Mark Twain's Comments on Holmes's Autocrat

Abstract

IN THE WINTER and early spring of I869 Mark Twain and Olivia Langdon spent much of their time together, happily reading proof on Innocents Abroad and studying Holmes's The Autocrat of the Breakjast Table. Twenty-five years later Mark Twain told Holmes how much The Autocrat had meant to him and to Livy during their engagement and later: told him you and I used the Autocrat as a courting book and marked it all through, and that you keep it in the sacred green box with the love letters, and it pleased him.' Until recently nothing more was known about this copy of The Autocrat than appears in Mark Twain's statement. But a few years ago it turned up in the Estelle Doheny Collection at the St. John's Seminary, Camarillo, California.' The question arises at once, Was this Mark Twain's introduction to Holmes's prose? We know from his own statement3 that, while in the Sandwich Islands, he had read and reread Songs in Many Keys, but the date of his first acquaintance with The Autocrat cannot be definitely established. Professor Ferguson suggests that its influence can be traced as early as i86i in the Quintus Curtius Snodgrass letters: