Date:  Sun, 14 Dec 1997 15:52:15 -0500
From:  Gregory {Greg} Downing <downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IS2.NYU.EDU>
Subject: Re: 'Mudville"

At 11:07 AM 12/14/97 -0500, you wrote:
>  I recently received a request from _Boston Globe_ writer Robert Smith
>for help in locating the original town Mudville (assuming it existed) that
>inspired E.L. Thayer in his poem "Casey at the Bat." I replied that the
>town is almost certainly mythical, like "Dogpatch" of the Li'l Abner comic
>strip. I quoted from Paul Dickson's baseball dictionary and also referred
>Mr. Smith to onomastics scholar Leonard Ashley.
>
>  Mr. Smith replied: "I still hold hope of finding the mythical Mudville,
>so I would appreciate you querying your learned friends [at ads-l].  E.L.
>Thayer never pinpointed the place, but he grew up in central Massachusetts
>and some in these parts are convinced it is here."
>
> A definitive answer might be available from the Massachusetts Historical
>Society (I'll check the address tomorrow)....
>
>Gerald Cohen gcohen[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]umr.edu
>

Maybe there is or maybe there isn't an original Mudville -- if there is,
it's hard to imagine this wouldn't have been written about already,
somewhere. But perhaps germane are various longstanding figurative uses of
mud, incl. "one's name is mud/Mud," which OED2 cites from as early as 1823
(which scotches that hornetookian speculation one sometimes hears, in
accordance with which the phrase derives from the name of the doctor who
treated Booth after the Lincoln assassination). OED2 mud n. meaning 3 has
some semantic analyses of the origin of "one's name is mud." OED2 mud n.
also deals with other locutions in which "mud" is used figuratively in
negative ways.

Perhaps Thayer chose a fictional name to make the poem more generic, rather
than attaching it to a particular place or team. But only research can say.
By the late-19C the Post Office was however forcing various shall-we-say
colorfully-named US localities to change to more genteel monikers. If there
was anyone who ever named a town Mudville, it may therefore be that their
onomatsic efforts wold have been undone before the time the poem was written
(1880s or 90s as I recall).

I just looked it up -- the poem was originally publd. in the Hearst
newspaper in San Fran in 1888 (he and Hearst were friends from Harvard
days). There's a very interesting brief bio of Thayer at:

http://www.clark.net/pub/cosmic/thayer.html

He graduated with high honors in Philosophy, was a fellow student of
Santayana's and a pupil of Wm James, and also edited the Harvard Lampoon.
He's known for this one poem, written when he was about 25. But no one ever
said life isn't strange....

Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu