A Sheaf of Recovered Mark Twain Letters in Honor of Bob Hirst

Transcribed below are parts or all of about fifty letters to, by, or about Mark Twain as well as an inscription by Twain in an autograph album, all new to scholarship. In an essay in the New York Independent in December 1869, the Brooklyn minister T. De Witt Talmage (1832–1902) reminisced about “a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in church, and a working man should enter the door at the other end would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer for being keener on the scent than a stupid watchdog.”2 Mark Twain read an excerpt from Talmage's essay in the Chicago Advance, a Congregational paper,3 and soon excoriated Talmage for his classist comments in “About Smells” in his Galaxy column for May 1870:4We have reason to believe that there will be laboring men in heaven; and also a number of negroes, and Esquimaux, and Terra del Fuegans, and Arabs, and a few Indians, and possibly even some Spaniards and Portuguese. All things are possible with God. We shall have all these sorts of people in heaven; but, alas! in getting them we shall lose the society of Dr. Talmage. . . . I fear me that in the better world we shall not even have Dr. Talmage's good Christian friend.5Talmage replied to Twain, whom he considered “a personal enemy,” in a letter to the editor of the Troy, N.Y., Times printed on April 22, 1870, and reprinted in the Brooklyn Eagle.6Talmage's retort and/or a letter Twain received from one of Talmage's parishioners urging him to read the clergyman's entire article convinced Twain that he had “wronged” Talmage and he publicly apologized.7 Soon after the birth of his son in November 1870, Twain joked in a letter to a friend about Langdon's arrival in the buff:8He, fancifying that people down here dress as they do up there, has come without his bandbox; and I wish you would buy him a cloak and a cap and order the grocery man that you buy them of to send them express to me. Redpath & Fall, Twain's lecture bureau, assured the sponsor of his scheduled lecture in Brooklyn that it would be his only public appearance in the city that winter.9Three weeks later, Redpath & Fall notified the Brooklyn sponsor that Twain had changed the topic of his forthcoming lecture there.10 In early January 1872, Mark Twain intervened on behalf of the poet and journalist W. A. Kendall (1831?–1876), who was ill in New York and unable to afford a return ticket to his former home in San Francisco. In Ohio on a lecture tour, Twain telegraphed his friend W. D. Howells (1837–1920), editor of the Atlantic Monthly, to ask Bret Harte (1836–1902) to “petition the steamship company for a pass for him & sign my name” to it. “I will send him fifty dollars get him some money if you can I do not know him but I know he is a good fellow and has hard luck.”11 According to a later report in the San Francisco News Letter, Twain and Harte “raised the funds necessary to relieve Mr. Kendall and pay his passage to California. At Mr. Harte's solicitation, the Pacific Mail Company allowed Mr. Kendall a first-class passage upon a second class ticket.”12 Kendall sailed from New York before the end of the month and arrived in San Francisco on March 6.13 Unfortunately, he had not learned that Harte was one of his benefactors. Kendall published a scorching attack on the former editor of the Overland Monthly on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle several months later, alleging Harte had swindled some contributors and routinely failed to repay money he borrowed.14 Or as the Detroit Free Press soon editorialized, Kendall characterized Harte “in colors that belong to no human being but a regular ‘dead beat.’”15Harte soon received a copy of Kendall's attack clipped from the Chronicle and he forwarded it to Twain with this note: “Do you remember the man to whom you gave $50; for whom I raised $60 and procured by begging a first class passage to San Francisco and to whom I sent anonymously $25, when I was rather poor myself? Well—this is the reptile!”16 Twain tried to act as a peacemaker between the two men, though concealing how he had learned of their dispute, by writing Kendall a letter in late December from Hartford hitherto lost to scholarship. Kendall received it in San Francisco no later than January 9, 1873:17To his credit, Kendall tried to smooth over relations by publishing Twain's letter in the San Francisco Chronicle a few days later, though there is no evidence that he ever reconciled with Twain or Harte. Kendall died by suicide exactly four years to the day his mea