That Permeable Boundary: The Spectre of Artemus Ward's Early Toledo Lectures Laid to Rest

In “Artemus Ward's First Lecture,” published over half a century ago, John Q. Reed contended that he had uncovered evidence in the files of the Toledo Herald and Times and the Toledo Blade of two early comic lectures that Charles Farrar Brown1 (aka Artemus Ward) delivered in Toledo, the first on 20 or 21 October 1860 and the second on 1 February 1861, well before he embarked on his wildly popular “Children in the Wood” lecture tour in November 1861.2 Subsequent Ward scholars—e.g., James C. Austin, John J. Pullen, and David E. E. Sloane—have uncritically repeated this assumption.3 As I demonstrate in this note, however, the supposed transcription of Brown's first “lecture,” printed in the Toledo Herald and Times on 24 October 1860, was actually a reprinting of a humorous local color item that Brown had previously published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer after a visit to Toledo, and the presumed notice of a second “lecture” in 1861 refers to a comic performance by an impostor well-known to Brown: an itinerant side-showman named Ward whose act sometimes incorporated squibs and jokes pirated from Brown's Artemus Ward letters—material that Ward claimed Brown had stolen from him.4In his column in the Plain Dealer on 22 October 1860, Brown reported that he had made a “flying trip” over the weekend to Toledo, where he dropped in on his old friends at the Herald and Times.4 A local item in the Herald and Times of the same date contains an account of Brown's visit to the editorial sanctum the previous Saturday: Notwithstanding the general lugubrious and sombre airs which the weather wore on Saturday morning, our sanctum was filled with sunshine by the stalking in over its threshold of the world renowned showman, Artemus Ward, Esq.The writer, most likely Norman T. Nash, offers a fond reminiscence of having visited Charley Brown in Cleveland on his first day as the new local editor of the Plain Dealer in the fall of 1857 and concludes with fulsome praises of Brown's success there as the author of the Artemus Ward letters.Because the writer conflates Brown and his literary persona Artemus Ward, this article, in combination with an editorial item published two days later, led Reed to assume that Brown had gone to Toledo for a professional engagement as “Artemus Ward the Showman.” However, the local editor's notice of Brown's visit, significantly, contains no mention of a lecture or speech of any sort; nor does the longer article published on the editorial page two days later, where editor H. T. Smith similarly regales Charley Brown as “the great Showman,” Artemus Ward: Our readers do not need to be told that the great Showman was in Toledo on Saturday last, and inaugurated the present rainy spell—for we have advised them of that fact in a previous number. “Artemus” is a genius in his way, and when he does a thing, he is apt to do it up very brown.6In an aside intended to clarify the motive for Brown's visit to the Herald and Times office, Smith provides a significant new piece of information about the murky period (1853–55) when Brown tramped through Ohio and Kentucky (and further South) as a journeyman printer after he left his position with the Carpet-Bag in Boston and before he signed on as a local editor with the Toledo Commercial: We, at that time, being chock full of patriotism and possessed of that commodity known in the profession as the insane idea of attempting to inscribe our name on the topmost niche in the temple of fame, engaged in the enterprise of publishing a paper, and “Artemus” was found to be our man to “set up” the first copy! For five months he toiled at the case steadily.7Before inviting his readers to “listen to” what he labels Artemus Ward's “discourse,” he continues to conflate Charley Brown the writer of squibs with his creation, the semiliterate showman—an ambiguity that undoubtedly contributed to Reed's misinterpretation of this item as a review of a performance. But the humorous discourse that follows—the text that Reed considered to be a transcription of Artemus Ward's inaugural lecture—turns out to be nothing more than a reprinting of Brown's report of his trip, a local color item sprinkled with a few jokes, published two days earlier in the Plain Dealer under the heading “A Flying Trip to Toledo.” The common introductory formula at the time for cited material—generally some variation of “Hear him”—in the Herald and Times editorial remarks appears to have contributed to Reed's mistaking the squib for a speech. The “discourse” in its entirety follows: Finally he had a call—not to preach—but to enlist in the “show bizness.”—He enlisted. He went in to win. He has won, and we are as much pleased with his success as he himself can be.—Now listen to his discourse about Toledo—the canal part of which explains itself:Seven years have passed away since the writer of this “piece” saw Toledo for the first time, and we mean no disrespect to that now flourishing and enlightened municipality when we state that Toledo was then rather rough. The buildings, like the ladies in some parts of Mexico, were very frail, and the streets were paveless. The sidewalks were constructed of planks, loosely thrown together, and a walk in the dark from “Rumsey's Exchange,” now the Collins house, to the post office was about as perilous an undertaking as the crossing of Niagara on a rope, after the style of Blondin.8 On rainy days, we remember, teamsters had a frightful time working their horses thro’ the mud on Summit street, and on those days we used to stuff our ears with cotton to guard against hearing their profanity, which, like the mud, was awful and deep.Morals were in a loose state. Men were shot down and cut up on the slightest provocation, and the Coroner and Undertaker were the busiest men in town. One morning the dead body of an elderly boatman was found on the bank of the Canal. The man had been stabbed in a drunken broil at a low grocery nearby.