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Updated: May 28, 2025
Howells has called Hannibal "a loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town"; and the elder Clemens was himself a slave-owner, who silently abhorred slavery. When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son had to get his education as best he could.
He had just begun his long life-labor when Longfellow and Tennyson, Hugo and Wagner came upon the scene, and together they wrought wisely and well in that mighty seed-field which is the world! What a galaxy of intellectual gods! now all gone, returned home to High Olympus the weird land left to the Alfred Austins, the William Dean Howells and the Ian McLarens!
There is a definite though slender story interest and idea, yet since the framework of story is really for the purpose of hanging thereon the genial essayist's dissertations on life, we may decide that the book is primarily essay, the most charmingly personal, egoistic of literary forms. The essay "slightly dramatized," Mr. Howells happily characterizes it.
A brother who was there at the time and survived till the seventies told a visitor that his "Lordship was as handsome as a saint." In the lobby adjoining Byron's room are cases of autographs and photographs of distinguished visitors, such as Mr. Howells, Longfellow, Ruskin, Gladstone, King Edward VII when Prince of Wales, and so forth. Also a holograph sonnet on the monastery by Bryant.
For the venerable Howells, lavender and mignonette. For Zola, Rochefort and wet leather. For Mrs. Humphrey Ward, lilies of the valley. For Marie Corelli, tuberoses and embalming fluid. For Chambers, sachet and lip paint. For But I leave you to make your own choices. All I offer is the general idea. It has been tried in the theatre.
Then, as to public amusements, we have to look quite as closely and distrustfully at the action of the reformers as we have at the action of the kind gentlefolk who are going to give us "Daniel Deronda" and the highly entertaining works of Mr. William Deans Howells in place of the dear welcome stories that pass away the long hours.
"Well, I read 'The American, I don't remember the others." "'The American! That is by Henry James." "Is it? Well, I knew that it was by either Howells or James, I forgot which. They didn't write a book together, did they?" "Well, not that I know of. Why, the depth of your ignorance about American literature is something appalling.
This was all very well, but I said: 'A better test would be to have them write words that I dictate. "'I will ask them, she said. She seemed to listen as if to voices inaudible to me, and at last said: 'They will try it. "Again we placed the goblet of water on the clean slate under the table, and while holding it as before, I said: 'Now ask them to write the name "William Dean Howells."
Several of his poems had been kindly received and published by the Atlantic Monthly, so that the young lady from New England who screamed with surprise at seeing the Atlantic on a western table and cried, "Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?" could be met with, "There are several contributors to the Atlantic in Columbus." The several were Howells and J.J. Piatt.
William D. Howells, who during his recent residence in Boston gave much of his valuable time as a visitor for the Associated Charities, was amused one day to be told, on knocking at the door of a house where he had studiously endeavored to inspire a sense of cleanliness, that he could not come in, as the floor had just been washed and he might soil it again."
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