy and admiration and malice:
“There he goes!Ⓐtextual note That’s the boy that made a contract Ⓐtextual note.”
[begin page 233]I would have hunted up stragglers, and couples,Ⓐtextual note and groups and gangsⒶtextual note of boys and girls, every day, in order to pass them by with studied modesty and unconsciousness, and hear them say:
“He’s the one! He made the contract Ⓐtextual note !”
Those happy experiences would have made a record upon my memory, I suppose. Indeed I almost know that they would have done it.
At a very much earlier age than that,Ⓐtextual note I was made the recipient of a considerably smaller distinction by Mrs. Horr, my school-teacher, and I have never forgotten it for a moment since, nor ceased to be vain of it.Ⓐtextual note I was only five years old, and had been under her ministrations only six months when she, inspired by something which she honestly took to be prophecy, exclaimed in the hearing of several persons that I would one day be “President of the United States, and would stand in the presence of kings unabashed.”Ⓐtextual note I carried that around personally, from house to house, and was surprised and hurt to find how few people there were, in that day, who had a proper reverence for prophecy,Ⓐtextual note and confidence in it. But no matter—the circumstance bedded itself in my memory for good and all. Therefore I cannot see how that much larger thing, that actual thing, that visible and palpable thing—a contract Ⓐtextual note, an imposing and majestic contract Ⓐtextual note—could have entered into my life at the maturer age of eighteen or nineteen and then flitted away forever and left no sign that it had ever been there.
When I examine the next detail I am surprised again. According to the affidavit of what is left, at this distant day, of the elder Mr. Rees, the contract required him to pay Ⓐtextual note me for my infant literature; also that I received the payment Ⓐtextual note. These things are unthinkable. In that day there was no man in the United States, sane or insane, who could have dreamed of such a thing as wanting an unknownⒶtextual note lad who had never written a line of literature in his life to furnish him some literature;Ⓐtextual note and not only furnish him some literature but ask him to take pay Ⓐtextual note for it! It is true that in that ancient day everybody wrote ostensibleⒶtextual note literature. There were no exceptions then, there are none now. Everybody wrote for the local paper,Ⓐtextual note and was glad to get in gratis—publication was sufficient pay. There were a few persons in America—fifteen perhaps, maybeⒶtextual note twenty-five—who were so widely known as writers that they could demand remunerationⒶtextual note of the periodicals for their output and get it, but there were no Clemenses in that clan; there were no juveniles in it; no unknown lads lost in the remotenesses of the wild and woolly West who could ask for pay for their untrained scribblings and get it.
In 1853, which is “more than fifty years ago,” my brother was hit a staggering blow by a new idea—an idea that had never been thought of in the West by any person before—Ⓐtextual notethe idea of hiring a literary celebrity to write an original story for his Hannibal newspaper for pay Ⓐtextual note ! He wrote East and felt of the literary market, but he met with only sorrows and discouragements. He was obliged to keep within the limit of his purse, and that limit was narrowly circumscribed. What he wanted was an original story which could be continued through three issues of his weekly paper and cover a fewⒶtextual note columns of solid bourgeoisⒺexplanatory note each time. He offered a sum to all the American literary celebrities of that day, in turn, but, in turn, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and all the others declined. [begin page 234] At last a celebrity of about the third degree took him up—Ⓐtextual notewith a condition. This was a Philadelphian, Homer C. Wilbur, a regular and acceptable contributor to Sartain’s Magazine Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note and the other first-class periodicals. He said he could not write an original story for the sum offered— which was five dollars Ⓐtextual note—but would translate one from the French for that sum. My brother took him up, and sent the money—I don’t remember now where he got it. The story came. We made an immense noise over it. We bragged in double-great-primerⒶtextual note capitals, readable at thirty yards without glasses, that we had bought it and paid Ⓐtextual note for it—proudlyⒶtextual note naming the sum—Ⓐtextual noteand we ran it through four numbers of the paper, increasing the subscription list by thirty-eightⒶtextual note copies, payable in turnips and cord-wood;Ⓐtextual note and it took all of three months for the excitement to quiet down.
Important as this memorable enterprise was, no contract Ⓐtextual note passed between the parties. The whole thing was done by letters—just mere ordinary letters—fourteen or fifteen I suppose;Ⓐtextual note and each person paid the other person’s postage. It was a fashion of the day. Postage was ten cents, and we didn’t prepay because the letter might never arrive and the money would be wasted. Nothing passed but just letters—mere ordinary letters. My brother trusted the great author, the great author trusted my brother. Signed and sealed contracts Ⓐtextual note for periodical literature have never been known in this country, nor heard of in any other, except in the one single instance which we have under consideration this morning. The elder Rees, professional affidaviter, had the monopoly of that novelty. He wouldn’t trust even an obscure child of nineteen in so stately a matter as a bucketful of literary slops, without a contract that would hold that lad and be good for fifty years.
