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Autobiographical Dictation, 8 December 1908 ❉ Textual Commentary

Source documents.

Williams to SLC      Manuscript letter, Henry Williams to SLC, 29 November 1908: ‘connecticut state prison . . . Williams.’ (281.5–282.41).
TS      Typescript, seven unnumbered leaves, made from Howden’s notes and Williams’s letter.

Howden’s TS, which Clemens did not revise, is the only authoritative text for the dictated portion of this text. For Williams’s letter we follow the original, retaining his spelling errors but omitting some typographical features of Williams’s prison stationery letterhead. All the printed elements have been rendered in the present text with small capital letters, to distinguish them from words inscribed by hand. Howden’s accidental variations from copy are not reported.

[begin page 281]
Dictated at Stormfield, December 8textual note, 1908

Speaking of burglars, here is a curious coincidence. I will lead up to it by inserting here a letter which I received about a week ago from the Connecticut Penitentiary. It is from the worst and toughest of our two burglars—Williamsexplanatory note—who has just begun a nine-year term there for his midnight adventures in my house and with the sheriff on the train.

CONNECTICUT STATE PRISON.


Wethersfield, Conn. Sunday Nov. 29. 1908
Name, Henry Williams,
Register No., 2176 Grade, 2d.

To Mr. Dr. S. L. Clemens, L.L.D.
No.   ,   Street.
Town, Redding Conn.
Fairfield County.  State,  (Personal Matter)


Write only on Ruled Lines.

The prisoner must confine himself to family or business matters of his own.textual note No news of other prisoners or reference to criminal matters must be made, and no allusions to prison matters or prison officials will be mailed or received.

No letters mailed to General Delivery in large cities.


To The Person Receiving This Letter:—Do not visit friends on Sunday, Fourth of July, Fast Day, Thanksgiving Day or Christmas. Prisoners in the First Grade may receive one visit every two weeks: in the Second Grade, once a month. No visits permitted to prisoners while in the Third Grade or when tickets have been taken. Friends may send prisoners, by mail, suspenders, handkerchiefs, comb, hair brush, tooth brush, slippers—but nothing else. Friends may bring a small quantity of fruit when visiting a prisoner. First grade prisoners may write once a week. Second grade prisoners may write once a month; third grade prisoners cannot write at all. Certain weekly newspapers and magazines will be admitted, but no dailies. All mail inspected. Address prisoner’s mail with full name and registered number. Friends may visit prisoners on Friday, as above noted. No express packages received.

All letters to and from United States
must be written in English


[begin page 282]

Most Honorable Sir:

In order to have a clear conscience and peaceful mind, which is so essential to human life, and as I firmly believe in your “genuine gentleness, honest symphaty, brave humanity and sweet kindliness”explanatory note I take the boldness and ask of you the following respectful and humble request.

Since you know the weakness and frailty, the many struggles and temptations, and miseries of human life, better than most men, I humbly come to you and beg that you will forgive me and trust, that you will not be harsh with a repentant and regretful sinner and bear no malice or ill-will towards me. We are all human and therefore apt to make mistakes and fall into temptations and times come into our lives “when necessity knows no law” (to borrow one of your own expressionsexplanatory note) and we perceive, when it is too late, what a terrible mistake we have made. But it is only:

“Old age and experience hand in hand, lead us to death and make us understand;
That after a search so painful and so long, our whole life had been in the wrong.”explanatory note

Since all is over, I cannot help to make mention of “a certain class of people” who did all in their power to prejudice and bias me against the long-eared, thoughtless and slow-minded public at large, and put me down as a low, hard-hearted, vicious and dangerous evil-doer, in order to gain notoriety and satisfy their pityful political ambition.— But, “Father forgive them, they know not what they did.”explanatory noteBeing my first offence against the lawexplanatory note, I have asked for a fair and square trial; but it was denied. I have pleated for mercy and clemency but received none. “Oh what a fatal time when society casts off and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a thinking being!”explanatory note It is not for myself and my hard estate, that I am pleading; but for those I love and left behind and who are dear and true to me and whom I have so shamefully disgraced. Perhaps like me they struggle with, each feeling of regret; but it is my place to repent and ask you to forgive. It is in your power, most venerable sir, to relieve the painful and oppressed heart of a repentent sinner and have compassion with him. For: “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety nine just persons, that need no repentance.” (Luke. 15–7.) My sole consolation lies in the verb “forgive.”—

