Friendship Album including unpublished material by 'The Long Island Farmer Poet'.

Bookseller Notes

The notes and poems here are are addressed to Serena Lambertson of Great Neck, NY - and represent her friends and acquaintances over some five years - but the album is of interest principally for five pieces (three in manuscript) by the 'Long-Island Farmer Poet', Bloodgood Haviland Cutter (1817-1906), and one by his wife Emmeline (d. 1881).Cutter was immortalised as the redoubtable Poet Lariat in Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869), after he met the author aboard the steamship Quaker City in 1867. Twain described Cutter: 'He is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses in homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his portrait at the head. These he will give to any man that comes along, whether he has anything against him or not [...]' One of these self-published poems appears here, entitled 'People will talk'. Cutter was a born self-publicist who evidently thrived on the Twain connection; in 1886 he published The Long Island Farmer's Poems, which included an autographed picture of Mark Twain and a mention of his identity as the inspiration behind Poet Lariat. The simplicity of Cutter's bucolic self-image and his undoubted eccentricity belied a savvy business sense. Cutter was indeed a farmer, but was also a prosperous landowner with extensive property in Great Neck, NY, and across Manhasset Bay, where he built a large house of some twenty rooms. His residuary estate of nearly half a million dollars was willed to the American Bible Society, and his enormous collection of books, antiques, art, travel mementoes and various other items (including 'as hot a bunch of waistcoats as ever appeared on Broadway') was sold at auction. There are five three manuscript pieces by Cutter in the present album, and one by his wife Emmeline Cutter (Nee Allen, of the wealthy Great Neck Allens), with whom he had eloped in 1840. Two of his printed poems loosely inserted.