 | MARK TWAIN AND BRET HARTE: A MYSTERIOUS EARLY PIRACY
IN CONTEXT |  |
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,
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
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
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,
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 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
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
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"
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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.
"Podgers' Letter from New York," dated 10 December 1865, San Francisco Alta California, 10 January 1866, p. i; the correspondent, Richard L. Ogden, had been an investor in the Californian.
See Early Tales & Sketches, Volume 2: 1864 — 1865, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 262–272.
This recollection is recorded in Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), 1:277; it is evaluated in Early Tales & Sketches, Volume 2, op. cit., 264—265, 265 n. 7.
These few details of Henry Clapp's life and associations have been brought together from primary sources, including Clapp's own writings in the Leader and the Saturday Press; his books, The Pioneer; or Leaves from an Editor's Portfolio (Lynn, Mass.: J. B. Tolman, 1846), and Husband vs. Wife (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1858); and his translations of some of Fourier's works. Also consulted were Clapp family records in the Nantucket Historical Society (with the help of Elizabeth Oldham), proceedings of the temperance and peace conferences Clapp attended in Europe, newspaper obituaries, and the published testimony of his friends, including William Winter's Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909) and Horace Traubel's multi-volume chronicle, With Walt Whitman in Camden. Several Bohemians who adopted conventionally respectable persons in the post-bellum era, especially Howells and Edmund Clarence Stedman, left interesting recollections of their former lives and those of their associates, Henry Clapp included (for Howells, see his Literary Friends and Acquaintance; Stedman's contributions are scattered throughout the posthumous collection, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, cited in note 56 below). An excellent work of scholarship on Henry Clapp and the Bohemians, sometimes overlooked by literary investigators because of its theatrical perspective, is Tice L. Miller's Bohemians and Critics: American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981).
German immigrant Charles Pfaff ran a "modest Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon" originally situated at 647 Broadway ("Pfaff's" and "Go to Pfaff's!" Saturday Press 2 [3 March 1860]: pp. [2] and [3]; Trow's New York City Directory for the Year Ending May 1, 1861, H. Wilson, comp. [New York: John F. Trow, 1860], p. 679). By 1865 the advertised address was 653 Broadway (three doors further north); the change of address is confirmed in many "puff" paragraphs and advertisements for Pfaff's that appeared in the original and revived Saturday Press—publicity that Henry Clapp freely gave, in appreciation of Charles Pfaff's generosity in supplying him and other poor and hungry Bohemians food and drink over the years (e.g., "Pfaff's!! Pfaff's!!" Saturday Press 4 [12 August 1865]: 31; a similar advertisement for Pfaff's can be seen in the column adjacent to the advertisements for Wit and Humor, in the issues of 17, 24, and 31 March 1866).
Saturday Press 4 (18 November 1865): 248 (eighth of sixteen pages); "Sayings of Josh Billings," written "For the Saturday Press," began on p. 242.
George P. Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, ed. George P. Rowell (New York: George P. Rowell and Co., 1869) records a circulation of 65,000 for the New York Sunday Mercury, likely for 1867 (p. 177). For Mark Twain's first encounter with Artemus Ward, see his letter to Jane Lampton Clemens, 2? January 1864, in Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 1: 1853 –1866 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp. 267–270, especially 269–270 n. 5; an informative article on the life of Charles Farrar Browne is "Obituary," American Literary Gazette and Publishers' Circular 7 (15 March 1867): 292.
Newell was said to have left the Sunday Mercury before heading west (see under Newell in National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. II, New York: James T. White and Co., 1905); he likely had a role in securing Artemus's Mercury contributions, however, and could have helped Mark Twain as well. Mark Twain's two Mercury pieces were "Doings in Nevada" and "Those Blasted Children," which appeared respectively in the issues of 7 and 21 February 1864. By separate arrangement, he made further contributions in 1867. Fellow Territorial Enterprise reporter William Wright (Dan De Quille) left a memoir of a soirée arranged by "The Menken" in her Virginia City hotel room, attended by Wright, Ada Clare, and Mark Twain; according to Wright, Menken did not invite Newell, who paced the floor outside. Mark Twain is said to have made a poor impression, by accidentally kicking his hostess in a failed attempt to kick her dog (William Wright, "Salad Days of Mark Twain," San Francisco Examiner, 19 March 1893, 13–14). If Wright's recollection is accurate, the events of the evening could conceivably have affected Mark Twain's relationship with the Sunday Mercury.
