22 September 1872 • (2nd of 2) • London, England (MS and transcript: NNC and Conway 1872, UCCL 00811)
I have worried through, after a fashion—a heavy job, & roughly done—but memory will enable you to read it.1explanatory note I have marked the Marble Arch, & the Hyde Park & the Statuary of Leicester Square, “Mabille,” &c, with a star (*) so that you could explain the allusions—an American reader would not understand them. They wouldn’t comprehend anything about it. I have appended one footnote myself to the reference to the Albert Memorial.2explanatory note
Lost a wad of bank bills out of my vest pocket last night on my way home—£40—suppose I did it taking out my watch—& just as luck goes, in this life, it is an even bet that the least deserving scalawayg in London found it.3explanatory note
Hoping to be able to g drop in on you before you go out of town or soon after your return, I am
enclosure: 4explanatory note
Mr. ChairmanⒶemendation &Ⓐemendation gentlemen, it affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club which has extended its hospitalities & its cordial welcome to so many of my countrymen. I hope you will excuse these clothes.5explanatory note I am going to the theatre: that will explain these clothes. I have other clothes than these.6explanatory note Judging human nature by what I have seen of it, I suppose that the customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our human nature—not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (& God knows, & you know we are depraved enough) & all our sophistication, & untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence & simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle innocuous little thing about “Twain” & “one flesh,” & all that sort of thing, I don’t try to crush that man into the earth—no. I feel like saying: “Let me take you by the hand, sir; let me embrace you; I have not heard that pun for weeks.” We will deal in palpable puns. We will call parties named “King” Your Majesty, & we will say to the Smiths that we think we have heard that name before somewhere. Such is human nature. We can not alter this. It is God that made us so for some good & wise purpose. Let us not repine. But though I may seem strange, may seem eccentric, I mean to refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though I could make a very good one if I had time to think about it—a week.
I can not express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit to this prodigious metropolis of yours. Its wonders seem to me to be limitless. I go about as in a dream—as in a realm of enchantment—where many things are rare & beautiful, & all things are strange & marvelous. Hour after hour I stand—I stand spell-bound, as it were—& gaze upon the statuary in Leicester Square.7explanatory note I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry the Eighth, & Judge Jeffreys,8explanatory note & the preserved Gorilla, & try to make up my mind which of my ancestors I admire the most. I go to that matchless Hyde Park & drive all around it, & then I start to enter it at the Marble Arch—&—am induced to change my mind.9explanatory note It is a great benefaction—is Hyde Park. There, in his Hansom cab, the invalid can go—the poor sad child of misfortune—& insert his nose between the railings, & breathe the pure health-giving air of the country & of heaven. And if he is a swell invalid, who isn’t obliged to depend upon parks for his country air, he can drive inside—if he owns his vehicle. I drive round & round Hyde Park, & the more I see of the edges of it the more grateful I am that the margin is extensive.
And I have been to the Zoological Gardens.10explanatory note What a wonderful place that is! I never have seen such a curious & interesting variety of wild animals in any garden before—except “Mabille.”11explanatory note I never believed before there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can find there—& I don’t believe it yet. I have been to the British Museum.12explanatory note I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have nothing to do for—five minutes—if you have never been there. It seems to me the noblest monument that this Nation has yet erected to her greatness. I say to her, our greatness—as a Nation. True, she has built other monuments, & stately ones, as well; but these she has uplifted in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the world’s stage, destroying tyrants & delivering Nations, & whose prodigies will still live in memories of men ages after their monuments shall have crumbled to dust—I refer to the Wellington & Nelson columns, &—the Albert Memorial.
The Library at the British Museum I find particularly astounding. I have read there hours together & hardly made an impression on it. I revere that library. It is the author’s friend. I don’t care how mean a book is, it always takes one copy.13explanatory note And then, every day that author goes there to gaze at that book, & is encouraged to go on in the good work. And what a touching sight it is of a Saturday afternoon to see the poor toil-worn clergymen gathered together in that vast reading-room cabbaging sermons for Sunday!
