26–28 October 1865
Clemens wrote this letter on 24 October 1865, and it was probably published in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise two or three days later. The first section is preserved in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, which reprinted it from the Enterprise on October 30, whereas the last two sections are preserved in an undated clipping in the Yale Scrapbook. The scrapbook clipping has been paired with the Bulletin extract on the basis of the subheading of the last section, “more fashions—exit ‘waterfall’ ” which resumes the theme of fashions and hairstyles begun in the first part of the letter. The allusion in the middle section to the meeting of the San Francisco board of supervisors “last night” establishes the date of composition as October 24.1 The partial sentence at the end of the first section shows that not all of the letter has been recovered: editorial ellipses indicate possible or demonstrable omissions in the present text.
“re-opening of the plaza,” the middle section of the letter, scarcely qualifies as a coherent sketch, but it touches on an important and recurring interest of Clemens'—his distaste for bureaucratic regulation of the simple pleasures of life. Having refurbished Portsmouth Square with green lawn, the supervisors proceeded to regulate its use by dogs as well as people—and Clemens here registers his “vulgar” protest. He would embody much the same rebellious feelings in “Colloquy between a Slum Child and a Moral Mentor” (no. 219) early in 1868.
[begin page 316]But perhaps the central interest of this letter (or at least of what has been preserved) lies in Clemens' return to the familiar role of a struggling, concerned expert in ladies' fashions—one who is, nevertheless, well over his head. “Fashions are mighty tanglesome things to write,” he observes in the first section, and true to his word he wanders away from his subject in the middle section, only to return to it, somewhat more angrily, in the last. The basic form of the joke is commonplace in Clemens' early work: “Mark Twain—More of Him” (no. 64) and “The Lick House Ball” (no. 65), both written in 1863, are good examples. Within a month of the present letter he would return to the theme with “The Pioneers' Ball” (no. 137), published in the Enterprise. And his interest would persist, at least as late as January 1868, when he wrote “Fashions” (no. 221) as part of a letter to the Chicago Republican.
Clemens struck through the portion of the letter which is now in the Yale Scrapbook, probably in January or February 1867, while preparing material for his Jumping Frog book. The clipping itself follows a page stub, which may indicate that the earlier section was considered a potential sketch for the book. None of the letter was, however, reprinted.
. . . .
a love of a bonnet described.
Well, you ought to see the new style of bonnets, and then die. You see, everybody has discarded ringlets and bunches of curls, and taken to the clod of compact hair on the “after-guard,” which they call a “waterfall,” though why they name it so I cannot make out, for it looks no more like one's general notion of a waterfall than a cabbage looks like a cataract. Yes, they have thrown aside the bunches of curls which necessitated the wearing of a bonnet with a back-door to it, or rather, a bonnet without any back to it at all, so that the curls bulged out from under an overhanging spray of slender feathers, sprigs of grass, etc. You know the kind of bonnet I mean; it was as if a lady spread a diaper on her head, with two of the corners brought down over her ears, and the other trimmed with a bunch of graceful flummery and allowed to hang over her waterfall—fashions are mighty tanglesome things to write—but I am coming to it directly. The diaper was the only beautifulⒶemendation bonnet women have worn within my recollection—but as they have taken exclusively to the waterfalls, now, they have thrown it aside and adopted, ah me, the infernalest, old-fashionedest, ruralest atrocity in its stead you ever saw. It is perfectly plain and hasn't a ribbon, or a flower, or any ornament whatever about it; it is severely shaped like the half of a lady's [begin page 318] thimble split in two lengthwise—or would be if that thimble had a perfectly square end instead of a rounded one—just imagine it—glance at it in your mind's eye—and recollect, no ribbons, no flowers, no filagree—only the plainest kind of plain straw or plain black stuff. It don't come forward as far as the hair, and it fits to the head as tightly as a thimble fits, folded in a square mass against the back of the head, and the square end of the bonnet half covers it and fits as square and tightly against it as if somebody had hit the woman in the back of the head with a tombstone or some other heavy and excessively flat projectile. And a woman looks as distressed in it as a cat with her head fast in a tea-cup. It is infamous.
. . . .
mustered out of service.
re-opening of the plaza.
