MacWhorter’s book was reviewed in The Christian Examiner 52 (March 1857), where his argument was dismissed as a ‘cobweb’. For details of the MacWhorter affair, see Catherine E. Beecher, Truth Stranger than Fiction (Boston, 1850). For more about this period in Bacon’s life, see, in addition to Hopkins: Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston, 1866); Caroline Dall, What We Really Know about Shakespeare (Boston, 1886); Bruce A. Rhonda, ed., Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (Middletown, Connecticut, 1984); and the groundbreaking work of Helen R. Deese, ‘A New England Woman’s Network: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Healey Dall, and Delia S. Bacon’, Legacy 8 (1992), pp. 77–91; as well as Deese, ed., Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman, Caroline Healey Dall (Boston, 2005). See, too: Nancy Glazener, ‘Print Culture as an Archive of Dissent: Or, Delia Bacon and the Case of the Missing Hamlet’, American Literary History 19 (2007), pp. 329–49, and Zachary Lesser, ‘Mystic Ciphers: Shakespeare and Intelligent Design: A Response to Nancy Glazener’, American Literary History 19 (2007), pp. 350–6.
THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESOLVED
Hawthorne’s Notebooks are a valuable source of information about Delia Bacon and the authorship question; see Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, 1856–1860, ed. Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis (Columbus, Ohio, 1997). So too are his letters: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Letters, 1853–1856 and The Letters, 1857–1864, both volumes edited by Thomas Woodson, James A. Rubino, L. Neal Smith and Norman Holmes Pearson (Columbus, Ohio, 1987). See too Hawthorne’s ‘Preface’ to Bacon’s The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded.
I quote Leonard Bacon’s view of America’s political roots from his A Discourse on the Early Constitutional History of Connecticut (Hartford, Conn., 1843). Also see his essay, ‘The Proper Character and Functions of American Literature’, American Biblical Repository, n.s. 3 (January 1840), as well as Hugh Davis, Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate (Baton Rouge, 1998). I am indebted to Nina Baym’s argument that ‘Bacon’s find, displacing republicanism from bourgeois Puritans to Church of England aristocrats, deprived New England Calvinism of its originary historical claim, and, indeed, struck more generally at American exceptionalism’ (‘Delia Bacon: Hawthorne’s Last Heroine’, Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 20 [1994], pp. 1–9).
For Emerson’s interest in Delia Bacon, see, in addition to Hopkins, Theodore Bacon’s Delia Bacon: A Biographical Sketch. Emerson’s high praise for Delia Bacon is quoted in Helen R. Deese, ‘Two Unpublished Emerson Letters: To George P. Putnam on Delia Bacon and to George B. Loring’, in Essex Institute Historical Collections 122 (1986). For Emerson on Shakespeare, see Sanford E. Marovitz, ‘Emerson’s Shakespeare: From Scorn to Apotheosis’, in Emerson Centenary Essays, ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale, Illinois, 1982), pp. 122–55, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Shakspeare, or the Poet’, in Representative Men: Seven Lectures, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4, introduction and notes by Wallace E. Williams, ed. Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), and The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).
For Delia Bacon’s time in England see Hopkins’s biography. Carlyle’s response is quoted in Laporte’s essay and Whitman from November Boughs, in The Works of Walt Whitman, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 2 vols (New York, 1948). Theodore Bacon quotes Carlyle’s letter to Emerson on 8 April 1854 that ‘Miss Bacon has fled away to St. Albans (the Great Bacon’s place) five or six months ago; and is there working out her Shakespeare Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all evidence from museums or archives’. Hawthorne recorded, after visiting Delia Bacon in England, that her working library was restricted to books that ‘had some reference to her Shakespearian theory’: ‘Ralegh’s History of the World, a volume of Bacon’s letters, a volume of Montaigne, and a volume of Shakespeare’s plays’ (see his English Notebooks).
For Bacon’s anonymous and landmark essay, see ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays; An Enquiry Concerning Them’, Putnam’s Monthly 7 (1856), reprinted in Americans on Shakespeare, 1776–1914, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot, 1999). For Richard Grant White, see his ‘The Bacon-Shakespeare Craze’, The Atlantic Monthly 51 (April 1883), and his Memoirs of the Life of William Shakespeare (Boston, 1865).
