University of Virginia Library

MARK TWAIN AND BRET HARTE: A MYSTERIOUS EARLY PIRACY IN CONTEXT

by Richard Bucci

I

On 14 March 1866 an anthology of humorous writings called Wit and Humor; or, Odds and Ends was advertised in the New York Daily Tribune. Readers were encouraged to send the publisher, J. R. Sutherland and Co. of Philadelphia, $1.50 for a cloth-bound book or $1.00 for a paperback; in return they would receive a "thick volume" of selections, many by featured contributors with nationally recognized names. From that date the volume was the subject of an extensive advertising campaign which did not end until the third week of May.

Advertisements for Wit and Humor, in four textually distinct versions, appeared in at least nine prominent American publications. The Tribune advertisement ran in each issue through 20 March. On 17 March the same text began appearing in the New York Saturday Press (see figure 1), the leading paper of America’s Bohemian avant-garde, where it was printed, with evident care, ultimately in nine consecutive issues. Starting on 25 March this Tribune-Saturday Press version was in turn published in two issues running of the New York Sunday Mercury, one of the widest-circulating periodicals in the nation. A second version, with wording that described an apparently later conception of the volume, likewise began on 14 March, in the Washington, D.C., Daily National Republican. This form was in turn printed in the Round Table (see figure 2), New York’s self-consciously stuffy literary weekly, on 24 and 31 March. The text is also distinguished by the inclusion of "Mrs. Partington" as a contributor and the omission of "Pomeroy Brick." On 15 March a third version, reflecting the change to Mrs. Partington and today conspicuous for the error "Mark Train," made the first of six appearances in the New York Times. This text, misprint and all, would reappear later in the month, beginning on 26 March, in six issues of the Boston Evening Transcript. A fourth version, including both "Mrs. Partington" and "Pomeroy Brick" but omitting "Josh Billings," appeared in every issue of the New York Evening Express from 23 through 31 March and in every issue of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican from 27 March through 2 April.1

The anthology was likely a piracy: of the contributors named in the advertisements, most had national reputations, and all but two had already published their works in authorized editions. The two exceptions were "'Bret,' of The Californian" and Mark Twain. Depending on how the measurement is taken, Wit and Humor was their first book.

"Bret" was of course Francis Bret Harte (1836–1902). He had already edited a book, Outcroppings: Being Selections of California Verse, which was published by Anton Roman in San Francisco in December 1865 (copyrighted 1866). Harte selected many of the poems in this volume, but included none of his own; he wrote a brief preface, but did not sign it. The first authorized book of his own writings would be called Condensed Novels and Other Papers. When assembled, the manuscript for this volume would consist mainly of pieces written for the Californian, a San Francisco literary weekly founded in 1864 by New York transplant and Outcroppings contributor Charles Henry Webb (1834 – 1905). Harte and Webb alternately edited the Californian, and in seeking a publisher for his collection, Harte may have consulted with his more worldly colleague. Eventually secured (with the help of the New York agent of Anton Roman) was George W. Carleton, Webb's friend and publisher and the publisher of a number of other notable humorists, including Artemus Ward. When Harte's book appeared in October 1867, it drew favorable notices, but the author soon grew unhappy in his relationship with Carleton. In a letter to James R. Osgood, he revealed that his arrangement with Carleton was informal and expressed a desire to have Osgood's company publish a revised Condensed Novels (this came to pass in 1871). Harte also revealed that Carleton printed 1,800 copies of the original edition and intended to print no more; bibliographical investigation by Nathan Van Patten discovered that the edition comprised separate issues, in 1867 and 1870, likely constituted respectively of 1,500 and 300 copies.

FIGURE 1. One of the versions of the advertisement in its early state: example from the New York Saturday Press, 31 March 1866, p. 8 (original size approximately 4.5 × 7.0 cm).

FIGURE 2. The later state of the advertisement: example from the Round Table 3 (24 March 1866): 189 (original size approximately 5.5 × 7.5 cm).

Harte brought out a second book two or three months after Condensed Novels appeared: The Lost Galleon and Other Tales was a collection of some of his poems, finely printed by Towne and Bacon in San Francisco at the end of 1867. This volume also drew notice in the East, though it was unfavorably compared to Condensed Novels and Harte was warned of adopting a poetic demeanor imitative of Holmes.2

As for Mark Twain, he would beat Harte to market by five months with a book of his own, despite its having been refused in prospect by Carleton in early 1867.3 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches appeared at the end of April 1867, through the enterprising efforts of the ubiquitous Webb. He had returned to New York one year earlier, and sold his interest in the Californian within a few months (having briefly considered transferring it to New York).4 Mark Twain followed him to New York in January 1867, where Webb arranged for him to see Carleton about publishing a collection of his sketches from the

Californian and the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Webb then came to his aid when Carleton sent the author away: he published the book himself, or jointly with the American News Company. A Webb penname, "John Paul," appeared on the title page as editor, along with his real name as publisher; he also copyrighted the book in his own name (an action that would eventually contribute to the disruption of his relationship with the author).

Apart from Wit and Humor, two other unauthorized collections published before 1867 contained Mark Twain writings. The first was Fun for Three Months (New York: T. W. Strong, 1864 or 1865), an anthology partly composed of sheets of the humor journal Yankee Notions. In the issue of Yankee Notions for April 1864, a Mark Twain item appeared below the editorial title, "The Play of Ingomar in California." Jacob Blanck described Fun for Three Months as a "twilight book," a classification he applied to publications "made up of the sheets of the original periodical publication, or produced from the plates thereof... ."5 The questioned status of this volume has contributed to the tendency to regard the second unauthorized anthology, Beadle's Dime Book of Fun No. 3, as the first book in which Mark Twain's work appeared. Itself little more than a pamphlet at 80 pages, the Beadle volume was the third in a series, and it also had the appearance of a periodical. Blanck did not regard it as a periodical or a twilight book however, and it contained three items by Mark Twain, all copied from periodical printings.6 The presumed issue date of the third Dime Book of Fun was April 19, 1866, however— more than one month later than the appearance of the first advertisements for Wit and Humor. The later versions of these advertisements imply that the volume had already been published; the advertisements also mark the first time that the names of Bret Harte and Mark Twain were used to attract Eastern readers. Unlike the Beadle volume, Wit and Humor was promoted in literary papers and advertised as an anthology of the writings of particular authors.

No further sign of Wit and Humor has been discovered after the advertisement in the Saturday Press of 12 May; none of the copies that the publisher advertised as ready for shipment has been located. Of that publisher, J. R. Sutherland, little can be said with confidence. Beyond the advertised mailing address, a Philadel-

phia cxsonnection has not been established: the name is not listed as a person or business in the Philadelphia directories, and Sutherland advertisements have not been found in Philadelphia newspapers.7 The instruction in Sutherland's advertisements, "Mailed to any address on receipt of price," is characteristic of the advertisements of publishers of cheap editions, especially the large Philadelphia establishment T. B. Peterson and Brothers. This firm frequently advertised in Eastern newspapers of this period; in the New York Tribune of 16 March 1866, for example, a T. B. Peterson advertisement appeared almost adjacent to the advertisement for Wit and Humor, offering to ship the novels of Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth "postage paid on receipt of retail price." However, most of the books by American authors on Peterson's long list were, like the novels by Mrs. Southworth, commissioned by that publisher.8 While there will be cause further to discuss T. B. Peterson and Brothers in another context, this company was unlikely to have been connected with Wit and Humor, despite the Sutherland company's advertised Philadelphia address and similar approach to marketing and sales.

