Funny Letters From Famous People

by Charles Osgood

Thou hadst nought to fear from his piercing talons,

  Nor from the murdering gun

  Of the thoughtless sportsman.

  Safe in thy wired castle,

  GRIMALKIN never could annoy thee.

  Daily wert thou fed with the choicest viands,

  By the fair hand of an indulgent mistress;

  But, discontented,

  Thou wouldst have more freedom.

  Too soon, alas! Didst thou obtain it;

  And wandering,

  Thou are fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel RANGER!

  Learn hence,

  Ye who blindly seek more liberty,

  Whether subjects, sons, squirrels, or daughters,

  That apparent restraint may be the real protection;

  Yielding peace and plenty

  With security.

  You see, my dear Miss, how much more decent and proper this broken style is, than if we were to say, by way of epitaph,

  Here SKUGG

  Lies snug,

  As a bug

  In a rug.

  And yet, perhaps, there are people in the world of so little feeling as to think that this would be a good enough epitaph for poor Mungo.

  If you wish it, I shall procure another to succeed him; but perhaps you will now choose some other amusement.

  Remember me affectionately to all the good family, and believe me ever, Your affectionate friend …

  Benjamin Franklin

  Washington Irving

  THE BURDEN of reciprocal correspondence is more than some can bear, Washington Irving obviously among them. In 1828, he wrote to one Antoinette Bolviller:

  Oh! This continually accumulating debt of correspondence! It grows while we sleep, and recurs as fast as we can pay it off. Would that I had the turn and taste for letter-writing of our friend the prince, to whom it seems a perfect delight; who, like an industrious spider, can sit in that little dark room and spin out a web of pleasant fancies from his own brain; or rather, to make a more gracious comparison, like a honey-bee goes humming about the world, and when he has visited every flower, returns buzz–buzz–buzz to his little hive, and works all that he has collected into a perfect honeycomb of a letter. For my part I know no greater delight than to receive letters; but the replying to them is a grievous tax upon my negligent nature. I sometimes think one of the greatest blessings we shall enjoy in heaven will be to receive letters by every post and never be obliged to reply to them.…

  With the greatest regard, your friend,

  Washington Irving

  Gustave Flaubert

  A SMITTEN WOMAN named Louise Colet showed a certain persistence in attempting to visit Gustave Flaubert. Apparently, he wasn’t interested in letting Mme. Colet down easily. In 1855, he wrote:

  Madame:

  I was told that you took the trouble to come here to see me three times last evening.

  I was not in. And, fearing lest persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in.

  Yours,

  G.F.

  Charles Dickens

  ENGLISH NOVELIST Charles Dickens usually tried his level best to be polite and considerate under any circumstances, solving tangled social problems of all sorts throughout his rather complicated life. Celebrated illustrator George Cruikshank, whose etchings and drawings grace a number of Dickens’s novels to this day, apparently invited himself along to a dinner party. Rather than discourage Cruikshank, Dickens wrote the following prudent and amusing letter to the party’s host, W. Harrison Ainsworth:

  My Dear Ainsworth,

  Cruikshank has been here to say how that he thought your dinner was last Saturday, how that he now finds it is next Saturday, and how he means to come with me and surprise you. As the surprise, however agreeable, might be too much for Mrs. Touchet, I have thought it best to send you this warning. Mind, you must assume the virtue though you have it not, and feign extravagant astonishment at the sight of the Illustrious George.

  Charles Dickens

  In 1858, Dickens got his first taste of the writings of George Eliot, who was, unbeknownst to Dickens (and most of the rest of the world), a woman. But he certainly had his suspicions:

  Dear Sir:

  I have been so strongly affected by the two first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humor and the pathos of the stories, I have never seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that I should find it very difficult to describe to you, if I had the impertinence to try.

  In addressing these few words of thankfulness to the creator of the sad fortunes of Mr. Amos Barton, and the sad love-story of Mr. Gilfil, I am (I presume) bound to adopt the name that it pleases that excellent writer to assume. I can suggest no better one; but I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seems to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.…

  Dickens wrote this letter to John Bennett, the owner of a clock repair shop:

  Gad’s Hill Place

  Higham by Rochester, Kent

  Monday night

  Fourteenth September, 1863

  My Dear Sir:

  Since my hall clock was sent to your establishment to be cleaned it has gone (as indeed it always has) perfectly well, but has struck the hours with great reluctance, and after enduring internal agonies of a most distressing nature, it has now ceased striking altogether. Though a happy release for the clock, this is not convenient to the household. If you can send down any confidential person with whom the clock can confer, I think it may have something on its works that it would be glad to make a clean breast of.

  Faithfully yours,

  Charles Dickens

  Lady Isabel Burton

  LADY ISABEL BURTON, wife of the intrepid explorer/author Sir Richard Burton, often found herself in places and situations that few other women of her station had ever endured. In a letter to her mother in 1865, she described one such situation:

  Dear Mother:

  It was fortunate that I had the foresight to take iron bedsteads along, as already at Lisbon three-inch cockroaches seethed about the floor of our room. I jumped on to a chair and Burton growled, “I suppose you think you look very pretty standing on that chair and howling at those innocent creatures.” My reaction was to stop screaming and reflect that he was right; if I had to live in a country full of such creatures, and worse, I had better pull myself together. I got down among them, and started lashing out with a slipper. In two hours I had a bag full of ninety-seven, and had conquered my queasiness.

  Lewis Carroll

  LEWIS CARROLL (Charles Dodgson) was known as a photographer as well as a mathematician; today, of course, he is best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

  Here is a hyperbolically apologetic letter that Carroll wrote to a young friend and photographic model, Annie Rogers, in 1867:

  My dear Annie:

  This is indeed dreadful. You have no idea of the grief I am in while I write, I am obliged to use an umbrella to keep the tears from running down on to the paper. Did you come yesterday to be photographed? And were you very angry? Why wasn’t I there? Well the fact was this—I went out for a walk with Bibkins, my dear friend Bibkins—we went many miles from Oxford—fifty—a hundred, say. As we were crossing a field full of sheep, a thought crossed my mind, and I said solemnly, “Dobkins, what o’clock is it?” “Three,” said Fipkins, surprised at my manner. Tears ran down my cheeks. “It is the HOUR,” I said. “Tell me, tell me, Hopkins, what day is it?” “Why, Mond
ay, of course,” said Lupkins. “Then it is the DAY!” I groaned. I wept. I screamed. The sheep crowded round me, and rubbed their affectionate noses against mine. “Mopkins!” I said. “You are my oldest friend. Do not deceive me, Nupkins! What year is this?” “Well, I think it’s 1867,” said Pipkins. “Then it’s the YEAR!” I screamed, so loud that Tapkins fainted. It was all over: I was brought home, in a cart, attended by faithful Wopkins, in several pieces.

  When I have recovered a little from the shock, and have been to the seaside for a few months, I will call and arrange another day for photographing. I am too weak to write this myself, so Zupkins is writing it for me.

  Your miserable friend,

  Lewis Carroll

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

  AUTHOR, PHYSICIAN, and father of the famous twentieth-century jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was clear about matters for which he had a healthy dislike, as this highly specific letter to the Reverend James Freeman Clarke amply and humorously demonstrates:

  October 24, 1862

  My dear James,

  I received your circular for a meeting of the “Protective War-Claim Association” last week, and now I have a new one, which I feel bound to answer.

  I go very little to society and club meetings. Some feel more of a call that way, others less; I among the least.

  I hate the calling of meetings to order. I hate the nomination of officers, always fearing lest I should be appointed secretary. I hate being placed on committees. They are always having meetings at which half are absent and the rest late. I hate being officially and necessarily in the presence of men most of whom, either from excessive zeal in the good cause or from constitutional obtuseness, are incapable of being bored, which state is to me the most exhausting of all conditions, absorbing more of my life than any kind of active exertion I am capable of performing.

  I am slow in apprehending parliamentary rules and usages, averse to the business details many persons revel in; and I am not in love with most of the actively stirring people whom one is apt to meet in all associations for doing good.

  Some trees grow very tall and straight and large in the forest close to each other, but some must stand by themselves or they won’t grow at all.… I have

  [long] recognized an inaptitude, not to say ineptitude, belonging to me in connection with all such proceedings.

  “What if everybody talked in this way?” The Lord arranges his averages in such a way that to every one person like myself there are two or three organizing, contriving, socializing intelligences, and three or four self-sacrificing people, who have forgotten what they like and what they hate by nature, and about a dozen good indifferent folks that will take part in anything they are asked to.

  Horace Greeley

  THE FAMED nineteenth-century journalist Horace Greeley was beset by financial woes for many years. While he was editor of the New York Tribune, which he funded, he received many begging letters. Here’s a typical example:

  Dear Sir:

  In your extensive correspondence you have undoubtedly secured several autographs of the late distinguished American poet, Edgar A. Poe. If so, will you please favor me with one, and oblige.

  Yours respectfully,

  A.B.

  Greeley shot off the following response:

  Dear Sir:

  I happen to have in my possession but one autograph of the late distinguished American poet Edgar A. Poe. It consists of an I.O.U., with my name on the back of it. It cost me just $51.50, and you can have it for half price.

  Yours,

  Horace Greeley

  Mark Twain

  SAMUEL L. CLEMENS (better known as Mark Twain) penned this drolly disgruntled letter of complaint to the gas and electric company in Hartford, Connecticut. Twain suffered the incompetence of others with hilarious aplomb. This letter, by the way, was never mailed.

  Gentlemen,

  There are but two places in our whole street where lights could be of any value, by any accident, and you have measured and appointed your intervals so ingeniously as to leave each of those places in the centre of a couple of hundred yards of solid darkness. When I noticed that you were setting one of your lights in such a way that I could almost see how to get into my gate at night, I suspected that it was a piece of carelessness on the part of the workmen, and would be corrected as soon as you should go around inspecting and find it out. My judgment was right; it is always right, when you are concerned. For fifteen years, in spite of my prayers and tears, you persistently kept a gas lamp exactly half way between my gates; and then furnished such execrable gas that I had to hang a danger signal on the lamp post to keep teams from running into it, nights. Now I suppose your present idea is to leave us a little more in the dark.

  Don’t mind us—out our way; we possess but one vote apiece, and no rights which you are in any way bound to respect. Please take your electric light and go to—but never mind, it is not for me to suggest; you will probably find the way; and anyway you can reasonably count on divine assistance if you lose your bearings.

  S. L. Clemens

  But here’s a letter Twain did send to the local gas company in Hartford when, in the middle of winter, they shut off his service without any notification:

  February 12, 1891

  Dear Sirs:

  Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone?

  Ys

  S. L. Clemens

  At the height of his career, Twain received a request from the director of a theater company who wanted to dramatize Tom Sawyer. The director requested Clemens’s permission to use the name “Mark Twain” in announcing the production and concluded his letter by offering the author a free ticket to the performance.

  Clemens replied with scathing wit, although again he never actually mailed the letter:

  Hartford

  September 8, ’87

  Dear Sir,

  And so it has got around to you, at last; and you also have “taken the liberty.” You are No. 1365. When 1364 sweeter and better people, including the author, have tried to dramatize Tom Sawyer and did not arrive, what sort of show do you suppose you stand? That is a book, dear Sir, which cannot be dramatized. One might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air.…

  … I have seen Tom Sawyer’s remains in all the different kinds of dramatic shrouds there are. You cannot start anything fresh. Are you serious when you propose to pay my expence—if that is the Susquehannian way of spelling it? And can you be aware that I charge a hundred dollars a mile when I travel for pleasure. Do you realize that it is 432 miles to Susquehanna? Would it be handy for you to send me the $43,200 first, so I could be counting it as I come along; because railroading is pretty dreary to a sensitive nature when there’s nothing sordid to buck at for Zeitvertreib.

  Now as I understand it, dear and magnanimous 1365, you are going to recreate Tom Sawyer dramatically, and then do me the compliment to put me in the bills as father of this shady offspring? Sir, do you know that this kind of compliment has destroyed people before now? Listen.

  Twenty-four years ago, I was strangely handsome. The remains of it are still visible through the rifts of time. I was so handsome that human activities ceased as if spellbound when I came in view, and even inanimate objects stopped to look—like locomotives, and district messenger boys and so-on. In San Francisco, in rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather. Upon one occasion I was traveling in the Sonora region, and stopped for an hour’s nooning, to rest my horse and myself. All the town came out for a look. A Piute squaw named her baby after me,—a voluntary compliment which pleased me
greatly.

  Other attentions were paid me. Last of all arrived the president and faculty of Sonora University and offered me the post of Professor of Moral Culture and Dogmatic Humanities; which I accepted gratefully, and entered at once upon my duties. But my name had pleased the Indians, and in the deadly kindness of their hearts they went on naming their babies after me. I tried to stop it, but the Indians could not understand why I should object to so manifest a compliment. The thing grew and grew and spread and spread and became exceedingly embarrassing. The University stood it a couple of years; but then for the sake of the college they felt obliged to call a halt, although I had the sympathy of the whole faculty.

  The president himself said to me, “I am sorry as I can be for you, and would still hold out if there were any hope ahead; but you see how it is: there are a hundred and thirty-two of them already, and fourteen precincts to hear from. The circumstance has brought your name into most wide and unfortunate renown. It causes much comment—I believe that is not an overstatement. Some of this comment is palliative, but some of it—by patrons at a distance, who only know the statistics without the explanation,—is offensive, and in some cases even violent. Nine students have been called home. The trustees of the college have been growing more and more uneasy all these last months—steadily along with the implacable increase in your census—and I will not conceal from you that more than once they have touched upon the expediency of a change in the Professorship of Moral Culture. The coarsely sarcastic editorial in yesterday’s Alta,—headed Give the Moral Acrobat a Rest—has brought things to a crisis, and I am charged with the unpleasant duty of receiving your resignation.”

  I know you only mean me a kindness, dear 1365, but it is a most deadly mistake. Please do not name your Injun for me.