You will pardon my referring to these things. Everything in this monster city interests me, & I can not keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive. People here seem always to express distances by parables. To a stranger it is just a little confusing to be so parabolic—so to speak. I collar a citizen, & I think I am going to get some valuable information out of him. I ask him how far it is to Birmingham, & he says it is twenty-one shillings & sixpence. Now, we know that don’t help a man any who is trying to learn. I find myself down town somewhere, & I want to get some sort of idea of where I am—being usually lost when alone—& I stop a citizen & say: “How far is it to Charing Cross?” “Shilling fare in a cab,” & off he goes. I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime to the ridiculous, he would try to express it in coin.
But I am trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics & historical reflections. I will not longer keep you from your orgies. ’Tis a real pleasure for me to be here, & I thank you, for the name of the Savage Club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest & the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who came among you a stranger, & you opened your English hearts to him & gave him welcome & a home—Artemus Ward.14explanatory note Asking that you will join me, I give you his memory.15explanatory note
* Sarcasm.—The Albert Memorial is the finest monument in the world, & celebrates the existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of obscurity.Ⓐemendation 16explanatory note
Clemens referred to his enclosure, a “rough draft” of the speech he had delivered the previous evening at the Savage Club. Conway included it in a letter of 24 September to the Cincinnati Commercial:
On the occasion of his first appearance at the Club he came attended by his publisher, the genial and clever Mr. {Edmund} Routledge. Fortunately the chairman of the evening was the inimitable Toole, the wittiest actor in London. Mark Twain was given the seat of honor at his side, and when the repast was over, Toole arose and invited us to fill our glasses. A large proportion of the fifty or sixty persons present did not know that any distinguished guest was present until this unusual invitation to fill glasses was given. The necessity of repairing to the theaters has made it the rule that there shall be no toasts or speeches to prolong the dinners, except at the Christmas or anniversary banquet. All now set themselves to know what was up. Toole then said: “We have at our table Mark Twain.” At these words a roar of cheers arose, and for some moments the din was indescribable. Toole then proceeded in a penitent way to confess that for a year or two he had been cribbing from Mark Twain in a way that must now, he feared, suffer a humiliating exposure. When now and then he had indulged in an innocent “gag,” he had had friends rush to him behind the scenes or on the streets with “Toole, that was capital; your own, I suppose?” Now invariably when he had been so greeted the thing happened to be Mark Twain’s. So all he could say was: “Oh—ah—well—ahem—glad you liked it.” He could not exactly make out how it was, but when he did put in a bit of originality, his friends seemed very rarely to come and inquire whether it was his own or not. Toole’s deferential gravity and innocent look is always amusing, but his fooling in this speech was unusually funny. When Mark Twain arose, the contrast between him and the clever, comic actor beside him was singular. The one is small, with a jolly, blooming countenance, full of quickness, eye ever on the alert; the American tall, thin, grave, with something of the look of a young divinity student fallen among worldlings. (Conway 1872)
According to a “private letter” quoted in the New York Tribune, “Mark was the guest of Mr. Lee.” Nearby sat Watts Phillips (1825–74), a dramatist and novelist; Andrew Halliday (1830–77), an essayist and dramatist; and Tom Hood (“Mark Twain at the Savage Club,” 8 Oct 72, 8).
Clemens’s speech manuscript has not been found. His enclosure is therefore transcribed from the text in the Cincinnati Commercial, which was typeset from that manuscript (Conway 1872). Where Clemens said he had inserted a “star” (asterisk) to identify allusions needing explanation, Conway interpolated explanations in square brackets (see the textual commentary). For “Mabille” and the Albert Memorial, see notes 11 and 16.
See 22 Sept 72 to OLCclick to open letter, and note 15.
Conway introduced Clemens’s speech as follows:
Being one of the Savages, I have the happiness of laying before your readers Twain’s speech, of which the Londoners are in hopeless ignorance, but, alas, it loses much by being transferred to paper. In its proper setting, related to its immediate environment, and delivered with a solemn and dry suavity, quite indescribable, it struck others present besides myself as the best after-dinner speech we had ever heard.