Your “Tramp Abroad” gives me much pleasure and—pain, for it recalls many scenes of my boyhood and one who saw “Alt Heidelberg” knows “warum ich traure in des Lebens Blüthezeit.”explanatory note

In the hope, that my appeal will not be rejected, not for my sake but for those I love, I once more implore your compassion an clemency and with a thankful and regretful heart I conclude these few and simple lines, giving you the repeated assurance of my gratitude and sincerety. I remain, most venerable sir, very respectfully yours,

Henry Williams.

When I began to read this letter, I also began to be touched.textual note I could feel my heart softening. But the process was suddenly interrupted. There was something about the tone of the letter that seemed vaguely, dimly, remotely familiar: it was as if I had read such a letter ages ago, or had dreamed it; also I had the feeling that there was something unpleasant about that ancient experience. Without definitely knowing why, I began to chill towards the writer of this present letter.

[begin page 283] Presently the feeling dawned upon me that I had come in contact with this kind of a letter before, at some time or other in the past. My mental machinery went on automatically digging deeper and deeper into my memory, and at last it uncovered the source of my present fancies and imaginings. I now remembered that I had once read such a letter; I also remembered that I had written about it in some book of mine. I did not know which book it was, but I could recall the very look of the room in which I wrote the book. Not the whole book, but the last two chapters of it, one of which chapters contained that reminiscence. I occupied that room only a fortnight but I remembered that it was during that fortnight that I wrote the chapter which contained that matter. That gave me the date—1882. This enabled me to identify the book—“Lifetextual note on the Mississippi”textual note—since I was busy with no other book during that year. I took down the volume and instituted a search; in chapter 52 I found what I was after. In that chapter there is a letter from an ostensible criminal who has acquired religion, to a brother rascal who is serving a term in a penitentiary for burglary. The letter is the work of apparently a phenomenallytextual note ignorant person, also an elaborately sweet and simple-heartedtextual note and permanently and perfectly converted person. The Reverend Joseph H. Twichelltextual note brought that letter to me in that old day and tried to read it to me, but its moving pathos broke him down and he could not finish it. I tried to read it and it broke me down. Copies of it were distributed around among the clergy, and they read it to their congregations, sobbing, and the congregations wept all through the ordeal.

By and bytextual note it was discovered that the letter was a humbug; it was written by the jailed convict himself, to himself; and that its ostentatious illiteracy was a pretensetextual note, for the rascal was an educated rascal. With this light upon the matter I read the letter again, this time without breaking down, and was amazed that so glaring a fraud, so transparent a fraud could ever have deceived anybody possessed of any vestige of insight or intelligence. I have re-readtextual note that old letter once more, ten minutes ago; and again I have marveledtextual note that it deceived Twichelltextual note and those other clergymen and me. Its bad spelling is preposterously, extravagantly, impossibly bad; bad but not ingeniously bad; sillily, stupidly, inartistically bad; as a piece of sham manufacture it is grotesquely poor and lubberly; even the housecattextual note ought to have perceived at once that it was the product of a humbug.

The coincidence referred to above is this: the name used by the writer of that ancient letter was Williams. The name used by the writer of the letter to me from the penitentiary a week ago is Williams; the ancient Williams was a burglar, this present Williams is a burglar; the ancient Williams was sent up for nine years and the same thing happened to this present Williams two or three weeks ago: the tone of sweet repentance and pious sentimentality observable in the ancient letter pervades this present one. I wonder if penitentiary people always get to feeling like that. Two years ago Robert Fulton Cuttingexplanatory note told me that there are men who make their living writing pathetic letters for prisoned convicts and that sometimes these writers do not find it necessary to write fresh letters for new clients but are content to use a really good and moving letter over and over again merely changing names and places to fit new circumstances and new clients. It may be that one of these experts helped to write the letter quoted above—I feel reasonably sure [begin page 284] that he furnished the pathos, the sentimentality, the repentance,textual note the piety, the humility and the Biblical and other quotations, for I cannot conceive of our Williams having any of this kind of merchandise in stock. He is a low and coarse and hard-hearted creature in all his fibres and sentiment and piety and repentance and humility are distinctly out of his line. The last thing he said upon leaving in charge of the officers for the penitentiarytextual note was, that when he got out of prison he would hunt down his fellow convict and kill himexplanatory note.

