24 and 25 November 1869 • Hartford, Conn.,and Boston, Mass. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00377)
Hartford Nov. 24/69
I am perplexed—for I wonder where my darling is. She keeps writing me indefinitely about going to New York, this week, but I can’t make out what part of this week she means.1explanatory note She is a dear little—rascal. But I love her—I love her with a stronger, prouder & profounder affection every day as the time goes by. One year ago, lacking a day, my life was glorified with the gladdest surprise that had ever burst upon it—& since that moment my Livy has been all in all to me. I have now known almost ten months of restful happiness,2explanatory note a satisfied tranquillyity Ⓐemendation, a broadening charity, a more generous view of men & motives, an unaccustomed stirring within me of religious impulses, not grand and strong, it is true, but steady & hopeful—the subdued & far-off cadences of approaching music, as it were. A new, strange, beautiful life these ten months have given me; a broadening & aspiring life, a life worth ages of the desert existence that went before it. And therefore how can I help loving the noble woman who has made this paradise for me & beautified Ⓐemendationadorned it with the her enduring love & the gentle graces of her nature? I do love you, darling, with all the energy of a heart starved for love these many & many years. And its passion-torrents are left behind, its rocks & shoals are passed, its restless rivulets are united, & so, in one stately river of p Peace it holds its unvexed course to that sea whose further tides break upon the shores of Eternity.
We have had a pleasant day & a pleasant evening, child. I called at Mr Hooker’s a moment & saw him—then went over to Warner’s & visited with him & his wife an hour. She sent a world of love & loving messages to you which I ship to you in bulk to save port dues. I like her.3explanatory note
Warner soon talked himself into such a glow with the prospect of what we could do with the Courant now that I have achieved such a sudden & sweeping popularity in New England, that he forgot we had not yet come to any terms, & fell to appointing the work I should do on the paper. The same way this evening at Twichell’s, in another long private conversation. I told him I would not leave the Express unless the boys were willing, & I felt sure they would not be—& that I would not ask them to give me as much for my interest as I gave for it, for they should not say I left without benefiting them by leaving—further, by his own showing, the only Courant fifth I could get they had foolishly bought from a partner & paid $4,000 more for it than they considered it worth, in order to get rid of him, & borrowed the money to do it with; (unpaid yet—a hungry debt of $ Ⓐemendationnear $30,000).4explanatory note I said it would be paying the Express $3,000 $5,000 Ⓐemendationto let me go, & paying the Courant $29,000 for $25,000-interest to take me in—$9,000 altogether to get hold of an interest far less valuable & lucrative than my Express interest—& all I should get for it would be, the pleasure of living in Hartford among a most delightful society, & one in which you & I both would be supremely satisfied in. ⒶemendationI said if I were absolutely worth $35,000 I would pay $9,000 in a moment for the sake of getting ourselves comfortably situated, but unfortunately I wasn’t worth any such sum,. I said I would do nothing till I talked with you. He wanted me to talk with Mr. Langdon & write the result, & I said I would.5explanatory note
Three times I have met Sam Bowles, of the Springfield Republican, & notwithstanding he wrote me a note saying I must always sit at his table when in Springfield, I was ashamed to find myself calling him a in my secret heart a born & bred cur, every time. And notwithstanding my shame, I could not help comforting myself with the reflection that my judgment of men was oftener right than wrong. The other day we met him, & afterward I said, “Nasby, I never have heard anybody say a word against Sam. Bowles, & he always treats me politely, but I cannot get rid of the conviction that he is a dog”—& Nasby said a very great many people had very convincing proofs that Mr. Bowles was exactly that. Then I remembered his treatment of Richardson, a circumstance I had forgotten., since Bliss told me the other day. And now it came ab Ⓐemendationout, confidentially, from Twichell, to-night, that last June both Hawley & Warner were full of the idea of having me on the Courant, but ran to consult ⒶemendationBowles the great journalistic oracle, & he advised them not to do it—& in their simplicity they took in good faith the word of a man who had just come from California & knew what a card I was there & consequently what a trump I could make myself here.6explanatory note Livy darling I guess we couldn’t pull loose all the Buffalo anchors easily, & so we may as well give up Hartford—but my gracious, wouldn’t I like to tilt that Courant against the complacent Springfield Republican & make that journal sick? I think so.
