1 January 1874 • London, England (MS: CtHMTH, UCCL 01027)
Ever so many thanks for the New Year remembrances. I cordially wish you & yours a happy & successful year. I am sorry enough that I have to lose the opportunity of dining with you—I find myself booked for every day till I leave—Jan. 7. Have to take a farewell dinner with Dolby2explanatory note on Sunday.
But we won’t let the friendship die. You must come across the water—& you will, some day—& we will have a renewal at HarftfordⒶemendation.3explanatory note With the kindest regards to yourself & famlily, I am
George Hyett Fitzgibbon, a London journalist, befriended Clemens in October 1872, shortly after he first arrived in England. Since then Fitzgibbon had written frequent complimentary squibs about Clemens in the newspaper for which he corresponded, the Darlington Northern Echo. He lived in Islington, a London suburb, with his wife and two daughters ( L5 , 194 n. 1).
George Dolby, Clemens’s English lecture agent ( L5 , 160 n. 1, 446–48).
Fitzgibbon is not known to have visited Hartford.
MS, Cyril Clemens Collection, Mark Twain House, Hartford (CtHMTH).
L6 , 2.
The MS, owned at one time by Charles Retz (of New York), later belonged to Edmund W. Evans, Jr. (of Oil City, Pennsylvania), who offered it for sale in April 1934 (AAA/Anderson 1934, lot 127). When offered for sale again in 1946, it was apparently the property of W. W. Cohen (Parke-Bernet 1946, lot 88). Cyril Clemens donated it to CtHMTH in 1984.