settle down to the seat of plague

My coworker Alexandra and I couldn't stop giggling over this silly letter Henry Mercer wrote in October 1880, when he was 24 years old. We can't figure out who it was written for (it was in with his other correspondence,¹ so perhaps it was never sent?) and it took a little puzzling over before we realized it was meant to be taken as satire. Weird, eccentric, Victorian-rich-guy satire.

 

Philadelphia

October 21st, 1880

To Johnson Janitor, gender He, species unknown

Offensive wart,

It is so long since you have performed this act, never familiar to you, that I will forget my self-respect sufficiently to recall what your sense of manliness seems to forbid you to recollect.

    You first get a basin- I will not excite your fear by saying tub- get a bucket, or even a tomato can would do, one thing however I must tell you now and without regard to your family traditions- a halved coconut shell will not suit your particular case. I am sorry to say it, but it is too small. It could not hold but what it might have to hold. So lay aside all luxurious reassurance in regard to so congenially small a vessel.

    When you have borrowed all or any of the above articles, of course you understand me when I say borrowed, and you will also understand me when I express a hope that you may find a friend sufficiently degraded in his own esteem and sufficiently loathed by his fellows to venture the loan. I said friend? Of course any friend of yours would do and of course also any enemy, or any ordinary victim of justice [moderately he knows?] would not do. I warn you against such. But if you are without friends and criminals spurn? I will inform you that you need not borrow. You can find a tomato can in the back yard or around the outer walls of the state prison. Where it is I need not tell you. 

    Given there a tomato can, say. Fill it with water- yes water. Do you know what that is? If not, get your wife to see if she can recollect any information that might have escaped inadvertently from her grandmother, or the subject in her early days. Say ask your wife- don't try to recall anything from your side of the house. There is no use. If your wife forgets and there seems no hope, thinking of that nature at long intervals obliges you to do. Eliminate from what is thereby recalled to your mind, all that seems most hesitant to your senses therein and consider the result- whatever may be your [wounded?] feelings as to the matter,- an inconceivably plague-stricken edition of what I speak of- namely water.

    Given then the vessel and given water and given the vessel filled with water- now you want SOAP. You start! You shudder! Ah, I see. Of course you do not understand me. But, I say beg or steal money and buy it. Keep going to the drug stores until you reach one so low that they allow you to remain in it or perhaps where none dare kick you, you understand me when I say dare. Now they won't understand you if  you try to say SOAP. So get your wife as soon as she stops praying to God to kill her to write it. No matter what---. Don't try to tell her how to spell it, but don't carry anything spelled COPE or SOUP to the drug store or you will either get kicked or get the wrong article.

    Now you’ve got everything. I say go down in the stable. Lead out the poor horses, tie them anywhere- it is better to lose them than allow them to suffer the agony of being present. Yet stop open the doors, they will go out of their own accord. If you hear anything in the line of a second edition of the Baalam’s ass story, keep it to yourself, it will do you no good to tell it.

    Now get to work. Get what soap you can worked off on your hands and face. If you can get your shirt off, work some- well say the rest of the cake- over your chest and other parts. Keep tossing on water from the can little by little as you settle down. --- the old shirts lay them aside. You may lose money, but think of the poor starving shivering millions who would bedew you with curses and saliva if you offered out of charity to give them old shirts. There work on- harder- work on till you settle down to the seat of plague. 

    Now, will suppose you have done about ten percent of the indecent job. I will consider that you were now fit to be hung- which before you were not. Leave the stable. Don’t try to drive in the horses- they won’t go in. Throw the soap away and the water away. Destroy the tomato can. Then wait till night and at night walk out on the streets. Get under a lamp post behind a --- factory where the crowds can find everything handy when they see you.

 

1. Mercer, Henry Chapman. Letter to “Johnson Janitor,” October 21, 1880. Letter. Henry Chapman Mercer Papers, (MSC 291, Series 1, Folder 2), from the collection of the Mercer Museum Research Library.