‘To the five hundred and seventy-five thousands friends who have made this series of John Henry books a success beyond all dreaming, my deepest gratitude.
To the Good Fellows of the Press who have looked upon John Henry with the Eye of Understanding, and who, realizing that these books were never intended to be more than an humble form of entertainment. . .I say thank you, with all my heart.
To the Busy Little Bunch of Newspaper Knockers who have so assiduously plied hammer and harpoon since this series began, I want to say that 575,000 John Henry books were sold up to March 1st, 1906.
There is your answer, O Beloved of the Short Arm Jab!
Ponder thereon, ye Little Brothers of the Knock-Out Drops, Five Hundred and Seventy-five Thousand books sold (and mine is twelve per cent, of the gross1) while you are still drawing your little $18 per and still singing second tenor in the Anvil Chorus.2
Now O, sweet-scented Companions of the Crimp, and Brethren of the Double-Cross, ask your weazened little souls what's the use?’
Reading a recent disquisition on reviews and their sometimes injurious effects, I thought immediately of these magnificently self-confident lines, prefaced by the US humourist George Vere Hobart (1867-1926) to his book Skidoo!, published in 1906. Skidoo! was number six of a baker’s dozen books of devoted to Hobart’s New York boulevardier ‘John Henry’. Launched in 1901 he was still going strong when the series ended in 1914. And the defiant theme was recurrent, the nose thumbed, the finger of scorn displayed; only the sales figures changed: ever upwards and printed defiantly on every new half-title.
Yet for all his sales – and alongside ‘John Henry’ were plays and screenplays, poetry and several more fictional characters – Hobart remains elusive. Search and the George Vere Hobart you find is a British aristo, scion of the Earls of Buckinghamshire, who gave us Hobart, Tasmania, governed Canada and is numbered thus amid those that pass for the great and good. But did not – assuming that Hobart was no remittance man - write hugely best-selling humour books from 1898 through to the 1920s. Only when one drops the Vere and goes simply for V. does the plot offer a little greater penetrability.
Not that Hobart himself gives us much help. He simply worked, and only his obituaries offer some rare detail. He was born in Canada and aged 17 emigrated to Cumberland, Maryland to work as a telegraph operator. This transmuted (though we have no connecting trail) into writing humourous sketches for the papers and then, all listed in wikipedia, ‘musicals, librettos, novels and children’s books’. He wrote plays and many song lyrics. Maybe it was overwork that did for him but he was just 59 when a ‘general breakdown’ laid him low for good.
The John Henry series came out under the pen-name ‘Hugh McHugh’; while ‘John Henry’ himself was not the ‘steel-drivin’ man’ of folklore and ballad (perhaps Hobart’s private joke?), but was, along with his friend Bunch and his wife Clara Jane (or sometimes Peaches), an adornment of New York City’s brighter young people. Not Mrs Astor’s exclusive 400, perhaps, but by no means bereft of what our devotedly slangy hero termed baubees, feathers, mazuma, salve and simoleons among much synonymous else.
Bereft of biography, we must insert a syllable and look to bibliography. Hobart seems to have debuted in 1899 with the verse collection Many Moods and Many Meters, a collection of rhymes which sometimes strays into the gruesomely mawkish (for instance a poem entitled ‘Sweetheart of Mine’ which was widely syndicated in February 1890…but no, let us not besmirch his memory), at others into drum-pounding patriotism (casus belli: the contemporary war with Spain) and which throws in the same cod-German made so successful by ‘Hans Breitmann’ (the earlier creation of slang lexicographer and Romani specialist Charles G. Leland). In 1900 Hobart, writing as himself, also essayed two books of ‘gonversationings’ from one D. Dinkelspiel, another speaker of allegedly komisch-Deutsch3; then one that delineated the correspondence between Ikey, a Jewish drummer (i.e. travelling salesman), out selling, or more usually failing to sell his father’s products. Here, however, there is no dialect: Ikey, all modern hustler and hunting after assimilation, offers the latest slang; his father, with a foot still in the old country, opts for standard American.
Hobart also put together Eppy Grams (1904) and Idle Moments in Florida (1921), mixing topical humour, prose and verse. He looked at the lower reaches of vaudeville with Jim Hickey: A Story of the One-Night Stands (1904; the ‘stands’ are those of a touring company, not its transient lotharios) and penned such plays as What’s Your Husband Doing? (1917) and A Cure for Jealousy (1918). It was all very light though in 1914 came the glutinously preachy Experience: A Morality Play of Today, aimed at bringing Pilgrim’s Progress to New York City (complete with nightclubs, casinos and cocaine) but which even at the time must have made the cynics wince.
