It may be not uninteresting to compare Thackeray’s opinion of Willis with Willis’s impressions of Thackeray. The author of the “Book of Snobs” paid his respects twice, at least, in print to the author of “Pencillings by the Way:” once in a review of “Dashes at Life” in the “Edinburgh” for October, 1845, and again in an article “On an American Traveler,” being the sixth number of “The Proser,” contributed to the nineteenth volume of “Punch” (1850), and occasioned by Willis’s “People I have Met.” In both of these papers he quizzes Willis, though not unkindly. He laughs especially at his fashion in “Ernest Clay,” of representing the aristocratic English dames as all throwing themselves at the head of the conquering young genius who writes for the magazines.
“The great characteristic of high society in England, Mr. Willis assures us, is admiration of literary talent. As some captain of free lancers of former days elbowed his way through royal palaces with the eyes of all womankind after him, so in the present time, a man by being a famous Free Pencil may achieve a similar distinction. This truly surprising truth forms the text of almost every one of Mr. Willis’s ‘Dashes’ at English and Continental life.”
“That famous and clever N. P. Willis of former days, whose reminiscences have delighted so many of us, and in whose company one is always sure to find amusement of one sort or the other. Sometimes it is amusement at the writer’s wit and smartness, his brilliant descriptions and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits, and sometimes it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis’s own expense.… To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the duchess pass by in her carriage and gaze with much reverence on the strawberry leaves on the panels and her Grace within; whereas the odds are that the lovely duchess has had, at one time or the other, a desperate flirtation with Willis the conqueror.… He must have whole mattresses stuffed with the blonde or raven or auburn memories of England’s fairest daughters. When the female English aristocracy reads this title of ‘People I have Met,’ I can fancy the whole female peerage of Willis’s time in a shudder: and the melancholy marchioness, and the abandoned countess, and the heart-stricken baroness trembling, as each gets the volume, and asking of her guilty conscience, ‘Gracious goodness! Is the monster going to show up me?’”
Especially does he chaff Willis about his story of “Brown’s Day with the Mimpsons,” the hero of which adventure, an American who is hand in glove with noble dukes, etc., is asked home to dinner by Mimpson, a plain, blunt British merchant, whose wife snubs Mr. Brown, mistaking him for a plebeian person. The latter avenges himself by a somewhat cavalier deportment, and by obtaining, through his dear friend Lady X., a ticket to Almack’s for Mrs. M.’s companion, the pretty Miss Bellamy; while the matron herself and her haughty daughter, who are dying for a ticket, are left out in the cold. Thackeray remonstrates as follows with Mr. Brown, under whose modest mask he fancies that he sees the “features of an N. P. W. himself:”—
“There’s a rascal for you! He enters a house, is received coolly by the mistress, walks into chicken-fixings in a side room, and, not content with Mimpson’s sherry, calls for a bottle of champagne—not for a glass of champagne, but for a bottle. He catches hold of it and pours out for himself, the rogue, and for Miss Bellamy, to whom Thomas (the butler) introduces him. Come, Brown, you are a stranger and on the dinner list of most of the patricians of May Fair, but isn’t this un peu fort, my boy? If Mrs. Mimpson, who is described as a haughty lady, fourth cousin of a Scotch earl, and marrying M. for his money merely, had suspicions regarding the conduct of her husband’s friends, don’t you see that this sort of behavior on your part, my dear Brown, was not likely to do away with Mrs. M.’s little prejudices?”
In April, 1840, Mr. and Mrs. Willis sailed for America, taking with them Miss Bessie Stace, a younger sister of Mrs. Willis, who was to make them a visit at Owego. The “Corsair” had not been a success financially, and Dr. Porter had become discouraged and discontinued publication in March, transferring his subscription list to the “Albion.” Since the establishment of the paper, a year before, Willis had ceased his contributions to the New York “Mirror,” and he did not resume them until the end of 1842. But meanwhile he was not left without a market for his literary wares. Just before leaving England he had received a letter from Mr. J. Gregg Wilson, the publisher of “Brother Jonathan,” a new weekly printed in New York, with a circulation of some twenty thousand, informing him of the “Corsair’s” suspension, expressing a warm admiration for his talents, and inviting him to write the “Brother Jonathan” a weekly letter, a column in length, for which he promised to pay him at the highest current rates. To this paper Willis contributed about a year and a half, or up to September, 1841. His humorous poem, “Lady Jane,” was published in installments in the “Dollar,” the monthly edition of “Brother Jonathan.” With both of these periodicals he had a quasi editorial connection, though the real editor was Mr. H. Hastings Weld. He received similar invitations from the two monthlies, “Graham’s Magazine” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” which were paying their contributors—among whom were nearly all the principal writers in the country—prices hitherto unknown to American periodicals. Willis was paid at the rate of $50 for an article of four printed pages of the “Lady’s Book,”—less, no doubt, than a writer of equal reputation could command now, but regarded as wildly munificent in 1841. Twelve dollars a page were the regular rates of both these magazines. “The burst on author-land of Graham’s and Godey’s liberal prices,” said Willis, “was like a sunrise without a dawn.” Mr. Charles T. Congdon, in his interesting “Reminiscences of a Journalist,” says that “Mr. Willis was the first magazine writer who was tolerably well paid. At one time, about 1842, he was writing four articles monthly for four magazines, and receiving $100 each.” This means an income of $4,800 a year, but the strain required to keep up such a rate of production must tax the powers of the readiest writer, and it was no wonder if the product was of very uneven excellence. The four magazines here referred to were undoubtedly the “Mirror,” “Graham’s,” “Godey’s,” and “The Ladies’ Companion,” of which Mrs. Sigourney was for a time the editor, and to which Willis contributed in 1842 and 1843 a half dozen stories and a few “Passages from Correspondence” and “Leaves from a Table Book.” Two of these stories are not found among his collected writings: “Poyntz’s Aunt,” a Saratoga tale, which has been mentioned before, and “Fitz Powys and the Nun, or Diplomacy in High Life,” a very impossible fiction, and not worth describing. Such of the “Leaves” and “Scraps” as deserved preserving found their way into “Ephemera.” His contributions to “Godey’s” began with the January number for 1842, and continued, though with greatly diminished frequency, till January, 1850. During the first year he had an article in nearly every number, most of them stories. For “Graham’s” he began to write in January, 1843, and contributed occasionally as late as 1851. “The Marquis in Petticoats” and “Broadway; A Sketch” were published in 1843 in Epes Sargent’s short-lived magazine; “The Power of an Injured Look” in the “Gift” for 1845, an annual issued in Philadelphia. He edited another annual, the “Opal” for 1844, and wrote articles of various kinds for other periodicals. During the two years and a half from January, 1842, to June, 1844, he published, all in all, some forty stories, collected, with two or three exceptions, in “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.” Willis was at this time, beyond a doubt, the most popular, best paid, and in every way most successful magazinist that America had yet seen. He commanded the sympathy of his readers more than any other periodical writer of his day, and his reputation almost amounted to fame. Colonel Higginson tells a story, illustrating his vogue, about a solid commercial gentleman in Boston, who, finding himself by chance at some literary dinner or tea, is reported to have entered into the spirit of the occasion by saying that “he guessed Gō-ēthe was the N. P. Willis of Germany.”
