14 December 1874 to William Dean Howells
Clemens wrote no letters on 15 December. On that day he traveled to Boston for one night, to attend the dinner at the Parker House hosted by the Atlantic Monthly publishers for its contributors. Howells described the occasion in a letter of 20 December to his father, William C. Howells:
Our Atlantic dinner on Tuesday was very successful and happy. There were about thirty contributors present, and we had speeches from nearly all. I was prepared with a written speech, which I read. Mark Twain spoke twice, and so did several others. I sat at one end of the table, with him and Aldrich near me, and we had a particularly jolly time. After the dinner, Aldrich and I staid all night with Clemens at the Parker House, and sat up talking it over till two o’clock in the morning. The only drawback was the absence of some of the older contributors, who were all but Doctor Holmes, detained by one fatality or other. (Howells 1979, 84–85)
The Boston Globe reported that the dinner marked
a year since the Atlantic passed into the hands of the present publishers, and they chose the day of issue of the first number of the new year on which to bring about them the authors who have made the Atlantic what it is and those who are giving their young energy and enthusiasm to the grateful task of keeping alive its old traditions.
It thought the occasion “was fitly to be ranked with the most noteworthy gathering of the kind that the Athens of America has seen” (“The Atlantic Writers,” 16 Dec 74, 4). Those on hand, in addition to Clemens, Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and Holmes, were: Henry O. Houghton and his business associates—Melancthon M. Hurd, Horace E. Scudder, and George H. Mifflin; William Foster Apthorp (1848–1913), the Atlantic music editor, whose department was a regular feature; Edward Atkinson (1827–1905), economist and contributor on financial topics—for example, “The Righteousness of Money-Making” in December 1874; William Mumford Baker (1825–83), Presbyterian clergyman and novelist, contributor of fiction; James Freeman Clarke (1810–88), Unitarian clergyman and temperance, suffrage, and abolition activist, contributor chiefly of articles on religion; Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–92), Unitarian minister, painter, poet, and critic, contributor of poems, essays, and reviews; William Reynolds Dimmock (d. 1878), president of the Adams Academy, a Quincy, Massachusetts, preparatory school, contributor of articles on education; George Cary Eggleston (1839–1911), lawyer, Confederate soldier, novelist, and journalist, contributor of a series of “Rebel’s Recollections” that concluded in December 1874; Arthur Gilman (1837–1909), textbook author and historian, contributor of essays and reviews; George Washington Greene (1811–83), literary editor and historian, contributor of historical essays; Henry James, Jr. (1843–1916), who was seated near Howells and Clemens, contributor of numerous essays, stories, reviews, and, in January 1875, the first installment of Roderick Hudson; George Parsons Lathrop (1851–98), contributor of numerous reviews, essays, and editorial articles, who in 1875 became the Atlantic’s associate editor under Howells; William Pitt Preble Longfellow (1836–1913), architect, nephew of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and contributor of review articles on architecture and art; Thomas Sergeant Perry (1845–1928), a prolific reviewer, particularly of French and German works; Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (1831–1917), educator, abolitionist, and journalist, and contributor of political and social reviews and historical essays, such as his series “The Virginia Campaign of John Brown,” which began in January 1875; John Townsend Trowbridge (1827–1916), contributor of poems, stories, and reviews; Francis H. Underwood (see 2 Dec 74 to Howells, n. 1click to open link); George E. Waring, Jr. (see 14 July 75 to Waringclick to open link, n. 1); and Edwin Percy Whipple (1819–86), author, editor, and a regular on the Redpath Lyceum Bureau’s list of lecturers (1869–77), contributor of articles and reviews on a wide variety of literary, historical, and social topics. Also in attendance was Charles Fairchild, not an Atlantic literary contributor, but a Boston paper manufacturer who reportedly was “a close friend and drinking companion of James R. Osgood and his knights of the quill—Aldrich, Samuel Clemens, and William Dean Howells.” He had advanced the $20,000 that Hurd and Houghton used to purchase the magazine from Osgood in late 1873 (Ballou, 203; 11 Dec 74 to Houghton and Company, n. 1click to open link). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell were prevented from attending by sickness in their families. Among the other prominent figures invited but absent were William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James T. Fields, John Hay, Thomas W. Higginson, Edmund C. Stedman, Bayard Taylor, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In a long article about the affair for the New York Evening Post of 17 December, Lathrop wrote:
Mark Twain was summoned to deliver himself on the topic of “The President of the United States and the Female Contributors.” He affected to be a little staggered by the magnitude of the subject, and asked solicitously if he was to take it “one at a time.” His friend, Mr. Howells, in inviting him to this dinner had not told him that he had been preparing a speech for two weeks beforehand; if he (Twain) had been told that he must prepare himself, he could have talked on this subject for two or three weeks running. He then passed to other matters, and alluding to the dinner, confessed that he had had doubts, when first asked, as to whether he had better come to a publishers’ dinner. But he was agreeably surprised: he found that the publishers treated their contributors as if they were persons whom they really wanted to conciliate. He had had a nice dinner. [Laughter.] He was willing to call it a good dinner. [More laughter.] An admirable dinner! It was as good as he should have got at home. (Lathrop, 2)
In fact, neither President Grant nor any of the Atlantic’s female contributors attended; it is not known if they were invited. George Cary Eggleston, in his 1910 memoirs, recalled his own “brief ordeal” of speaking while being scrutinized by Lathrop, “who had been designated as the ‘historian of the evening and chronicler of its events,’” and who studied him “as a bugologist might study a new species of beetle.” After he sat down, convinced of his “oratorical failure,” Howells kindly approached “to say something congratulatory.” Then “Mark Twain was there waiting to say something on his own account”:
“When you were called on to speak,” he said, “I braced myself up to come to your rescue and make your speech for you. I thought of half a dozen good things to say, and now they are all left on my hands, and I don’t know what on earth to do with them.” (Eggleston 1910, 150)
Apart from Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and Holmes, Clemens met most, if not all, of the guests for the first time (“Local Varieties,” Boston Herald, 16 Dec 74, 4; Atlantic Index; Eubank, 296–305; “A Dinner on Parnassus,” New York Tribune, 18 Dec 74, 3; Gilman).