J. R. Sutherland was almost certainly a Canadian firm; the evidence for this deduction is cumulative and sufficiently convincing. J. R. Sutherland and Company (and A. R. and J. R. Sutherland) published gazetteers and business directories of Canada West counties in the early and mid-1860s. For example, J. R. or James Sutherland was compiler and publisher of the 1862 volume for Oxford County and the 1865–1866 volume for the combined counties of Northumberland and Durham; A. R. and J. R. Sutherland published the volumes for Brant County that same year, and for Kent County the previous year (1864–65). J. R.'s location was shown as Woodstock, a town in Oxford County, while the A. R. and J. R. Sutherland company was located in Ingersoll, a town ten miles further to the west in the same county. A few years earlier, possibly as far back as 1856, James Sutherland was living in the United States. There he compiled and published directories and other works at least until 1860, possibly for Michigan and Wisconsin. Beginning in 1858 he published directories for Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri, mostly with a partner named Henry N. McEvoy. Perhaps war's outbreak brought him and McEvoy to Canada, where the partnership eventually resumed: in 1870 the two men were collaborating on Canadian county directories. J. R. Sutherland was also listed in 1870 as publishing a monthly journal in Hamilton, Ontario. According to a contemporary Canadian practice, Sutherland may have been a distributor rather than the actual producer of Wit

and Humor. In attested instances of this practice a Canadian printing house would perform the presswork for a particular unauthorized edition of a work by an American author, presumably using an original American printing as printer's copy. The resulting copies would be identical except for advertising matter and different title page imprints belonging to particular Canadian news dealers. A tantalizing clue that potentially connects Wit and Humor to this practice concerns Sutherland's partner, McEvoy. In 1869, McEvoy was the editor and compiler for the C. E. Anderson company, the gazetteer and directory branch of the Daily Telegraph Printing House in Toronto. As will be discussed in the following section, this printing company, owned by John Ross Robertson and James B. Cook, produced unauthorized editions of Mark Twain's first books the following year (1870), according to the method just described.9

However Wit and Humor may have been produced, it is likely to have been the first book in which the sketches of Bret Harte and Mark Twain were featured. The presence of their names in advertisements in the East is also without known precedent. The advertisements are important evidence of the early national esteem of California's two leading authors, and invite questions relating to the progress of their careers. As these questions are pursued, particular revelations about Bret Harte and Mark Twain disclose connections to a larger literary landscape, in its commercial and artistic dimensions, during the transformative 1860s. The deceptively narrow testimony provided by the advertisements acts ultimately as a prism through which the strands of an inadequately remembered world of publishing and authorship appear: democratic and nonconforming, centered in New York and not Boston, looking westward for new inspiration and audiences.

II

J. R. Sutherland's Philadelphia-based distribution strategy would have been an early and daring variation on a theme that some Toronto and Montréal publishers were about to take up with a vengeance. Within a few years of the appearance of Wit and Humor advertisements, American publishers and authors would be facing the rampant unauthorized Canadian publication of their domestically

copyrighted works. A brief exploration of this development, which involves not only Canadian publishers but London counterparts as well, can help place Wit and Humor in an historical context.

In an article appearing in the New York Sun in 1878 and reprinted in the Publishers' Weekly, George W. Carleton gave an account of the situation in the extremity of its development, which was characterized by the very low prices of mail-order Canadian books.

Mark Twain's authorized books were destined for routine copying by Toronto and Montréal publishers, who would apply ingenious and speedy methods of production and sale. The effect the appearance of these copies had on Mark Twain's temper is easy to imagine—his reaction was akin to the exasperation expressed by his one-time nemesis Carleton. From the title-page imprints of some of the surreptitious copies, an appearance is created that several Canadian editions were made of each of Mark Twain's works. Gordon Roper, pioneering scholar of Canadian literature, examined the apparently different copies and discovered that some were distinguished only by their title page imprints (and sometimes advertising pages). The diverse imprints indicated not the volume's publishers, but Toronto and Montréal news vendors, booksellers, and stationers. Further evidence led Roper to the conclusion that apparently various "editions" of some titles were the work of a single publisher—though not always the same company. These companies were usually controlled, Roper further disclosed, by one or more of a handful of publishers, whom he identified as Alexander Belford, George M. Rose, John Ross Robertson, and James B. Cook.11 Given the known profile of J. R. Sutherland, stationer and compiler of gazetteers, Wit and Humor could have followed the pattern that Roper discovered, with the distributor's

name appearing in the advertisements and presumably on the title page, partly or wholly shielding from view the name of the publisher.

Wit and Humor appeared at the dawn of an era in which American literary works were freely appropriated by Canadian publishers. American authors and publishers would struggle with the problem until 1891, when the United States finally enacted an international copyright law. At that time British and Canadian authors could at last be offered protections in America analogous to those which their American counterparts sought in the British dominions. Until then, however, the legal status of an author's work in the English-speaking world would remain insecure, and mercantile avenues for unauthorized publications remained open. By mid-century, American publishers had already made a tradition of the free appropriation of the literature of Britain; as America's literature matured, British publishers in their turn began to take notice. Some American authors were able to secure contracts with a British publisher, as did Irving, Cooper, and Melville with John Murray (father and son), but these agreements were supported not by the law but by the good word of the publisher and the respect he commanded from competitors. Neither Webb nor Mark Twain made such an arrangement for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and this book proved especially vulnerable. The authorized edition appeared a scant eight weeks after the death in Southampton of Charles Farrar Browne, known as Artemus Ward (b. 1834), the young comedian mourned by a British public whose enthusiasm for American vernacular speech and humor he had done much to excite. The commercial possibilities of a book by Artemus's friend Mark Twain were not lost on George Routledge, who made three editions of Jumping Frog between 1867 and 1872, nor on Routledge's shiftier rival John Camden Hotten, who added an edition of his own in 1870. Tens of thousands of copies of the four pirated editions were sold in the British isles in a few years' time—well over ten times the sales of the American edition.12

Though he received nothing from the Routledge and Hotten editions, Mark Twain acknowledged some years later that they contributed to his future success. At a time when he was scarcely known in the States, that is, they made him a popular author in England. He later recalled that the success of the Jumping Frog piracies led to a competitive "scramble"—presumably by the two rival houses—to secure his approval for authorized British editions of future books.13 Artemus

Ward, helped by his English lecture manager, Edward P. Hingston, made an agreement for authorized publication with Hotten in 1864 and seems to have been well served by him. Bret Harte's publisher, Carleton, had a ready-made arrangement with Sampson Low and Son in London, and so authorized publication of Harte's Condensed Novels was coordinated on both sides of the Atlantic (a move that did little to prevent unauthorized appropriation of this work and others by Harte). Later, as the American editions of Harte's works were handled by Fields, Osgood, then Osgood alone, and finally Houghton Mifflin, arrangements were made with Routledge and then Hotten's successor, Chatto and Windus, among others. Mark Twain too would prefer first Routledge and then Chatto and Windus after Hotten died in 1873. In an 1889 interview Andrew Chatto made it clear why the Americans were ill-disposed to Hotten but not to his successor.

American authors (and, intermittently, some publishers) long favored their nation's participation in an international agreement; decade after decade they advocated for this cause, but Washington did not alter its policy. The Round Table was particularly active in the cause. A thoughtful contribution to the discussion appeared in the issue of 16 December 1865; it was signed "C. L.," initials probably belonging to Charles Godfrey Leland, an author whose experience with piracy would be bracing. Leland was the creator of the popular "Hans Breitmann" ballads beginning in 1856. In 1868 he began to gather them in collections; his authorized American publisher was T. B. Peterson and Brothers and he consigned European rights to his friend Nicolas Trübner. The works were briskly pirated nonetheless in Canada, Australia, and also in England (by Hotten). While his own losses to unauthorized publication were still a few years in the future, Leland was able nonetheless to call attention to an essential fact about international copyright. Influence in Washington on the copyright question rested with "less than half a dozen publishers, who have acquired wealth by reprinting foreign books"; the influence of this group (which at times included the Harpers) was undiminished by the protests of America's greatest authors, including Washington Irving, who, C. L. reveals, had recently visited the capital and

there witnessed "the intrigues of certain northern publishers against the rights of the very men they pretend to assist. ..."15

The freedom from copyright restrictions asserted by American publishers in reprinting British books was one cause of the insecurity of authors' rights; another was Britain's policy of outlawing colonial publishing enterprises in its North American provinces. In mid-nineteenth-century America, the wants of the reading public were mainly satisfied with cheap unauthorized editions of British works. The popularity in America of the novels of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens was fostered and sustained to enormous proportions by these editions, a problem that Dickens publicly complained of early in his career, on his first visit to the New World. Because most American companies paid foreign authors little or nothing, their editions could be offered at prices that British publishers could not match. Anglophone Canadian readers were caught in a legal and economic vise, and starved for affordable books, especially in the years before and immediately after confederation (1867). Their booksellers were permitted to offer only the expensive English editions, which were made more expensive by high shipping costs. The importation of American reprints was prohibited and for a time Imperial agents vigilantly inspected bookseller-bound packages, destroying all contraband copies they found. Imperial law reserved the publishing business for the home country and forced on the colonies the status of a captive market. An astute observer reported that the scarcity of books in Canada inspired extraordinary remedial projects, including John Murray's 1840s series, the Home and Colonial Library.16 He added, however, that this set "contained none of the new and fresh books which the colonists wanted."

