Notes: Jones’s Private Argyment
The themes of this poem, the relative claims of corn and cotton upon the attention of the farmer and the disastrous results of speculation, are treated indirectly in ‘Thar’s More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land’, and directly and with consummate art in ‘Corn’.
1. “That air same Jones” appears in ‘Thar’s More’, etc., written in 1869, in which we are told:
“And he lived pretty much by gittin’ of loans,
And his mules was nuthin’ but skin and bones,
And his hogs was flat as his corn-bread pones,
And he had ’bout a thousand acres o’ land.”
He sells his farm to Brown at a dollar and fifty cents an acre and goes to Texas. Brown improves the farm, and, after five years, is sitting down to a big dinner when Jones is discovered standing out by the fence, without wagon or mules, “fur he had left Texas afoot and cum to Georgy to see if he couldn’t git some employment.” Brown invites Jones in to dinner, but cannot refrain from the inference-drawing that names the poem. — “Which lived in Jones,” “which Jones is a county of red hills and stones” (‘Thar’s More’, etc.) in central Georgia.
13. Readers of ‘David Copperfield’ will recall Micawber’s frequent use of ‘I-O-U-’s’.
47. “Clisby’s head” refers to Mr. Joseph Clisby, then editor of the Macon (Ga.) ‘Telegraph and Messenger’, who had written editorials favoring the planting of more corn.