George Horatio Derby's "Musical Review Extraordinary," or, Felicien David in the New World

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century no writer enjoyed greater popularity with the American public than George Horatio Derby. His readership was remarkably broad: General Ulysses S. Grant, hardly a noted lover of books, once quoted Derby's work in an army dispatch of 1864.1 Yet Derby published little. Only one book, Phoenixiana (1856), appeared during his lifetime, and, although The Squibob Papers followed four years after his death, it is on Phoenixiana that his reputation was based. Eleven editions appeared during the first year of issue alone. Today Derby is all but forgotten. He is often accorded some space in anthologies of American humor, and generally referred to as a precursor of and influence on Mark Twain. But Derby's wit has lost little of its bite, and the originality of his temperament remains fascinating to this day. Derby was born into a distinguished and once wealthy New England family in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1823. His unusual character asserted itself early. At the age of twelve he was expelled from a Boston boarding school for what the priggish headmaster described as Derby's native relish for sin.2 In 1842 Derby entered West Point, where his sense of humor and fondness for practical jokes soon made his reputation. Military discipline and the strictness of the Academy were never able to subdue his spirits. On one occasion, when requested to write an essay about the greatest of virtues, Derby selected Impudence, asserting that it got a man farthest.3 Despite such pranks, in 1846 Derby graduated seventh in his class of fifty-nine (which included George B. McClellan and Stonewall Jackson), and was assigned to