6 July 1873 • London, England (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00947)
London, July 6.
This is the letter which I have been intending to answer write this long time, but things have interfered constantly. We had a jolly time here for a month with Miss Clara, but now she has gone to the Continent to remain six weeks.1explanatory note
We seem to see nothing but English social life; we seem to find no opportunity to see London sights. Tuesday we are to visit an English country gentleman & Friday dance at the Lord Mayor’s.2explanatory note But no “sights.” No nothing, in fact, to make a book of. HoweverⒶemendation, I mean to go to work presently, collecting material.3explanatory note We have met many pleasant people at dinners—Tom Hughes, Herbert SpenscerⒶemendation,4explanatory note Joaquin Miller, Hans Breitman,5explanatory note Willes Wills (who wrote the two great dramatic successes of the period, Chas. I & Miss Bateman’s Medea),6explanatory note Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins,7explanatory note Edmund Yates, Tom Hood, W. C. Bennett (you remember his poem “Baby May” in the Whittier Bryant Selections)8explanatory note Douglas Jerrold, Jr.,9explanatory note & i at my Lord —’s we were to have met Mr. MotleyⒶemendation & Robert Browning, but business interfered & we did not go.10explanatory note Tomorrow night I am to meet two or three of England’s great men11explanatory note—& I find that the really great ones are very easy to get along with, even when hampered with titles. But I will confess that mediocrity with a title is (to me) a formidableⒶemendation thing to encounter—it don’t talk, & I’m afraid to.12explanatory note
But I must tell you a secret, now, & mind you don’t let me be discovered in divulging it. Joaquin Miller, at a date not yet fixed, is to marry the only daughter of Sir Thomas Hardy, Baronet. We see Miller every day or two, & like him better & better all thee time. He is just getting out his Modoc book here & I have made him go to my publishers in America with it (by letter) & they will make some money for him.13explanatory note
S His sweetheart is rather tall & slender, (about 26) good looking, good hearted, affectionate, frank, honest, cordial, unassuming, educated, intelligent, (she does a little in literature,) thoroughly English, & very much in love with Joaquin.14explanatory note
Sir Thomas Hardy (aged 70) is grandson to that best beloved Captain of Nelson’s who received the Admiral in his arms when he sank upon the bloody deck of the Victory upon that memorable day that England still glorifies & still mourns, & who heard the dying words “Kiss me, Hardy,” that are a part of English history now.15explanatory note And now I am reminded that I saw that colossal & superb old ship the other day, all beflagged in honor of the Shah, & with the signal flying once more at her masthead her old historical guns booming & her old historical signal flying at her masthead once more after all these lagging years, “England expects that every man will do his duty!”16explanatory note God knows I wish we had some of England’s reverence for the old & great.
Sir Thomas is a delightful specimen of the right & true Englishman. Loving, cordial, simple-hearted as a girl; fond of people of all ranks, if they are only good & have brains; devoting his house, his heart & his hospitalities four hours every Saturday night to a host of bright people that come & go as freely as if the house was theirs, & waiting for no formal invitation; & he is heartily aided & abetted in all this by his wife & daughter. He is keeper of the Queen’s Records (these 53 years) & is very learned.
Lady Hardy (say 50) looks 40 & is stout & handsome—is even beautiful after one comes to know her—which is after four minutes acquaintanceship. She is a very volcano of warm-heartedness & is in a permanent state of irruption. Perhaps it is all set forth in a remark of Livy’s yesterday when we started up there on her second & my third visit—she felt “ as if she “were going home.” And home it was, all the evening., & I smoked the pla premises all up before the company got there—not by permission, but command. Heaps of people came, & they were bright & talkative, too, having left their English reserve outside the gate.
Lady Hardy has written a number of novels & is well known here, but I think not in America. She told us the facts upon which her “Chance “Casual Acquaintance” was founded,—a thrilling recital & admirably done. Pity people can’t always talk a book instead of writing it.17explanatory note
The Hardy mansion is a modest, homelike one near Regent’s Park. The grounds at its back are delightful with greensward & trees, & a broad cam canalⒶemendation or stream sweeping past its rear almost hidden with overhanging foliage—& all so still & so rural that one can hardly believe it is in the heart of the greatest city in the world. Miller is visiting there for a while at present & has a room in the house, & mighty cosy it is, too.
