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Henry Wheeler Shaw April 21, 1818-October 14, 1885
Birth Date: April 21, 1818 Death Date: October 14, 1885 Genre(s): HUMOR/SATIRE Table of Contents: Biographical and Critical Essay WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
Selected Books
Other
By the middle 1860s, when Mark Twain was still relatively unknown, Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings) had achieved national fame as one of the foremost literary comedians in America. He made his reputation as a coiner of clever aphorisms, a writer of familiar essays, sketches, and burlesque almanacs, and as a comic lecturer. He was a humorist, a homespun philospher, and a conscious literary artist. One of his chief strengths was originality; in such a graphic epigram as "when a feller gits a goin down hil, it dus seem as tho evry thing had bin greased for the okashun," even the deliberate misspellings fade into the background behind the compelling image. Shaw was born on 21 April 1818, in Lanesboro, Massachusetts, located in the heart of the Berkshire Hills. Young Henry was brought up in an enlightened, active family--both his paternal grandfather and father being involved in national and state politics. His formal education consisted of district schooling, college preparatory study at a private academy, and a little over a year's work at Hamilton College in 1833-1834. Shaw was a restless and questing young man, inclined to be venturesome and prankish rather than scholarly. Thus it is not surprising that he was expelled from Hamilton for climbing a lightning rod and removing the clapper from the chapel tower bell. Though Shaw left school forever, he had learned enough about life during these early years to pique his keen curiosity about a wide variety of subjects. Yielding to wanderlust, Shaw spent ten years (1835-1845) traveling and working in the Middle West and West. He even signed up for two geographical explorations in those regions. Then at age twenty-seven he returned to Lanesboro and married his childhood sweetheart, Zilpha Bradford (a descendant of William Bradford). For nine years the Shaws moved about, Shaw trying his hand at farming and supervising the mining of coal before settling in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he and Zilpha decided to raise their two daughters. In Poughkeepsie Shaw worked as auctioneer and real-estate agent and was elected to the city council in 1858. It appeared that, as he now approached middle age, he had found his niche as businessman and solid citizen. In the late 1850s, however, Shaw began writing humorous sketches for area newspapers to while away his leisure time. Using such pseudonyms as Efrem Billings, Si Sledlength, and finally Josh Billings, he found his first major success in 1864 with the quaintly written "Essa on the Muel, bi Josh Billings," a piece that employed misspellings and faulty grammar in the mode of Artemus Ward's writings. It was snapped up by a Boston newspaper and reprinted in three comic journals within a month. The way was now paved for Shaw to collect his witticisms and sketches in a book; with the help of Charles Farrar Browne (the creator of Artemus Ward), Josh Billings, Hiz Sayings was published in 1865. The book was highly successful, and "Josh Billings" was launched. Josh Billings, Hiz Sayings and Shaw's next book, Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868), both contain the aphorisms, short essays, and sketches so characteristic of Shaw's writings. The aphorisms are pithy, incisive statements conveying general truths. Written in characteristic cacography and distorted grammar, they cover every subject from beauty to boredom. They are filled with comic devices of understatement ("[I] found the ice in a slippery condition"), anticlimax ("Buty is power; but the most treacherous one i kno ov"), and antiproverbialism ("'Give me liberty, or giv me deth'--but ov the 2 I prefer the liberty"). Occasional puns and malapropisms are also present. Shaw's "afferisms" convey a sense of ease and spontaneity that belies the actual effort and time that went into their composition. He once said he worked three hours on one particular saying, just "to get it right." The imagery is sharp and original, and the sayings excel in succinctness. Walter Blair has observed that regardless of the subject, "Josh Billings showed a great gift for squeezing much lore into few words." Shaw himself averred that "ginowine proverbs ar like good kambrick needles--short, sharp, and shiny." The sayings were widely appealing to the reading populace of his time, a people nurtured in the traditions of honesty, frugality, and moral righteousness. Shaw as cracker-barrel philosopher was much in demand. The essays and sketches in Josh Billings, Hiz Sayings and Josh Billings on Ice cover a multitude of subjects; they are short (rarely more than 500 words) and seemingly artless and informal in structure. In actuality, they are usually constructed around carefully chiseled individual sentences. On the surface the essays might seem little more than series of epigrams; but a closer look reveals their true artistry, especially in unity and stylistic charm. Shaw was a well-read man, and literary models for his essays can be found in Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith: the clarity, ease, and charm with which these classic eighteenth-century authors wrote are apparent in Shaw's work. So adept is Shaw in the genre of the short essay that Walter Blair calls him "primarily an essayist." His subjects range from topics of the day, such as women's suffrage and trends in language and literature, to