The observer was Samuel Edward Dawson (1833–1916), a Montréal publisher favored by American authors and well informed on the subject of copyright in the English-speaking world. The occasion for his observations was an 1882 lecture, published as Copyright in Books. It relates the history of copyright in England, America, and Canada as it operated through the nineteenth century, in the complex interactions of authors, publishers, and governments as they pursued their often competing interests. Dawson discusses the practical implications of the laws of the three governments during the decades of the 1860s and 1870s, and explains why American authors eventually found it almost impossible to prevent unauthorized publication of their works in Canada. By the Imperial Copyright Act of 1842, Imperial copyright was granted only to works that were published first within the British Isles—as opposed to British dominions, including the provinces that became Canada. A question lingered for some time as to whether authors needed also to be resident in Great Britain while their books were in press; a series of legal decisions, culminating in the final appeal in the case

of Sampson Low against Routledge (Routledge v. Low, 1868), endorsed the view that authors could secure Imperial copyright by residing "anywhere in the British dominions" while their works were in press in London.17 That is, a visit only to the nearest colony was needed: American authors could stay in Canada while their books were being published in London. As one result of this decision, Dawson entertained a stream of visits to his Montréal home by prominent authors from the United States seeking to fulfill the stipulation; they included Oliver Wendell Holmes and eventually Mark Twain. Holmes made his visit in 1867 for his book The Guardian Angel, and the copyright he thereupon secured was defended successfully in London in 1868.18

Wit and Humor was a portentous piracy: in appropriating the works of Mark Twain and Bret Harte even before the two authors had secured a national readership in their home country, the surreptitious volume set a precedent for the prodigious appropriations of the coming years. As Mark Twain's and Bret Harte's stars rose in the States, dozens of unauthorized editions of their works were produced in Canada. The copying began in earnest in 1870, with a ten-cent edition of Jumping Frog bearing the imprint of A. S. Irving, a Toronto news agent. It was a reprint of the Routledge edition of 1870; Gordon Roper has shown that the presswork for this volume was performed by the Daily Telegraph Printing House of Toronto, a company owned by John Ross Robertson and James B. Cook. The same year The Innocents Abroad also appeared with Irving's title-page imprint—as well as with the imprints of at least three other companies, including Dawson Brothers; Roper revealed that these were separate issues, all deriving from the same typesetting performed by the same printer responsible for the Irving Jumping Frog. As has already been mentioned, the Daily Telegraph Printing House is indirectly connected to J. R. Sutherland: Sutherland's partner, Henry N. McEvoy, is listed as working for this Robertson and Cook-owned company in 1869. The connection suggests (for now, no more than suggests) a possibility that Wit and Humor too was the work of this printing house.

Like Mark Twain, Bret Harte encountered vigorous appropriation of his works in North America and England. Condensed Novels was brazenly pirated in New York in 1867; its next unauthorized publication was in 1871, a prodigious year for Harte piracies. Hotten led the way with four Harte volumes: Sensation Novels, Condensed; That Heathen Chinee and Other Poems; East and West (a copy of Osgood's authorized East and West Poems); and Lothaw ... by Mr. Benjamins," a parody of Disraeli's novel Lothair that Harte made for the authorized Osgood edition of Condensed Novels. In Canada that year, the Canadian News and Publishing Company issued two volumes, Condensed Novels and Poems, while A. S. Irving brought out The Luck of Roaring Camp. The following year came more of the same,

with Ward, Lock and Tyler in London contesting Hotten for the role as the most prolific source of unauthorized Harte editions.19

Mark Twain visited Montréal in 1881, determined to put a stop to the busy Canadian presses, which had without his agreement reproduced all his books and even compiled unique anthologies of his writings. He made an especially vigorous effort to secure both Imperial and Canadian copyright for a new book, The Prince and the Pauper. Dawson, the publisher of the authorized Canadian edition of this work, explained that Mark Twain achieved his first object but failed in achieving the second, because of a change in Canadian law since the time when Holmes won his case. The Canadian Act of 1875 was carefully designed to support Canadian publishing and authorship and granted local copyright only to authors domiciled (as opposed to "residing") in Canada. Dawson's authorized Canadian edition did preclude other Canadian publishers from printing the work within Canada, but not from employing a printer across the border and importing the result (subject to payment of a duty of 12–1/2 percent). This gap in the intersecting laws was soon exploited. As with earlier works such as Tom Sawyer and A Tramp Abroad, and Harte's Gabriel Conway, a pirated edition of The Prince and the Pauper was issued in Toronto within weeks of the appearance of the first American edition. On the title page was the imprint of the Rose-Belford Publishing Company, a particularly active combination of two of the publishers identified by Gordon Roper; not to be denied, a third publisher, John Ross Robertson, soon followed with a fugitive edition of his own.20 Certain of Robertson's publications from the early 1880s well illustrate Mark Twain's failure to secure Canadian copyright: the publisher brought out many editions of the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain during this time, some of which he included in "Robertson's Cheap Series," at prices of thirty cents or less. These editions and others like them remained legally incontestable. In 1866 the Sutherland company (or Robertson and Cook's printing house) could not have been constrained from printing Wit and Humor in Canada, but sales in the United States might have been stopped by an injured copyright holder. No record of any action pertaining to the book has been discovered, however.

III

Given that earlier and later versions of the advertisement for Wit and Humor appeared on the same date, 14 March 1866, they suggest that the volume was already printed by then. Like other early unauthorized printings it would have helped Mark Twain's reputation if not his pocketbook. The very early use of his name to attract sales is noteworthy in itself. Of the authors named as contributors only Mark Twain would become a creator of enduring literature; the works of the others, with the exception of some of Bret Harte's stories, have mostly been forgotten. Yet in the spring of 1866 Mark Twain's claim to a place in the advertisement would seem to have been the least explicable. The limit of his celebrity is indicated by the persistent misprint, "Mark Train," appearing in all the Wit and Humor advertisements in the New York Times and Boston Evening Transcript (the name "McArone" was also misspelled in this least carefully composed version). His brief burlesques and sketches written for the Californian had not yet "appeared ‘between covers,'" as an alert critic observed in the Round Table in September 1865.21 Neither had they been much reprinted in the East—the critic must have seen the Californian itself. The Golden Era, San Francisco's first literary journal and the widest-circulating newspaper in the West, was also available in New York; its editor Joseph Lawrence (1824–78) was, like Webb, a New York transplant with connections in the East. Mark Twain wrote little for the Golden Era, however, and only in November 1865 would that paper begin to reprint his writings in quantity (when Lawrence replayed for San Francisco readers substantial excerpts from Mark Twain's correspondence about their city to the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise). Webb almost certainly supplied Californihi subscriptions to a number of New York papers, including the Round Table. The editors of these papers and many of their contributors were known to him; the Round Table was even adopted by Webb as the model for the design and layout of the Californian (he eschewed the Round Table's haughty editorial tone).

When Wit and Humor was advertised, six months after the Round Table review cited above, Mark Twain's name was better known, for reasons explained by a correspondent of the San Francisco Alta California: "Mark Twain's story in the Saturday Press of November 18, called ‘Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog,' has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near."22 The history of the tale that gave Mark Twain an Eastern reputation has been masterfully reconstructed by Robert Hirst and Edgar Branch.23 A few details remain elusive. When he completed the story in San Francisco in mid- October 1865, Mark Twain sent the manuscript to New York, either to Artemus Ward or directly to Artemus's publisher, George Carleton. The story begins,

"Mr. A. Ward, | Dear Sir," and was meant as a long-delayed answer to a request by Artemus for a contribution to his second book, in which the traveling funny man would recount his Western adventures.

Mark Twain's receipt of this request had been long delayed, since it likely arrived in San Francisco just after he had quietly removed from the city for the winter, to the mining country of Tuolumne and Calaveras counties. He returned to town at the end of February 1865 with little money but potential literary treasure, to be converted from experiences of tale-telling in the mining camps. He seems to have written to Artemus that he had a theme in mind for a contribution, but that it was probably too late to work it up; he later recalled that Artemus again urged him to write something.24 A further delay, however, did keep him from contributing; its causes were both literary and psychological. As he struggled to find the right mining country tale to retell, and the right way to retell it, he simultaneously experienced an acute crisis of consciousness, partly brought on by poverty, in which he thought of taking his own life. He was not yet thirty. At the apogee of his mental turbulence, perhaps between 16 and 18 October 1865, he wrote what for a long time was regarded as the funniest story in all American literature. Carleton received the manuscript in New York just as Artemus Ward: His Travels, was advertised for sale. Unable to include it in a book that was already printed and bound, Carleton passed it on to Henry Clapp, Jr., editor of the New York Saturday Press. The choice was wise and logical.