Some of the friends & relatives of the family oppose the match, but the family are satisfied.
There, now, you know as much about it, now, as I do., & I have done a wicked thing to tell you; but then you have so warm a friendship & interest in Miller that one could not do less.18explanatory note
But I must stop, for I do not approve of writing letters on the Sabbath day & am not a person who will do it.
on back of letter as
folded:
Livy & the Modoc are well & they love
you—so they say.19explanatory note The Modoc st is able to stand alone, now. She is getting
into a habit of swearing when things don’t suit. This gives us
grave uneasiness.
Clara Spaulding had left with her mother, and possibly her father as well, on 26 June. She rejoined the Clemenses in Edinburgh on 9 August (OLC to MEC, 23 June 73, CU-MARK; 2 and 6 Aug 73 to Langdonclick to open letter; Thompson, 99–100).
The Clemenses’ two-day visit to Charles E. Flower of Stratford-upon-Avon was scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, 8 and 9 July. Clemens had met the lord mayor of London, Sir Sydney Hedley Waterlow, the previous fall (28 Sept 72 to OLC, n. 1click to open letter; 5 Nov 72 to Lee, n. 1click to open letter). On Friday, 11 July, the Clemenses were presumably among the eight hundred guests who attended “a grand ball at the Mansion House” given by “the Lady Mayoress” (London Pall Mall Gazette, 12 July 73, 6).
For the outcome of this resolve to resume research on a book about England, see 30 Dec 73 to Fitzgibbon, n. 2click to open letter.
Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) was better known by his pen name, “Hans Breitmann.” Like several other American humorists, since 1868 Leland had been successfully reprinted in England. Clemens knew him by September 1872, when he mentioned him in his English journal (click to open letter). Thompson described how Clemens and Leland met again in 1873:
There called one day a large middle aged gentleman and his wife, returned from Egypt, elegantly and soberly dressed in black; serious, quiet and cultured. That was C. G. Leland, talented and learned essayest, etc. But, like most people, I had associated him with “Hans Breitman,” the humorous Pennsylvania Dutch dialect poet. (Thompson, 89)
The first of the Hans Breitmann ballads, “Hans Breitmann’s Barty,” was published in 1857, but Leland did not collect it and his subsequent rhymes until July 1868, when T. B. Peterson published Hans Breitmann’s Party in Philadelphia, the book that was reprinted in London and marked the start of his fame. Before that Leland had written for and edited a variety of magazines and newspapers, including Vanity Fair (1860–61), The Knickerbocker (1861–62), Continental Magazine (1862–63), and the Philadelphia Evening Press (1866–69) (Sloane, 259–61; Leland).
William Gorman Wills (1828–91) was born in Ireland. He supported himself by writing stories and painting portraits, but his eccentricity and absent-mindedness jeopardized his promising career as a painter. In 1865 he began writing for the stage, and in 1872 was retained as a dramatist by Hezekiah L. Bateman, the American manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. His first production for the Lyceum was Medea in Corinth (July 1872), in which Bateman’s daughter Kate Josephine Bateman (1843–1917), a former child prodigy, achieved one of her greatest dramatic successes. His next effort, Charles I (September 1872), won great acclaim for Henry Irving in the title role; Clemens had seen this play in late September or early October 1872, and described it in his journal as “a curious literary absurdity” (Mark Twain’s 1872 English Journalsclick to open letter). He must have met Wills around the same time. In 1907 he recalled a dinner that had occurred “thirty-five years ago” at which he “told Irving and Wills, the playwright, about the whitewashing of the fence by Tom Sawyer, and thereby captured a chapter on cheap terms; for I wrote it out when I got back to the hotel while it was fresh in my mind” (AD, 19 Aug 1907, CU-MARK, in MTE , 331–32). This dinner must have taken place in 1872, not in the summer of 1873, since Clemens wrote the final version of the whitewashing episode, for chapter 2 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in January 1873 ( TS , 504–5; see also pp. 114 and 261). The occasion of Clemens’s 1873 meeting with Wills has not been documented.
