SOURCE: "Humor," in American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, Columbia University Press, 1944, pp. 71-98.

In the following excerpt, Gohdes documents the zeal with which British readers consumed American humor writing and speculates on the source of that popularity.

So impressive is the avidity with which the English consumed the products of transatlantic wits and drolls during the period immediately following the Civil War that the historian who attempts even such a superficial survey as the present one may well be asked to assign causes for the phenomenon.

Of course no explanations of quirks in public taste are really adequate. The crocuslike flowering of British enthusiasm for Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and other American humorists of the sixties and seventies is essentially similar to the recent vogue for cross-word puzzles or for plebeian wit attributed to Confucius—something for the social-psychologists, or even the sociologists, to generalize about. The student...