My pet, I had to give up Mrs Perkins.7explanatory note I slopped out there in the mud today (it rained like all possessed, yesterday, but held up & did not interfere with my audience at night.)8explanatory note When I reached her house she had been gone to the city about fifteen minutes. I was very sorry, but it couldn’t be helped.
Didn’t see Alice Day—am afraid I didn’t right thoroughly want to, though maybe I might have been mistaken.
I have ordered Twichell to stand by & assist Mr. Beecher to marry us, & I told him you wanted it so.9explanatory note It’s powerful expensive, but then we’ll charge him for his board while he is there.
Bless your old heart I wish I could see you. Rather see you than anybody in the world. I would, Livy, old sweetheart. I would, indeed. Because I love you. I love you with all my heart, Livy darling.
Good-bye, & the peace of God be rest upon you now & always, darling.
Miss Olivia L. Langdon | Elmira | N. Y. St. Nicholas Hotel | New York. return address: boston lyceum Ⓐemendationbureau, no. 20 bromfield st. boston. postmarked: boston mass. nov. 25. 8.p.m. docketed by OLL: 147th
On 22 November Olivia and Jervis Langdon had gone to New York City, where they registered at the St. Nicholas Hotel. Assisted by Susan Crane, who had preceded them by a week, and by John D. F. Slee and his wife, Emma, father and daughter spent the next few days making wedding preparations and purchasing furnishings for the house in Buffalo that was to be Jervis Langdon’s wedding gift. “Mr L. & Sue will return from New York this week,” Olivia’s mother wrote Mary Mason Fairbanks on 25 November, “& next week I expect to join Livia there to remain 2 or 3 weeks” (Olivia Lewis Langdon to Fairbanks, 25 Nov 69, CtHMTH; “Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 24 Nov 69, 3; “Personal,” New York Tribune, 24 Nov 69, 5).
It was on 25 November 1868 that Olivia admitted “over & over & over again” that she loved Clemens ( L2 , 294); they became formally engaged on 4 February 1869.
John Hooker’s home at Forest and Hawthorn streets, was near Charles Dudley Warner’s, on Hawthorn. Warner’s wife, the former Susan Lee (1838?–1921), of New York City, whom he had married in 1856, was known for her warm hospitality and her talent as a pianist. She and Olivia became close friends after the Clemenses settled in Hartford (Van Why, 4, 5, 7, 42, 44–45, 51; “Nook Farm Genealogy,” 30).
The available “Courant fifth” was the share that William H. Goodrich had relinquished at the end of 1868. Goodrich returned to the paper on 31 December 1869 by purchasing, instead of his former share, the “fractional pecuniary interest” that belonged to silent partner Thomas M. Day (“Partnership Changes,” “A Card,” Hartford Courant, 1 Jan 70, 2). Before becoming co-owner of the Buffalo Express, Clemens had been interested in buying into the Courant.
Such a letter to Warner, if ever written, is not known to survive.
Clemens’s and Nasby’s encounter with Samuel Bowles must have come during the second week of November 1869, when both lecturers were in Boston. Bowles might have first met Clemens in San Francisco in August 1865, while on a trip west with Schuyler Colfax and Albert D. Richardson. (If so, his 1868 meeting with Clemens would have been their second encounter: see 22 June 69 to Bowles, n. 1click to open letter). Both Bowles and Richardson published books about the trip—Bowles’s Across the Continent (Springfield, Mass.: S. Bowles and Company, 1865) and Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1867, 1869 revised edition). Bowles, whose mistreatment of Richardson has not been explained, was well known for his abrasiveness. Wendell Phillips, for example, called him “a veteran” in the “fine art” of “abuse and insolence,” lavished from “his coward’s castle, on every true man for the last fifteen years” (Hudson, 584). Richardson’s life was about to come to a sudden end. On 25 November 1869 he was fatally wounded by Daniel McFarland, the divorced husband of his fiancée, Abby Sage McFarland, and he died a week later.