Clapp (181g-75), the man who was ultimately instrumental in revealing Mark Twain to Eastern readers, was an unusual figure on the American cultural scene. A Nantucketer by birth and a descendant of the Coffins, he was a campaigner in the New England reform movement in the 1840s. As editor of a temperance and anti-slavery paper in Lynn, Massachusetts, he spent 60 days in jail after criticizing the legal system as prejudiced against the poor. When he was released, his friends sent him to Europe, where he stayed a year, attending the World's Temperance Convention in London with Lyman Beecher. He returned to Europe in 1848, and passed the next six years in England, Belgium, and France. In Paris he lived at the Hotel de Corneille at the center of the Bohemian life contemporaneously described by Henri Murger. Amidst revolutionary events, he deepened his radical views, especially studying the works of Charles Fourier. He also abandoned the cause (and practice) of temperance. On his return he settled in New York where he gathered around him like-thinking men and women; they advocated socialism, communal living, and free love (that is, the separation of human intimacy from ecclesiastical or state control). With Albert Brisbane he made reliable English translations of some of Fourier's works, and helped Horace Greeley and others better understand the philosophy that was intermittently espoused in the New York Tribune. Clapp remained a busy editor and columnist the while. He edited and wrote for the Leader, and in 1858 founded his own journal, a weekly review of the arts called the Saturday Press. In form and tone he followed models, especially the feuilleton, encountered during his residence in

Paris. His paper failed on the eve of war's outbreak, at which point he devoted more attention to Vanity Fair, New York's illustrated humor magazine. Founded in 1860, it was modeled closely on Punch. Clapp provided the artistic inspiration, and even chose its name, doubtless a reflection of his following, possibly in situ, Thackeray's serial story, issued in parts by Bradbury and Evans, publishers of Punch, in 1847 and 1848. For both the Saturday Press and Vanity Fair, the men and women of Clapp's circle supplied most of the prose, poems, and pictures. These New York writers and artists came also to be called the Bohemians: they were serious about literature and art, but recoiled from the bourgeois respectability that they believed had overgrown and strangled the Boston cultural model.25 They were known to gather of evenings at Charles Pfaff's restaurant and saloon at 647 Broadway, just above Bleecker St. The location was then convenient to the theaters, where many worked, a few as players (such as Adah Isaacs Menken), many as critics.26

Clapp revived his Saturday Press at war's end, in a different format, offering sixteen tabloid pages, rather than the original four pages of broadsheet. There seemed to be a bit more advertising at first, but the paper eventually shrank to eight pages, and despite Clapp's struggles to keep it alive, it failed in June of 1866. In its brief and interrupted run, however, the Saturday Press came to be regarded as the only literary periodical on the national scene to rival the Atlantic for artistic quality—if not for what was later called "brownstone respectability." It struck a more realistic tone, and was demonstratively frank about the human condition, especially the universal needs for humor and love. These were the few attributes

which to Clapp's mind comprised the soul of the Bohemian attitude as he found it in the Latin Quarter, and he did much to encourage them among his associates on Broadway. Clapp's friend, the sometimes friendless Walt Whitman, was a contributor to the Saturday Press; so was the youthful William Dean Howells. Others included Fitz-James O'Brien, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, George Arnold, William Winter, and especially Ada Clare (Jane McElhenney, 1836—1874), with whom Clapp formed a close bond. They were the authors of the best writing in the pages of New York's journals and newspapers, and some were or would become Carleton authors. In an editorial paragraph in the issue of 18 November, Clapp introduced Saturday Press readers not only to Mark Twain but also to Josh Billings, another comedian of modest reputation soon to become nationally known. Clapp seemed to foresee Mark Twain's approaching preeminence, remarking enigmatically that he "will shortly become a regular contributor to our columns," and "his articles have been so extensively copied as to make him nearly as well known as Artemus Ward."27 These statements seem uncannily to refer to the future, rather than the present. At the time they were uttered, Mark Twain's articles had not yet been much copied in the East, and, as far as is known, he had not yet arranged to become a contributor to the Saturday Press.

Clapp may have been prompted to take Mark Twain's story by an intermediate relation, such as Artemus Ward or Charles Henry Webb. Artemus's intimacy with Henry Clapp dated from the fall of 1860, when he was lured from the Cleveland Plain Dealer to write and edit for Vanity Fair. In 1863, the year that Vanity Fair expired, Artemus and Webb separately went West, beginning a wartime trend by which many of the Bohemians met Bret Harte and Mark Twain for the first time. Mark Twain became fast friends with Artemus Ward when the famous comedian arrived in Nevada in December 1863. Artemus was so taken with the personality and writings of the local reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise that he proposed that they return to New York together for lecturing and further travel. Mark Twain, then unknown to a public beyond the Nevada Territory, declined this extraordinary invitation. At Artemus's urging he did agree to contribute to the New York Sunday Mercury, a widely circulating cultural paper where Artemus's writings had been appearing since the failure of Vanity Fair.28 The ex-editor of the Mercury, Robert Henry Newell (1836–1901), was one of several of Artemus's friends connected with that paper. Newell was author of the Mercury's "Orpheus C. Kerr Papers"; he arrived in Virginia City not long after Artemus departed. He was then in the tow of Mrs. Newell, the actress Adah Isaacs Menken, who would soon become his ex-wife. Like Artemus,

the Newells were both veterans of Clapp's table at Pfaff's. Mark Twain had already reviewed earlier performances of "The Menken" in San Francisco; when the couple came to Nevada he may have discussed Artemus's proposal with Newell. Perhaps unprepared psychologically to enter on a national literary stage, Mark Twain did not press this opportunity, and managed to send only two pieces to the Mercury.29

After these pieces appeared in the winter of 1864, the New York press saw little of Mark Twain until after he had moved to San Francisco. Then in August 1865 a prose prologue and poem written in dialect called "He Done His Level Best" was reprinted in the Leader. This was the paper Clapp edited before recommencing the Saturday Press (where the poem alone was again reprinted, in September). The text was taken from "Answers to Correspondents," a column Mark Twain conducted in the Californian in June and July, and so Charles Henry Webb might just as easily have acted as liaison between the author and Henry Clapp. Webb had been the first of the Bohemians to arrive in the West, and the first to befriend Mark Twain. He thought even more highly of Mark Twain's talents than did Artemus, as evidenced by a comparison he made in early November. Responding as "John Paul" in the Sacramento Union to the Round Table's recent recognition of Mark Twain (quoted above), Webb wrote: "To my thinking Shakspeare had no more idea that he was writing for posterity than Mark Twain has at the present time, and it sometimes amuses me to think how future Mark Twain scholars will puzzle over that gentleman's present hieroglyphics and occasionally eccentric expressions."30

Almost certainly Webb did not regard the comparison as hyperbolic. Part of what prompted it was a Shakespearean dimension in Mark Twain's art, today associated with his maturity, that was already present in his early writing. A realistic representation of regional speech stood out in both "He Done His Level Best" and the jumping frog story (which Webb probably first heard, as did Bret Harte, in dramatic narration by the author). As presented, prologue and poem were brief snippets from Mark Twain's ongoing experimentation with the "Pike county" dialects of his youth, which he heard again in the emigrant voices of

the mining camps and restaurants of Nevada and California.31 The purported poet (named only in the original piece, not the reprinted extracts) was "Simon Wheeler," a persona based on Ben Coon, an Angels Camp bartender and former Illinois steamboat pilot who was likely the narrator of the jumping frog story as Mark Twain first heard it. The authentic sound of the re-creation, pitched in these items for an absent-minded and humorless elder storyteller, proved irresistibly attractive to Eastern readers. Especially impressed were the literary-minded, not least because the vernacular narrative did not rely on the overused device of bad spelling. Mark Twain also experimented at this time with the youthful pitch of this dialect. Elaborated, this version would bring its author immortality; it is heard for the first time, as far as is known, in the voice of a boy in "Fitz Smythe's Horse" (published in the Territorial Enterprise in January 1866). Like the jumping frog story and the poem, this piece also attracted Eastern attention, when it was included in Beadle's Dime Book of Fun.

