29 June 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00629)
It was hard to give up the Cleveland trip—& after the letter was written1explanatory note & given to Crane to mail, we so hated to give it up that we lay & talked till midnight about it & then went & woke Crane & told him not to mail it, but give us one more day to try to contrive the journey——so we tried all ways, but no use—I couldn’t dare make another break in my work lest I fail entirely. So we reluctantly shipped the ll etter. Don’t do anything to weaken our resolution, because it has been mighty hard to arrive at it & it would be awful to have to go through the wear & tear of it again.
I w Ⓐemendation have written a lecture which I just know will “fetch” any audience I spout it before. I do hope to talk it before you in Cleveland.2explanatory note You shall say it is tip-top. I call it “Reminiscences of some Un-Commonplace Characters I have Chanced to Meet.” It tells a personal memory or so of Artemus Ward,; Riley Blucher, an eccentric, big-hearted newspaper man;3explanatory note the King of the Sandwich Islands;4explanatory note Dick Baker, California Miner, & his wonderful cat;5explanatory note Dr. Jackson & the Guides;6explanatory note the Emperor Norton, a pathetic San Franciscan lunatic;7explanatory note Blucher & our Washington landlady, a story I told in the Galaxy;8explanatory note the a grand oriental absolute monarch, the Rajah of Borneo;9explanatory note the our interview with the Emperor of Russia, about as I told it before—didn’t alter it (a great deal) because it always “took” on the platform in that shape;10explanatory note & Blucher’s curious adventure with a beggar. I give this man the name of Blucher merely for convenience.11explanatory note
Of course you can’t tell much about the lecture from this, but see what a splendid field it offers, & you know what a fascination there is in personal matters, & what a charm the narrative form carries with it.
The 1871–72 tour did not include a Cleveland appearance.
Probably adapted from “Riley—Newspaper Correspondent” (8 July 70 to OLC, n. 2click to open letter; 28 Nov 70 to Bliss, n. 1click to open letter).
Kamehameha V (1830–72), whom Clemens hoped to meet on a visit to Iolani Palace on 4 April 1866, but evidently saw only once, at a royal funeral. Clemens made both complimentary and uncomplimentary remarks about the king in his 1866 notebooks and newspaper letters, but finally held a high opinion of him ( N&J1 , 98–233 passim; RI 1993 , 717; SLC 1866 [MT00463], 1866 [MT00466], 1866 [MT00469], 1866 [MT00472], 1873).
Clemens described Abraham Reeves Jackson’s guide-baiting techniques in chapter 27 of The Innocents Abroad ( L2 , 65–66).
Joshua A. Norton had proclaimed himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States” in the late 1850s ( L1 , 324–25 n. 2; Hart 1987, 354–55). In 1880, Clemens wrote:
O, dear, it was always a painful thing to me to see the Emperor (Norton I., of San Francisco) begging; for although nobody else believed he was an Emperor, he believed it. . . . Nobody has ever written him up who was able to see any but his ludicrous or his grotesque side; but I think that with all his dirt & unsavoriness there was a pathetic side to him. Anybody who said so in print would be laughed at in S. F., doubtless, but no matter . . .; I have seen him in all his various moods & tenses, & there was always more room for pity than laughter. (3 Sept 80 to Howells, MH-H, in MTHL , 1:326)
Clemens first told this anecdote in an 1868 letter to the Chicago Republican and in 1870 retold it in “Riley—Newspaper Correspondent.” The subject is the lament of an “oppressively emotional” and “morbidly sentimental” landlady for a neighbor’s servant who was “‘a-sitting over the red-hot stove at three o’clock in the morning and went to sleep and fell on it and was actually roasted! not just frizzled up a bit, but literally roasted to a crisp!’” The landlady asks Riley to suggest an appropriate epitaph: “‘Put it “Well done, good and faithful servant!”’ said Riley, and never smiled” (SLC: 1870, 727; 1868).
Joseph W. Torrey (1828–84) was an American merchant who, in 1865, acquired a ten-year concession on a large tract of land in northern Borneo. The local sultan conferred the titles of Rajah of Ambong and Marudu and Sir Maharajah of North Borneo upon Torrey. In late 1865 he established a small colony as a base for trading operations, but it was abandoned before the end of 1866. Although never formally encouraged by the United States government, Torrey continued to exploit his concession until 1881 (L. R. Wright, 49–55, 116, 142–43, 165; Tregonning, 6–12, 24–25; MTMF , 155–56 n. 7). Clemens had met Torrey in March of 1868 while traveling by ship from New York to San Francisco ( N&J1 , 496–97):
We established a Jokers’ Society, and fined every member who furnished an unbearably bad joke. We tried one man for his life (the Rajah of Borneo), for building a conundrum of unwarranted atrocity. Mr. Cohen disliked his trunk, and often spoke angrily of its small size. The conundrum touched upon this matter:
“Why is one of the passengers, or his trunk, like a certain geographical, algebraical, geometrical, technical term? Answer—Because he is a truncated cone (trunk-hated Cohen).”
We hung him. (SLC 1868)
Clemens described the encounter of the Quaker City passengers with Tsar Aleksandr II in his 1868–69 “American Vandal Abroad” lecture (“Mark Twain,” Chicago Republican, 8 Jan 69, 4; “Mark Twain’s Lecture,” Peoria Transcript, 12 Jan 69, 3; Fatout 1976, 27–36). See also 30 May 70 to Bliss, n. 3click to open letter.
Still another anecdote about Riley, this time recalling an occasion when he treated a beggar to an elaborate meal while destitute himself. Clemens used it in chapter 59 of Roughing It ( RI 1993 , 407–11).
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino (CSmH, call no. HM 14275).
L4 , 424–426; MTMF , 154–56.
see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.