According to the professional affidaviter,Ⓐtextual note I was paid Ⓐtextual note for those writings. If it was money, I wonder what the sum was. I know perfectly well, by the Wilbur case, and by the difference between Wilbur’s fame and my obscurity, it couldn’t have been over thirty cents for the bucketful, and I know also that it must have included the bucket. But if the pay was delivered in the universal currency of the FarⒶtextual note West, it couldn’t have been cord-wood, because cord-wood was never hauled in smaller lots than half-cords, and a half-cord would have been worth a dollar and a quarter, and would have covered more literature than even a reckless and improvident Rees would have been willing to enter into a solemn contract for. If it was eggs, I got six dozen; if it was watermelonsⒶtextual note I got three; if it was bar-soap I got five bars;Ⓐtextual note if it was tallow-candles I got thirty; if it was soda-water I got six glasses; if it was ice-cream I got three saucers—and the colic. I have no recollection of ever getting those riches. If I got any of them I know I got them in instalments, and wide apart;Ⓐtextual note for in that day any so noble an irruptionⒶtextual note of wealth as three plates of cream, all paid down in one single instalment,Ⓐtextual note would have been an event so electrifying and so exaltingⒶtextual note that it would stay caked in my memoryⒶtextual note three centuries.Ⓐtextual note
The common human trait which the Reeses have laid bare for inspection—and which the rest of the nations of the earth carefully conceal for shame, and pretend that they do not possess it—is the trait which urges a man to sacrifice all his pride, all his delicacy, all his decency, when his eye falls upon an unprotected dollar—aⒶtextual note spectacle which sometimesⒶtextual note takes the manhood out of him and leaves behind it nothing but the animal. Affidavits are nothing to this kind of a person; they come cheap; he would make [begin page 235] a hundred a day for thirty cents apiece. This kind of person is gratefullyⒶtextual note ready to dig up a crime or a foolishness that has been condoned and forgottenⒶtextual note by the merciful for fifty years, if he can get a dollar and a half out of it. It is fatal for hisⒶtextual note kindⒶtextual note to have the luck to trace home to an esteemed and respected white-headed woman a forgottenⒶtextual note disgrace whereby she tarnished her good name in her girlhood,Ⓐtextual note for he will remorselesslyⒶtextual note expose itⒶtextual note if there is half a handful of soiled dollars in it for him. It is out of the breed of Reeses that the world gets its Burkes and HaresⒺexplanatory note. But theⒶtextual note Burkes and Hares are to be pitied, not reviled. They only obey the law of their nature. They did not make their nature; they are not responsible; and no humane person will permit himself to say harshⒶtextual note things about them. It would be impossible for me to say abusive things about these modern Burkes and Hares of the MiddleⒶtextual note West. They mustⒶtextual note have bread to eat, andⒶtextual note their ways of acquiring it are limited. As is natural, they acquire it in those ways which give them the most pleasure, the most satisfaction, the most contentment. They dig up dead reputations and sell the rotten product for food, and eat the food. Their ancestors, Burke and Hare, dug up the dead in the cemeteries andⒶtextual note sold the corpses for bread and ate the bread;Ⓐtextual note which is another way of saying they fed upon the dead. The Reeses are only Burkes and Hares deprived of their natural trade by the obstructive modern legal conditions under which they exist.
I may have written those papers, but it is not at all likely that I did. In any case, I have no recollection of it, and must let it stand at that. But one thing I willⒶtextual note quite confidently maintain, in spite of all the affidavits of all the Burkes and Hares, and that is that when the affidaviter says that there was a contract Ⓐtextual note, and that I was paid Ⓐtextual note for the work, those two statements are plain straightforward falsehoodsⒺexplanatory note; and what is more, and worse, they are poorly devised, unplausible, and inartistic. As works of art, evenⒶtextual note a Rees ought to be ashamed of them, I think.
not yet finished about the British Premier and his seventieth birthday, but I will let that go over until another day] Clemens again mentions Campbell-Bannerman in the Autobiographical Dictation of 1 October 1907, but does not return to the subject of his birthday.
In a chapter which I dictated five months ago . . . dates of their occurrence] See the Autobiographical Dictation of 29 March 1906 ( AutoMT1 455–62).
