25 November 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01155)
Your amendment was good. As soon as I saw the watchman in print I perceived that he was lame & artificial. I wrote him up twice before sending him to you, but couldn’t get Mrs. Clemens to approve f Ⓐemendationof him at all. Dam the watchman—as Twichell’s ostler would say—& as Mrs. Clemens thinks Ⓐemendation, though she seldom expresses a thought of that nature—never, indeed, unless strongly moved.2explanatory note
Oh, that letter wasn’t written to my wife, but to you. 3explanatory note Twichell only saw it because he knew I would naturally write you when I got home & he asked me not to mail the note when written, until he could inspect it, because he would be a party concerned.
No, I detest Lamb—even the modern addition of mint sauce does not beguile me. I am named after more obscure but nobler beings.4explanatory note
You Atlantic people spell well enough, & you plainly improve one’s grammar, but you don’t divide good.5explanatory note
I am seriously afrai◇d to appear in print often—newspapers soon get to lying in wait for me to blackguard me. You think it over & you will see that it will doubtless be better for all of us that I don’t infuriate the “critics” too frequently.6explanatory note
With kindest regards to Mrs. Howells & the children—7explanatory note
Clemens answered Howells’s letter of 23 November as well as the following one (CU-MARK):
Clemens must have returned the proofs in the present letter.
Since the manuscript and proofs of “Old Times” are lost, Howells’s amendment, and any revisions Clemens may have made in the account of the night watchman in the first installment, cannot be identified. In 1883 Clemens reused the passage as published, without revision, in chapter 5 of Life on the Mississippi. For “Twichell’s ostler,” see 12 Nov 74 to OLC (from Ashford), n. 1click to open letter.
Clemens was named for his grandfather, Samuel B. Clemens (1770–1805), of Virginia, and for “an old, dear Virginia friend of his father” who belonged to the prominent Langhorne family, also of Virginia (Lampton 1990, 79, 96; MTB , 1:13). For a discussion of Clemens’s dislike of Charles Lamb, see Gribben, 1:393.
The objection was to the way the Atlantic printers were hyphenating words at the end of a line of type. Two instances of irregular, or at least unconventional, end-of-line hyphenation survived in the first installment of “Old Times”: “pict-|ure” and “vent-|ured,” which Clemens would have divided as “pic-|ture” and “ven-|tured” (SLC 1875, 70, 73).
Clemens may have had in mind items like the following, from the New York Evening Express of 19 October 1874: “An Indiana race-horse has been named ‘Mark Twain;’ not that Mark was ever fast, but then he has a way of walking off with the purses of a too-confiding public” (“Facts and Fancies,” 1).
Winifred (1863–89), John Mead (1868–1959), and Mildred Howells (1872–1966) (Howells 1979, 462).
MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).
L6 , 295–97; MTHL , 44–45.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.