Charles Henry Webb

Charles Henry Webb

Charles Henry Webb (born January 24, 1834 in Rouse's Point , New York ; died May 24, 1905 in New York ) was an American inventor, writer, journalist, and publisher. He also published under the pseudonyms John Paul and Inigo .

Life

He attended school in his hometown of Rouse's Point, but moved to New York at the age of 17, eventually hired on a whaling ship and spent the next three years at sea; He made the decision to do so under the impression of reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick , as Arthur Stedman reports in the foreword of his 1892 edition of the novel. On his return in 1855, Webb found that his family had in the meantime moved to Illinois and followed them to the Midwest, where he made a name for himself as a businessman over the next few years and earned a modest income through the wheat trade, among other things. In 1860 he moved to New York again, worked as a journalist for the New York Times , for which he also reported as a war correspondent on the battlefields of the American Civil War , including the Battle of the Cross Keys . He was a frequent guest in Charles Pfaff's beer cellar, the meeting place for New York's literary bohemians.

In 1863 he moved to California and soon became one of the leading figures in the press and literature of San Francisco alongside Bret Harte . First he wrote there for the daily newspaper San Francisco Evenening Bulletin and under the pseudonym Inigo humorous articles for the magazine Golden Era . In 1864 he founded the weekly literary magazine The Californian with Harte . This sheet is important for American literary history because it printed the first stories of Mark Twain in 1864/65 , who also moved from New York to California in 1864. After his return to New York in 1866, Webb operated under his pseudonym John Paul as the editor of Twain's first short story book The Celebrated Jumping Frog, And Other Sketches (1867). Twain, however, complained after the publication that Webb had not only cheated him out of the proceeds, but also sloppily edited the edition.

As a writer, Webb distinguished himself primarily as a satirist. First he published parodies of contemporary bestsellers. In 1865, while still in San Francisco, he brought a parody of Dion Boucicault's Arrah-na-pogue to the theater stage under the title Arrah-na-Poke , and in 1867 he published Liffith Lank, or Lunacy , a novel-length parody of Charles Reades Griffith Gaunt , and In 1868 in St. Twelmo, or the Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga , he targeted the stilted scholarship of Augusta Jane Evans ' Schmonzette St. Elmo . The author traces the learned diction of the protagonist Etna Early (in Evan's original Edna Earl ) back to the fact that she swallowed an unabridged dictionary in her childhood. In various newspapers and magazines, in the 1870s again as John Paul in the New York Tribune , in the years before his death then under his real name, especially in Harper's Magazine , he published various humorous poems and prose pieces. His best-known poem to date, Dum Vivimus Vigilemus , warns urgently of the dangers of bed rest.

As an inventor, Webb emerged as a designer of calculating machines. In 1868 his patented Webb's Adder was introduced on the American market, on which one could add numbers up to the sum 999, in 1874 he also patented a method for filling rifle cartridges.

Works

• Our Friend from Victoria (Drama, 1865)
• Arrah-na-Poke (drama, 1865)
• Liffith Lank, or Lunacy (1867)
• St. Twelmo, or the Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga (1868)
• John Paul's Book: Moral and Instructive: Consisting of Travels, Tales, Poetry, and Like Fabrications (1874)
• The Wickedest Woman in New York (1875)
• Parodies, Prose, and Verse (1876)
• Sea-Weed and what we seed: my Vacation at Long Branch and Saratoga (1876)
• Vagrom Verse (1889)
• With Lead and Line along Varying Shores: A Book of Poems (1901)

literature

• BB Шилов: Чарльз Генри Вебб: сумма прописьюилов . In: ИНФОРМАЦИОННЫЕ ТЕХНОЛОГИИ. August 2006.

Web links

• Webb, Charles Henry (John Paul) (1834-) - Bibliographical collection at The Vault at Pfaff's