Explanatory Notes        Apparatus Notes ()
This text has been superseded by a newly published text
MTPDocEd
To James T. Fields
18? March 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (Paraphrase: James T. Fields to SLC,
20 March 1876, CU-MARK, UCCL 12953)
(SUPERSEDED)

On Wednesday, I hear, the subscriber is to speak a lecture in your city. Your welcome missive is just here telling me I am to stop at your mansion of Hospitalities on that occasion.1explanatory note

Textual Commentary
Provenance:

See Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.

More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.

Explanatory Notes
1 

Fields’s full letter of acceptance read (CU-MARK):

My dear Clemens.

On Wednesday, I hear, the subscriber is to speak a lecture in your city. Your welcome missive is just here telling me I am to stop at your mansion of Hospitalities on that occasion. Thank you, sir. I will. My time to leave here is in the 10 A M. train that day, arriving in Hartford about ½ past one, & I will proceed to “Mark Twain’s House” at once. We read your Saint Patrick letter at our Breakfast table this morning, & we all agreed that no such hitting of nails on heads had been printed for a long time.

always yours,
James T. Fields.

On Fields’s envelope, at a later date, Clemens wrote in pencil: “James T. Fields (author of ‘Yesterdays with Authors’).” Fields’s book had been published in 1872 (Fields 1872). He lectured at Seminary Hall in Hartford on Wednesday, 22 March, on Wordsworth, the first in a series of six lectures (Hartford Courant: “Lectures by James T. Fields of Boston,” 18 Mar 76, 2; “Mr. Fields’s Lecture on Wordsworth,” 23 Mar 76, 2). For Clemens’s St. Patrick letter, see 16 Mar 76 to McCloudclick to open link. Fields presumably saw the reprint of it in the Boston Advertiser for 20 March (“In General,” 1).