Willis lived at Owego till 1842, and continued to date his letters to “Brother Jonathan,” “Graham’s,” etc., “from under a bridge.” He had expected something like £1,000 from General Stace’s estate, but it yielded him nothing. His publisher failed about this time, and his arrangement with “Brother Jonathan” coming to an end, he engaged with a Washington paper, the “National Intelligencer,” to send it fortnightly correspondence from New York. All these causes combined made it necessary for him to take up his residence in the city and to offer Glenmary for sale; which he did with a heavy heart, taking the public into his confidence, as usual, in his affecting “Letter to the Unknown Purchaser and Next Occupant of Glenmary,” first printed in “Godey’s” for December, 1842, and included in all subsequent editions of “Letters from under a Bridge.”
“I thought to have shuffled off my mortal coil tranquilly here; flitting at last in some company of my autumn leaves, or some bevy of spring blossoms, or with snow in the thaw.… In the shady depths of the small glen above you, among the wild flowers and music, the music of the brook babbling over rocky steps, is a spot sacred to love and memory. Keep it inviolate, and as much of the happiness of Glenmary as we can leave behind stay with you for recompense!”
This sacred nook—reserved from purchase—was the spot where his own hands had broken the snow and frozen earth to bury the little body of his first child, a daughter, born dead December 4, 1840. The father’s grief and disappointment found a voice in one of the most naturally and simply written of his poems, “Thoughts while making the Grave of a New-Born Child.” On June 20, 1842, a second daughter, Imogen, was born, his only surviving child by his first wife. Later in the same summer he broke up his home at Glenmary and removed to New York. For a while he “pitched his uprooted tent” in Brooklyn lodgings; then he went to housekeeping for a time, and afterwards took rooms at the Astor. When in London in 1836, Willis had accompanied his publisher, Macrone, on a visit to Dickens, then “a young paragraphist for the ‘Morning Chronicle,’” living in lodgings at Furnivall’s Inn. This visit he afterwards described in his “Ephemera,” and Forster says that he and Dickens “laughed heartily at the description, hardly a word of which is true.” Be this as it may, when Mr. and Mrs. Dickens came to America in 1842, Willis ran down to New York to be present at the “Boz” ball. He wrote to his wife at Glenmary that he had spent an afternoon in showing Mrs. Dickens the splendors of Broadway, and had danced with her at the ball, where, encountering Halleck, the two poets “slipped down about midnight to the ‘Cornucopia’ and had rum toddy and broiled oysters.” Among Willis’s private papers is a cordial letter from Dickens, dated at Niagara, April 30, 1842, regretting that he should not have time to accept his invitation to make him a visit at Owego.
A rapprochement now took place between Willis and his former associate General Morris. The “New York Mirror” of December 31, 1842, announced that, expenditures having largely exceeded receipts, the paper would henceforth be discontinued, but that a new series would begin in a few weeks. The issue of the 17th of the same month had contained two short sketches, “Imogen and Cymbeline” and “A Charming Widow of Sixty,” which were afterwards joined into one and worked up into “Poyntz’s Aunt.” These were of no importance except as being his first direct contributions to the “Mirror” since the establishment of the “Corsair,” over two years and a half before. On Saturday, April 8, 1843, the first number of the “New Mirror” was issued under the joint editorship of Morris and Willis. The latter had now entered upon an active career of journalism which lasted, with a single brief interruption, for nearly a quarter of a century, till his death in 1867. With the “New Mirror” he resumed the duties of an editor, which he had laid down when he sold out the “American Monthly” in 1831. He had been, it is true, a nominal editor of the old “New York Mirror” and of the “Corsair,” but virtually he was merely a contributor and foreign correspondent of both these papers, and had felt no real responsibility for their conduct. In the three periodicals which Morris and Willis now edited successively, the “New Mirror,” the “Evening Mirror,” and the “Home Journal,” the business management remained in the hands of the former, but the literary policy was largely shaped by Willis, and almost the entire time and energies of both partners were given to their enterprises. The office of the new journal was at No. 4 Ann Street, and its title in full ran as follows:—