culpa appeared in the newspaper.18 Invited to lecture in Kingston, Ontario, Twain politely declined:19 Dan De Quille, aka William Wright (1829–1898), Twain's friend and Virginia City colleague, wrote James Crawford (1833–1885), superintendent of the U.S. Mint in Carson City from 1874 to his death, on June 20, 1875,20 about his work on the History of the Big Bonanza (1876). De Quille was composing the book at Twain's home in Hartford, though such statistics do not appear in the finished history. In an advertisement published in 1878, Twain endorsed a type of box mattress invented by the New York physician Edward P. Fowler (1834–1914).21 Coincidentally, Fowler was also the personal physician of Henry H. Rogers (1840–1909), vice-president of the Standard Oil Company, who befriended Twain in 1893. A rural Kentucky columnist who wrote under the penname “Scribbing Innocent” wrote Twain in 1880 to ask about his birthplace in Missouri.22 In 1880, Twain declined an invitation to attend a dinner in Montreal in honor of Louis-Honoré Fréchette (1839–1908), poet laureate of Canada and an in-law of Howells. They met and became friends a year later, however, when Twain established temporary residency in Quebec in an attempt to qualify for a Canadian copyright to The Prince and the Pauper.23 When the Dublin press reported that he had arrived in Ireland in June 1882, Twain was quick to denounce the imposture.25 The claim that Twain pirated his humor from Dan De Quille was commonplace in the late-nineteenth century—so much so that a committee organizing a Salt Lake City literary conference held on New Year's Day 1882 asked Twain to contribute some of De Quille's jokes to the meeting: Mark Twain, Hartford.If you have any more of Dan De Quille's jokes on hand that you have no use for, please ship them C.O.D. to the New York World office. The CommitteeTwain replied in a telegram sent C.O.D.:26 Twain along with two companions cruised the lower Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans in spring 1882, when he researched the chapters added to “Old Times on the Mississippi,” his 1876 memoir. They traveled downstream from to Vicksburg aboard the packet Gold Dust, a trip he chronicled in chapters 23–37 of Life on the Mississippi (1883). On August 8, three months after Twain left the Gold Dust, it exploded and sank near Hickman, Kentucky, with sixty-four casualties, including seventeen dead. Twain wrote Joseph W. Bryan (1830–1903), founder of the Anchor Line Company in 1880, a week later to ask about the surviving crew.28 The Reverend Daniel Emerson (1818–1893), a graduate of Western Reserve College, opened a school in the Second Presbyterian church in Hannibal in late 1853 and advocated for temperance in the Hannibal Journal. Thirty years later he wrote Twain to ask if he had been responsible for the failure of the newspaper.33Orion Clemens (1825–1897) replied for his brother: Keokuk, Iowa, Dec. 13, 1883.Rev. Daniel EmersonDear Sir: My brother has sent your letter of the 21st ult. I thank you for unburdening my conscience. I thought I murdered my paper myself. From Hannibal, I removed to Muscatine, where I purchased an interest in the Muscatine Journal. My father's name was Samuel. He lived and died in Virginia.35 After buying the Hannibal Journal in 1850, I changed its name to the Western Union, and its publication ceased in 1853. Yours respectfully, Orion Clemens. Three years after residing in Quebec, Twain was invited by the Canadian writer and editor George Iles (1852–1942) to attend the 1884 Winter Carnival in Montreal.36Twain declined, explaining that he would be on a speaking tour with George Washington Cable that winter.40 Twain sent a letter dated 18 March 18, 1885, and later copied in ads that touted the Babcock fire extinguisher.41 In reply to a Montreal piano salesman's inquiry,42 Twain praised the Fischer piano in a testimonial letter written between February 19 and late May 1885.43 Thomas C. Zimmerman (1838–1914), co-owner and editor of the Reading, Pa., Times and Dispatch, sent Twain copies of four poems translated from German that he had printed recently in his newspaper: Heinrich Heine's “The Lore-Lei” (4 April 1885, 2) and “Das Meer ergläntze welt hinaus” (11 April 1885, 2), Thomas C. Porter's “The Lore-lei” (11 April 1885, 2), and Wolfgang Müller's “Mein Herz ist am Rheine” (18 April 1885, 2). Twain thanked Zimmerman on May 5, 1885.44 According to his letter to the Belknap and Warfield bookstore in Elmira on July 8, 1885, Twain had been mistakenly charged for a copy of Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1883) edited