John Paul, "Letter from San Francisco," dated 1 November, Sacramento Union, 3 November 1865, p. 2.
The travel writer Bayard Taylor, who visited California in 1849 and again in 1859,
offered a cultivated Easterner's view of the emigrant "Pikes," whom
Mark Twain would portray with
affection:
A "Pike," in the California dialect, is a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern
Texas, or Southern Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the
plains were from Pike county, Missouri. ... He is the Anglo-Saxon
relapsed into semi-barbarism. He is long, lathy, and sallow;
he expectorates vehemently; he takes naturally to whisky; he has the
"shakes" his life long at home, though he generally manages to get
rid of them in California; he has little
respect for the rights of others; he distrusts men in "store
clothes," but venerates the memory of Andrew
Jackson; finally, he has an implacable dislike to trees.
Girdling is his favorite mode of exterminating them; but he
sometimes contents himself with cutting off the largest and
handsomest limbs. When he spares one, for the sake of a little shade
near his house, he whitewashes the trunk. (At Home
and Abroad: A Sketch-Book of Life, Scenery and Men,
second series, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862, p. 51)
Seymour's co-editor at the Weekly Review was Theodore Hagen, founder of the paper; see under Seymour in Cyclopedia of American Biography, new and enlarged edition of Appleton's Cyclopedia ..., vol. 5 (New York: Press Association Compilers, Inc., 1915).
Ballou's Monthly Magazine 23 (May 1866): 418 (see also p. 420); the circulation of Ballou's, probably for 1867, is given in George P. Rowell's American Newspaper Directory (1869, op. cit.), p. 177.
Harte never completely collected his early poetic parodies, though "The Willows" (after Poe's "Ulalume") and a few others were reprinted in The Lost Galleon and also Poems (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1871). There is evidence that he once intended to do more with them: some installments of "San Francisco, by the Poets" are scissored out of a bound volume of the Californian that he owned, which survives in the San Francisco Public Library. Harte revealed the connection between his first "Truthful James" poem and Swinburne's Greek-themed verse tragedy in the interview cited in the previous note.
The dates of the New York reprints are given here; the original publication dates can be found in George Stewart, "A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines and Newspapers of California, 1857–1871," University of California Publications in English 3 (1933): 134, 135, 149–151, and in Bret Harte: A Bibliography, op. cit., pp. 81, 83, 92–96. All the Californian "Condensed Novels" were first published in the summer and fall of 1865 (including the revised "Fantine" after Hugo, reprinted from the Golden Era); all appeared in volume 3 of the Californian, except the final effort, "Mr. Midshipman Breezy," which appeared in volume 4. While Clapp and the other Bohemian editors preferred the "Condensed Novels," they reprinted other Harte items from the Californian, including, in the Leader, "Stories for Little Girls" (9 September 1865) and "The Lament of the Ballad-Writer" (18 November), and, in the Saturday Press, "A Venerable Imposter" (3 February 1866), a story Harte included in Condensed Novels and Other Papers.
Retrospectives on literary popularity and taste are uncertain; illustrative in this connection is T. Edgar Pemberton's observations on the "Condensed Novels," made in 1900. Speaking of the authors whom Harte imitated, Pemberton remarked that Cooper, Marryat, Bulwer-Lytton, and Charles Reade were "not much read today," while "Miss Braddon" and "Mrs Henry Wood" were among those who were "always with us" (Bret Harte: A Treatise and a Tribute [London: Greening and Co.], p. 85). Confirmation of the contemporary popularity of even those works treated in the "Condensed Novels" that are most obscure today can be found in James D. Hart's classic study, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1950).
See "Ada Clare," Golden Era 12 (15 May 1864): 4; Ada Clare commenced discussing the "Sensation Stories" of Braddon, Wood, T. S. Arthur and others in her very first column, "Ada Clare," Golden Era 12 (20 March 1864): 4–5. Some details of Jane McElhenney's biography may be found in the recollections of two friends, William Winter, Brief Chronicles (New York: Dunlap Society, 1889), pp. 48–49, and Charles Warren Stoddard, "Ada Clare, Queen of Bohemia, National Magazine 22 (September 1905): 637–645. Ada Clare mentioned her public praise of the "Condensed Novels" in her letter to Stoddard of 14 September 1865 (reproduced in Stoddard's article).