The speaker had on full evening dress—swallow-tail coat, white cravat, and all that,—to wear which to the club dinner calls down upon the wearer considerable chaff, until it be meekly apologized for. This fact will explain the opening sentences of Twain’s speech, which were uttered with deprecating lowliness. (Conway 1872)
Conway inserted the comment “—and here the speaker’s voice became low and fluttering—” after “hope.”
Here Conway added, “The manner in which these words were uttered produced a great deal of merriment.”
Conway, as Clemens suggested in his letter, explained the joke: “{Great laughter—Leicester Square being a horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the center, the King being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better condition.}” This statue of George I in armor, “modelled by C. Burchard in about 1716,” was “sold for Λ16 in 1872 and removed from the Square” (Weinreb and Hibbert, 817–18).
Clemens might have seen the statue of Henry VIII at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield, situated in a niche over the principal entrance gateway: in his London guidebook he underlined “Henry VIII” in a description of the statue, and noted in the margin, “Why not Rahere?” (Rahere was the founder of the hospital) (Pardon, 96ȁ). A wax effigy of Henry VIII was on display at Madame Tussaud’s as well (information from Madame Tussaud’s). George Jeffreys, first Baron Jeffreys of Wem (1648–89), was an English judge notorious for his brutal and unjust treatment of defendants charged after the Monmouth rebellion of 1685, during trials known as the “bloody assizes.” No statue or effigy of Jeffreys that Clemens could have seen has been identified.
Here Conway explained, “{Cabs are not admitted in Hyde Park—nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.}”
The Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park were opened in 1828 (Weinreb and Hibbert, 978). Clemens described his 15 September visit there with Henry Lee in his English journal (Mark Twain’s 1872 English Journalsclick to open letter).
Despite Clemens’s mention of marking “Mabille” with an asterisk, Conway did not add an explanation for it. The Jardin Mabille in Paris was one of the most frequented of the public bals d’été, recommended to the tourist “on account of the gay, brilliant, and novel spectacle they present. The rules of decorum are tolerably well observed, but it need hardly be said that ladies cannot go to them with propriety.” At Mabille,
on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, when the admission is 5 fr., many handsome, richly dressed women of the ‘demimonde’ and exquisites of the boulevards assemble here, while on the other evenings, when the admission is 3 fr., and women enter without payment, the society is still less respectable. (Baedeker 1874, 51)
In chapter 14 of The Innocents Abroad Clemens mentioned having made a brief visit to the Jardin Mabille in 1867.
Clemens went to the British Museum with Lee, as he recorded in his journal (Mark Twain’s 1872 English Journalsclick to open letter). A six-month ticket to use the Reading Room, issued on 18 September to “Mr Samuel L. Clemens | Langham Hotel,” survives in the Mark Twain Papers. The museum, first housed in Montagu House on Great Russell Street, opened in 1759. Its original holdings comprised antiquities, works of art, and books formerly belonging to Sir Hans Sloane, Robert Harley (earl of Oxford), and the Cotton family. The collection, continually enlarged by purchases and gifts, eventually outgrew the available space, necessitating the construction of a new museum building on the same site, completed in 1847 (Weinreb and Hibbert, 89–91).
Conway explained, “{A copy of every book printed in Great Britain must by law be sent to the British Museum, a law much complained of by publishers.}” This law had been in effect since the passage of the Literary Copyright Act of 1842 (Copinger, 18, 73).
