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