The Plaza, or Portsmouth Square, is “done,” at last, and by a resolution passed by the Board of Supervisors last night, is to be thrown open to the public henceforth at 7 o'clock a. m. and closed again at 7 o'clock p. m. every day. The same resolution prohibits the visits of dogs to this holy ground, and denies to the public the privilege of rolling on its grass. If I could bring myself to speak vulgarly, I should say that the latter clause is rough—very rough on the people. To be forced to idle in gravel walks when there is soft green grass close at hand, is tantalizing; it is as uncomfortable as to lie disabled and thirsty in sight of a fountain; or to look at a feast without permission to participate in it, when you are hungry; and almost as exasperating as to have to smack your chops over the hugging and kissing going on between a couple of sweetheartsⒶemendation without any reasonable excuse for inserting your own metaphorical shovel. And yet there is one consolation about it on Nature's eternal equity of “compensation.” No matter how degraded and worthless you may become here, you cannot go to grass in the Plaza, at any rate. The Plaza is a different thing from what it used to be; it used to be a text from a desert—it was not large enough for a whole chapter; but now it is traversed here and [begin page 319] there by walks of precise width, and which are graded to a degree of rigid accuracy which is constantly suggestive of the spirit level; and the grass plots are as strictly shaped as a dandy's side-whiskers, and their surfaces clipped and smoothed with the same mathematical exactness. In a word, the Plaza looks like the intensely brown and green perspectiveless diagram of stripes and patches which an architect furnishes to his client as a plan for a projected city garden or cemetery. And its glaring greenness in the midst of so much sombreness is startling and yet piercingly pleasant to the eye. It reminds one of old John Dehle's vegetable garden in Virginia, which, after a rain, used to burn like a square of green fire in the midst of the dull, gray desolation around it.
more fashions—exit “waterfall.”
I am told that the Empress Eugenie is growing bald on the top of her head, and that to hide this defect she now combs her “back-hair” forward in such a way as to make her look all right. I am also told that this mode of dressing the hair is already fashionable in all the great civilized cities of the world, and that it will shortly be adopted here. Therefore let your ladies “stand-by” and prepare to drum their ringlets to the front when I give the word. I shall keep a weather eye out for this fashion, for I am an uncompromising enemy of the popular “waterfall,” and I yearn to see it in disgrace. Just think of the disgusting shape and appearance of the thing. The hair is drawn to a slender neck at the back, and then commences a great fat, oblong ball, like a kidney covered with a net; and sometimes this net is so thickly bespangled with white beads that the ball looks soft, and fuzzy, and filmy and gray at a little distance—so that it vividly reminds you of those nauseating garden spiders in the States that go about dragging a pulpy, grayish bag-full of young spiders slung to them behind; and when I look at these suggestive waterfalls and remember how sea-sick it used to make me to mash one of those spider-bags, I feel sea-sick again, as a general thing. Its shape alone is enough to turn one's stomach. Let's have the back-hair brought forward as soon as convenient. N. B.—I shall feel much obliged to you if you can aid me in getting up this panic. I have no wife of my own and therefore as long as I have to make the mostⒶemendation of other people's it is a matter of vital importance to me that they should dress with some degree of taste.
The first printing appeared in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably sometime between 26 and 28 October 1865 (TEnt). The only known copy of this printing, part of a clipping in the Yale Scrapbook (p. 39), is copy-text from “mustered” (318.13) through “taste.” (320.3). The first printing for the opening section of the letter (317.1–318.12) is not extant. This section survives in the only known contemporary reprinting of the Enterprise, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin for 30 October 1865, p. 3 (EB), which is copy-text. Copies: PH from Bancroft (EB) and from Yale (TEnt).
We have conjectured that the section preserved in TEnt and the section preserved in EB are in fact from the same letter to the Enterprise. We have adopted the title typically used by that paper for Mark Twain's daily letter to it during the last part of 1865, several examples of which are preserved in the Yale Scrapbook. The letter probably had a dateline reading “San Francisco, Oct. 24,” if it was like other letters written about this time. The TEnt clipping in the scrapbook preserves only the last four words of a section of the letter now wholly lost, and there may well have been sections both before and after “A Love of a Bonnet Described” that are not preserved. Ellipsis points indicate that material has been or may have been lost.
Mark Twain canceled the clipping of TEnt in the scrapbook. Since it follows a page stub that might well have held the earlier part of the letter, there is some possibility that this unidentified section was removed to serve as printer's copy for JF1. None of the letter, however, was reprinted in JF1, and Mark Twain did not subsequently reprint it. There are no textual notes.