University of Virginia Library

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.