It is not known when Clemens met novelists Anthony Trollope (1815–82) and William Wilkie Collins (1824–89). (Trollope and Collins were friends, dining together as recently as 10 June.) By 1873 Trollope had passed the peak of his popularity as a novelist. He had published The Eustace Diamonds in book form in October 1872, and a travel book, Australia and New Zealand, in February 1873. Phineas Redux was about to begin serial publication in the London Graphic on 19 July, and he had just completed writing Harry Heathcote of Gangoil on 28 June, allowing him to resume work on The Way We Live Now on 3 July. By 6 July Trollope had already invited Clemens to the dinner honoring Joaquin Miller the following evening (see note 11). Soon after meeting Clemens, Collins evidently provided him with complimentary tickets to his play The New Magdalen, which had opened on 19 May. According to Thompson, “Clemens wanted to see Wilkie Collins’ new play, ‘The New Magdalen.’ I got choice seats (they were complimentary) but he was prevented, and we went without him” (Thompson, 99). Collins soon made a lecture tour in the United States, and when he was about to return home, he “received a select company of his most intimate friends at the St. James Hotel” in Boston. Clemens was among the guests and “gave a brief description of his reception in England, saying that he thought he was very successful in the object of his visit there, which was to teach the people good morals, and to introduce some of the improvements of the present century” (“Wilkie Collins,” Boston Evening Transcript, 17 Feb 74, 1; Trollope, 1:xv, xxxvii, 2:xi–xii, 589).
William Cox Bennett (1820–95) was a journalist and poet whose sentimental paean to his infant daughter was collected in William Cullen Bryant’s Library of Poetry and Song (1871). Clemens had met Bennett’s brother John in London in 1872 (see 25 Sept 72 to OLCclick to open letter).
Clemens referred to William Blanchard Jerrold (1826–84), not to his late father, playwright and journalist Douglas William Jerrold (1803–57). Upon his father’s death the younger Jerrold succeeded him as editor of Lloyd’s Weekly London News, holding that position until his own death. Jerrold had written successfully for the London stage and had also published a great variety of books, including collections of his own journalism, novels, a biography of his father, travel books, and, between 1871 and 1873, “charming descriptions, with portraits and facsimiles of handwriting, of six imaginary days spent respectively with Dickens, Scott, Lytton, Disraeli, Thackeray, and Douglas Jerrold” ( DNB , 10:790). He was about to begin publishing what became his major work, The Life of Napoleon III, based in part on documents supplied by Napoleon’s widow. Clemens seems to have met Jerrold on 1 July at a large party given by the Countess of Crawford and Balcarres “at the family mansion in Grosvenor-square,” an event to which he was apparently invited by his old friend from Nevada, George Turner (“Fashionable Entertainments,” London Morning Post, 2 July 73, 5). Clemens dictated his comments on the experience to Thompson on 2 July, noting that the company were not in the habit of introducing “anybody to anybody else except that they introduce person to one other person, and that was sufficient. I saw that in 2 or 3 other cases and my own case. Sat around among fine people ½ hour.” Someone “took pity on our lonely condition” and introduced him to a lady who did not speak English, but tried instead to converse with him in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and, finally, Greek:
Between us we spoke all the languages there are; I one and she all the rest....
Melancholy spectacle of the son of Douglas Jerrold sitting around in the hall of magnificent house. His turn to come out and speak or recite or imitate something, then be up and go about his business. 45 years old. (N&J1, 551–52)
Thompson recalled years later that Clemens “mentioned as rather pathetic, a well known writer who read selections from his more distinguished father’s writings at grand receptions and recieved for it five guineas as he quietly left” (Thompson, 86). Clemens was sufficiently struck by this incident to remind himself to make use of it on at least three separate occasions, the first in early 1885: “Describe Judge Turner, Countess so-& so’s rout; polyglot woman; poor Douglas Jerrold jr & his dirty shirt standing in hall with footmen” (N&J3, 87). Then, in 1888:
& the awful spectacle of Douglas Jerrold’s son at the grand evening blow-out of the noble bitch with the Italian name.
I was one canceled word into that business through that ass Judge Turner.