by her husband Thomas Carlyle.47 James B. Pond (1838–1903), Twain's lecture manager, wrote the Australian politician and journalist John L. Dow (1837–1923) in late 1885 about Twain's recent business and literary successes.48 In late July 1886 the local businessman Julius G. Rathbun (1833–1909) wrote Twain to solicit a contribution to the Hartford baseball club. Rathbun received a check for $25 and a reply from Twain to the effect that the only thing preventing him from contributing $50 instead of $25 was the conduct a local baseball fan who sat near him in the bleachers:49I always politely ask him to give me points on the game . . . but instead of that he looks very hard at me, and I am afraid he will drop me over the grandstand sometime or another. In an unsigned essay later attributed to him (“Wanted—A Universal Tinker,” Century, 31 [December 1885], 318) Twain imagined a company that employed a versatile workforce (carpenters, painters, plumbers, roofers, repairmen, etc.) customers would hire to maintain their homes.50 In this note of October 11, 1886, to Alfred J. Weyman, secretary of the Scottish Society of Literature and Art, Twain thanked the Society for electing him to its membership.51 Twain gave the artist Karl Gerhardt (1853–1940) a letter of introduction to his friend John D. McComb (1830–1896), a Forty-Niner and former part-owner and managing editor of the San Francisco Alta California.53 Twain sent a letter praising S. H. Barrett's circus, undated but published in August 1887, to a correspondent in Spokane.56 In early February 1894, Twain declined an invitation to the Oxford Club dinner the evening of February 8 in honor of William Berri, Jr. (1848–1917), publisher of the Brooklyn Standard Union and president of the Club.58 On May 16, 1894, J. B. Pond, who managed the North American leg of Twain's round-the-world lecture tour in 1895, wrote Robert Sparrow Smythe (1833–1917), who would manage the balance of his tour in 1896.59 The English journalist Basil Tozer (1872–1949) resided at the Hotel Brighton in Paris when the Clemenses lived there intermittently between March 1894 and April 1895. Twain later sent Tozer a letter in which he paraphrased the “prose poem” about Hawaii he read at the baseball dinner in New York on April 8, 1889.60 Two months before the Saratoga Literary Festival in early September 1895, the Boston journalist Helen M. Winslow (1851–1938), asked Twain to “serve as a patron” of the festival—that is, to help sponsor it. Twain soon replied:61 To treat his gout, Twain once ordered a barrel of mineral water from Henry C. Fish (d. 1897) and John W. Henry, two of the founders in 1883 of the Relief Springs and Land Company in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.64 Pond received a telegram from Twain on September 15, the day he, his wife Olivia (1845–1904), and daughter Clara (1874–1962) disembarked in Sydney:65 In early October 1895, David H. Bottrill, children's columnist for the Adelaide Journal and founder of the Sunbeam Society, a children's charity, welcomed Twain to his city and sent him a circular about the Society. Twain replied to him on October 14:66 When Twain fell ill with dyspepsia in Jeypore, India, in February 1896, his best friend Joe Twichell (1838–1918) wrote Twain's brother-in-law Charles Langdon (1849–1916), who had accompanied Twain on the Quaker City cruise to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, to inquire about his health.67 Twain mailed a letter from Vienna to the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916). Though the letter has been lost, the address on the envelope survives.68 Though he generally disparaged autograph collectors, Twain complied with a request for his signature from John Thomas Lee (1869–1950), who considered “it a feat to have drawn such a chatty treasure from the great Mark.”69 Sara Estelle Marshall, a 1910 graduate of Wellesley College, married Dulany Mahan (1885–1940), son of Twain philanthropist George A. Mahan,70 in June 1911. In 1900, when she received a letter from Twain, she was one of sixteen active members of the Hannibal chapter of the SPCA, aka the “Mark Twain Band.”71 In an interview published in the Hartford Courant on October 26, 1900, Twain remarked that he had cured his dyspepsia “by adding Plasmon to my other food and have had no return of it since.”73 H. physician and of the American Plasmon asked Twain the day the comments attributed to him Twain replied that he had is the Twain William in the written and by James A. between 1900, when he from and December when the In a letter to Twain