The advocacy of Artemus Ward and Charles Henry Webb for the little known comedian bordered on the passionate, and Mark Twain might thereby have been confident of his chances of attaining a measure of success in the East. Until the jumping frog sketch was printed and had met with national approval, however, the author struggled with debt and depression. The Wit and Humor advertisements are evidence that his Eastern repute, which helped him eventually regain his composure, did not ebb, though he left San Francisco at this time, for Hawaii. The number and selection of items contained in Wit and Humor have not been discovered. For Mark Twain, it is hard to imagine that the collection did not include the jumping frog tale; other likely selections of his work would have been writings that appeared early enough in the Eastern press, whether in the form of reprints from the Western press or original contributions. They were few in number and were concentrated in three papers associated with Bohemian New York. "The Story of the Bad Little Boy" was reprinted in the Leader (20 February 1866), and the Saturday Press reprinted "The Ballad Infliction" (9 December 1865), "The Pioneer Ball" (23 December), and "'Mark Twain' on the Launch of the Steamer ‘Capital'" (30 December). All the pieces were probably copied from the Californian: the earliest and latest of the four were written for that paper and the middle

two were reprinted there, from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Besides ‘Jumping Frog," Clapp printed one original sketch of Mark Twain's, "The Mysterious Bottle of Whiskey" (3 March). Finally, Mark Twain contributed three original sketches to the New York Weekly Review: "The Great Earthquake in San Francisco" (25 November 1865), "The Christmas Fireside" (3 February 1866), and "An Open Letter to the American People" (17 February). Almost nothing is known about his arrangement with the Weekly Review, though probably germane is that in 1865 Henry Clapp, who may have quarreled with the editor of the Leader, temporarily transferred his pen to the Weekly Review, where he joined his friend, co-editor Charles B. Seymour, who was also dramatic critic for the New York Times and would write for the revived Saturday Press.32 The influence wielded by the small Bohemian weeklies—an influence that more than any other elevated the names of Bret Harte and Mark Twain to national prominence—was partly due to the fact that their columns were mined for content by other periodicals of much larger circulation. "The Mysterious Bottle of Whiskey," for example, was taken from the Saturday Press for the May 1866 issue of Ballou's Monthly Magazine, the self-proclaimed "cheapest magazine in the world." Ballou's was brought out in Boston by the publisher of the weekly Flag of Our Union; the reprinting put Mark Twain's name before 75,000 readers.33

The prominence given to Bret Harte in the Wit and Humor advertisements attests to his leading position among Western writers and especially to the popularity of his "Condensed Novels." "[T]he instinct of parody" Harte recalled in a later year, "has always possessed me."34 Certainly in his early literary life he found the form irresistible, and adopted it often whether in prose or in poetry. His unfortunately misunderstood satire of 1870, "Plain Language from Truthful James" (notorious as the "Heathen Chinee"), was a kind of parody, in that according to Harte he followed carefully meter he found in Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (1865). Harte came out as a parodist in 1861, at the age of twenty-four, writing "Mysteries of the Two Metropolises" as "J. Keyser" for the Golden Era. He followed this treatment of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities with efforts after works by Hugo and Michelet, which appeared in 1862. Transferring his pen to the newly founded Californian in 1864, he conducted a series of poetic parodies called "San Francisco, by the Poets," treating of Spenser, Gray, Poe, Scott, and Tennyson.35 In 1865 he resumed his burlesques of prose writers, dubbing them "Condensed Novels"; thirteen appeared in the Californian in 1865. They were

not written in a "Western" style, but rather followed the stylistic cues of their English, French, and American subjects. Absent too were the Western vernacular themes on which the enduring artistic value of Harte's Overland Monthly stories has depended, though the author did include some inside references to rural and metropolitan California. The "Condensed Novels" drew readers from a bookish public, first in San Francisco, but soon in the East as well. The pieces reappeared in the Leader and the Saturday Press, suggesting again the possibility of Webb's intervention, though Harte himself, as intermittent editor of the Californian, may also have been in contact with Henry Clapp.

The Leader reprinted five "Condensed Novels": "Myself" (originally "Me"), after Bulwer-Lytton's My Novel (12 August 1865); "Terence Deuville," after Charles Lever's Charles O'Malley, the Irish Dragoon (19 August); "The Ninety-nine Guardsmen," after the Dumas novels translated as The Three Guardsmen and The Forty-five Guardsmen (2 September); "Selina Sedilia," after the works of Maria Elizabeth Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood (Ellen Price), including, by the former, The Trail of the Serpent (16 September); and "Guy Heavystone," after Guy Livingstone by George Alfred Lawrence (25 November). The Saturday Press also reprinted five items: "Muck-a-muck," after Cooper's "Leatherstocking" novels (28 October 1865); "Fantine," after the discretely published part of Hugo's Les Misérables (9 December); "Mr. Midshipman Breezy," after Frederick Marryat's Mr Midshipman Easy (30 December); "Miss Mix," after Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (20 January 1866); and "The Haunted Man," following the Dickens story of that name and "A Christmas Carol" (10 February).36 Ten of a total of fifteen parodies thus found an Eastern audience. Harte knew of his rising Eastern popularity as early as 8 January 1866, when he wrote to Outcroppings publisher Anton Roman, "I have some idea of publishing a little book of my California sketches and burlesques including the 'Condensed Novels,' which have been widely copied and seem to be popular in the East. Let me know what you think of it. Of course, I should depend entirely upon its sale in the East."37

In "The Haunted Man," a late "Condensed Novel," the protagonist is tormented by novelistic formulæ and an itinerary of scenes from the works of Dickens and his imitators and rivals. There too are sketched scenes from Hawthorne, Scott, and Thackeray, authors otherwise untreated in the "Condensed Novels"

(though Thackeray is present in them in another sense). Harte did choose a few authors of like stature as objects for his parodies—Dickens, Brontë, Hugo, Collins—but in the main treated of little-remembered sentimental and gothic productions. While many of these were popular in the 1860s, some of the references may have been obscure even to Harte's contemporaries.38 Motive for a few selections may have come from the columns of the Golden Era, which had begun serialized publication of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Trail of the Serpent in December 1863. The merits and faults of her literature and that of her competitors, including Mrs. Henry Wood, were also ably assessed there, by a recent product of Bohemia's westward exodus. Ada Clare, the "Queen of Bohemia," landed in San Francisco in March 1864 and took her place among the Golden Era writers, in all likelihood by advance arrangement with Joseph Lawrence. She and her son Aubrey had barely settled into their quarters in the Russ House before the first installment of "Ada Clare" appeared. With this column came more than a whiff of Pfaffian iconoclasm to upstart San Francisco, though thereby masked were neither the author's magnetic good nature nor her vulnerability to the prejudice she encountered as a husbandless mother. Her commentaries on literature, drama, and society were unusually learned and professional for San Francisco then and would not have escaped Harte's attention. Of particular relevance to his "Condensed Novels" would have been the informed assessments of popular literature, including passages in which Braddon and Wood were discussed as rivals. She and Harte never became friends exactly, but Ada Clare may have helped firm his grasp of popular literature; after returning to New York she expressed admiration for the "Condensed Novels" in her column in the Weekly Review.39

From a distance of nearly 150 years Harte's choices for his "Condensed Novels" seem logical, and judiciously representative of the popular literature of that time. While this appearance is not at all false, the sources from which the choices were drawn can be brought into closer focus: all the novels and romances Harte chose to burlesque were available to him in the collections of the Mercantile Library of San Francisco; all but a few were published by T. B. Peterson and Brothers of Philadelphia. In his writings from the 1860s, Harte attested both to

his familiarity with Peterson's publications and to his regular use of the Mercantile Library, which then had the city's largest publicly available collection of books and journals. In "Among the Books" he reported on the library for the Californian (without using its name); he noted how keenly the clientele awaited the arrival of new books and journals. Sentimental novels were "bespoken some weeks ahead" by "young ladies with pale blue eyes," who were wont lightly to underline such passages as "Mary did not answer but pressed her hand convulsively to her heart. ..." He also gave an idea of his own reading habits when he complained of hogs who sat (literally) on the latest issues of Punch and the Saturday Review while perusing the latest issue of the Illustrated London News. In "Railway Reading," also written for the Californian, he referred pointedly to formulaic moralizing in the work of Peterson author Timothy Shay Arthur and in the stories published in Peterson's Magazine.40

The Mercantile Library's collection no longer exists, but its contents in the 1860s can be partly reconstructed from surviving records. A few months before the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the Mercantile Library had formally merged with the Mechanics' Institute. The collections were still housed separately, and totaled two hundred thousand volumes. Apart from the library of Adolph Sutro, which was not yet available for public use, the merged libraries would have been the largest in San Francisco and in California. The Sutro library was partly destroyed in the calamity (another large private library, that of H. H. Bancroft, escaped the destruction). The fire found both the Mechanics' Institute Library at 31 Post Street and the Mercantile Library, then in temporary storage at 228 Sutter Street.41 Both collections were completely consumed. Fortunately printed catalogues of the Mercantile Library have survived, including those compiled in 1861 and 1874.42 The 1861 catalogue lists some fourteen thousand volumes. One entry, Punch's Prize Novelists by Thackeray, suggests Harte's inspiration for the "Condensed Novels," as they very much followed the pattern and style of these satires. They were made for Punch in 1847 and some were collected in an edition by D. Appleton (New York, 1853), likely the one owned by the Mercantile Library. Thackeray's subjects included Bulwer-Lytton,

