CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
Charles Dudley Warner’s literary fame today rests almost entirely on his collaboration with Mark Twain on the novel The Gilded Age (1873). In his own lifetime, Warner was highly respected as a critic and essayist, and only to a lesser degree as a writer of fiction. That said, the highlight of his career came near the end of his life with the production of a trilogy of novels, A Little Journey in the World (1889), The Golden House (1894), and That Fortune (1899), which trace the economic rise and fall of an American everyman.
Warner was born the son of Sylvia Hitchcock and Justus Warner on a farm near Plainfield, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1829. He enjoyed a simple and relatively tranquil early childhood. But at the age of five his father died, and despite his mother’s attempts to keep the family together Warner was sent off three years later to live with a relative in the neighboring town of Charlemont, Massachusetts. By the time Warner had turned twelve, he was reunited with his mother and they, along with Warner’s younger brother, moved to Cazenovia, New York, to live with an uncle on his mother’s side. Soon after, Warner was enrolled in the nearby Oneida Conference Seminary, a renowned Methodist preparatory school. In 1848 he was admitted to Hamilton College as a sophomore and graduated three years later.
After taking employment performing various odd jobs in a bookstore and as a printer, in 1853 Warner joined a railroad surveying expedition to Missouri. Warner had suffered from poor health since childhood and his doctors recommended “outdoor life” as a tonic. After two years out west Warner’s physical condition greatly improved and he returned east in 1855, moved in with an uncle, and prepared to study law. In 1856 he married Susan Lee of New York City, a former classmate at the Methodist seminary. The young couple lived with a friend while Warner studied law at the University of Pennsylvania, taking his LL.B. in 1858. The Warners moved to Chicago for two years, where Charles formed a law practice with a friend. In 1860 Warner moved his family back east to accept the lucrative and influential position of associate editor of the Hartford Evening Press, which in 1867 would merge with the Hartford Courant. Warner assumed full editorial responsibilities for the paper in 1861 after its chief editor joined the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Once in Hartford, Warner became a close acquaintance of several prominent nineteenth-century American literary figures, including Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. As a neighbor of Twain’s in the city’s Nook Farm Community, their two families grew especially close, and it was through this relationship that the idea for a collaborative novel was born. But The Gilded Age was not Warner’s first book. Three years prior, he collected a number of agricultural essays he had written for the Courant in a volume titled My Summer in a Garden (1870). His second book, Saunterings (1872), is an account of his yearlong travels through Europe in 1868.
Warner’s next collection of essays, Backlog Studies (1873), consisted of articles he had published in Scribner’s Magazine. This book perhaps best represents the brand of social and literary criticism Warner would become known for in the late nineteenth century. The topics he covers in this volume include the breakdown of the family, the blurring of cultural distinctions between men and women, the problem of sensational fiction, and the proper role of the literary critic. In 1881, he made perhaps his most significant contribution to literary criticism as an author in the distinguished American Men of Letters Series. Warner’s biography of Washington Irving was the first volume published in the series and it helped set a standard for the critical evaluation of American authors that would last for years.
During the 1880s and ’90s Warner traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe and documented those journeys in numerous travel books such as Our Roundabout Journey (1883); On Horseback: A Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, with Notes on Travel in Mexico and California (1888); and Our Italy: Southern California (1891). Reflecting to a certain extent his growing reputation as a literary critic, Warner was invited to join the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine in 1884. Eight years later, in 1892, Warner took over the responsibility of contributing essays to the magazine’s celebrated “The Editor’s Study,” an editorial column made internationally famous by William Dean Howells in the 1880s.
Throughout his adult life Warner thought deeply and wrote sensitively about late-nineteenth-century American culture. But his attention extended far beyond a general concern for the material excesses of the “Gilded Age” that he criticized in his best fiction. He also participated actively in many of the social movements of his day, including prison reform, civic improvement, and various interests for the public good. In addition, Warner served as the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was involved in a handful of other national societies and organizations. Charles Dudley Warner died on October 20, 1900, at the age of seventy-one, at his home in Hartford.