20 March 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 02468)
You or Aldrich or both of you must come to Hartford to live. Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe’s (just where we drive in to go to our new house,) will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.1explanatory note The lot— a is 85 feet front & 150 deep—long time & easy payments on the purchase. You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can’t you? Come, will one of you boys buyⒶemendation that house? Now say yes.2explanatory note
Mrs. Clemens is an invalid yet, but is getting along pretty fairly. We send best regards.
Ezra Hall was a prominent Hartford attorney. His partner, Franklin Chamberlin, had sold the Clemenses the Farmington Avenue property on which they were building their house. Hall’s house was at 3 Forest Street, and Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s was at 1 Forest Street; both were near the intersection with Farmington Avenue. John and Isabella Beecher Hooker’s house, which the Clemenses were renting, was an easy walk away, at the opposite end of Forest, near its intersection with Hawthorn Street. It does not seem to have been numbered ( L5 , 271 n. 6, 480 n. 3; Geer 1873, 74, 80, 129; Van Why, 4–5).
Howells’s response is not known to survive, but neither he nor Aldrich accepted Clemens’s invitation. On 21 March Howells gave a glowing account of Hartford in a letter to a friend:
Did I speak in my last of the charming visit I’d had with Warner and Mark Twain at Hartford. It seemed to me quite an ideal life. They live very near each other, in a sort of suburban grove, and their neighbors are the Stowes and Hookers, and a great many delightful people. They go in and out of each other’s houses without ringing, and nobody gets more than the first syllable of his first name—they call their minister Joe Twichell. I staid with Warner, but of course I saw a great deal of Twain, and he’s a thoroughly good fellow. His wife is a delicate little beauty, the very flower and perfume of ladylikeness, who simply adores him—but this leaves no word to describe his love for her. (Howells 1979, 56)
Warner’s home, apparently unnumbered, was on Hawthorn Street, near the Hooker house. Twichell lived at 6 Atwood Street, not in Nook Farm but only about three blocks away (Geer 1873, 135, 137, map; Van Why, 4–5).
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L6 , 85–86; Paine 1912, 114, excerpt; MTB , 1:503, excerpt; Paine 1917, 783; MTL , 1:217; MTHL , 1:15–16.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.