John T. Raymond returned home with good personal notices and prepared for a fall tour of the midwest. A reviewer from a small town paper in Wisconsin put the London failure in proper perspective:
JOHN T. RAYMOND
LA CROSSE REPUBLICAN-LEADER
November 18,1880There is nothing that will captivate the eye of a stranger in a strange land like a familiar object, be it ever so trivial. A scrap of an American newspaper picked up by an American in Egypt, would divide honors with the pyramids. The great popularity of some leading authors is due, not to the fact that their works give new range to thought, but because, in many cases, they merely range the changes on the old rules and rhythms learned in the school house, and recall to mind the degree of joy, as the index of knowledge points to its pleasure. It is an easy matter to discover why Mr. John T. Raymond and his inimitable "Col. Mulberry Sellers" were a failure among the cockneys and aristocracy of England. They were unable to recognize on that side of the Atlantic the true likeness which is produced of a character that is closely allied to the people of the West as the pompous and corpulent John Bull is to the English public. To be sure, Col. Mulberry Sellers is slightly elongated to make the hit more palpable, but of the audience that filed out of the Opera House. . . there was probably not one who gave the matter a thought, but what had selected from the realms of flesh and blood a veritable Sellers full of schemes with "millions in them."
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