29 October 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: ViU, UCCL 01140)
Although I am not able to write a play now, there are better men that can.1explanatory note Would it not be well worth your while to provoke W. D. Howells of the Atlantic Monthly into writing a play? My reason for making the suggestion is that I think he is writing a play. I by no means know this, but I guess it from a remark dropped by an acquaintance of his.2explanatory note I know Howells well, but he has not confided anything of the kind to me. Still I think that if you & Bronson are done with your fight (I mean the newspaper one) it would be a right good thing to hurl another candidate into the jaws of the critics.3explanatory note
I am not meaning to intrude, & hope I am not.4explanatory note
letter docketed: S. J. Clemens
Clemens had turned down Daly’s request for a play in a letter of 14 August 1874.
No such acquaintance has been identified; this claim may have been merely a stratagem.
Playwright Bronson C. Howard (1842–1908) had gone to New York from his native Detroit in 1865. He first made his mark with Saratoga, a comedy, which had a notable run of over a hundred performances at Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre during the 1870–71 season. On 17 October 1874 Daly had brought out Howard’s new comedy, Moorcroft, or The Double Wedding, based on a John Hay story, “The Foster Brothers.” Audiences were amused and entertained, as were those critics who could overlook the play’s imperfections. Some reviewers were dismissive, however. The New York Evening Post, while finding some merit in Howard’s work and more in Daly’s production, observed:
There was a prevalent idea that the author of “Moorcroft” intended that his play should be a picture of American life and manners—should be, in fact, as national as Mark Twain’s sketch of Colonel Sellers in the “Gilded Age.” If Mr. Howard had any such intention we do not think that he has succeeded in perfecting his design. (“Music and the Drama,” 19 Oct 74, 2)
The New York Tribune’s critic, possibly William Winter, remarked:
A sillier play than “Moorcroft” it has never been our misfortune to witness; and we are fully persuaded that the public understood, and will continue to understand, its silliness. It is, possibly, a trifle better than “Saratoga,” because that play was coarsely indelicate and this one is not indelicate at all; but the same sickening puerility of style characterizes both the plays, and in “Moorcroft” it swells and bourgeons like an inflated cauliflower. Any talk about American Comedy, in relation to this piece, would be an impertinence to intelligent readers. Our literature is not destitute of good comedies, as all persons know, who know anything about the subject; and, as to the compositions of Mr. Howard, he has never written one line of comedy, and, if the quality and traits of his pieces may be accepted as indications, he never will—for they clearly denote that he is naturally ignorant of the whole matter. (“The Drama,” 19 Oct 74, 4)
And the New York Herald reported:
There is not a sparkle in it all. The comedy is the dreariest rubbish that even the modern comedy has produced, and were it not somewhat relieved by an occasional fratricide it would be unbearable. Indeed the comedy may be said to have no existence in this piece, for whenever it is introduced it descends into the regions of low farce or burlesque. (“Amusements,” 18 Oct 74, 5)
In announcing Moorcroft, the Herald noted that the earlier play, Saratoga, had been an “adaptation from the French” (“Musical and Dramatic Notes,” 17 Oct 74, 7). This, as well as the negative criticism, brought an indignant letter of 19 October, published by the Herald two days later, in which Howard denied any plagiarism. After the newspaper responded editorially, both Howard and Daly joined battle in lengthy letters of 24 October, published the next day. Howard again denied plagiarizing, while Daly reproached the press for not nurturing the “native drama” it claimed to want and for not applauding Moor-croft as “an effort toward a worthy end” (Howard 1874 [bib13579], 1874 [bib13580]; Augustin Daly). On 24 October Howard also wrote a long letter to the New York Tribune, published on 28 October. Responding to the Tribune’s review, he protested its discourtesy and “use of contemptuous and insulting terms,” which he found typical of American criticism. As documentation he produced scores of examples of the “epigrammatic violence of expression” that critics, in Boston as well as New York, had used in deriding his plays during the previous four years (Howard 1874). (Howard wrote his letters from the Lotos Club, in New York, to which he had belonged since 1871.) Neither his and Daly’s letters nor their revisions of Moorcroft were enough to save it: the play closed on 31 October (Odell, 9:14–15, 536–37; “Amusements,” New York Evening Express, 19 Oct 74, 2; New York Herald: “Mr. Howard and the Drama,” 22 Oct 74, 6; “The Origin of Howard’s ‘Saratoga,’” 24 Oct 74, 7; “American Dramatists and Managers,” 25 Oct 74, 8; “Matinees,” 31 Oct 74, 10; New York Times: “Dramatic,” 18 Oct 74, 7; “Fifth Avenue Theatre,” 24 Oct 74, 6; “Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre,” 25 Oct 74, 7; Elderkin, “List of Members,” 35, 40).
Daly replied on 4 November (CU-MARK):
In fact, Daly had already written Howells, on 3 November. Howells replied affirmatively on 14 November, having in mind a dramatization of his current novel, A Foregone Conclusion, as well as “a farce or vaudeville of strictly American circumstance” (Howells 1979, 74–75). It wasn’t until 1876, however, that he submitted the farce, The Parlor Car, which Daly accepted, but did not produce. A dramatization of the novel, not by Howells, was produced in London in 1884. Howells’s revised version of the London play was staged several times in the United States in the middle and late 1880s, but never by Daly and with only indifferent success (Howells: 1876; 1960, 314–37).
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L6 , 263–65; Joseph Francis Daly, 147.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 15 May 1962.