The story about Meigs appears in Baconiana 6, 3rd series (1908), pp. 193–4. For William Henry Smith, see his Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Letter to Lord Ellesmere (London, 1856) as well as his Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry, Touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days of Elizabeth (London, 1857). William Henry Smith was still at it in 1884, when he published a slight pamphlet, Bacon and Shakespeare. William Shakespeare: His Position as Regards the Plays, etc. (London, 1884).
Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to allay her fears about rivals in his letter of 12 May 1856. For more on this, see: John Alden, ‘Hawthorne and William Henry Smith’, Book Collector 5 (1956). Hawthorne, even more than Emerson and Carlyle before him, was fascinated by Delia Bacon; though he too didn’t believe her theory, he did more to help her see her book into print than anyone else (finding her a publisher, covering the cost of publication out of his own pocket, and even acceding to the publisher’s demand to write a preface to her book). Bacon had much to thank Hawthorne for, though in her increasing paranoia and mental instability, she eventually turned against him as well. See Robert Cantwell, ‘Hawthorne and Delia Bacon’, American Quarterly 1 (1949), pp. 343–60, and James Wallace, ‘Hawthorne and the Scribbling Woman Reconsidered’, American Literature 62 (1990), pp. 201–22.
For Delia Bacon’s alternative titles, see her letter from London of 5 July 1855 to the American publishers, Phillips and Sampson (Folger MS Y.c.64). Hawthorne’s essay, ‘Recollections of a Gifted Woman’, first appeared in Atlantic Monthly 11 (1863) and is reprinted in Americans on Shakespeare. Theodore Bacon quotes Delia Bacon’s letter to Hawthorne in October 1856 that ‘the archives of this secret philosophical society are buried somewhere, perhaps in more places than one. The evidence points very strongly this way, it points to a tomb – Lord Bacon’s tomb would throw some light on it I think.’
We know about Delia’s plans for opening Shakespeare’s tomb from Leonard Bacon’s letter to Dr George Fayrer, 8 January 1858 (Folger MS Y.c.2599, number 119). Emerson’s posthumous praise for Delia Bacon appears in a letter to Caroline Sturgis Tappan on 13 October 1857, quoted in Hopkins, who also quotes a letter that Emerson wrote not long after to Caroline Healey Dall:
’Tis very tragic to have such extraordinary abilities made unavailable by some disproportion, or by a want of somewhat which everybody else has. But if one could forget that there is a suffering woman behind it, her book, as it is, is a literary feast. More ability, and of a rare kind, goes to it, than to a score of successful works.
For Schoenbaum’s harsh judgement, see especially the 1970 edition of Shakespeare’s Lives. And for Delia Bacon, ‘The author’s apology and claim’, quoted here, see Folger MS Y. c.2599, number 311. For the international appeal of the Baconian movement, see R. W. Churchill, Shakespeare and His Betters.
MARK TWAIN
My account of Twain’s final years draws on Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain, God’s Fool (New York, 1973); William R. Macnaughton, Mark Twain’s Last Years as a Writer (Columbia, Missouri, 1979); and Karen Lystra, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years (Berkeley, 2004). See too, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols (New York, 1924); Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, ed. Michael J. Kiskis (Madison, 1990); John Lauber, The Making of Mark Twain (New York, 1985); The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York, 1959), and Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York, 1966).
On the rise of autobiography, see Mark Twain–Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872–1910, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William
M. Gibson, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1960); Robert Folkenflik, ‘Introduction: The Institution of Autobiography’, in The Culture of Autobiography, ed. Folkenflik (Stanford, 1993); Loren Glass, ‘Trademark Twain’, in American Literary History 13 (2001), pp. 671–93; and Loren Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York, 2004). Louis Kaplan, who first tried to tabulate them in A Bibliography of American Autobiographies (Madison, 1961), counted over 6,300 of them up to 1945. Also see American Autobiography 1945–1980, ed. Mary Louise Briscoe, Barbara Tobias and Lynn Z. Bloom (Madison, 1982), and Robert F. Sayre, ‘The Proper Study: Autobiographies in American Studies’, in American Quarterly 29 (1977), pp. 241–62. See too, Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (London, 1981). I quote Conrad from Some Reminiscences (London, 1912). As for Twain on autobiographical elements in his own fiction, see Michael Kiskis’s Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, which cites a letter Twain wrote to Kate Staples in 1886. Twain said as much two years later in a headnote to Mark Twain’s Library of Humor, where he observed (in the third person) that his ‘earliest book, The Innocents Abroad, was the result of his experience and observation’ and that his ‘succeeding books continue the story of his own life, with more or less fullness and exactness’, as cited in Alan Gribben’s essay, to which I am much indebted, ‘Autobiography as Property: Mark Twain and His Legend’, in The Mythologizing of Mark Twain, ed. Sara deSaussure Davis and Philip D. Beidler (University, Alabama, 1984). See too Twain’s letter to an unidentified correspondent in 1891, where he writes: ‘As the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well equipped for that trade,’ Mark Twain’s Letters, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York, 1917).
