5 January 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (Postal card: Parke-Bernet, 2-3 November 1938, lot 121; and type transcript, CU-MARK, UCCL 01295)
All right. I’ve started them.1explanatory note
I want you to come here again before you sail. I want you to take my new book to England, & have it published there by some one (according to your plan) before it is issued here, if you will be so good.
us postal card. | write the address on this side—the message on the otherⒶemendation Moncure D. Conway, Care of J. T. Fields, Esq 148 Charles St Boston. postmarked: hartford conn. jan 5 11am
Clemens answered the following postcard, sent on 4 January (CU-MARK):
Please express my overshoes to care of James T. Fields 148 Charles St Boston. I will get them if sent at once
M D Conway
Conway had left his overshoes after his three-day stay at the Clemens home at the end of December 1875 (see L6 , 599–601). Fields was the author and retired Boston publisher.
Conway replied (CU-MARK):
148 Charles St
Boston
Jan. 5
My dear Clemens,
I am in luck. Just as I have got your kind postcard asking me to come again, I receive also an invitation to lecture three times—in—in ☞In Hartford!! (I couldn't utter that in a calm voice) The time set for my first lecture is the 18th of this month, and the other two are Jan. 22 & 23.
Now your dear wife, just because she is Amiability slightly disguised in flesh & blood, shall not be imposed upon by another long visit. It is probable that between 18th & 22d I shall be lecturing somewhere else (I hope in New Haven). But I think you & she must prepare yourselves for some further invasion of your household. I hope you are diligently mastering that Dissenters' trouble of yours (which reminds me of the man who entered a bookshop & asked for Pepys' Diarhee.
We will talk over the book when we meet in the intervals of b-ll-r-ds. By the way, we think b—ds a good Sunday pastime in London—especially holy (perhaps because our tables have holes)—but I suppose that at Farmington we should make the old Puritan gods turn over in their graves by the click of anything that did not give pain.
Ever yours
M D Conway
Overshoes received
Sponsored by Hartford’s Unitarian Society, Conway lectured at Allyn Hall on “Demonology, or the Natural History of the Devil,” “Science and Religion in England,” and “Oriental Religions; Their Origin and Progress” on 18, 22, and 23 January, respectively, staying with the Clemenses while he was in Hartford. The book Clemens wanted Conway to offer to an English publisher was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , the American edition of which was in production at the American Publishing Company in Hartford. For Conway’s own gloss of “Dissenters’ trouble,” see L6 , 600–1. The famous diary that Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) began keeping in shorthand in 1659 was first deciphered and published in part in 1825 (Hartford Courant: “Amusements,” 17 Jan 1876, 2; “The Devil: Mr. Conway’s Lecture on Demonology,” 19 Jan 1876, 1, 4; “Mr. Conway’s Lectures,” 24 Jan 1876, 1; L6 , 585–86; Pepys 1825).
Postal card: Parke-Bernet catalog, sale of 2–3 November 1938, lot 121, is Source text for the letter; typed transcript, CU-MARK, is Source text for the address.
MicroPUL, reel 1.
The typed transcript in CU-MARK indicates that the MS was at one time in the Justin Turner Collection.