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1601
1601 MARK TWAIN The correct and complete title of 1601 as first issued was: [Date
1601.] 'Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of
the Tudors.' For many years after its anonymous first issue in 1880
its authorship was variously conjectured and widely disputed. In Boston
William T. Ball one of the leading theatrical critics during the late
go's asserted that it was originally written by an English actor (name
not divulged) who gave it to him. Ball's original it was said looked
like a newspaper strip in the way it was printed and may indeed have
been a proof pulled in some newspaper office. In St. Louis William
Marion Reedy editor of the St. Louis Mirror had seen this famous tour
de force circulated in the early 80's in galley-proof form; he first
learned from Eugene Field that it was from the pen of Mark Twain.
"Many people" said Reedy "thought the thing was done by Field and
attributed as a joke to Mark Twain. Field had a perfect genius for
that sort of thing as many extant specimens attest and for that sort of
practical joke; but to my thinking the humor of the piece is too mellow
--not hard and bright and bitter--to be Eugene Field's." Reedy's opinion
hits off the fundamental difference between these two great humorists;
one half suspects that Reedy was thinking of Field's French Crisis.
But Twain first claimed his bantling from the fog of anonymity in 1906
in a letter addressed to Mr. Charles Orr librarian of Case Library
Cleveland. Said Clemens in the course of his letter dated July 30
1906 from Dublin New Hampshire:
"The title of the piece is 1601. The piece is a supposititious
conversation which takes place in Queen Elizabeth's closet in that year
between the Queen Ben Jonson Beaumont Sir Walter Raleigh the Duchess
of Bilgewater and one or two others and is not as John Hay mistakenly
supposes a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy to
the sober and chaste Elizabeth's time; if there is a decent word findable
in it it is because I overlooked it. I hasten to assure you that it is
not printed in my published writings."
TWITTING THE REV. JOSEPH TWICHELL
The circumstances of how 1601 came to be written have since been
officially revealed by Albert Bigelow Paine in 'Mark Twain
A Bibliography' (1912) and in the publication of Mark Twain's Notebook
(1935).
1601 was written during the summer of 1876 when the Clemens family had
retreated to Quarry Farm in Elmira County New York. Here Mrs. Clemens
enjoyed relief from social obligations the children romped over the
countryside and Mark retired to his octagonal study which perched high
on the hill looked out upon the valley below. It was in the famous
summer of 1876 too that Mark was putting the finishing touches to Tom
Sawyer. Before the close of the same year he had already begun work on
'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' published in 1885. It is
interesting to note the use of the title the "Duke of Bilgewater" in
Huck Finn when the "Duchess of Bilgewater" had already made her
appearance in 1601. Sandwiched between his two great masterpieces Tom
Sawyer and Huck Finn the writing of 1601 was indeed a strange interlude.
During this prolific period Mark wrote many minor items most of them
rejected by Howells and read extensively in one of his favorite books
Pepys' Diary. Like many another writer Mark was captivated by Pepys'
style and spirit and "he determined" says Albert Bigelow Paine in his
'Mark Twain A Biography' "to try his hand on an imaginary record of
conversation and court manners of a bygone day written in the phrase of
the period. The result was 'Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen
Elizabeth' or as he later called it '1601'. The 'conversation'
recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period was written with all the
outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day when fireside
sociabilities were limited only to the loosened fancy vocabulary and
physical performance and not by any bounds of convention."
"It was written as a letter" continues Paine "to that robust divine
Rev. Joseph Twichell who unlike Howells had no scruples about Mark's
'Elizabethan breadth of parlance.'"
The Rev. Joseph Twichell Mark's most intimate friend for over forty
years was pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church of Hartford
which Mark facetiously called the "Church of the Holy Speculators"
because of its wealthy parishioners. Here Mark had first met "Joe" at a
social and their meeting ripened into a glorious life long friendship.
Twichell was a man of about Mark's own age a profound scholar a devout
Christian "yet a man with an exuberant sense of humor and a profound
understanding of the frailties of mankind." The Rev. Mr. Twichell
performed the marriage ceremony for Mark Twain and solemnized the births
of his children; "Joe" his friend counseled him on literary as well as
personal matters for the remainder of Mark's life. It is important to
catch this brief glimpse of the man for whom this masterpiece was
written for without it one can not fully understand the spirit in which
1601 was written or the keen enjoyment which Mark and "Joe" derived from
it.
"SAVE ME ONE."
The story of the first issue of 1601 is one of finesse state diplomacy
and surreptitious printing.
The Rev. "Joe" Twichell for whose delectation the piece had been
written apparently had pocketed the document for four long years. Then
in 1880 it came into the hands of John Hay later Secretary of State
presumably sent to him by Mark Twain. Hay pronounced the sketch a
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