The Gilded Age Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61 - Han ager ikke ilde som veed at vende.

  CHAPTER 62 - Gedi kanadiben tsannawa.

  CHAPTER 63

  APPENDIX

  NOTES

  TRANSLATIONS OF CHAPTER-HEAD MOTTOES

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Colonel Sellers Feeding His Family on Expectations.

  CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

  Charles Dudley Warner’s literary fame today rests almost entirely on his collaboration with Mark Twain on the novel The Gilded Age (1873). In his own lifetime, Warner was highly respected as a critic and essayist, and only to a lesser degree as a writer of fiction. That said, the highlight of his career came near the end of his life with the production of a trilogy of novels, A Little Journey in the World (1889), The Golden House (1894), and That Fortune (1899), which trace the economic rise and fall of an American everyman.

  Warner was born the son of Sylvia Hitchcock and Justus Warner on a farm near Plainfield, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1829. He enjoyed a simple and relatively tranquil early childhood. But at the age of five his father died, and despite his mother’s attempts to keep the family together Warner was sent off three years later to live with a relative in the neighboring town of Charlemont, Massachusetts. By the time Warner had turned twelve, he was reunited with his mother and they, along with Warner’s younger brother, moved to Cazenovia, New York, to live with an uncle on his mother’s side. Soon after, Warner was enrolled in the nearby Oneida Conference Seminary, a renowned Methodist preparatory school. In 1848 he was admitted to Hamilton College as a sophomore and graduated three years later.

  After taking employment performing various odd jobs in a bookstore and as a printer, in 1853 Warner joined a railroad surveying expedition to Missouri. Warner had suffered from poor health since childhood and his doctors recommended “outdoor life” as a tonic. After two years out west Warner’s physical condition greatly improved and he returned east in 1855, moved in with an uncle, and prepared to study law. In 1856 he married Susan Lee of New York City, a former classmate at the Methodist seminary. The young couple lived with a friend while Warner studied law at the University of Pennsylvania, taking his LL.B. in 1858. The Warners moved to Chicago for two years, where Charles formed a law practice with a friend. In 1860 Warner moved his family back east to accept the lucrative and influential position of associate editor of the Hartford Evening Press, which in 1867 would merge with the Hartford Courant. Warner assumed full editorial responsibilities for the paper in 1861 after its chief editor joined the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War.

  Once in Hartford, Warner became a close acquaintance of several prominent nineteenth-century American literary figures, including Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. As a neighbor of Twain’s in the city’s Nook Farm Community, their two families grew especially close, and it was through this relationship that the idea for a collaborative novel was born. But The Gilded Age was not Warner’s first book. Three years prior, he collected a number of agricultural essays he had written for the Courant in a volume titled My Summer in a Garden (1870). His second book, Saunterings (1872), is an account of his yearlong travels through Europe in 1868.

  Warner’s next collection of essays, Backlog Studies (1873), consisted of articles he had published in Scribner’s Magazine. This book perhaps best represents the brand of social and literary criticism Warner would become known for in the late nineteenth century. The topics he covers in this volume include the breakdown of the family, the blurring of cultural distinctions between men and women, the problem of sensational fiction, and the proper role of the literary critic. In 1881, he made perhaps his most significant contribution to literary criticism as an author in the distinguished American Men of Letters Series. Warner’s biography of Washington Irving was the first volume published in the series and it helped set a standard for the critical evaluation of American authors that would last for years.

  During the 1880s and ’90s Warner traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe and documented those journeys in numerous travel books such as Our Roundabout Journey (1883); On Horseback: A Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, with Notes on Travel in Mexico and California (1888); and Our Italy: Southern California (1891). Reflecting to a certain extent his growing reputation as a literary critic, Warner was invited to join the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine in 1884. Eight years later, in 1892, Warner took over the responsibility of contributing essays to the magazine’s celebrated “The Editor’s Study,” an editorial column made internationally famous by William Dean Howells in the 1880s.

  Throughout his adult life Warner thought deeply and wrote sensitively about late-nineteenth-century American culture. But his attention extended far beyond a general concern for the material excesses of the “Gilded Age” that he criticized in his best fiction. He also participated actively in many of the social movements of his day, including prison reform, civic improvement, and various interests for the public good. In addition, Warner served as the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was involved in a handful of other national societies and organizations. Charles Dudley Warner died on October 20, 1900, at the age of seventy-one, at his home in Hartford.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS

  In this Modern Library Paperback Classic edition of The Gilded Age, the text by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, and the selected illustrations by Augustus Hoppin, Henry Louis Stephens, and True Williams are based on the first American edition, published by the American Publishing Company in 1873.

