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
90’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.”
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