this to Twain his for the to In the for he that the had “a for and the and for In February Twain was asked by (1872–1949) of the Paris Journal to express his about the of and Twain's and his his in published in has them two to possible as it is possible to from and from the and of the two in will the in this of the world be in your personal be would the in be in was in his I that in fifty years the in the will be that the where will have to a that no will any the and the Free that the and will once be that the of will be as and as it is and that at that will have her that she will have to her that she will have her great and which has been only in A Mark should be in fifty In my this should be its it to that without or they would to their without I am in I will for any other than the one they have Mark no U.S. published any of Twain's letter to the Paris though a few the including the The Paris Journal has from Mark Twain his as to the of in Mark Twain that in fifty the will have a and but the will to the and the for the and they will be will have her great along the of which has only been in Mark Twain an at in New York on March that some by the and the “Old of Twain wrote the day to express his advertisement for the an undated Twain new to The of edited by Twain's friend William T. was this as a to Twain was a friend of the and editor C. After and with in he wrote to thank the for his “I have your & with I friends To the of their be added an undated letter Twain wrote the sometime between when Twain became the Hartford of Charles and when co-owner of the Hartford I can but as a it me from and are to my and up at the Hartford Courant they on me, and the of them read two of your to me. only to be that you to work on their is to in any so I so much your up their was me my Mr. C. is not to my and my but to you that the very laureate ever in is your in so is one in they but L. wrote this letter before 1887, when Charles L. and to the of American Literature by as the of their business and Twain remarked soon after that the poet had to believe the to his and was to at the end of the and lose of The American routinely with Mark Twain the three years of his only a of from to Twain well and a note he sent her from early in 1910 have hitherto been to John in in which opened at the on the evening of September and she met Twain soon when she him at the Press on September 19 or at the Club dinner on November she was after one of his that I a of his met and he my on After about it to get for he had all about me. as I was better do he down and your I he my a you me I thought you a of wrote her the When I first I thought you only such a to me. you are the wife of I and for my me your to me at the the and in May of them the Club the the Daniel was its after that he was a to “I would to him with my when I in no one and his me over a hard and letters over the Twain in a of his to her with a or In May for dinner at Twain's home as a with in her and he along with the her one of his and her to his for the On to wife of his James Twain arrived for in New York accompanied by who him as he also wrote Twain routinely when she was on In one letter she about been and he her to a new type of which he would I the and tried but it was no I wrote to him and him that it me a of was a few weeks before his death, but even in his his humor He me. I in the L. December she him with even before she learned that his daughter had died that He sailed to three weeks later and wrote her from the on January 26, I am so to know you are for I you are for one some for but you to and be and be so things are with you as they to to when the for Clara was days before was from the of this was a all and I not ship has but my has me in the of the and I am as as any other ever I . . . and I know no no about the has all of my your I you from and Twain to his home on April to the week of his no by a note from he replied in has been as letter that Mark Twain ever one which been will the thought the letter and personal for public however, the of the letter had am to know how you it. will always be for me, I as as God. I have upon the of my Life for me has been a to this letter not only was it was to her and to her to the and which all her public after her death, second husband Edward the of letters she had received from Mark Twain to the columnist who considered them I of these letters lost in a On May the day Twain's home on in Hannibal was Twain's and literary wrote to thank George who had the to the Twain this undated in a autograph

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.