Charles Lever, and Cooper, authors at which Harte did not himself resist taking further aim.43

The 1861 Mercantile Library catalogue does not offer publication information, but the section "Novels and Romances" contains scores of titles that were available through T. B. Peterson and many that were uniquely available from that publisher. The company was founded in 1845 by Theophilus B. Peterson (1823–90). His older brother was Charles J. Peterson, the well-known editor of the Saturday Evening Post, Graham's Magazine, and eventually Peterson's Magazine, which Theophilus would publish. Theophilus later brought his two younger brothers into the firm and for forty-five years pursued energetically a business model indicated in the following lines from his obituary: "His first book was published in 1846, being a reprint of [Charlotte Campbell Bury's] popular 'sensational' novel, [The Disinherited and the Ensnared]. The price of the London edition was $7.50; the price of Peterson's edition was twenty-five cents."44 In the 1850s and 1860s, Peterson offered entire sets of works by English and French authors, who received no compensation (with the notable exception of Dickens); hundreds of commissioned American titles were also offered. Prices were extremely low and libraries and book dealers were the firm's target customers.45 By 1865 the

Mercantile Library is known to have added thousands of volumes to its collections: a report in that year described "the largest institution of its kind" in San Francisco as containing "about thirty thousand volumes"; its membership and collections were growing to an extent that a new building was contemplated.46 The "new accession" to which the report referred may have been furnished in part by responses to one of Peterson's many advertisements:

Most of the works Harte chose were already listed in the 1861 Mercantile Library catalogue; the exceptions were works published after that year, and all of these appear in the 1874 library catalogue, though they would have been acquired years earlier. The 1874 library catalogue still omitted publishers' names, but did include places and dates of publication. By this date many of the objects of Harte's parodies were represented in the library by copies from newer printings. Some of the older copies had been retained, however, and in the library catalogue the place of publication for many of these is identified as "Phil.," which under the circumstances may be taken as an indication of a Peterson edition. Thus for Lever's Charles O'Malley, the Irish Dragoon (p. 490); Bulwer-Lytton's My Novel (pp. 118–119); most of the works of Timothy Shay Arthur, the target author of Harte's '"John Jenkins" (p. 43); Dumas' The Three Guardsmen and The Forty-five Guardsmen, objects of "The Ninety-nine Guardsmen" (pp. 265–266); most of the works of Mrs. Henry Wood, half the basis of Harte's "Selina Sedilia" (p. 913); and Dickens's Christmas Stories, including "The Haunted Man" and "A Christmas Carol" (p. 222). Peterson did not publish Jules Michelet's La Femme or Hugo's Fantine (part one of Les Misérables): both were published in 1862 in English translation by Carleton (the former with Carleton's erstwhile partner Rudd). That

summer they were treated by Harte in the Golden Era (the text of "Fantine" that reappeared in the Saturday Press was taken from the 1865 reprint in the Californian). Harte could have seen the originals of these works in the Mercantile Library as well: La Femme appears in the 1861 catalogue; Carleton's Les Misérables: Fantine appears in the 1874 catalogue (like the original French edition, it was not available until 1862). The library also owned a copy of Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, the memoir of Confederate spy Maria Isabella Boyd, as introduced by George A. Sala: this work was the object of Harte's "Mary McGillup."

Harte may have found his own way to the Mercantile Library, or he may have been encouraged by a mentor, Thomas Starr King (1824–64), to whom he would dedicate Condensed Novels and Other Papers. San Francisco's wartime Unitarian minister and civic leader took an active interest in Harte's literary and political fortunes. Starr King had once been at the center of Mercantile Library activities in Boston and he began arranging to speak at the San Francisco branch even before departing for his Pacific pulpit. Harte heard the series of lectures he eventually gave there, calling them "too good for this latitude."48 In his turn, Harte may have encouraged Mark Twain to use the library. In 1865 and 1866, Mark Twain made his patronage of the Mercantile Library known more than once in his San Francisco writings, and when the ejaculation, "Bilk!" appears in "Me," Harte's rendering of Bulwer-Lytton's My Novel, Californian readers would have recognized the reference. Mark Twain's lexicographic excursus on this word, for which he relied on "authorities in the Mercantile Library," appeared in the Californian on 8 July 1865, and Harte's "Me" appeared in the following issue.

An exceptional "Condensed Novel," apparently unconnected to the Mercantile Library or a T. B. Peterson edition, was "NN ... a Novel in the French Paragraphic Style." This essay seems to have been inspired by the literary Francophilia Harte recognized in the work of his Bohemian colleagues, Charles Henry Webb above all. A few weeks after "NN" appeared, Harte received news of the death of "McArone," the Bohemian poet and humorist George Arnold. In a tribute to Arnold penned for the Californian, Harte remarked that Arnold "early adopted from the French, that pithy, curt, epigrammatic, paragraphic style, which Chanes Henry Webb, his only successful rival, has introduced to such popularity on this coast in his 'Things.'"49 The familiarity Harte exhibits in his obituary with the work of Arnold, which appeared mainly in the small literary papers of New York, suggests a possibility that Harte saw "Flimsy Fiction" in the

New York Leader, Arnold's review of an adventure novel by a Peterson author, in which he also generally criticizes Peterson as a publisher of "dingy and inelegant" books.50 Harte also revealed an emotional connection to Arnold, an indication of the wider affinities between the New York Bohemians and what may be seen as their San Francisco offspring. These were a small group of Californian contributors and editors, including the young poets Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coolbrith, the storyteller Prentice Mulford, and critics James F. Bowman and Tremenheere Lanyon Johns. For a time the actor Dan Setchell and the artist Edward Jump were also with them. Albert S. Evans, the straight-laced local reporter of the San Francisco Alta California, referred contemptuously to the group and particularly its perceived leaders, Mark Twain and Charles Henry Webb, as the "Bohemian Mutual Admiration Society."51

Especially as personified in Charles Henry Webb, the relationship to Clapp's Bohemia became the motivator by which the works of Harte and Mark Twain were showcased in the East, and national recognition began to attach to their names. Webb and Harte did not always see eye to eye, and may have had a falling out in 1866, so Harte's success with Carleton could have been attained independently of the influence which Webb would have been in a position to exert.52 Webb had come to California from the New York Times in 1863; when he left San Francisco in April 1866, Harte took over the editorial chair of the Californian. Webb returned to New York and was soon back at the Times, where in November he published a parody of Charles Reade's successful novel Griffith Gaunt; or, Jealousy (under the misprinted title, "Lippits Lank; or, Lunacy"). The following month Carleton, one of the American publishers of Reade's novel, brought out Webb's work as a brochure, with illustrations by Sol Eytinge, Jr. (and the title repaired to "Liffith Lank").53 Webb would arrange Mark Twain's

unlucky meeting with Carleton, but his involvement in Harte's more fortunate encounter has not been established.

Harte's reaction to Wit and Humor, if he did know of this book, is not preserved. It is safe to assume that he would have been displeased at any attempt to pirate his "Condensed Novels" before he had collected them himself. Mark Twain was in a somewhat different position and may have been the least injured of the burglarized authors. He was not then ready to publish a book of his own, and his slight Eastern reputation could only have been helped by the publicity. Conceivably the other authors on the list, especially those whose work was available in authorized editions, might have been moved by the advertisement to take action; they or their publishers might even have eventually stifled distribution of Wit and Humor.