"Among the Books," Californian 3 (30 September 1865): 8; "Railway Reading," Californian 5 (9 June 1866): 9.
"Destruction of San Francisco and Other California Libraries," Library Journal 31 (May 1906): 213–215, also untitled articles, pp. 201–202; Descriptive List of the Libraries of California (Sacramento: W. W. Shannon, Superintendent of State Printing, 1904), pp. 85, 88–89, 94. Bancroft's collection, then reportedly of fifty thousand books and manuscripts, awaited shipment to its new owner, the University of California, at a location five blocks beyond the zone of destruction, at 1538 Valencia Street. Most of nMark Twain's writing for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise was also lost, when the fire destroyed the last two substantially complete files of that paper that included the issues from before mid-1866, which were housed in the Merchants' Exchange and the San Francisco Public Library (other Enterprise files had been destroyed in an 1875 Virginia City fire).
A Classified Catalogue of the Mercantile Library of San Francisco ... Consisting of About Fourteen Thousand Volumes, [Horace H. Moore], comp. (San Francisco: Mercantile Library Association, 1861); Catalogue of the Library of the Mercantile Library Association of San Francisco (San Francisco: [Mercantile Library Association], 1874). The 1874 catalogue was the third (the first was compiled in 1854); it recorded the state of the library as of 1 February 1874, when it contained over thirty-six thousand volumes (p. v).
Appleton's 1853 edition of Punch's Prize Novelists did not, however, include Thackeray's treatments of Charles Lever or Cooper. The library also possessed these works, in their original form, as its collections included a complete run of Punch. A more complete edition of Thackeray's condensed novels eventually appeared as Novels by Eminent Hands. For the Thackeray edition of T. Y. Crowell and Co. (London, 1904), John Bell Henneman prepared a bibliographic inventory of the satires, which was reprinted the following year in the introduction to Novels by Eminent Hands, in The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, vol. 15 (New York: Riverdale Press, 1905), p. vi. As Henneman pointed out, Thackeray's "George de Barnwell, by Sir E. L., B. L.," etc., is aimed at the works of Bulwer-Lytton; "Phil Fogarty. A tale of the Fighting Onety Oneth. By Harry Rollicker" is a treatment of Charles Lever's Charles O'Malley, the Irish Dragoon, with a reference to Lever's Confessions of Harry Lorrequer; and "The Stars and Stripes. By the Author of 'The Last of the Mulligans,' 'The Pilot,' Etc.," obviously refers to Cooper. A critical edition of the satires, along with a discussion of textual history, are offered in The Snobs of England and Punch's Prize Novelists, ed. Edgar F. Harden, The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Peter L. Shillingsburg, general editor (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005).
"A Veteran Publisher," Newsman 8 (January 1891): 1; see also "Notes and Queries," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 36 (January 1912): 117–119. A sketch of Peterson's Magazine appears in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1938), pp. 306–311.
Peterson was not wholly above taking liberties with American authors, as indicated by its 1865 republication of Herman Melville's Israel Potter, under the new title The Refugee and advertised (in the catalogue cited in note 8) at $1.50 in paper and $2.00 in cloth. Melville was not informed of the new edition, did not approve the new title, and was paid nothing. Yet Peterson acquired the rights of the novel legally, as it did, apparently, all the American works it published: see Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, with a historical note by Walter E. Bezanson, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and Newberry Library, 1982), pp. 224–226. Dickens was perhaps the best treated British author in America, largely owing to his good relations with American publishers, which began with his 1842 visit to America; as Eugene Exman discussed in his history of the Harpers, an informal agreement between the Harpers and Peterson for the publication of Dickens's works did return some money to the author (The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing [New York: Harper and Row] p. 56).
Quotation from the catalogue in Speech of George Francis Train (1865, see note 8 above). A report from mid-1865 numbered the Mercantile Library's collections at 20,000 volumes; the collection of the Bancroft Company was then at its largest reported size (200,000 volumes) but was not open to the public ("Notes on Books and Booksellers. Literature of the Pacific Coast," American Literary Gazette and Publishers' Circular 5 [15 July 1865]: 122, reprinting the San Francisco Weekly Bulletin of unknown date). Harte could have availed himself of another library mentioned in the same report: the reading room of the What Cheer House, a San Francisco "temperance" hotel catering only to men, said to contain 5,000 volumes. Two years later, in "A Californian Caravansary," an article for Harper's Monthly, Charles Henry Webb counted "between three thousand and four thousand volumes." What Cheer proprietor R. B. Woodward established the library by purchasing the first fifteen hundred books from the Harpers—titles, Webb said, that were selected for their "good moral tendency" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine 35 [April 1867): 603–606, quotations from p. 605). An earlier account made of this library observed that it included "nearly four hundred volumes of the best fictitious works, including several from Dickens, Irving, Scott, Cooper, Miss Bremer, Marryat, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and others" ("Library of the What Cheer House, San Francisco" Hutchings' California Magazine 5 [January 1861]: 294–295; an informative illustration of this library is provided on p. 295).