Lucy Perkins (see 12 Aug 69 to Bliss, n. 4click to open letter).
The Hartford Courant’s thoughtful review, probably written by Charles Dudley Warner, analyzed “the uncommon success with the audience” of Clemens’s 23 November lecture at Allyn Hall:
The hall has not been so crowded, on any occasion, for a long time. And the vast audience sat for over an hour in a state of positive enjoyment, in a condition of hardly suppressed “giggle” and expectancy of giggle, with now and then a burst of hearty, unrestrained laughter. The laughter was never forced; people laughed because they could not help it. And what was it all about?
Mr. Clemens, a self-possessed gentleman, with a good head and a face that led one to expect humor, with an unembarrassed but rather nonchalant manner, was walking about the stage, talking about the Sandwich Islands; talking, and not repeating what seemed to be a written lecture. It was a conversational performance. His stories, his jokes, his illustrations, were told in a conversational way, and not “delivered.” With a half lingering hesitation in his speech, and a rising inflection of voice, he talked exactly as he does in private; and the same peculiarities that make him to the parlor a capital narrator, ensured him success before this audience.
The thing seems very simple, and yet there was a good deal of art in it. Perhaps we can find in the cyclopedia more than he told us about the Sandwich Islands, more and a good deal less. But we do not find Mark Twain in the cyclopedia account, nor his peculiar manner of looking at things. The art of the lecture consisted in the curious mingling of grave narration and description with the most comical associations, and with occasional flashes of genuine wit. And the whole was leavened by a manner that would make the fortune of a comedian. Mr. Dickens’s greatest success was in comedy, and even his finest passages of humor owed their best effect to the manner of the artist. In the humorous lecture or reading it is impossible to separate the person from what he says or reads.
Mr. Clemens made as decided a hit with his audience in Hartford as he did in Boston. And we do not doubt that it was a genuine success. We did not go expecting him to expound political economy or the philosophy of Kant, but to have an hour of healthy laughter; and we thanked fortune that we had it, and that there is left a genuine humorist who can give it to us. And when we went away we did not care to make an inventory of our “information.” For ourselves, we reckon among our benefactors those who can make us laugh, innocently. Humor has its office. (“The Humorous Lecture—Mark Twain,” 25 Nov 69, 2)
Joseph H. Twichell in fact assisted Thomas K. Beecher with Clemens’s and Olivia’s “simple and impressive” marriage ceremony in Elmira on 2 February 1870 (“Personal,” Buffalo Express, 3 Feb 70, 4).
As Clemens’s revisions on the envelope show, he held on to this letter until 25 November, when he returned to Boston, hoping for a note from Olivia informing him of her whereabouts. Probably that evening he enclosed the photograph, just before he decided to mail the letter to New York City—although he still had no confirmation that she was there (see the next letter). It and the similar photograph that he sent to Olivia two days later were taken during the week of 7–13 November: “Mark Twain, Josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby were photographed together last week. When shall these three meet again!” (Boston Saturday Evening Gazette [“Sunday Morning Edition”], 14 Nov 69, 2, TS in CU-MARK). George M. Baker, a friend of James Redpath’s, evidently had contracted with photographer Horatio G. Smith and with “The American Humorists” for the sale of these photographs (“Presentations,” Boston Advertiser, 27 Dec 69, 1; Boston Directory, 62, 563).
MS and enclosed photograph, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK). The photograph is reproduced in facsimile.
L3 , 403–408; LLMT , 122–24, without the enclosure.
see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.