The Buckeye Chronicles - Artemus Ward

a compendium of facts about Ohio history

by Dan Chabek

Artemus Ward

Early Ohio writers were, for the most part, priggish idealists with a style that was stiff, overly sentimental and prone to using lessons in morals.

But Charles Farrar Browne, a tall, thin, red-haired scribe with a long Roman nose and a drooping moustache, was an exception. Writing under the pen name of Artemus Ward, he developed a satirical approach that poked fun at his straitlaced contemporaries.

Charles Farrar Brown alias Artemus Ward circa 1864, from Sandburg, Carl Abraham Lincoln: The War Years Vol 3 Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

In his antebellum columns and letters in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he gained a reputation as a humorist and a debunker whose pun-ridden, misspelled and ungrammatical accounts made readers, including a war-worry-burdened Abe Lincoln, laugh. He also became a deadpan-comedian lecturer of renown.

Browne was born in Waterford, Maine, in 1834. He came to Ohio as an itinerant printer in the early 1850s.

He left the Plain Dealer in 1860 to work for Vanity Fair, a comic monthly. Later his letters to the London Punch magazine made him popular in England, where he died in 1867 at age 33.

Artemus Ward's Letter to Punch Magazine (1866), from the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia

The Genial Showman: Being Reminiscences of the Life of Artemus Ward by Charles Farrar Browne from Pageant of America Vol. 11 The Lure of the Frontier by Stanley Thomas Williams, Yale University Press (1928)