March 31 Thursday – Sam read “English As She Is Taught” for the Longfellow Memorial, Boston, Mass. Charles E. Norton (1827-1908) presided, and Sam was the third to read, as he recalled 20 years later in an interview [N.Y. Times, Feb. 24, 1907 p.4]. The following Boston Globe article, however, puts him first. The program began at 2 P.M. and he barely made his 4 P.M. train to New Haven. Authors who read included W.D. Howells, Julia Ward Howe, Edward Everett Hale, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas W. Higginson (1823-1911), George W. Curtis, Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and James Russell Lowell. In 1910 Howells recalled the event:
He was a great figure, and the principle figure, at one of the first of the now worn-out Authors’ Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum to aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop…who imagined the reading, but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens’s turn to read he introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded of Darwin’s delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day’s exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a good night’s rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was such a isterine speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture [MMT 50-1].
Note: George Parsons Lathrop (1851-1898), freelance writer, journalist, active in the Copyright League. Lathrop married Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose and was the author of A Study of Hawthorne (1876), and editor of twelve volumes of Hawthorne’s works (1883).
The Boston Daily Globe, p.6 Apr. 1, 1887 ran a full article on the readings, “Boston Museum Full to the Doors,” with a sub headline, “Mark Twain’s Bright Sayings Create Merriment.”
The man who sat at the left of Mr. Howells and doubled himself up like a jack-knife, and then put himself in shape again, is not a bashful man by any means, though he acts awkwardly and seems to be ready to faint away the moment he comes before an audience. He is Innocents-Abroad-Roughing-It-Gilded-Age-Tom-Sawyer-Huckleberry-Finn-Mark-Twain Samuel L. Clemens, who Makes Such Funny Jokes that not only do other people laugh at them, but he laughs at them himself, and grows fat on home-made humor. He pulled his long moustache and ran his fingers through his shaggy hair, like a boy who expects to get whipped as soon as his teacher comes around to his place.
Introducing Mark Twain.
Shortly after the curtain rose, Professor Charles Eliot Norton stepped to the front of the stage amidst a warm welcome of applause, and said:
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN — We are met here today to do honor to the memory of the most widely loved poet that ever lived. His poetry made all who read it his friends.…
And first comes one who has added to the innocent gayety of nations, who has made even Connecticut relax her rigid gravity, who has laughter and merriment for his attendant squires, and whose shield, like Mrs. Fizziwig’s visage, is “one vast, substantial smile.”
Ah! What a gift is this! To lighten weary hours, and to may gay ones gayer. Mark Twain’s syrup to exhilarate the dull and to quiet the restless. “Children cry for it.” We are all children. Come, Mr. Clemens, and give us a taste of your precious, patent champagne-mandragora (Applause.)
Clemens then took a train to New Haven in time to read the piece again at Yale’s Kent Club at 8 P.M. He stayed the night in New Haven. [Mar. 17 to Jewett; Apr.1 to Fields].
L.P. Lewis wrote from Yorkshire, England asking Sam’s “aid for a bazaar to be held the beginning of June” to raise funds to restore their “ancient but very shabby church” [MTP].