To
William Dean Howells
19 April 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, correspondence card, in pencil: MH-H, UCCL 01413)
19 April 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, correspondence card, in pencil: MH-H, UCCL 01413)
Apr. 19.
Many thanks. I was not intending to intrude on the President, but I shall certainly go now & present your letter if there is a reception while I am in Washington—& of course there will be, as I shall be there a week or more.1explanatory note I am mighty sorry you can’t go. Mrs. Howells ought to go now & not put ift off—invitations from Presidents are so kind of seldom, you know.2explanatory note
Ys Ever
Mark
Explanatory Notes
1 Clemens was planning a trip to Baltimore to attend the rehearsals for Ah Sin at Ford’s Opera House, where the play was scheduled to open after its week in Washington.
In the hope of securing an interview with President Hayes at the White House, he carried
a letter of introduction from Howells, which is not known to survive.
2 Hayes had recently invited the Howells family to visit him in the White House. Howells
replied on 9 April: “Elinor opened your letter, and read it aloud. The children were
all for starting at once to Washington. In the meantime we thank you cordially for
your kind invitation, and hope some time to profit by it” (Howells 1979a, 163–64). In late June 1877, the Howellses spent “a most exciting week” with Hayes
in Boston, and then in Newport. On 2 July Howells wrote his father, “I never saw so
popular a man, and I greatly admired the perfect taste and sense of all that he said
and did.— Probably we shall go to visit at the White House this winter or fall.” Although
he was unable to accept “five or six” more invitations later in the year, he and Elinor
did finally travel to Washington for a visit in May 1880 (Howells 1979a, 168, 179–80, 251).
MS, correspondence card, in pencil, MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 (98).
MTHL , 1:174.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open letter.