1873 ALS – HUMORIST BENJAMIN P. SHILLABER, FIRST EDITOR TO MARK TWAIN, CREATOR OF “MRS. PARTINGTON”

1873 ALS – HUMORIST BENJAMIN P. SHILLABER, FIRST EDITOR TO MARK TWAIN, CREATOR OF “MRS. PARTINGTON”

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Item Code: L12056

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A characteristically witty one-line autograph letter signed "B. P. Shillaber," penned at Chelsea, Massachusetts, March 22, 1873, and addressed to the autograph collector William R. Pratt, Esq. The complete text reads:

"Chelsea, Mar. 22, 1873 / Wm. R. Pratt, Esq. / Dear Sir: Though always at peace, I was never at Concord. / Yours truly, B. P. Shillaber."

The note is a small gem of the author's humor. Replying to what was almost certainly a collector's request for a sentiment, Shillaber turns on a pun: "peace" and "concord" are synonyms, so to be "always at peace" yet "never at Concord" is a cheerful contradiction — with a wink at the famous Massachusetts town that this lifelong Bay State man professes never to have visited. It is exactly the sort of quick, good-natured wordplay that made him a household name.

Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber (1814–1890) holds a unique place in American literary history: as founding editor of the Boston humor magazine The Carpet-Bag (1851), he was the first to publish the work of a sixteen-year-old Samuel L. Clemens — the future Mark Twain — whose sketch "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter" appeared in its pages in 1852. Shillaber was himself among the most popular humorists of the nineteenth century. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he trained as a printer and rose to editorial posts at the Boston Post and Saturday Evening Gazette, where he created his celebrated comic character Mrs. Ruth Partington — an American answer to Mrs. Malaprop whose garbled wisdom is widely credited as a model for Mark Twain's Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He spent his final years in Chelsea, where this letter was written, and died there in 1890.

CONDITION: Single leaf of period blue-lined letter paper, approximately 5 x 8 inches, written in ink in a clean, legible hand with a bold, fully legible signature. Old mailing folds, light overall toning, a few scattered spots of foxing, and modest edge chipping with a small loss at the lower corner — none of it touching the text or signature. A clever, eminently displayable autograph from a major figure of American comic literature, with a direct and documented link to Mark Twain.  [ss][ph:L]

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