Cynicism, or at least a certain light-heartedness, informed his biggest hit, the John Henry stories, credited to the pseudonymous ‘Hugh McHugh’. The ever more popular series included such titles as I Need the Money (1903), Out for the Coin (1903), I’m from Missouri (1904), You Can Search Me (1905), Go To It (1908) and Boobs (1914). John Henry’s world seems to resemble a New York out-station of Wodehouse’s Drones Club, though chronology has one wondering whether the still unpublished Wodehouse might not have encountered, and drawn lessons from ‘McHugh’ on his first trips to New York c. 1902. Certainly his own Bingo Little, whose first appearance came in the short story ‘Jeeves in the Springtime’ (1921) has a good deal in common with John Henry.4
Hobart was hardly alone. For me Helen Green van Campen, was the top of the bill and I have written of her already, but among America’s many best-selling humourists of 125 years past were Clarence L. Cullen who wrote two volumes of Tales of the Ex-Tanks (i.e. ex-alcoholics, the ‘tank’, technically a cistern, being the outsize repository of alcohol that dictated their lives), W.J. Kountz with Billy Baxter’s Letters (1899), ‘Billy Burgundy’’s Toothsome Tales Told in Slang (1902) and Roy McCardell’s Conversations of a Chorus Girl (1903). (He was also a prolific screenwriter for the silents, as was his successor Anita Loos, whose 1925 hit Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was another hymn to the merry-merry.) None might have existed if memory is all they have to depend on. Even George Ade of Fables in Slang and much more, whose sales outdid even Hobart, has slipped away. Perhaps we can credit O. Henry (real name William Sydney Porter) with lasting - he occupies a category of his own - and his urban tales, such as The Four Million (1906) and The Voice of the City (1908), are studded with the language of the street.
If we cannot tell, then let us at least show. The thirteen ‘McHugh’ titles were good for 511 slang terms, of these some 174 currently stand as first recorded uses.
‘One day last week I was beating the ballast up Broadway when Pete, the Piker, declared himself in and began to chatter about cinches at the track. “Get the saw, Pete, and cut it,” I said; “it's many a long day since I've been a Patsy for the ponies. Once they stung me so hard that for months my bank account looked like a porous plaster, so I took the chloroform treatment and now you and your tips to the discards, my boy, to the discards!”
Pete isn't really a native of Dopeville5-on-the-Fence, but he likes to have people think he knows the racing game backwards. And he does - backwards. In real life he's a theatrical manager and his name on the three-sheets is Peter J. Badtime, the Human Salary Spoiler. Pete had me nailed to the corner of Broadway and 42d Street for about ten minutes when fortunately Bunch Jefferson rolled up in his new kerosene cart and I needed no second invitation to hop aboard and give Pete the happy day-day! “Whither away, Bunch?” I asked, as the Bubble began to do a Togo through the fattest streets in the town.’
It’s a style of its day, that rare creation, a slang that comes from the brownstones rather than the gutter. Orotund, even, middle-class and some of it a very different lexis to the street-level usages of John Henry’s fictional contemporary, Edward W. Townsend’s office-boy Chimmie (thus spelt) Fadden with whom there are no overlaps at all. John Henry, for instance, was at home in that still aspirational toy, the automobile (no mass-consumable Model T Ford till 1908) and Hobart helped the naming: the bubble (from automobubble, a coinage of cartoonist TAD Dorgan), benzine buggy, kerosene cart, smoke wagon and whiz wagon. Long gone, every one.
Even the New York Times raved. In a three-column review of It’s Up to You (1902, the third in the series) McHugh was credited as ‘one who has arrested and crystallized and made permanent for all time the fleeting and evanescent phrases of American life.’ The word ‘master’ was used of an author who ‘knows his English “as she is spoke”.’ His is ‘the literary sustence required by that vast throng of the American people which finds its highest enjoyment at the Casino, the New York Roof Garden and the Keith and Proctor Circuit.’ The Gray Lady, a touch de haut en bas, meant the world of musicals and vaudeville, but it is rare, then and even now, that so slangy a book is thus admired. But, as the review concluded, ‘why go on? Historical research, psychological perspicacity, and verbal grace - are all here! ‘It’s Up to You’ is one of the illuminative masterpieces of the times.’
By the end John Henry’s sales were pushing a million copies. Yet for all his bravado and vainglory who knows, let alone reads Hobart now? Time has succeeded where the Anvil Chorus failed. The knockers knocked in vain, but the bell as ever tolled. And while the slang, or some, has lasted, it has proved fickle: the content, slang’s eternal themes,6 remains but Hobart’s form might never have even been.
The books came at six bits (75¢) a pop; the answer is $431,250, of which 12% is $51,750. In purchasing terms, the contemporary dollar would be worth thirty-three of its kind today.
The real ‘Anvil Chorus’, from Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore, offers Spanish Gypsies striking their anvils at dawn and singing the praises of hard work, good wine, and Gypsy women. Hobart played a different tune, notable a pun on the sound of hammer on anvil: knocking, one of slang’s many terms for negative critique.
An example: ‘Vunce I bought vun uf dem circulation liber aries vare you pay fifty cents a day down und vun tollar a veek, und after you pay sigs tol lars a month in two years id is yours uf you can find der receipts. Der vun I bought on der distillment plan id is called Men Vot Haf Made Famousness in der Vorld.’ For me, at least, the aisles are unrolled.
But who knows. In Back To the Woods (1902) we find squattez-vous which sounds more like Angela Brazil’s British schoolgirls than Wall Street scufflers. Let us just note that Hobart and Wodehouse overlapped on 152 slang items. Make of that what you will.
Or some of them. Like Wodehouse’s Drones once more, John Henry, though appreciative of women, does not permit either gender sex.
You are, as ever, too kind. Did you know of John Henry? Slang takes me to some odd corners. To my lifelong shame, I double-checked your grandfather's clock info. I mean, come-on, FFS, surely...? But there it is, in the OED. Indelibly linked (the song) with the early ’50s when it got regular airplay on BBC request programs. That and, inter alia, 'Three Coins in the Fountain', and for me and my contemporaries, 'The Laughing Policeman' with much loud and raucous laughter instead of choruses.
Thank you, T, as ever.