Polyglot woman there. (N&J3, 407)
And, finally, in 1897: “Douglas Jerrold’s son at the grand evening party” (Notebook 41, TS p. 37, CU-MARK).
In his 4 July letter to Adam Badeau, Clemens referred to this same “luncheon at Lord Houghton’s.” He may have suppressed the name here to protect Houghton’s privacy, anticipating that Fairbanks might publish his letter in her husband’s Cleveland Herald.
On 7 July Trollope hosted a dinner in honor of Joaquin Miller at the Garrick Club, to which he invited Clemens. The other guests were Thomas Hughes; Edward Levy, editor of the London Telegraph; and Granville George Leveson-Gower (1815–91), the second Earl Granville, Liberal-party leader of the House of Lords since 1855 as well as minister for foreign affairs from 1870 to 1874. On 5 July Trollope teased his good friend Kate Field, “Two of the wildest of your countrymen, Joachim Miller & Mark Twain, dine with me at my club next week. Pity you have not yet established the rights of your sex or you could come and meet them, and be as jolly as men” (Trollope, 2:591; Griffiths, 362). In 1907 Clemens recalled this “long forgotten” occasion:
Anthony Trollope was the host, and the dinner was in honor of Joaquin Miller, who was on the top wave of his English notoriety at that time. There were three other guests; one is obliterated, but I remember two of them, Tom Hughes and Levison-Gower. No trace of that obliterated guest remains with me—I mean the other obliterated guest, for I was an obliterated guest also. I don’t remember that anybody ever addressed a remark to either of us; no, that is a mistake—Tom Hughes addressed remarks to us occasionally; it was not in his nature to forget or neglect any stranger. Trollope was voluble and animated, and was but vaguely aware that any other person was present excepting him of the noble blood, Levison-Gower. Trollope and Hughes addressed their talk almost altogether to Levison-Gower, and there was a deferential something about it that almost made me feel that I was at a religious service; that Levison-Gower was the acting deity, and that the illusion would be perfect if somebody would do a hymn or pass the contribution-box. All this was most curious and unfamiliar and interesting. Joaquin Miller did his full share of the talking, but he was a discordant note, a disturber and degrader of the solemnities. He was affecting the picturesque and untamed costume of the wild Sierras at the time, to the charmed astonishment of conventional London, and was helping out the effects with the breezy and independent and aggressive manners of that far away and romantic region. He and Trollope talked all the time and both at the same time, Trollope pouring forth a smooth and limpid and sparkling stream of faultless English, and Joaquin discharging into it, and tumbling it, and disordering it,—his muddy and tumultuous mountain torrent, and— Well, there was never anything just like it except the Whirlpool Rapids under Niagara Falls. (AD, 19 Aug 1907, CU-MARK, in MTE , 332–33)
Edward Levy was presumably the other “obliterated” guest, for Miller mentioned him in a letter he wrote to Lord Houghton shortly after the dinner:
Trollopes dinner at the Garrick was very pleasant indeed. My genial countryman—Mark Twain—was there; the editor of the Telegraph also. There was a member of the Cabinet I believe but not being familiar with your great politicians and being unfortunate in remembering names I cant tell you who he was. Also some members of Parliament all genial gentlemen. (Gohdes, 298)
According to Frederick Locker, Trollope was
combative, and he was boisterous, but good-naturedly so. He was abrupt in manners and speech; he was ebullient, and therefore he sometimes offended people. ... Some of Trollope’s acquaintance used to wonder how so commonplace a person could have written such excellent novels; but I maintain that so honourable and interesting a man could not be commonplace. (Locker-Lampson, 331–32)
Miller claimed that Clemens was “shy as a girl” and “could hardly be coaxed to meet the learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand” (Marberry 1953, 116).
In late July 1873 Miller’s London publisher, Richard Bentley and Son, issued his first major prose work, Life amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History, an ostensibly autobiographical narrative now regarded as largely a work of fiction. In it Miller described the customs of the California Indians with whom he had lived on the McCloud River in Shasta County. These Indians may or may not have been Modocs (as Miller claimed), a tribe whose heroic war to reclaim their land from white settlers was much in the news in 1872 and 1873. The book was very popular, in part because of the sympathy aroused by the Modoc war, but not well received by critics. According to an unsympathetic biographer, Miller freely admitted that Prentice Mulford had been “hired to manufacture the volume after listening to Joaquin’s tales of adventure” (Marberry 1953, 119–20, 129–30, 137–38; Frost, 68–72, 129; Hart 1987, 325, 469). For the edition issued by Clemens’s American publisher, see 16 July 73 to Bliss, n. 2click to open letter.