Clemens’s friend and fellow humorist Artemus Ward achieved a triumphant success in London in 1866 with his comic lecture on the Mormons. Conway claimed in his Autobiography that “never was American in London so beloved.” Ward made the Savage Club his headquarters, and became its “life and soul”:
Yet all those brilliant articles in “Punch,” all those unforgettable dinners, lasted but six months, and the entertainments in Egyptian Hall only seven weeks. When it was learned that the most delightful of men was wasting away under rapid consumption even while he was charming us, the grief was inexpressible. (Conway 1904, 2:136–37)
Conway conducted Ward’s funeral in March 1867: “The chapel in Kensal Green Cemetery was filled to its utmost capacity. All the chief actors and actresses, writers of plays, literary men and women, were present, and sorrow was in every face.” From that time Conway “enjoyed the friendship of many connected with the stage, and became a member of the Savage Club” (Conway, 2:137). In the early paragraphs of his Cincinnati Commercial article Conway reminisced about Ward and compared Clemens to him, suggesting that Clemens was “not simply a humorist, like Artemus, ... but a shrewd observer, capable of making grave criticisms on general subjects” (Conway 1872). Clemens had delivered a lecture on Ward during his 1871–72 tour (2 Jan 72 to Redpath, n. 1click to open letter; L4 , 478–82).
Conway concluded his article:
In deep silence, and with much feeling, the company present rose and drank to this sentiment. Then, after some moments, the new-comer was heartily cheered, and the members went up to make his acquaintance. Soon after Mark Twain went off to the Gayety Theater with some friends, and saw Byron’s play, “Good News,” and “Ali Baba,” (a new extravaganza,) in both of which Toole appeared, and in the latter of which he had the most absurd gag, crying out: “As Mark Twain says in the ‘Jumping Frog,’ ‘Lie on, Macduff, and thingumbobbed be he,’” &c. Afterward the party supped with Mr. Straight, M.P.
I am sorry to learn from a note received from Mark Twain to-day that the pleasant evening did not end so happily after all. On returning to his hotel (the Langham) he discovered that he had dropped—he thinks on taking out his watch—a roll of bank notes amounting to forty pounds. He only fears that the meanest scalawag in London may have found them. (Conway 1872)
Although Clemens wrote Conway that he had “appended one footnote,” Conway rendered the footnote as a separate paragraph enclosed within square brackets in the body of the text. In his Autobiography Conway recalled a more amusing version of Clemens’s remarks:
After speaking of Hyde Park he got off a satire so bold that it quite escaped the Englishmen. “I admired that magnificent monument {i.e. to the Prince Consort} which will stand in all its beauty when the name it bears has crumbled into dust.” The impression was that this was a tribute to Albert the Good, and I had my laugh arrested by the solemnity of those around me. Indeed, one or two Americans present with whom I spoke considered it a mere slip, and that Mark meant to say that the Prince’s fame would last after the monument had crumbled. (Conway 1904, 2:143)
The 175-foot-high monument to Albert, prince consort of England (1819–61), on the south side of Kensington Gardens, had just been completed in July 1872, except for the statue of the prince, which was added in 1876. Designed by George Gilbert Scott, the memorial took ten years to plan and construct, at a cost of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. Its Gothic canopy is inlaid with polished stones, mosaics, and enamels. The base comprises seven tiers of statuary, executed by ten different artists and sculptors (Weinreb and Hibbert, 11–12). Clemens described the monument at some length in his journal (Mark Twain’s 1872 English Journalsclick to open letter).
MS, Conway Papers, Columbia University (NNC), is copy-text for the letter. The MS for the enclosure has not been found. The source for it is “Mark Twain in London,” Cincinnati Commercial, 10 Oct 72, 4 (Conway 1872). Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Library of Congress (DLC).
L5 , 172–178; numerous newspapers, including “Mark Twain in London,” Newark (N.J.) Advertiser, 14 Oct 72, 2; Cleveland Leader, 15 Oct 72, 3; Cleveland Herald, 19 Oct 72; MTS 1910, 417–21; MTB , 3:1630–32; MTS 1923, 37–41; Fatout 1976, 69–72; all enclosure only.
The Conway Papers were acquired by NNC sometime after Conway’s death in 1907.
The quotation marks added by Conway for his printing of Clemens’s speech in the Cincinnati Commercial have been silently removed, and the internal single quotation marks silently restored to double ones, as they presumably were in the MS. The explanatory remarks that Conway inserted into the speech (at Clemens’s suggestion) have been removed from the text and quoted verbatim in the notes, rather than being recorded here as emendations.