—His friends stood weeping around the body. His gentle wife, the partner of his joys and sorrows—she whose smiles had lit up his household for many years—was there too. “I'll go for the coroner,” said a kind-hearted policeman. “No,” said the bereaved widow, “I reckon a Inquest ain't necessary. The old cuss wasn't of much account!” That was her style.Toledo is located on the Maumee.—There is no doubt about that, and many scandalous stories are told about that bright shining river. They say that in old times the scum of that river was thick enough to bear up ox-teams, and that the miasma arising from that stream could be cut with a knife. Fever and ague abounded. Everyone had it.—Everybody shook at stated periods. It was a common thing for ministers to pause in their sermons and say: “My hearers, let us shake!” It is related of a citizen that he once shook himself up to Perrysburg and came back on a raft of dead mules. But the ague has disappeared from Toledo and the Maumee is comparatively free from miasmic scum.— Much as that stream has been traduced we doubt if a river of greater native beauty can be found in the West.The Wabash Canal is another celebrated Toledo “institution.” The fashionable expression of “Old Hellonthe Wabash” originated from the fact that a venerable gentleman of that name founded this great infernal improvement, by which corn is brought to Toledo and whiskey is carried to Indiana. The corn crop was a failure along the Wabash one season and there were fears of a famine. “We have no wheat,” said a Hoosier clergyman to his congregation one Sunday, “and without corn we can't have bread.” “And nary drop of whiskey,” ejaculated a brother in the congregation, groaning with anguish.As we have before intimated, Summit street was far from being a second Champs Elysees seven years ago, although today it has much of the dash and bustle that characterize Broadway. Seven years have completely revolutionized Toledo. The flimsy and uncouth wooden buildings, the architects of which must have been laboring under a mild species of delirium tremens, that lined either side of Summit street have mostly disappeared, and massive and elegant brick blocks now greet the eye in their stead. The wholesale and jobbing houses of Toledo are quite numerous, and they thrive apace. The streets rejoice in good pavements and are gas-lit. The town is alive and really wears a metropolitan air. It is fast filling up with enterprising people, and must go gaily ahead. On a recent flying visit there we saw many more strangers, now citizens of the town, than we had expected to find, but encountered old familiar faces enough to make us feel entirely at home.“How the old time comes again!”9A glance at the Plain Dealer “City Facts and Fancies” column confirms that this is a faithful reprinting of Brown's local item from two days earlier. Several arguments can be mustered to counter any suggestion that the item originated as a comic speech. For instance, Brown's Toledo item resembles other local color pieces he posted after trips he made to Pittsburgh and Wheeling earlier that year. Moreover, it seems likely that had Brown delivered this material as a lecture or speech, he would have framed it as such in his column. Note that Brown describes himself as “the writer [i.e., not the speaker] of this ‘piece.’”A few months previously, in August 1860, Brown made a week-long trip to New York City, where there is evidence that he hobnobbed with George Wilkes, editor of Spirit of the Times, and the wags of the Saturday Press. It is almost certain that he began negotiations at that time to have his Artemus Ward letters syndicated in the comic weekly Vanity Fair, a decision that rankled with Plain Dealer editor Joseph W. Gray and led to Brown's resignation in November. By late October he may even have been negotiating the editorship at Vanity Fair he accepted before the end of the year. Three weeks later, on November 10, he posted his valedictory in the Plain Dealer and signed on as an advance agent for itinerant vocal humorist Ossian E. Dodge. In light of this re-interpretation of the nature of Brown's visit to Toledo in October 1860, I suggest that Brown undertook his flying trip to Toledo in October to deliver not a comic lecture but his farewells to his large circle of Toledo colleagues and friends.The second Artemus Ward “lecture” in Toledo took place on 1 February 1861, less than a month after Brown had settled into his new editorial position at Vanity Fair.10 The Toledo Herald and Times on that date announced that “Ward's great show this evening, at the Wigwam, is the topic of conversation on the street.” An advertisement for the engagement appeared in the Toledo Blade on 30 January, which Austin transcribed as follows: Artemus Ward, The Comic ShowmanThe Queer, Quaint, and Original Genius, Will give one of his Funny Entertainments, At the Wigwam, Friday Evening, Feb. 1, 1861.His delineations will comprise an account of his visit to the members of the “Women's Rights Society,” and of two days’ stay among the “Free Lovers