The Complete Works of Artemus Ward — Part 3: Stories and Romances — Story, Setting & Ideas

Misspelling as Method

The text's orthographic eccentricities are not random errors but a deliberate comic strategy. Ward writes "presinks" for precincts, "piany" for piano, and "trowsis" for trousers. These deformations affect proper names too: the heroine is "Elizy" and the hero "Moses." The narrator's grammar is equally unreliable—"them store close" and "nor what she was before, which is onnecessary." This consistent verbal clowning creates a persona that is both naive and knowing, a showman who pretends to bungle the very art of storytelling. The effect is to deflate the pretensions of sentimental fiction: when Moses folds Elizy to his hart and calls himself "a hunkey boy," the reader is invited to see the absurdity beneath the romance.

The Digression as Structure

Ward frequently abandons his plot for extended asides. In "Pyrotechny: A Romance after the French," the story of Reuben Pettingill's failed fireworks display is interrupted by a chapter titled "Oratory in America," which recounts a condemned man being offered a last speech only to be preempted by a local politician demanding a new protective tariff. The digression has no bearing on Pettingill's rockets, but it serves the same purpose: to mock grandiosity and misplaced seriousness. The narrator's comment on grammar—"why care for grammar as long as we are good?"—is itself a digression that undermines the very medium of the story. These interruptions are not flaws but the point: the real subject is the folly of trying to tell a straight tale.

Bathetic Anticlimax

Every story in this collection builds toward a moment of expected triumph that collapses into farce. In "Pyrotechny," Pettingill's rockets refuse to ascend; they "ploughed a little furrow in the green grass" instead of becoming eagles or wheels. The crowd's reaction moves from anticipation to sarcasm to anger, and an old villager delivers the final verdict: "Reuben, I'm 'fraid you don't understand pyrotechny." This pattern recurs across the excerpts: Moses's heroic entry is undercut by his absurd trophies; the orator's grand speech is hijacked by tariff talk. Ward's punchlines are not witty one-liners but structural collapses—the story itself fails to deliver what it promised, and that failure is the joke.

Readers should approach these stories as performances rather than narratives. Ward's persona is a comic lecturer who treats plot as a nuisance; the pleasure lies in watching him swerve into tangents, mangle language, and puncture every moment of earnestness. The catalog subject "American wit and humor" fits, but the excerpts reveal a more specific target: the conventions of popular romance and adventure fiction, which Ward dismantles with gleeful incompetence.

There’s a particular ache in Artemus Ward’s deliberate misspellings—a laughing at sentiment precisely because it hurts. Reading these parodies, I kept thinking of that old Joe Miller collection, where a punchline was just a way to sit with something true a little longer. The same shy, winking warmth lives in The American Joe Miller: A Collection of Yankee Wit and Humor — Inside the Classic, as if both books share a quiet, knowing glance across a century.