timeless views of types and characteristics of people and animals. Indeed, Shaw's numerous essays on animals are among his most memorable (witness "Essa on the Muel"). His method in both the human and animal essays is to single out the traits of each type, discuss them humorously, and occasionally draw a fitting moral from his observations. In the animal essays his method differs from Aesop's in that he dwells more on natural history than on moralistic fables involving animal characters and actions. Following the success of Josh Billings, Hiz Sayings, Shaw moved to New York City where in 1867 he launched his long-lived career as humor columnist on the New York Weekly. His column, variously called "The Josh Billings Papers," "Josh Billings' Spice Box," and "Josh Billings' Philosophy," consisted of a variety of material: aphorisms, essays and sketches, narratives and travel accounts, letters to correspondents, and even occasional poems and mock dramatic interludes. The material published in these columns, for which Shaw was paid $100 per installment, makes up most of the contents of his printed books, though much of it was revised before republication. Shaw's Weekly column became so popular that it continued for the remaining eighteen years of his life and was even rerun for several years posthumously. (The publishers simply did not announce Shaw's death in 1885.) Moreover, the columns were frequently pirated by other newspapers. While employed as an "Exclusive" by the Weekly, Shaw was free to continue to write books and to lecture. In 1869 he released the first installment of the soon famous Josh Billings' Farmer's Allminax, published annually until 1879. The Farmer's Allminax was his most successful literary venture, during its first year selling over 90,000 copies, the second year over 127,000, the third and fourth years over 100,000, and never less than 50,000 during the next six years. That Shaw's endeavor won such acclaim is not surprising, for he astutely capitalized on two highly popular types of almanacs at the time--the comic and the farmer's. Shaw's satiric Allminax combines the jokes, humorous tales, poems, and crude illustrations of the former with the mixture of informative and entertaining material in the latter, the result being an almanac that is both a burlesque of the typical almanac format and contents and, simultaneously, a lively jest book of Shaw's usual humorous aphorisms, essays, and miscellaneous pieces. Its burlesque touches on all the popular elements of the typical farmer's almanac: the Man of the Signs, monthly horoscopes, the farmer's calendar, weather predictions, and other odds and ends of interest to rural readers. The Allminax offers pleasant browsing even today. The burlesque of astrology is delightful, the monthly entries witty, and the humorous aphorisms among Shaw's most catching. When Shaw's original ten-year contract for the Allminax terminated in 1879, he gathered the ten issues together in the book that was his favorite: Old Probability: Perhaps Rain-Perhaps Not, the volume he referred to fondly as "My little Waif." Beginning in 1873, with Twelve Ancestrals Sighns in the Billings' Zodiac Gallery, reprinted from the Allminax for 1874, Shaw published a series of jest books--brief, inexpensive paperback volumes containing assorted humorous material from jokes and conundrums to comic drawings. This type of book was highly popular during Shaw's day, a trend encouraged by the proliferation of comic periodicals and humorous newspaper and magazine columns during the last half of the nineteenth century. The lengthiest and most diverse of his jest books are the several different volumes published as Josh Billings' Spice Box (1874 and following). Actually, much of the material in these entertaining volumes was only collected and edited by Shaw rather than written by him. Josh Billings' Trump Kards: Blue Grass Philosophy (1877) offers sixteen essays and sketches and nearly twenty pages of witty aphorisms and illustrations. A more obscure work is Josh Billings' Cook Book and Picktorial Proverbs (1880), a slender volume containing thirteen humorous recipes along with comic illustrations, aphorisms, and miscellaneous tidbits. In his preface Josh informs the public that the recipes "are the suggestions ov a man who never haz been able to cook hiz own goose just exactly right"; the reader who finds the dishes disappointing should take comfort in the thought that "they aint enny wuss than they are, and yu hav gained sumthing bi the experiment." In literary terms, Josh Billings Struggling With Things (1881) is the least interesting of the jest books, the small number of illustrated aphorisms seeming to exist primarily for the sake of the copious advertising that clutters its pages. By the time Shaw made the move to New York to write for the Weekly, he had begun to make his name as a platform funny man. Though his early attempts at lecturing were abortive, he eventually became so successful that he was sponsored by famed lecture circuit entrepreneur James Clark Redpath, who signed Shaw up as a "$100-a-night" man. For seventeen consecutive seasons Shaw was to read his lectures for as many as 100 nights a year in, as he said, "every town in Texas and California and in all the Canada towns and then down South from Baltimore across to Memphis and New Orleans." As one of Redpath's star performers, he became friends with other renowned lecturers such as Mark Twain and David Ross Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby). Shaw's lectures were usually on one of three topics--"Buty and the Beasts," "What i Kno About Hotels," and the frequently given "Milk." These were open-ended topics that allowed Shaw, in the persona of Josh Billings, much latitude. Each lecture was delivered in short, often aphoristic paragraphs. Transitions between subjects were purposely illogical and strained, a stylistic device that delighted the audience. The comic tone of a lecture was enhanced by Shaw's personal appearance, mannerisms, and carefully studied stage techniques. Tall and stoop-shouldered, Shaw had a large head and face, accentuated by long, shaggy hair and an unkempt beard. He wore solemn black suits and boots, shirts with oversized collars, and no necktie. His whole demeanor was half-serious, half-humorous, an appearance that created laughter in itself. Shaw sat to lecture, often next to a table with an untouched and unexplained pitcher of milk sitting on it. His halting delivery and superb comic timing capped off each successful performance. While Shaw was well under way with his lecturing, he published Everybody's Friend, or Josh Billings' Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (1874), a collection of most of his writings to date except the Allminax. Two years later his The Complete Comical Writings of Josh Billings appeared. Then in 1884 he began contributing aphorisms to the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine under the pseudonym Uncle Esek. So popular was "Uncle Esek's Wisdom" that the Century carried the column three years after Shaw's death. The Uncle Esek sayings differed from Shaw's usual aphorisms in that they were written in standard spelling and grammar. Shaw remained active and prosperous in his old age, until the summer of 1884 when his health began to fail. A year later he journeyed to the Pacific coast where his physicians thought the climate might prove resuscitative. But the sojourn there lasted only a few months; he died unexpectedly from apoplexy on 14 October 1885 in Monterey, California. Shaw had a broad, classical concept of humor that matched his general philosophy of life. He interpreted his comic talent as the ability to cause a "smile continually on the face of every human being on God's footstool, and this smile should ever and anon widen into a broad grin." Humor should both entertain and inform. Chaucerian in his world view, Shaw found amusement in and even pardoned the foibles of mankind. Though deep enough a thinker to ponder the failures of civilization and sometimes judge the progress of mankind with skepticism, he usually managed to override gloom with lighthearted witticisms that convinced an audience that life was worth living after all. In content, Shaw's writings are less political than those of many of his fellow literary comedians; nor did he write much fiction. Even though particular topics apropos of his times, such as women's rights and current fashions, are treated in his essays and aphorisms, his best pieces are usually those that deal with timeless, universal subjects and truths. The humor Shaw created, as Walter Blair has pointed out, is one of "phraseology rather than of character." His writings are so fresh and startling in use of imagery that Max Eastman viewed Shaw as a "poetic humorist" and went so far as to pronounce him the "father of imagism." Most of his language is in the cacography so faddish in his school and times. Early in his career Shaw resisted adoption of mis-spellings and substandard grammar until he realized these techniques would bring him popularity. He also sensed that moral apothegms phrased in unorthodox language would be more palatable than if presented unadorned and with high seriousness. The misspellings do cause some problems in reading and appreciating Shaw today; however, they also lend to the richness and quaintness of his style and combine forces with his wit to create humor. Though there were some detractors among Shaw's contemporaries, critics of his age generally praised his brand of humor and clever use of language. He was labeled "a Jacques and a Touchstone in one and the same person" and an "Aesop and Ben Franklin, condensed and abridged." At present, little is written critically about Shaw, the later twentieth century having largely relegated him to his historical place among the literary comedians. There are a few important exceptions, however; Shaw and the literary comedians have undergone recent critical reevaluation and drawn appreciative commentary in such books as Jesse Bier's The Rise and Fall of American Humor (1968); The Comic Imagination in American Literature (1973), edited by Louis D. Rubin; David B. Kesterson's Josh Billings (1973); and Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill's America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (1978). These critics and others have mainly concentrated on Shaw's brand of humor, his contributions to literary realism, and his striking use of the language. Jesse Bier rightly feels that Shaw was one of America's first comic theoreticians. Joseph Jones's enlightened view is that Shaw is far more than a cracker-barrel philosopher: he is "a rather severely self-disciplined artist."
Shaw was influenced by writers such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Burns, Goldsmith, Pope, Homer, Vergil, and Franklin. In turn he left his stamp on the likes of Mark Twain, Bill Nye, Kin Hubbard, Will Rogers, and the whole school of rural, cracker-barrel humorists. He contributed to the rise of realism in American letters with his probing critical barbs that lie beneath the surface of his humor. In all, he was a gifted man and writer who earned his place as a key figure in the development of American humor.
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