Barbara Schmidt recently asked several interesting questions about
"Colloquy Between a Slum Child and a Moral Mentor," first published in
Fables of Man (1972) where it was dated "Late 1860s or late 1880s," but
subsequently reprinted by Lou Budd and "provided with a date of
composition between Jan. and March 1868" in Collected Tales, Speeches, &
Essays, published by the Library of America.

I'm sure I can't answer the question about the "morgue spectator"
mentioned in the Enterprise letter she cites, but the date of "Colloquy"
and the slang are more within my reach. First, we should be clear that
the title is an assigned title--not Mark Twain's (the MS itself is
untitled). Tuckey published his text from a typescript copy made by
Dixon Wecter and cataloged by him as "Slum child and a moral mentor
colloquy." He did so because in 1972 the manuscript was still in private
hands and not accessible directly. Budd's text reproduces Tuckey's
(Fables of Man), but his date of composition comes from work on Early
Tales & Sketches, in which we planned to republish the sketch because
access to the original manuscript has since been obtained (the MS is now
at Vassar). We supplied the Library of America with the new date, which
is in fact based on the type of stationery and the ink color of the MS,
as well as the same evidence Barb cites, the letter to the Enterprise
datelined 20 January and published on 19 February 1868, wherein Mark
Twain reported his visit to a New York tenement house.

Budd glossed "shining" as "Shoe-shining" and "lush" as "Cash, money" (p.
1041). That seems about right to me. Thus "I goes to the Bowery when
shining's good and I've got the lush" means "I go to the Bowery when my
business shining shoes is good and I therefore have money to spend."
Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang is one of the few
sources to give this meaning for "lush": "Money; cash" which they say is
"Not common." (The adjective means "Prosperous; flush" according to W&F,
and may strike us as more familiar.) It seems appropriate that this
urchin's business is shoe shining. Clemens devoted a section of his Alta
letter written on 23 May 1867 and published 14 July 1867 (about seven
months earlier) to some of these New York "Boot Blacks," noting, among
other things, that they "blackguard each other in a slang that no
Christian can understand."

As for why Mark Twain was visiting the tenement in the first place, or
who accompanied him, we are still pretty much in the dark. He makes it
clear in the Enterprise letter that he was not alone. "One of the
philanthropists in our party advanced funds enough to set her up in
business again." He also says that  "We passed from the tenement house
to a mansion up town where one of our party had a call to make," but we
know nothing about who was in the party. In a letter to the Alta dated 1
February (published 3 March 1868) he says that on the next day, "the
21st of January I went with some newspaper men to see the new spectacle
at Niblo's, the 'White Fawn,' the splendid successor to the splendid
'Black Crook.'" But even if the two parties were the same, that tells us
very little about who they were.

Barb points out that Clemens was on the point of making a bargain with
the New York Herald, and asks whether one of the morgue spectators
described by Clemens in the Enterprise letter as "a man who has nothing
in life to accomplish but the spending of four hundred thousand dollars
a year" might in fact have been James Gordon Bennett, Jr. Clemens wrote
on 24 January that he "stopped in the Herald office as I came through
New York, to see the boys on the staff, & young James Gordon Bennett
asked me to write impersonally twice a week for the Herald, & said if I
would, I might have full swing, & abuse anbody & everybody I wanted to"
(Letters 2, 160). So Bennett seems a possibility unless one thinks that
he had more to do than simply spend his father's fortune. (Clemens also
knew Chase and Glen of the Herald, but they were scarcely wealthy men.)
Other possible colleagues at this time include John Russell Young and
possibly John Milton Hay, but neither one had an income approaching
$400,000 a year.

But just whom Clemens associated with in New York at this time is a
continuing and not easily solved puzzle, even when he gives us more of a
lead than these published newspaper letters do. In an Alta letter
written on 17 May 1867 and published on 16 June 1867 he devoted a long
paragraph to the Worrell sisters, San Francisco artists then performing
in New York. At one point he said the following:

"The Worrels must have done well, because I know of a fabulous offer
that was made them and they refused it. Also, that they had bought the
dwelling 209 1/2 Ninth street--so one good authority said, and another
good authority said they had only rented it--but in either case liberal
money would have to be forthcoming, because I have been in the house
often, last January, and know that to buy it or rent it either would
break me easy enough."

Somewhere in the New York directory of 1867 is a listing for the owner
or residents at 209 1/2 Ninth street, and therefore at least potentially
the answer to the question, Who was Clemens visiting in January 1867,
when he had just arrived from San Francisco and was talking with Charles
Henry Webb and Ned House about publishing the Jumping Frog book? Anyone
willing to read the directory "backwards" (looking at the addresses)
would almost certainly find something of interest.

One additional source I can think of for information of this kind are
the various gossip columns and local items columns published routinely
in New York newspapers. Clemens was considered "news" even then. Since
almost all of the extant papers are now on microfilm and therefore
borrowable, it is conceivable that we can improve our knowledge of his
associates at this crucial time in his career by a more thorough
examination of the papers. We've already combed through quite a few of
these, as well as all known memoirs of known associates. It is the
associates for whom no lead, or no lead strong enough to bear easy
fruit, is known who are the real challenge here.

A final comment on the "Slum Child" as forerunner to "Sociable Jummy."
It's worth noting for those who want to take Fishkin's argument
seriously that there are actually so many extant forerunners to
SJ--including the little boy in this sketch, and also the one in "Fitz
Smythe's Horse" and in "Conundrums for Little Christians," not to
mention the bootblacks he describes in the Alta letter mentioned
above--that it seems just about impossible to attribute the source of
Huck Finn's character and manner to Sociable Jimmy, who does not appear
until 1877. Mark Twain spent large parts of his life collecting just
such natural talkers, young and old, as models for his own efforts to
exercise "the first vurtue of a comedian, which is to do humorous things
with grave decorum and without seeming to know that they are funny"
("'Mark Twain' in the Metropolis").

Bob Hirst
Mark Twain Project