The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day.

TWAIN, Mark and Charles Dudley Warner. [Samuel L. Clemens].

$50,000.00

Item Number: 133022

Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1874.

First edition, mixed state of the only novel Clemens wrote with a collaborator and the book that gave the era it’s name in history.

Association copy, inscribed by Mark Twain on the fly-leaf, “To Mrs. P. T. Barnum with the kindest wishes of The Author Oct 1875.”

Octavo, bound in three quarter morocco, gilt titles to the spine, marbled endpapers, all edges marbled, fully illustrated from new designs by Hoppin, Stephens, Williams, White, etc., folding map. Sold by subscription only.

The volume is accompanied by an autograph letter signed by Clemens to the second wife of P.T. Barnum of 14 April [no year]: “My Dear Mrs. Barnum: My wife and I are greatly pained to learn of the decease of Mrs. Seeley whom we remember so well & so pleasantly. Words are of but little value at such a time, but still we are moved to tender our deep sympathy to you & your household in you great bereavement. Truly yours Samuel L. Clemens.”

Twain and Barnum were, by various accounts, friends, mutual admirers, and rivals. After visiting Barnum’s American Business Museum in New York City as a teenager, Twain criticized it as “one vast peanut stand” yet upon the opening of Barnum’s Hippodrome in 1875, he remarked, “I hardly know which to wonder at most…its stupendousness, or the pluck of the man who has dared to venture upon so vast an enterprise.” Clemens alluded to Barnum frequently in both his published works and private correspondence, and although he received many invitations from Barnum to dine in New York, he always declined. Barnum even proposed that the two collaborate on an anthology of “queer literature” based on letters he received from strangers hoping to join his circus, but Twain expressed little interest in the project. In 1867, Twain published “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress” , a satire of Reconstruction politics that painted Barnum as a ruthless exploiter of the performers he employed. Twain referred to the work as a “spiritual telegraph” delivered to him in advance from the “spirit world” and was certain that Barnum would never be elected to high office.

In very good condition. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. A very unique association copy.

The first major American novel to satirize the political milieu of Washington, D.C. and the wild speculation schemes that exploded across the nation in the years that followed the Civil War, The Gilded Age gave this remarkable era its name. Twain and good friend and neighbor Charles Warner borrowed the term from William Shakespeare’s King John (1595): “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily. is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Another interpretation of the title is the contrast between an ideal “Golden Age” and a less worthy “Gilded Age,” as gilding is only a thin layer of gold over baser metal, so the title now takes on a pejorative meaning as to the novel’s time, events, and people. Although more than a century has passed since its publication, the novel's satirical observations of political and social life in Washington, D.C. are still pertinent, and the work has appeared in more than 100 editions since its original publication. (BAL 3359).