The other contributors named in the advertisements for the volume were better established than either of the San Franciscans, and constitute a representative roster of American Civil War-era humor. "Artemus Ward" was first the creation of Charles Farrar Browne and then his adopted persona. Browne was a national celebrity as a lecturer, having extended the reach of his fame by appearing across the continent; though he had as yet published only one book, few American authors counted as many readers. His columns in Vanity Fair and the Sunday Mercury were widely reprinted and Artemus Ward: His Book (Carleton, 1862) sold more than forty thousand copies in its first six months, an unheard of sale for a humorous work—until Carleton brought out Artemus Ward: His Travels in 1865, with fifty thousand advance orders.54 He would depart for England in June 1866, where he would achieve his greatest and final triumphs, at age 33. Robert Henry Newell, author of the "Orpheus C. Kerr Papers" in the New York Sunday Mercury, was near the summit of his celebrity in March 1866, having published three volumes of these satires on wartime office-seeking and Copperheadism. Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818–85) was the author of a new book, Josh Billings, Hiz Sayings (Carleton, 1866). He was on the eve of greater popularity as a humorist, but his adoptive name was already familiar to a large public as belonging to the author of purely comic sketches cast in a scrambled alphabet and grammar. "Mrs. Partington," sometimes described as the American "Mrs. Malaprop," was the widely followed creation of Boston journalist Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber (1814–90). In the early 1850s Shillaber edited The Carpet-Bag, the humor magazine in which Mrs. Partington was featured. The future Artemus Ward became a Carpet-Bag contributor soon after Shillaber engaged him as a typesetter. (Conceivably, the young printer could have set up "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter," a river

tale contributed to the Carpet-Bag of May 1852 by a contemporary, Samuel L. Clemens, aged sixteen.) David Ross Locke (1833–88) achieved success during the secession crisis and the war as the creator of an ignorant proslavery preacher, the "Rev. Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby." Satires signed with this name appeared in the Toledo Blade and were widely reprinted; they were appreciated by President Lincoln as a counterweight to Copperhead propaganda in the North. Beginning in 1861, Joseph Barber 1808–74) contributed over one hundred letters to the New York Sunday Mercury over the signature "A disbanded volunteer." Written in a difficult backwoods dialect, the letters were strongly for Lincoln; in 1864 they were collected in a book, "affeckshinately inskribed" to "Abraham Lincoln of Illannoy, the loftiest of livin statesmen. ..." "Figaro" was Henry Clapp. His writings had appeared in a half-dozen New York papers over the past ten years, but his contributions to Wit and Humor were likely taken from the dramatic columns appearing over this signature in the Leader. George Arnold was one of Clapp's closest associates; the wide public following he gained for his work as the correspondent "McArone" is suggested in Harte's obituary. These were witty letters, devoted at first to the war for Italian independence and then to the U.S. Civil War; they were published in Vanity Fair until 1863 and then in the New York Leader, and were widely reprinted. Owing to the loving editorial work of his friend, the critic William Winter, Arnold can be more easily appreciated today for his poetry than for his McArone correspondence, which remains mainly uncollected.55

A few oddities in the advertisements for Wit and Humor can be noted. All four versions take care to credit Bret's "Condensed Novels" to the Californian. The presence of "Figaro" on the list, in keeping with the apparent intention of the compiler of Wit and Humor to include the comedy of the Bohemian writers, is puzzling from another perspective. Clapp's penname is present in all the advertisements, including those appearing in the nine consecutive issues of his own Saturday Press. This means that Clapp had foreknowledge of Wit and Humor, and must have approved of its publication. Why he should have accepted an advertisement of an apparent pirate anthology of his own writings and those of his contributors begs further questions—especially concerning the possibility of his own active involvement in the affair.

IV

In April 1867, "Mr. C. H. Webb" announced himself as a publisher by advertising three books for sale in a number of newspapers. Mark Twain's first authorized book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches, wxsould be ready on 24 April (the event may have been delayed by a few days); it was offered only in cloth, for $1.50. Also available were Webb's own "travesties": a revised and enlarged Liffith Lank and the new St. Twel'mo, a burlesque

treatment of St. Elmo, a sentimental novel by the Southern writer Augusta Jane Evans, published by Carleton in the previous year. These, the advertisements informed, were the "first instalments of his catalogue"; other "new and popular works would follow in rapid succession." Booksellers were instructed to place their orders with the "American News Company, Agents" at 119 and 121 Nassau Street, New York. Those interested in single copies were told to apply directly to Webb, though he did not list a separate address for himself.56

At this time Mark Twain was in New York, having recently returned from a visit to his family in Missouri. He would soon depart on the excursion to Europe and the Holy Land that would result in The Innocents Abroad (a book that would sell nearly seventy thousand copies in its first year). Shortly before embarking he instructed friend and lecture manager Frank Fuller to collect from Webb his share of the profits from the sales of his book and forward them to his mother. That he did not ask Webb to do this is perhaps a sign that a rift had already opened between the author and his publisher. Mark Twain believed that he would receive ten cents per copy; he eventually received nothing and was much perturbed. Webb did not last long in the trade, and brought forth no further volumes after the three announced in his first advertisement. A document produced to help resolve the dispute over Mark Twain's book indicates that Webb was actively selling the three books into 1870. By the fall of that year, a total of 3,826 copies of Jumping Frog had been printed and bound; according to the same record, Webb's own works fared somewhat better, showing a combined total of over 9,500 copies printed by the fall of 1869.57 Webb seems to have been pleased with the sales of his travesties: already in January 1867 he boasted in the Times of the "remarkable success" of the early Liffith Lank (under Carleton's imprint), which had "reached the third edition." Many years later he inquired of fellow ex-Bohemian Edmund Clarence Stedman, "Didn't I confuse the wretches of publishers who refused my travesties by publishing them myself and making money out of them?"58

Mark Twain was not as happy. Jumping Frog sales were a disappointment in the first place; in the second, he claimed to have received no royalty from them

at all. In 1906 he recalled that Webb pleaded in 1869 or 1870 that Jumping Frog had been a complete loss to him, and the American News Company had taken all the profits. Mark Twain further recounted a meeting with the manager of the American News Company (for which no independent corroboration has been found), who, he said, proved with his "books and accounts" that Webb had been regularly paid for the sales of Jumping Frog. Mark Twain concluded that "Webb had collected his dues and mine regularly from the beginning and had pocketed the money."59 Contemporary evidence indicates that Mark Twain's memory of the thirty-five year-old events was at least partly accurate. On 22 January 1870 he did inform his new publisher, Elisha Bliss, "I am prosecuting Webb in the N. Y. Courts—think the result will be that he will yield up the copyright & plates of the Jumping Frog, if I let him off from paying me money. Then I shall break up those plates, & prepare a new vol. of Sketches, but on a different & more 'taking' model."60

No independent record of Mark Twain's actions against Webb have been discovered; in November of 1870 he apologized to his friend for having hired a lawyer. On 22 December he reported to Bliss that he had settled matters with Webb: according to Mark Twain's accounting in that letter, he obtained full rights to his book in exchange for $600 in forgone royalties and an additional payment of $800.61 The settlement rankled the author, and it would seem that Webb had held firm, perhaps maintaining that he had been cheated by the American News Company, perhaps feeling that he had done more than anyone to promote Mark Twain and deserved some recognition and profit for this. In the same letter to Stedman cited above, Webb recited some of the services he performed for Mark Twain and other California writers.

Did I not publish Mark Twain when all the publishers refused him? Didn't I pilot him to Sacramento for an engagement with the Union to write letters from the Sandwich Islands? Didn't I get his hat checked to the Islands and back when the Union wouldn't advance the money for his fare? And who reared the stately columns of the Californian and enshrined therein Bret Harte, Mark Clemens, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, and others too tedious to mention?

It is testimony to the rapid success of the American News Company that it distributed both Beadle's Dime Book of Fun No. 3, where the jumping frog story appeared without authorial sanction, as well as the authorized edition of Jumping Frog. The firm's collaboration with Beadle and Company took place immediately upon its founding in 1864, and on a colossal scale. The address of the American News Company given in Webb's advertisement was already occupied in the early

1860s by Beadle's distributor, the agency of Sinclair Tousey. The founding of the new company was the final stage in a long and turbulent process of mergers and takeovers in the news business in New York. It was accomplished in the merger of the two most powerful agencies issuing from this process: Tousey and Company and H. Dexter, Hamilton.62 Beadle and Company, then America's most prolific publisher, automatically became one of their largest clients. A pioneer publisher of mass-market books, Beadle supplied soldiers and civilians alike throughout the Civil War with a variety of cheaply made books costing a "dime" or "half-dime." Beadle's list in the mid-1860s comprised hundreds of commissioned works, including biographies, adventure stories, and sensationalized treatments of episodes from American history. The American News Company distributed these editions from its founding; in an oft-repeated phrase, the company kept a "standing order for sixty thousand copies" of each Beadle title.63 This figure could well have been accurate. The North American Review of July 1864 noted that,

An article in the Round Table of 21 April 1866 reported that in addition to distributing most of the nation's magazines and weekly papers (measured by the number of copies), the American News Company was also handling 225,000 dime pub-

lications per month. The historian of Beadle and Company, Albert Johannsen, found an article in the New York Herald maintaining that the first twenty dime novels (introduced in 1860) had sold 4,352,000 copies by 1 July 1865.65