I edited one issue . . . several weeks to quiet down and pacify the people whom my writings had excited] When in September 1852 Orion was obliged to be out of town, he asked his brother to edit one issue of the Hannibal Journal, a weekly. Clemens, aged sixteen, took on the 16 September issue and part of the following week’s as well. In three of the five sketches he wrote he signed himself “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab” or “W.E.A.B.”: “Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse” (about a humiliating hoax perpetrated by a local merchant); “Editorial Agility” (aimed at Joseph P. Ament, editor of the rival Hannibal Missouri Courier, under whom he had served an apprenticeship from May 1848 to January 1851); and “Blabbing Government Secrets!” (satirizing the debate in the Missouri legislature over the allocation of land grants to the railroads). But the article that caused a real commotion was “ ‘Local’ Resolves to Commit Suicide,” which he signed “A Dog-be-Deviled-Citizen.” It ridiculed (without naming him) the local editor, J. T. Hinton, of the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger, who it was rumored had tried and failed to drown himself because he had been jilted. Clemens illustrated his brief article with a woodcut he carved himself, showing the local editor holding a lantern and walking into the stream, intent on “feeding his carcass to the fishes of Bear Creek. . . . Fearing, however, that he may get out of his depth, he sounds the stream with his walking-stick.” Hinton protested such rough treatment in his own local column, but Clemens followed up on 23 September with “Pictur’ Department,” also signed “A Dog-be-Deviled-Citizen,” containing two more woodcuts and further ridicule. Orion tried to defuse the situation in the same issue, saying the work was “perpetrated in a spirit of fun, and without a serious thought, no attention was expected to be paid to them, beyond a smile at the local editor’s expense.” But Hinton the same day responded at some length, dismissing the articles as “the feeble eminations of a puppy’s brain.” In 1871 Clemens published a sketch describing, and no doubt embroidering, these events, “My First Literary Venture,” in the Galaxy ( ET&S1, 71–75, 78; 4 Mar 1870 to Walden, L4, 86 n. 1; SLC 1852a, 1852b, 1852c, 1852d, 1852e, 1871).
I did not meddle with a pen again, so far as I can remember, until ten years later—1859] Texts of more than seventy newspaper letters and sketches by Clemens written between 1849 and 1859 have been recovered. Most were published in his brother’s various small-town newspapers: the Hannibal Western Union, the Hannibal Journal, and the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal. But a handful were published in journals like the Boston Carpet-Bag, the Philadelphia American Courier, the Hannibal Missouri Courier, the St. Louis Missouri Republican, and the New Orleans Crescent, while still other writings, like “Jul’us Caesar” (SLC 1855–56) and various poems for his friends’ albums, remained unpublished.
The pilots handed my extravagant satire . . . nor ever used his nom de guerre again] Clemens’s satire was an untitled sketch made up of an “editor’s” introduction and a letter giving river information signed “Sergeant Fathom.” It was published in the daily “River Intelligence” column of the New Orleans Crescent on 17 May 1859, less than six weeks after he got his pilot’s license (SLC 1859). Two days after it appeared the editor wrote that “the letter which appeared in the river column of the Crescent of Tuesday morning was handed to us by Mr. B. W. S. Bowen, pilot of the steamer A. T. Lacey” ( ET&S1, 128 n. 10). At the time Barton S. Bowen was copilot with Clemens on the Lacey (“Steamboat Calendar: Clemens’s Piloting Assignments, 1857–1861,” L1, 389). Clemens “told all about this” in chapter 50 of Life on the Mississippi. No evidence has yet been found that Isaiah Sellers (1803?–64) ever used “Mark Twain” to sign his contributions to newspapers (24 June 1874 to Unidentified, L6, 166–67 n. 1; Kruse 1992, 2–25).
I wrote no literature until 1866, when . . . “The Jumping Frog” was published in a perishing literary journal in New York] Clemens is distinguishing between journalism and literature. But much of his writing for the Enterprise must be considered something other than reportage—“Ye Sentimental Law Student,” written in 1863, for instance—and even before he was hired as a local reporter in 1862 he had volunteered the so-called “Josh” letters (no longer extant), which included at least one memorable burlesque. In addition, he wrote dozens of newspaper letters containing humorous sketches, as well as several literary articles for the Californian and the Golden Era, before “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the New York Saturday Press for 18 November 1865 (SLC 1863b, 1865e; ET&S1, 13–14, 16–17; see AD, 21 May 1906, especially the note at 47.3–5).