Miller had evidently been engaged to marry Iza Duffus Hardy (d. 1922) since at least late May, when the Hartford Evening Post announced that “Joaquin Miller is to marry an English lady, daughter of Sir T. D. Hardy of London. She will be Mrs. Miller No. 2” (“Personal,” 31 May 73, 3). In early June George Smalley told his Tribune readers, “I met him Joaquin Miller the other night at a club under Lord Houghton’s wing—handsome as ever, and as unconventional, and engaged to be married to another wife” (Smalley 1873). Iza Hardy began to write stories when quite young, starting work on a novel before she was fifteen. Her first book, Not Easily Jealous, was issued in 1872, and her second, Between Two Fires, in 1873. Her engagement to Miller was short-lived: in November the Elmira Advertiser announced that “Joaquin Miller has no present matrimonial engagement in England. It is broken off” (“Topics Uppermost,” 5 Nov 73, 4). Miller had by then already developed an interest in another young lady, a kinswoman of Lord Houghton’s wife, who rejected his attentions. On 9 September he wrote to Houghton:
What you tell me of the lonely condition of Miss Crewe only makes me feel a deeper interest in her and if I had a home worthy of her and she would accept it I know of nothing that would stimulate me to offer it her more than this statement of yours. But her answer to my letter was brief and indifferent so that the matter ended almost as soon as it began. ... I do confess to you that I was looking very seriously in the direction of Miss Crewe, for I am growing weary of this wandering about forever. I thought I saw a way to get on, but of course I was mistaken. (Gohdes, 300)
By all accounts, Miller was unconventionally free with his attentions to women: according to the Troy (N.Y.) Press, in January 1872 he had been “engaged to a lady of the Scottish nobility” (“Personal,” 30 Jan 72, 2). In an undated note made late in life, Clemens himself recalled Miller’s roving eye at this time: “Joaquin Miller ... engaged to daughter of Sir Thomas Hardy & made love to Clara Spaulding” (CU-MARK). Although Iza Hardy never married, she and Miller remained friendly, and were still corresponding in 1912 (Black, 204; Kirk, 764; “Death of Miss I. Duffus Hardy,” London Times, 31 Aug 1922, 9; Hardy to Miller, 9 Feb 1912, CU-BANC).
Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy (1804–78) was descended from Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy (1666–1732), not from Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy (1769–1839), the flag-captain (and later vice-admiral) who was present at Lord Nelson’s death at Trafalgar in October 1805. At age fourteen Thomas Duffus Hardy became a junior clerk in the Record Office, and in 1861 was appointed deputy keeper of the Public Records. He was knighted in 1873 in recognition of his long service in the archives, and of the many valuable historical publications he had edited and authored.
The celebrated signal that Nelson hoisted on the Victory, his hundred-gun flagship, as the enemy approached at Trafalgar (Smith, 1036). Clemens had seen the ship at Portsmouth on 23 June, when he attended the naval review for the shah (SLC 1873).
Lady Hardy’s A Casual Acquaintance: A Novel Founded on Fact had been well received upon its publication in 1866. It told of a Frenchman who murdered his wife in order to marry an heiress, and deceived a stranger into unwittingly accompanying her corpse to Paris. Thompson recorded Clemens’s retelling of the story after the Clemenses’ 5 July visit with the Hardys (N&J1, 557–59).
In “A Record of The Small Foolishnesses of Susie & ‘Bay’ Clemens (Infants.),” Clemens recalled that Susy was nicknamed “’Modoc,’ (from the cut of her hair.) This was at the time of the Modoc war in the lava beds of northern California” (SLC 1876–85, 3).
MS, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino (CSmH, call no. HM 14281).
L5 , 402–409; MTMF , 172–77; Harnsberger, 64, brief excerpt.
see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.