Textual Notes Dictated at Stormfield, December 8, 1908
  December 8 ●  Dec. 8th (TS) 
  own.  ●  own (Williams to SLC)  own. (TS) 
  touched. ●  touched typed off page  (TS) 
  “Life ●  Life (TS) 
  Mississippi” ●  Mississippi (TS) 
  phenomenally ●  phenominally (TS) 
  simple-hearted ●  simple hearted (TS) 
  Twichell ●  Twitchell (TS) 
  by ●  bye (TS) 
  pretense ●  pretence (TS) 
  re-read ●  reread (TS) 
  marveled ●  marvelled (TS) 
  Twichell ●  Twitchell (TS) 
  housecat ●  house-cat (TS) 
  repentance, ●  repentance (TS) 
  penitentiary ●  Penitentiary (TS) 
Explanatory Notes Dictated at Stormfield, December 8, 1908
 

the worst and toughest of our two burglars—Williams] For information on the 18 September 1908 burglary and the two perpetrators, Henry Williams and Charles Hoffman, see the Autobiographical Dictations of 6 October and 12 November 1908.

 

“genuine gentleness, honest symphaty, brave humanity and sweet kindliness”] This phrase (without the misspelled “sympathy”) is from “Biographical Criticism,” an essay by Brander Matthews that was included in the first volume, The Innocents Abroad, of numerous collected editions of Mark Twain’s works, issued by the American Publishing Company and Harper and Brothers beginning in 1899 (Matthews 1899; for information on the various editions see Schmidt 2010).

 

necessity knows no law . . . to borrow one of your own expressions] Clemens took credit for this ancient proverb in chapter 51 of The Innocents Abroad (SLC 1869a, 542).

 

“Old age and experience . . . in the wrong.”] A close paraphrase of lines from “A Satire Against Mankind” (1679) by John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester.

 

“Father forgive them, they know not what they did.”] A close paraphrase of Jesus’s words, as reported in Luke 23:34.

 

Being my first offence against the law] Williams had already served a five-year prison term (see AD, 12 Nov 1908, note at 276.10).

 

“Oh what a fatal time . . . thinking being!”] From Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862), as translated in Masterpieces of Ancient and Modern Literature (Peck et al. 1899, 12:6331).

 

“warum ich traure in des Lebens Blüthezeit.”] From Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Der Jüngling am Bache” (“The Youth at the Brook”), variously translated, but meaning “why I mourn in the flowering of life.”

 

Robert Fulton Cutting] Cutting (1852–1934), the great-nephew of steamboat inventor Robert Fulton, was a New York financier and businessman, philanthropist, and officer of several educational and social welfare agencies, which earned him the epithet “first citizen of New York.” Cutting and Clemens were among the organizers, in January 1906, of the Robert Fulton Memorial Association, which intended to build a Fulton monument in New York City. Clemens was the association’s first vice-president and a member of its executive committee (see AutoMT1 , 426–28, 630 n. 426.13–15; New York Times: “For a Monument to Fulton,” 18 Jan 1906, 8; “R. Fulton Cutting, Civic Leader, Dies,” 22 Sept 1934, 15).

 

he would hunt down his fellow convict and kill him] Williams held his accomplice, Charles Hoffman, responsible for rousing the Stormfield household during the burglary when he “stumbled and fell heavily over” a brass bowl that Williams had placed “noiselessly” on the floor. And Williams was no doubt infuriated because Hoffman’s momentary escape from the pursuing “posse” left him to take the brunt (by his telling) of a brutal capture that left him bloodied and unconscious (Williams 1922, 172, 175–77).