My account of the Riley adventure draws on the report of Isabel Lyon about the composition of Twain’s various works now housed at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library: ‘(Clemens), M. B. Isabel Lyon, “Holograph notes on books by S. L. Clemens”’. See too the correspondence at the Berg, ‘Clemens, S.L., A.L.S. to J. H. Riley’, 9 October 1870. An alternative version of Riley’s death appears in Twain’s correspondence with Bliss, to whom he writes on 15 May 1872 that ‘cancer has fast hold of his vitals and he can live but a little while. Nine physicians have tried their hands on him, but the cancer has beaten the lot’ (Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, ed. Hamlin Hill [Berkeley, 1967]).
For Twain’s allusions to The Tempest, see, for example, his ‘Memorable Midnight Experience’, in Mark Twain, The Complete Works (New York, 1923). And for Twain’s sense of himself as a classic, see Samuel Moffett, ‘Mark Twain: A Biographical Sketch’, McClure’s Magazine 13 (October 1899), pp. 523–9, which subsequently appeared as a preface to the Works. For Twain’s self-promotion, see, in addition to Gribben’s essay, Louis J. Budd, ‘A “Talent for Posturing”: The Achievement of Mark Twain’s Public Posturing’, in The Mythologizing of Mark Twain; Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain; and R. Kent Rasmussen and Mark Dawidziak, ‘Mark Twain on the Screen’, in A Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd (Oxford, 2005).
The best account of Helen Keller’s life can be found in Joseph P. Lash, Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy (New York, 1980). See too her memoir Midstream: My Later Life (New York, 1929). Kittredge’s review appeared in The Nation 75 (1902), pp. 268–70. While the review was published anonymously, Kittredge claimed it as his own: see James Thorpe, A Bibliography of the Writings of George Lyman Kittredge (Cambridge, Mass., 1948). Keller’s account of her growing scepticism about Shakespeare’s authorship appears in her unpublished and virtually unknown manuscript, ‘Francis Bacon’, in the Helen Keller Archives, American Foundation for the Blind, Box 223, Folder 9. Keller’s review of Greenwood’s book appeared in The Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind, as cited in Baconiana 7, 3rd series (1909), pp. 55–6. My account of Keller, Anne Sullivan Macy and John Macy’s visit to Twain at Stormfield draws heavily on the recollections of Isabel Lyon in her ‘Holograph notes on books by S. L. Clemens’, under the heading ‘Is Shakespeare Dead?’ (in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library). See William Stone Booth, Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon (Boston, 1909).
For how The Testament of Love altered biographies of Chaucer, see for example, William Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1803). See too: Walter W. Skeat, Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford, 1897), R. Allen Shoaf, ed., Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1998), and Paul Strohm, ‘Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s’, in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 83–112.
CIPHER HUNTERS
On the high hopes Baconians had for cracking the code and uncovering lost manuscripts at this time, see, for example, ‘The Goal in Sight’, Baconiana 7, 3rd series (1909), pp. 145–9, as well as New Shakespeareana 9 (1910). For a fascinating account of codes and literature, see Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore, 1997). See too, David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York, 1996).
Donnelly’s diary entry of 23 September 1882 is quoted from Martin Ridge, Ignatius Donnelly: The Portrait of a Politician (Chicago, 1962). See too, vol. 1 of Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, ed. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley, 1975), as well as vol. 3 of Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, ed. Robert Pack Browning, Michael B. Frank and Lin Salamo (Berkeley, 1979). Twain’s recollections of Donnelly’s book appear in his ‘Autobiographical Dictation, 11 January 1909’, archived in the Mark Twain Papers, University of California, Berkeley. See Ignatius Donnelly, The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (Chicago, 1888). For Donnelly’s approach to breaking the Shakespeare code, also see R. C. Churchill, Shakespeare and His Betters, as well as Donnelly’s The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone (Minneapolis, 1899). The definitive book on Shakespearean codes and ciphers is William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (New York, 1958).
Walt Whitman had first called his poem ‘Shakspere’s Cipher’; after a half-dozen or so periodicals rejected it, the poem ran in a new magazine, The Cosmopolitan (October 1887). For more on Whitman and the Shakespeare authorship question, see vol. 3 of Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (New York, 1914). See too, Whitman’s November Boughs (1888), where he writes: ‘we all know how much mythus there is in the Shakespeare question as it stands today. Beneath a few foundations of proved facts are certainly engulfed far more dim and elusive ones, of deepest importance – tantalizing and half suspected – suggesting explanations that one dare not put in plain statement,’ The Works of Walt Whitman, ed. Malcolm Cowley, vol. 2 (New York, 1948). And for Twain on Milton as the true author of Pilgrim’s Progress, see vol. 3 of Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals.
For more on Orville Ward Owen, see Friedman and Friedman, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, as well as John Michell, Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (London, 1984). I also quote from Schoenbaum’s account in Shakespeare’s Lives. The New York Public Library has a manuscript archive – the ‘Bacon Cipher Collection’, consisting of thirty boxes of material from Owen, Gallup and the Riverbank Laboratory. See Kate H. Prescott, Reminiscences of a Baconian (n.p., 1949). And for Gallup’s investigations, see Elizabeth Wells Gallup, The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon, part 3 (Detroit, 1910). Sceptics still try to decode the true meaning behind Malvolio’s lines in Act 2 of Twelfth Night; see, for example, Sundra G. Malcolm, ‘M.O.A.I. Unriddled: Anatomy of an Oxfordian Reading’, in Shakespeare Matters (Fall 2007), which takes this seriously as an Oxfordian anagram, and concludes that the anagram should read IAMO – ‘I am Oxford. (I am O).’
For Helen Keller’s frustrated efforts to see her work on Bacon into print, see her letter to Gilder, archived in the Henry E. Huntington L
ibrary, Francis Bacon Foundation/Arensberg Archive, Box 58, Folder for ‘Keller, Helen’. For his response, see R. W. Gilder to Helen Keller, 20 April 1909, American Foundation for the Blind, Helen Keller Archives, Box 210, Folder 5. And see Lash, Helen and Teacher, on her frustrated efforts to write something other than memoir. For Keller’s further correspondence on her authorship project, see Helen Keller to R. W. Gilder, 9 May 1909, American Foundation for the Blind, Helen Keller Archives, Box 210, Folder 4 (the lines about the ‘genuine data of Shakespeare’s life’ are dictated, not typed by Keller herself). See, too, Helen Keller’s letter to William Stone Booth, 23 May 1909, Helen Keller Archives, American Foundation for the Blind, Box 48, Folder 6. And for her additional recollections of Twain’s response to Booth’s ciphers, see Keller’s 1929 memoir, Midstream.
IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?
For Twain’s familiarity with Shakespeare, see Howard G. Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull: The British Connection (Bloomington, Indiana, 1970); Anthony J. Berret, Mark Twain and Shakespeare: A Cultural Legacy (Lanham, Maryland, 1993); Thomas J. Richardson, ‘Is Shakespeare Dead? Mark Twain’s Irreverent Question’, in Shakespeare and Southern Writers: A Study in Influence, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Jackson, Mississippi, 1985), pp. 63–82; Joe Falocco, ‘Is Mark Twain Dead? Samuel Clemens and the Question of Shakespearean Authorship’, The Mark Twain Annual 2 (2004), pp. 25–40; and Alan Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols (Boston, 1980). See too Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (Berkeley, 1988). And for his observation about the absence of evidence in Stratford, see vol. 1 of Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals. For Twain’s parody of Julius Caesar, see The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales and Sketches, vol. 2, 1864–1865, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley, 1981); and for his 1881 burlesque of Hamlet, see Mark Twain’s Satires and Burlesques, ed. Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley, 1967).
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