17 December 1872 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: Thompson, UCCL 00846)
I thank you heartily for your kindness to me & to my friend Charley.1explanatory note
The Ⓐemendation Almanac has come,2explanatory note & I have enjoyed those pictures with m Ⓐemendation all my soul & body. Perkins’s plagiarism of Doestick’s celebrated Niagara drunk is tolerable—that is, for a man to write whose proper place is in an asylum for idiots. Pity Ⓐemendation that I should say it who am his personal acquaintance Ⓐemendation.3explanatory note
“Your “Mexico” is a fifty-years’ history of that retrograding chaos of a country portrayed upon the p Ⓐemendationspace of one’s thumb-nail, so to speak; & that sphynx in “Egypt” charms me—I wish I could draw that old head in that way.4explanatory note
I wish you could go to England with us in May. Surely you could never regret it. I do hope my publishers can make it pay you to illustrate my English book. Then I should have good pictures. They’ve got to improve on “Roughing It.”5explanatory note
Nast had written from Morristown, New Jersey, on 15 December (CU-MARK):
Despite seventeen-year-old Charles Fairbanks’s early ambitions of becoming an artist, after finishing his schooling he began a career in journalism on his father’s Cleveland Herald. His introduction to Nast nevertheless developed into a lifelong friendship. He became to some extent Nast’s protégé, lived with him for a time, collaborated with him in 1892–93 on the short-lived Nast’s Weekly (Fairbanks supplying the text, Nast the pictures), and named his second son, born in 1879, after him (Paine 1904, 263, 510, 539–40; “Charles M. Fairbanks, Newspaper Man, Dies,” New York Times, 30 May 1924, 15; Fairbanks, 755).
Th. Nast’s Illustrated Almanac for 1873—the second in Nast’s series of almanacs for Harper and Brothers—reprinted Mark Twain’s “Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper,” first published in the Galaxy in May 1870. Nast had considered including it in his previous almanac ( L4 , 373–74 n. 2; Nast 1871; Nast 1872, 22–28; SLC 1870).
Nast reprinted a sketch by Eli Perkins (Melville De Lancey Landon, 1839–1910) entitled “New-Year’s Calls,” in which the author, during a series of social calls, becomes progressively tipsier, signified by his comically disordered syntax. The sketch reminded Clemens of a widely reprinted comic letter by Mortimer Neal Thomson, “Doesticks on a Bender,” about a visit to Niagara Falls, which first appeared in 1854 and introduced Q. K. Philander Doesticks to the public. Clemens had known Thomson since 1867. His acquaintance with Landon is undocumented, but he expressed his opinion of Landon’s work in the margins of a copy of Saratoga in 1901, published by Sheldon and Company in August 1872. He labeled the book “The Droolings of an Idiot,” noted insipid or stolen jokes, and railed at the author as “this foetus,” “this humbug, this sham,” and “this cur” (Landon, 99, 104, 129; Nast 1872, 17–21; Thomson, 26–32; L4 , 216 n. 1; Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular 2 {22 Aug 72}: 168, 178; Gribben, 1:394–95).
For each month of the almanac, Nast provided a humorous drawing depicting a different country or continent, integrated with the appropriate astrological sign. “Mexico,” picturing a native sitting backward on a crab (Cancer), was the headpiece for June; the Sphinx, representing “Africa,” and a scorpion (Scorpio) figured in the headpiece for October (Nast 1872, 10, 14). The drawings are reproduced below.
Nast traveled to Europe in March 1873, but returned in June without, apparently, having seen Clemens abroad. Clemens soon proposed to Bliss that Nast illustrate his next book, The Gilded Age (Paine 1904, 274–76; 4 Mar 73 to Blissclick to open letter; for the English book see 30 Dec 73 to Fitzgibbon, n. 2click to open letter).
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned in 1992 by Jean Thompson, who provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers.
L5 , 251–53; Paine 1904, 263, excerpts, text rearranged somewhat; Merwin-Clayton, lot 244, brief quote; “For Twain Letter, $43,” New York Tribune, 3 Apr 1906, 7, brief excerpt; Christie 1992, lot 164.
The MS was among the papers and drawings from Nast’s estate sold in April 1906 (Merwin-Clayton). In 1992 Jean Thompson discovered the MS laid in an unidentified volume in an edition of Mark Twain’s works, purchased at auction for one dollar; she resold it in November 1992 (Christie 1992, lot 164).