of Berlin Hights,” his excursional trip on the English Steamer Great Eastern, and subsequently of an interview with the Prince.Alongside of Judas Iscariot, one of the Wax Figures, will be found the largest Hog in the World—the Landlord of the Hotel of Guilford Court House, North Carolina.11The advertised delineations were all titles of Artemus Ward sketches written by Brown and previously published in the Plain Dealer. However, the final reference to the North Carolina hotel landlord serves as a red flag indicating that the handbill had nothing to do with Charles Farrar Brown.12The day after the entertainment at the Wigwam, a paragraph in J. H. A. Bone's local column in the Cleveland Herald humorously reported the scam: A fellow up in Toledo is advertising himself as the original “Artemus Ward,” and giving “delineations” that comprise “an account of his visit to the Women's Rights Society, of two days’ stay among the Free Lovers of Berlin Heights, his excursion trip on the English steamer Great Eastern,” &c.Of course that fellow wouldn't pick a pocket. (As Artemus would say “This is ironikal.”)13As early as January 1859 Brown published an exposé of this impostor, an itinerant side-showman, ventriloquist, and hustler named Thomas M. Ward, who maintained throughout his life that he was the original Artemus and the writer of Brown's squibs: On the prestige (however large or small it may be) of the Artemus Ward Letters, an itinerant vagabond named Ward, but not Artemus, is strolling through the small towns in the Northwest, giving sleight-of-hand shows. Someone in Indiana sends one of his bills. He calls himself Artemus Ward—says he writes the Ward Letters for this paper, and is the genuine individual. Our attention has been called to this person several times, but we should not have deemed him worthy of notice had not the Chicago Press and Tribune accepted him as the original A. W. We have merely to say that he never wrote a line for this paper. He is a thief and a liar.14In reading exchanges for items to reprint Brown likely saw advertisements such as the following, which Ward placed in the Chicago Press and Tribune for 25 December 1858: Look out for Fun! Ventriloquism. Artemus Ward.The Great Comic Showman; the Quaint, Queer, and Original Genius, will give one of his Popular Entertainments at the Mechanics’ Institute Hall This Evening, Dec. 24.15The epithet “the Quaint, Queer, and Original Genius” used in this advert matches the Toledo ad exactly. There can be no doubt that the entertainer at the Wigwam that evening was Thomas Ward, aka “the original Artemus Ward,” not Charles Farrar Brown. Several of Brown's friends and colleagues averred that he was well-acquainted with Ward and had even named his showman character after him. Brown's colleague at the Plain Dealer, N. A. “Deacon” Gray, described the “birth” of the character Artemus Ward as follows: [O]n a slow news day in January 1858 Brown indicated that he intended to “get up a letter as from a wandering illiterate ‘cuss’ showman, whose whole establishment would cost about $13.42 all told. I have seen just such a chap named Ward up in Lucas County, so that my letter will come closer to being “founded on fact.”16In 1881 Don Carlos Seitz recounted an interview with Dr. William P. Shattuck, conducted during a visit to the Brown home in Waterford, Maine. Brown had told Shattuck that the origin of his nom de plume was derived fromFor reasons unknown, Seitz discounted this explanation of the source of Brown's nom de plume decades later when he finally published his biography and espoused a new derivation, from the name of a Massachusetts landowner named Artemas Ward who, with three others, was allegedly granted a slice of Waterford in 1774 to settle a debt going back to 1609 arising from Sir William Phipps's expedition against the French in Canada.In the fall of 1861 several factors finally drove Charley Brown, who apparently never spoke at an annual printers’ meeting or editorial convention during his time on the Plain Dealer,18 to take the leap onto the rostrum with a new type of lecture so unique that one Western critic characterized it as “an eel or a catfish of an entertainment: impossible to grab hold of and full of sharp points.”19 Financial straits served as the primary impetus for this decision but his biographer E. P. Hingston noted that Brown had long wanted to take credit for his own work after years of watching minstrels, side-showmen, and clowns make money off his jokes.20 On the strength of his widely disseminated comic squibs and his lecture tours throughout the States and in London, Brown has been characterized as the first celebrity humorist, first stand-up comedian, and an important influence on Mark Twain. The expectation that “Artemus Ward” (as he advertised himself) would perform in the voice and character of his famous Showman and possibly exhibit his “wax figgers” and “moral bares” was promoted in his early advertisements, and an important part of the “goak,” with the result that when a tall, unsmiling, refined-looking young man in a swallow-tail coat nervously took the stage, audiences would burst into peals of laughter before Brown ever opened his mouth. This permeable and expertly manipulated boundary between the fictional showman Artemus Ward and the entertainer Charles Farrar Browne, especially as communicated in the Herald and Times items discussed here, gave rise to Reed's notion that Brown lectured twice in Toledo long before his decision to introduce a new genre: the burlesque platform lecture.21