Mr. Alden, editor of Harper’s Monthly] Called the “true genius of the magazine,” Henry Mills Alden (1836–1919), first hired by Harpers in 1862, was made editor of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1869, a position he held for fifty years, although he retired from active management some years before his death. He insisted from the beginning of his tenure that he be “first reader” of submitted manuscripts, and although he worked closely with writers and wrote numerous editorials as well as “The Editor’s Study,” his contribution was little known outside of the magazine, in part because the editorship was mostly associated in the public’s mind with William Dean Howells and George William Curtis, authors, at different times, of “The Editor’s Easy Chair.” On Alden’s seventieth birthday, Clemens said of his “dear and ancient friend”: “You bear a kind heart in your breast, and the sweet and winning spirit that charms away all hostilities and animosities, and makes of your enemy your friend and keeps him so” (“Henry Mills Alden’s 70th Birthday,” Harper’s Weekly 50 [15 Dec 1906]: 1813–14; Howells 1919; New York Times: “Henry Mills Alden” and “Henry Mills Alden of Harper’s, Dies,” 8 Oct 1919, 18, 19).
Mr. Thomas Rees] Thomas Rees (1850–1933) was the publisher of the Springfield (Ill.) State Register and the son of William S. Rees (d. 1859), publisher of the Keokuk Post (“Death of William S. Rees, the Street Preacher,” New York Times, 12 Oct 1859, 8).
an affidavit sworn to by Mr. Rees, Sr.] The affidavit may have been in the hand of Thomas Rees’s elder brother, George, who was assistant editor of the Post until their father’s death in 1859, when he became editor ( Keokuk City Directory 1859; MTB, 1:112; Rees 1908, 399–401).
a few columns of solid bourgeois] That is, text that is typeset in a font of medium size (9 point) with no additional line spacing.
a Philadelphian, Homer C. Wilbur, a regular and acceptable contributor to Sartain’s Magazine] Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art was published in Philadelphia between 1849 and 1852 by John Sartain (1808–97), a “master” of mezzotint engraving and a colleague and friend of Edgar Allan Poe’s. Among its prominent contributors were Poe, Longfellow, Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor, Harriet Martineau, William Gilmore Simms, Richard H. Stoddard, and George W. Bethune (Nichols 2004, 1, 12, 15). No contributions to the magazine by Homer C. Wilbur have been found.
Burkes and Hares] William Burke and William Hare were convicted of entrapping and murdering seventeen victims in Edinburgh in 1827–28 and selling their corpses for dissection to Dr. Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer, who taught students of the Edinburgh Medical College.
when the affidaviter says that there was a contract, and that I was paid for the work, those two statements are plain straightforward falsehoods] Clemens wrote three Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass travel letters and published them in the Keokuk Post in 1856 and 1857: “Correspondence,” “Snodgrass’ Ride on the Railroad,” and “Snodgrass, in a Adventure” (SLC 1856a, 1856b, 1857). He may have been correct that there was no written contract, but clearly there had been an agreement, if only verbal, to publish the letters. Thomas Rees, who knew of only two of the three letters, wrote his version of events in 1908, asserting that Clemens had indeed been paid:
The firm of Rees & Son arranged with the young man to write some articles for publication in the Keokuk Post, which they mutually agreed would be worth five dollars each. . . . After writing the first, he concluded that he ought to have seven dollars and a half apiece for his articles, and the publishers met him at that price, so he wrote the second article, which was published, after which he thought his talent was worth ten dollars per article. As the publishers had reached the limit, having already invested twelve dollars and a half, which I am certain was the first money ever paid Mr. Clemens for writing, and which represented the profits of about two years’ publication of that daily paper, the negotiations were broken off and the series of articles ended at that point. . . .
At the present time I have, locked up in the safe in my office, typewritten copies of these two articles, taken from the files of my father’s paper. Each one has an affidavit attached showing the genuineness of the publication and the circumstances under which it was written by Mr. Clemens. . . .
I thought that I would insert these two articles in this letter, but they are such crude attempts at humor and are of such inferior composition as compared with Mr. Clemens’ more recent writings, that, notwithstanding the affidavits, some persons might imagine that I had written them myself, and after all these long years even Mr. Clemens himself would, perhaps, doubt that he was the author of them. (Rees 1908, 400–401)
Source documents.
Alden to SLC Typed letter, Henry Mills Alden to SLC, 6 September 1906: ‘Editorial Rooms . . . Alden’ (231.1–14).Alden to Rees Typed letter (copy), Henry Mills Alden to Thomas Rees, 27 August 1906, enclosed with Alden to SLC: ‘COPY . . . Illinois.’ (231.15–30).
TS1 ribbon Typescript, leaves numbered 1267–83, made from Hobby’s notes, Alden to SLC, and Alden to Rees and revised.
TS1 carbon Typescript carbon, leaves numbered 1267–83, revised.
Clemens revised TS1 ribbon, and Lyon transferred his revisions to TS1 carbon, which he further revised. The text of the letters by Alden is based directly on the originals; TS1 is derivative, and the minor variants that Hobby inadvertently introduced have not been reported. TS1 is the unique source of the letter from Rees to Alden. On the first page of TS1 carbon Clemens wrote ‘not usable now’.