ABSTRACT
No-one describing Bret Harte can resist astronomical flourishes. In 1871, London’s Daily News reported:
America has a new star. . . The East and the West contend for the reflected rays of his celebrity; cities dispute for the honour of his presence; Chicago beguiles him from San Francisco, New York snatches him from Chicago, and Boston plots deeply his abstraction from New York. His lightest moment is chronicled in every paper, and where he stops for a few days a kind of ‘Bret Harte Circular’ appears in the daily press. 1