  EDITOR’S NOTE:

  For a translation of the Chinese epigraph on the facing page as well as

  translations of the chapter-head mottoes.

  PREFACE

  This book was not written for private circulation among friends
; it was not written to cheer and instruct a diseased relative of the author’s; it was not thrown off during intervals of wearing labor to amuse an idle hour. It was not written for any of these reasons, and therefore it is submitted without the usual apologies.

  It will be seen that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been the want of illustrative examples. In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed out of an ideal commonwealth.

  No apology is needed for following the learned custom of placing attractive scraps of literature at the heads of our chapters. It has been truly observed by Wagner that such headings, with their vague suggestions of the matter which is to follow them, pleasantly inflame the reader’s interest without wholly satisfying his curiosity, and we will hope that it may be found to be so in the present case.

  Our quotations are set in a vast number of tongues; this is done for the reason that very few foreign nations among whom the book will circulate can read in any language but their own; whereas we do not write for a particular class or sect or nation, but to take in the whole world.

  We do not object to criticism; and we do not expect that the critic will read the book before writing a notice of it. We do not even expect the reviewer of the book will say that he has not read it. No, we have no anticipations of anything unusual in this age of criticism. But if the Jupiter, who passes his opinion on the novel, ever happens to peruse it in some weary moment of his subsequent life, we hope that he will not be the victim of a remorse bitter but too late.

  One word more. This is—what it pretends to be—a joint production, in the conception of the story, the exposition of the characters, and in its literal composition. There is scarcely a chapter that does not bear the marks of the two writers of the book.

  S.L.C.

  C.D.W.

  INTRODUCTION

  Ron Powers

  The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day is far from the greatest novel about Washington ever written. It fails to reach the genre standard set, say, by Gore Vidal in Washington, D.C. That said, The Gilded Age is a fascinating and rewarding read: fascinating especially to lovers of its famous co-author.

  In the spring of 1873, the thirty-six-year-old Samuel Clemens was already celebrated as the journalist, humorist, and lecturer Mark Twain. Here, the reader can watch him make his first uncertain foray into the novel form, clinging to the arm of his co-writer, Charles Dudley Warner. Scarcely conscious yet of his prodigious literary gifts, Mark Twain is feeling his way toward them by instinct: he’s assembled the tools and techniques of his popular sketches, and is refitting them into the machinery of fiction. These tools—largely disdained by “literary” novelists of the time—include a richly suggestive personal memory; a near-photographic attention to endless varieties of people as they perform their labor, or professions, or varieties of scam and duplicity; and an infallible ear for the ways in which people speak—and, in their speech, reveal themselves.

  His instincts are as inspired as they are unconventional: construction of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer via these same appliances is little more than a year away, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will follow.

  This “dress rehearsal” of Mark Twain’s great fictional career is reason enough to recommend The Gilded Age. As a bonus, the novel rewards anyone curious to discover how backroom deals, sexual intrigue, and high-powered deception differed between the Washington of 130 years ago and the Washington of today. (Quick hint: not much.)

  Influential as a cultural artifact well beyond its literary merits—it supplied the nickname for the era of wealth, greed, scandal, and corruption symbolized by the figure of Boss Tweed, and it served to invent the Washington-novel genre—The Gilded Age happened almost by accident. It sprang into being out of an impulsive hearthside challenge in the Christmas season of 1872.

  On this evening, Sam and Olivia Clemens were entertaining their next-door neighbors at Nook Farm, near Hartford, Charles Warner and his wife, Susan. The after-dinner talk had turned to the novels the two women were currently reading. The menfolk could not resist needling them over the quality of their choices. One of the wives adroitly froze those literary smirks with the suggestion that perhaps the gentlemen thought they could write a better novel? A friend of Warner’s who heard the tale later wrote, “Thereupon both Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Warner began to twit Mark Twain; they made all manner of good-natured fun of [The Innocents Abroad], called it an accidental hit, and finally defying him to write another like it.” 1

  Clemens and Warner vowed to write a novel together, each man handing the manuscript back to the other when he’d completed a chapter. The two would read their work to the wives each week, and challenge them to guess which part was written by which husband. They hit on the novel’s setting almost at once, an exotic one by genteel contemporary standards: political Washington.

  They made for an odd couple of inside-the-Carriageway experts— on the surface, at least. Warner was a literary critic and writer of whimsical suburban essays and books along the lines of My Summer in a Garden. As co-owner of the Hartford Courant, he kept a close eye on the nation’s increasingly corrupt capital; what he observed outraged his reformist soul. Yet his considerable passion for social justice was muted under a rigidly Victorian syntax, which one reviewer had described as “dainty.”

  No one would ever accuse Warner’s host of being dainty. Only six years removed from his freewheeling years as a jackleg journalist in Nevada and California, Sam Clemens had fashioned a rough-and-tumble, sharply mimetic voice to deliver his biting newspaper satire. Sam Clemens’s outrage was far less constrained than his partner’s by any “polite” instinct; and it was informed by observation incalculably more intense and intimate than Warner’s or any of his contemporaries, save perhaps for Walt Whitman. In certain important ways—ways enabled by those working-journalist “tools” of his—the provincial Clemens knew Washington far more intimately than did his urbane eastern friend.

  The acute observing had begun when young Sam Clemens first hit Washington as a rustic eighteen-year-old in February 1854. This generally unknown visit was a stop in his astonishing two-thousand-mile odyssey outward from the Hannibal of his boyhood and then back to the Mississippi Valley. The rustic boy had negotiated several railroad connections, a stagecoach ride, a twenty-six-hour layover in Chicago, and a steamship voyage eastward across Lake Erie. He’d picked up printing jobs in New York and Philadelphia while touring the landmarks of those cities and writing letters about them to the home folks. These letters are astonishingly descriptive and knowledgeable—and authoritative—for a semi-schooled vagabond scarcely out of his mid-adolescence.

  On arrival in Washington, in a snowstorm, he’d made a beeline for the seat of American government. “The public buildings of Washington are all fine specimens of architecture, and would add greatly to the embellishment of a city such as New York,” he pronounced starchily, “—but here they are sadly out of place looking like so many palaces in a Hottentot village.”2 The boy found his way to the nerve center of the Capitol: the small, Victorian arena on the second floor of the North Wing.

  I passed into the Senate Chamber to see the men who give the people the benefit of their wisdom and learning for a little glory and eight dollars a day. The Senate is now composed of a different material from what it once was. Its glory hath departed. Its halls no longer echo the words of a Clay, or Webster, or Calhoun . . . the void is felt. The Senators dress very plainly as they should, and . . . do not speak unless they have something to say—and that cannot be said of the Representatives. Mr. Cass [Sen. Lewis Cass, Democrat from Michigan] is a fine looking old man; Mr. Douglas, or
“Young America” [Sen. Stephen Douglas, Democrat from Illinois] looks like a lawyer’s clerk, and Mr. Seward [Sen. William H. Seward, Whig from New York] is a slim, dark, bony individual, and looks like a respectable wind would blow him out of the country.3

  Astounding stuff ! Especially given that the writer was not a seasoned journalist, but a kid less than ten years removed from playing hooky on the Mississippi River islands off the Hannibal shoreline.

  What young Sam could not know, of course, was that the figures he described were just then wrestling with the destiny of the Union. Cass was soon to be secretary of state under President Buchanan. Douglas would become legendary as Abraham Lincoln’s rival for the presidency and in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Seward would also run for president against Lincoln, then become his wartime secretary of state and, afterward, negotiate the purchase of Alaska. On this snowy day, they were leading the debate on whether to repeal the Missouri Compromise, a debate that hastened the onset of the Civil War.

  Clemens’s next sojourn in Washington came fourteen years later. By November 1867 he was an experienced journalist who had covered the legislature in Carson City, Nevada. He soaked up the congressional/White House scene as secretary to Senator William Morris Stewart, the Nevada Republican and soon-to-be author of the Fifteenth Amendment whom Sam had known out west. He wrote newspaper correspondence and got himself acquainted with political insiders all the way up to the impeachment-bound President Andrew Johnson; he also trained his closely observing eye on the new post–Civil War Washington culture: the brisk political aides and suave operatives and “society” parasites; the shady buttonholers from railroad, timber, and mining interests; the all-too-available congressmen and senators. He jotted razor-sharp thumbnail sketches of these denizens into his notebook: “—very deep eyes, sunken unshaven cheeks, thin lips . . . whole face sunken & sharp”; “strong, unshaven face hermit—woman-hater—lives up in queer way in mountains alone . . .”; “—dismally & drearily homely, & when he smiles it is like the breaking up of a hard winter.”4 He toyed with aphorism: “Whisky taken into Com[mittee] rooms in demijohns & carried out in demagogues”; “Sherman—Hunt Indians—hadn’t lost any.”5 All of it would be there for him when it came time to start shaping his portions of The Gilded Age.