Starr King's relations with the Mercantile Library east and west are revealed in Edward Everett Hale's James Russell Lowell and His Friends (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1898 and 1899), pp. 66–67; and Robert B. Swain, "Address before the First Unitarian Society of San Francisco, in Memory of Their Late Pastor, Rev. Thomas Starr King" (San Francisco: Frank Eastman, 1864), pp. 7–12. Harte's evaluation of Starr King's lectures at the San Francisco Mercantile Library is given in a letter to Edwin Percy Whipple, 29 October 1865, reprinted in Autograph i (September-October 1912): 152 (MS in the Library of the University of California at Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections, Collection of Bret Harte Letters 1860–1902).
Bret Harte, "George Arnold," New York Saturday Press 3 (23 December 1865): 322–323, reprinting the Californian 3 (18 November 1865): 8. "Things" was the name Webb gave to his feuilleton-like column in the Golden Era, begun in 1863; in 1864 he moved it to the Californian, eventually changing its name to "Inigoings" (derived from "Inigo," one of his pennames).
Evans's attitude was partly an outcome of his defense of the police and San Francisco municipal authorities, which Mark Twain repeatedly accused of brutality and malfeasance in his daily letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In the feud that developed between the two reporters, Evans reserved his most contemptuous remarks for "Our San Francisco Correspondence," his weekly letter to the Gold Hill (Nevada) Evening News, which he signed "Amigo"; for "Bohemian Mutual Admiration Society," see the issues of 13 January and 5 February 1866 (p. 2). Long after Webb and Mark Twain had departed for the east, Johns and Bowman helped found San Francisco's Bohemian Club; though their memories of the 1860s provided the inspiration for this enterprise, the club's formal status and especially its exclusion of women were little in keeping with the spirit of Clapp's Bohemia.
Webb was a major contributor to Outcroppings, the volume of California poetry that Harte edited in 1865; as such he was offended by the editorial introduction, wherein Harte—who contributed no poems of his own—excused the volume's poems for their artistic modesty. Webb reacted in "Inigoings," his weekly column in the Californian, ridiculing Harte as a successful family man with a "lucrative" sinecure at the San Francisco Mint and a talent for "idiomatic English." A final estrangement between the two men may be reflected in a seemingly frosty tone adopted by Harte in his surviving letter to Webb, reporting on the disposition of the Californian, which Webb left in Harte's care when he departed San Francisco ("Inigoings," Californian 4 [10 February 1866]: 1; see note 4 above).
C. H. Webb, "Lippits Lank; or, Lunacy: A Tale that He who Runs may Reade," New York Times, ii November 1866; reportedly the pamphlet version of this work was in its third printing (with a Carleton title page) when the Philadelphia Evening Telegram printed an abridged text without crediting Webb. An unsigned exposé of this unauthorized reprinting then appeared in the New York Times; it was likely Webb's own work ("A Remarkable Piece of Literary Enterprise," 22 January 186y). Webb would publish further travesties with Carleton (nominally, at least), which were later gathered in Parodies: Prose and Verse (Carleton, 1876).
J. C. Derby, Fifty Years among Authors, Books and Publishers (G. W. Carleton and Co., 1884), p. 242; "George W. Carleton Retires," Publisher's Weekly 29 (22 May 1886): 651. Carleton announced the fifty thousand advance orders for Artemus's second book in "Carleton, Publisher," American Literary Gazette and Publishers' Circular 5 (15 October 1865): 279. Artemus Ward, His Travels, the book that almost included the jumping frog story, was dedicated to Dan Setchell; an intimate also of Webb and Mark Twain, Setchell was lost at sea, having sailed from San Francisco for New Zealand in January 1866 aboard a ship that never arrived.
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