No publication or sales figures for Dime Book of Fun No. 3 have been discovered, but it seems safe to assume that this volume was printed and distributed in many thousands of copies, perhaps five or ten times as many as the authorized Jumping Frog. (Given its price, however, the Dime Book of Fun might not have returned as much to Beadle and Company as Mark Twain thought his $1.50 book returned to Webb.) The third and last in the series of Beadle anthologies collecting previously published humorous works contained 80 pages and included, without authorization, as far as is known, three stories by Mark Twain: "'Mark Twain' on the Launch of the Steamer 'Capital,'" "Fitz Smythe's Horse," and "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." While the three pieces are prize examples of Mark Twain's Western writing, the Beadle compiler did much to obliterate their charm. Of the "Launch" sketch, originally written for the Californian, only about half—the "Scriptural Panoramist" section—was selected; the cut-down part was framed with introductory and concluding passages written by someone other than Mark Twain, and retitled "Story Number Six." Beadle reprinted only about one-third of the jumping frog story, in a form showing much tinkering in the dialect. "Fitz Smythe's Horse" is an extract from one of Mark Twain's daily San Francisco letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, now otherwise lost (see note 41). The poorly typeset Beadle text is nevertheless coterminous with the extract as it was reprinted three months earlier in the Golden Era; it would therefore seem to derive from it, or a lost intermediate reprinting of the Golden Era text, rather than the Enterprise itself. The number of surviving copies of the third Dime Book of Fun is higher than it would have been had not collectors and libraries identified it, as early as in the 1890s, as the first book publication of the jumping frog story.66 Expressions of this appreciation rarely mention, however, that Beadle's "Jim Smiley's Frog" is only a slight extract of Mark Twain's Saturday Press story.

In "My Début as a Literary Person," an essay appearing in the Century Magazine in 1899, Mark Twain recalled with bemusement the hopes he had once attached to an early journalistic "scoop." It came during his time as Hawaii correspondent of the Sacramento Union, a job secured for him by Webb, who, as

"John Paul," was the Union's popular San Francisco correspondent. In June 1866 the author was in Honolulu when most of the survivors of the Hornet, a clipper ship that had burned at sea, were brought there. Inopportunely suffering from severe saddle-boils, Mark Twain had himself carried on a stretcher to the convalescing men and with the help of a friend (the U.S. minister to China, Anson Burlingame) recorded their testimony. He worked all night on a long report of the ordeal and posted it on a San Francisco-bound schooner the following morning (likely 25 June); on 19 July the story appeared on the front page of the Union, then the West's most important and widest-circulating newspaper. No other paper east or west was able to present a more focused picture of the Hornet disaster. Mark Twain's letter gave a detailed account of the calamity—the uncontrollable fire that broke out in the hold of the kerosene-laden ship; the call to abandon ship in the remote South Pacific; the three lifeboats and thirty-one men that came away with ten days' rations each; and the single boat that survived forty-three days at sea, landing safely (with the help of alert Hawaiians) at the island of Hawaii. Not one of the fifteen occupants of the boat was lost. All owed their lives to their helmsman, the Hornet's captain, Josiah A. Mitchell of Freeport, Maine. He had carefully controlled the skimpy rations while piloting the craft across an estimated four thousand miles of ocean. Mark Twain was aware that he had described a great feat of navigation, one of the greatest in American history, equal to that of William Bligh's escape three-quarters of a century earlier.67 He wrote his mother that the story might be reprinted "all over the world."

He was not far wrong. A condensed version soon appeared in the hometown paper of two surviving passengers, the Stamford (Conn.) Advocate (17 August). Then the New York Herald, one of the nation's highest-circulating periodicals, reprinted the greater part of the letter on 27 August. It was thereafter copied far

and wide, in the United States, England, and Australia.68 Not long after posting his story, Mark Twain left Hawaii, sailing on the Smyrniote, another clipper, bound for San Francisco. Among his fellow passengers were Captain Mitchell and two other Hornet survivors, Samuel and Henry Ferguson (the Stamfordians). All three had kept diaries during the ordeal, which they allowed Mark Twain to copy; from the entries he fashioned "Forty-three Days in an Open Boat," a documentary history of the experience with his commentary, which he submitted to Harper's Monthly. As explained in "My Début," his expectation was that an appearance in the most important magazine in New York would secure for him an Eastern reputation. The piece was accepted and published, but his plan to achieve fame by it was frustrated, when in the Harper's annual index his article was attributed, so he recalled, to "Mike Swain" (actually the entry read "Mark Swain").69

Mark Twain's memory in "My Début" was selective; the view he remembers having in 1866, of discounting the importance of the jumping frog story's publication because it appeared "in a mere newspaper" (the Saturday Press) was not entirely accurate. By placing "Forty-three Days" in Harper's Monthly he did hope to enlarge upon the renown the jumping frog tale had brought him, but was foiled when the Harper's typesetter failed to recognize his name in manuscript. The choice of Harper's may have been guided by "C. H. Webb" and "Fitz Hugh Ludlow," Harper's index names belonging to two writers whom Mark Twain looked upon as mentors. Ludlow (1836–70) was the author of The Hasheesh Eater, anonymously published by Harper and Brothers in 1857. In addition to his contributions to Harper's Monthly, Ludlow wrote for the Atlantic and many New York papers; like his friend Artemus Ward he had been a subeditor of Vanity Fair. Like Artemus he traveled west in 1863, accompanying the painter Albert Bierstadt; in San Francisco he became a contributor to the Golden Era. Before returning to the East, he offered an assessment of California writers that included high praise for Mark Twain and Bret Harte. "Harper's and the Atlantic," he said, would welcome contributions from Harte; of Mark Twain he stated that in "funny literature, that Irresistible Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position. He makes me laugh more than any Californian since poor Derby [John

Phrenix] died. He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself."70 Ludlow need not have pointed his new friends in the direction of Harper's Monthly, however: Mark Twain would have known it as one of the few American periodicals with a national circulation. Each issue then appeared in over one hundred thousand copies; ten thousand alone were sent to California (a number about equal to the complete print runs of the leading California newspapers). The Atlantic's issue of perhaps fifty thousand copies was barely less impressive, but this magazine did not then attract his designs.71 Its reputation could have put him off for the same reasons that it attracted Bret Harte, who there published "The Legend of Monte del Diablo" in 1863: the Atlantic was regarded as a repository of higher culture and learning, and a keeper of a polite Bostonian attitude. This perception was a somewhat distorted one, since the standing of the Atlantic was in great measure created by the saucy essays of Holmes and the vernacular voice of Hosea Biglow; Fitz Hugh Ludlow, furthermore, was a favored contributor by 1865. While Mark Twain might have approached the Atlantic (perhaps with something other than "Forty-three Days"), his Pfaffian connections would have afforded him clearer advantage at Harper's.

While the Hornet's men were undergoing their tortuous ordeal, Mark Twain was having an opposite experience. In April and May of 1866 he was enjoying the hospitality of several American sugar barons and especially the company of their daughters, during five weeks of leisure on the island of Maui. On 22 May he returned to Honolulu from what he called a "perfect jubilee to me in the way of pleasure." "Few such months," he wrote his sister-in-law, Mollie Clemens, "come in a lifetime." He did no work at all nor even allowed himself to think of "business, or care, or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness." But his thoughts did not linger long on his tropical idyll. He soon turned to confront his own uncertain future and the care-worn lives of his family back in the States. He fumed about the Clemens family's failure to profit from a Tennessee land holding and then paused long enough to reflect on a literary matter. "If I were in the east, now," he told his correspondent, "I could stop the publication of a piratical book which has stolen some of my sketches."72 By this "complaint" Mark Twain was slyly informing the family that he was known outside the West, as an author whose work Eastern publishers valued enough to steal.

Scholars have assumed that the piracy in question was Beadle's Dime Book of Fun No. 3, which issued in New York on 19 April 1866. Yet it is difficult to see

how Mark Twain could have heard of this book in time to have mentioned it to his sister-in-law on 22 May: the authors of the pieces it contained were not advertised in advance and the date of publication was too late for news of its appearance to have reached him in Hawaii. On the other hand, each advertisement for Wit and Humor did include a list of contributors, with his name on it; these, furthermore, began to appear on 14 March, soon enough for Mark Twain to have received news of them. Given where the advertisements were printed, they were bound to attract the attention of his literary friends and associates. In light of his remark that he could have stopped publication were he in the States, he may have been sent a clipping of the advertisement in one of the three versions in which it was implied that the book was still in preparation. The present state of the evidence, therefore, no longer permits an assumption that the piracy to which Mark Twain referred in his letter was the Beadle book. His reference more reasonably fits Wit and Humor; or Odds and Ends, which boldly announced itself in journals that had been legitimately promoting the Eastern reputations of many of the mysterious piracy's unwitting contributors, including newcomers Mark Twain and Bret Harte.