Category Archives: Charles Dudley Warner

Charles Dudley Warner

Backlog Studies – Sixth Study, Part III

Backlog Studies – Sixth Study, Part III

by Charles Dudley Warner

Sixth Study

III
Herbert returned to us in March. The Young Lady was spending the winter with us, and March, in spite of the calendar, turned out to be a winter month. It usually is in New England, and April too, for that matter. And I cannot say it is unfortunate for us. There are so many topics to be turned over and settled at our fireside that a winter of ordinary length would make little impression on the list. The fireside is, after all, a sort of private court of chancery, where nothing ever does come to a final decision. The chief effect of talk on any subject is to strengthen one’s own opinions, and, in fact, one never knows exactly what he does believe until he is warmed into conviction by the heat of attack and defence. A man left to himself drifts about like a boat on a calm lake; it is only when the wind blows that the boat goes anywhere. Continue reading Backlog Studies – Sixth Study, Part III →

Charles Dudley Warner

Backlog Studies – Third Study, Parts I, II, III, IV

Backlog Studies, Third Study

by Charles Dudley Warner

Third Study

I
Herbert said, as we sat by the fire one night, that he wished he had turned his attention to writing poetry like Tennyson’s.

The remark was not whimsical, but satirical. Tennyson is a man of talent, who happened to strike a lucky vein, which he has worked with cleverness. The adventurer with a pickaxe in Washoe may happen upon like good fortune. The world is full of poetry as the earth is of “pay-dirt;” one only needs to know how to “strike” it. An able man can make himself almost anything that he will. It is melancholy to think how many epic poets have been lost in the tea-trade, how many dramatists (though the age of the drama has passed) have wasted their genius in great mercantile and mechanical enterprises. I know a man who might have been the poet, the essayist, perhaps the critic, of this country, who chose to become a country judge, to sit day after day upon a bench in an obscure corner of the world, listening to wrangling lawyers and prevaricating witnesses, preferring to judge his fellow-men rather than enlighten them. Continue reading Backlog Studies – Third Study, Parts I, II, III, IV →

Charles Dudley Warner

Backlog Studies – Second Study, Part IV

Backlog Studies, Second Study, Part IV

by Charles Dudley Warner

Second Study

IV

The fireplace wants to be all aglow, the wind rising, the night heavy and black above, but light with sifting snow on the earth, a background of inclemency for the illumined room with its pictured walls, tables heaped with books, capacious easy-chairs and their occupants,—it needs, I say, to glow and throw its rays far through the crystal of the broad windows, in order that we may rightly appreciate the relation of the wide-jambed chimney to domestic architecture in our climate. We fell to talking about it; and, as is usual when the conversation is professedly on one subject, we wandered all around it. The young lady staying with us was roasting chestnuts in the ashes, and the frequent explosions required considerable attention. The mistress, too, sat somewhat alert, ready to rise at any instant and minister to the fancied want of this or that guest, forgetting the reposeful truth that people about a fireside will not have any wants if they are not suggested. The worst of them, if they desire anything, only want something hot, and that later in the evening. And it is an open question whether you ought to associate with people who want that. Continue reading Backlog Studies – Second Study, Part IV →

Charles Dudley Warner

Social Screaming and Dinner-Table Talk

In these two short essays, Warner discusses normal behavior at occasions that ought to be fun: a party and a dinner. However, Warner uses a formal tone and over-analyzes the situations for comedic effect. This is a technique used by comedians to this day. However, Warner wrote at a time when anthropology was a new academic discipline and numerous public societies were dedicated either to studying civilizations or trying to reform public morals and campaign for social causes. Warner’s satire is to turn this kind of analysis back on mundane, unproblematic aspects of society. Continue reading Social Screaming and Dinner-Table Talk →

Charles Dudley Warner

The Sugar Camp

Warner wrote this memoir about his childhood in poor, rural Massachusetts while living in prosperous, urban Hartford. Along with nostalgic descriptions of making maple sugar in the spring, Warner makes some comments on the commercialism of his adulthood versus the perceived innocence of his childhood before the Civil War and the era of big business that he and Mark Twain satirized in The Gilded Age. Continue reading The Sugar Camp →

Charles Dudley Warner

Calvin–A Study of Character

This essay is an extended joke. The title makes the reader think they will get a boring biography of John Calvin (1509-1564), a theologian and leader of the Protestant Reformation. Instead, this is a profile of an interesting and unusual resident of Nook Farm. Can you discover why this Calvin seems slightly different? How does Warner’s writing lead us to think Calvin is something they are not? Continue reading Calvin–A Study of Character →

Charles Dudley Warner

Backlog Studies – Introduction and Cast

Backlog Studies

by Charles Dudley Warner

Introduction and Cast of Characters

Backlog refers to the large piece of wood that supports the fire in a large fire place (and therefore lasts longest). In the beginning of the book, Warner expresses his fear that fireplaces are going out of style with the introduction of new technologies for heating homes and that the important things that happen around fireplaces are also destined to disappear, namely conversations with family and neighbors and the contemplation and reflection that fireplaces inspire. The book is a “study” or demonstration of the conversation that fireplaces inspire. Continue reading Backlog Studies – Introduction and Cast →

Charles Dudley Warner

Charles Dudley Warner – Biographical and Critical Sources

Biographical and Critical Sources

Harriet Lewis Paff, Diary entry, No Date, “What I Know About Mark Twain”, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 852.

SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 16 Apr 1873, Hartford, Conn. (UCCL 00900). In Mark Twain Project Online. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. 2007.

Trinity College Archives, Watkinson Library Manuscripts, Monday Evening Club Record, Vol. 1. Joseph H. Twichell, “Qualities of Warner’s Humor,” The Century Magazine, volume 65, no.3 (Jan. 1903), pp.378-80.

Steve Courtney, “Hartford’s Elia,” Studies in American Humor, New Series 3, No. 22, Special Issue: Literary Comedians, Literary Comedy, and Mark Twain (2010), pp. 115-127.

George Parsons Lathrop, “A Model State Capital”, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol.71, no.425 (Oct., 1885), pp.715-734.

Horst H. Kruse, “A Matter of Style: How Olivia Langdon Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner Tried to Team and to Tame the Genius of Mark Twain”, The New England Quarterly, vol.72, no.2 (June, 1999), pp.232-250.

Annie Fields, Charles Dudley Warner (New York, 1904).

Thomas R. Lounsbury, “Biographical Sketch” in Charles Dudley Warner, The Relation of Literature to Life.