19 April 1867 • New York, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK and ViU, UCCL 00123)
Direct my letters to the this Ⓐemendationhotel in future. I am just fixed, now. It is the gem of all hotels. I have never come across one so perfectly elegant in all its appointments & so sumptuously & tastefully Ⓐemendationfurnished.1explanatory note Full of “bloated aristocrats” too, & I’m just one of them kind myself—& so is Beck Jolly.2explanatory note
The book will issue the 25th. James Russell Lowell (“Hosea Biglow,”) says the Jumping Frog is the finest piece of humorous writing ever produced in America.3explanatory note
Give my love to all my sweethearts.
Dorsey 4explanatory note goes west in a day or two.
Orion Clemens Esq | 1312 Chesnut street | St Louis | Mo Ⓐemendation postmarked: new-york Ⓐemendationapr 19 postage stamp removed 5explanatory note
On returning from St. Louis, Clemens spent four or five days at the Metropolitan before moving on 19 April to the Westminster (“Arrivals in the City,” New York Times, 20 Apr 67, 8). It is possible that he had roomed at the Westminster before going to St. Louis, since his Alta letters written on 2 and 18 February allude to his rooming in East Sixteenth Street (SLC 1867). In a later letter to the Alta, he summarized his reasons for preferring “the European system” recently adopted by hotels like the Westminster, where everything was “quiet, and genteel and orderly.” He noted that “it is costly, but it is comfortable—prodigiously comfortable,” especially in comparison with the “great caravan hotels” like the Metropolitan (SLC 1867).
Sobieski (Beck) Jolly (1831–1905) was a well-respected river pilot and a friend of Clemens’s since they met in the fall of 1857, when Clemens served as a cub pilot under Jolly on the John J. Roe (L1 , 74). He was currently piloting the Virginia between New Orleans and St. Louis, where he almost certainly saw Clemens in mid-March (“River News,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 16 Mar 67, 4).
If James Russell Lowell (1819–91) made such a statement about Mark Twain’s “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” it has not been independently documented. The attribution is suspect because a New York correspondent for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported on 24 January that according to Webb, Lowell had called Webb’s just-published Liffith Lank “the best thing of the kind ever written in America’ (“Gossip from New York,” letter dated 24 Jan, San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 19 Feb 67, 1).
Dorsey is unidentified, although he was probably the same man Clemens mentioned in an 1861 Nevada letter (George Turner and SLC to OC, 18–30 Sept 61,click to open link L1 , 128).
Clemens seems routinely to have used Orion’s name, rather than his mother’s, in addressing envelopes for letters written to her and the family. Jane Clemens was not listed in the 1867 St. Louis directory, although both Pamela Moffett and Orion Clemens were (Edwards 1867, 257, 582).
MS of letter, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK); MS of envelope, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU). A photographic facsimile of the MS of the letter is on pp. 446–47. The MS consists of one sheet of white wove paper, 5½ by 9⅛ inches (13.9 by 23.1 cm), inscribed on both sides in black ink, now faded to brown.
L2 , 27–28; Previous publication: MTB , 1:321, brief quotation.
see Mark Twain Papers, pp. 514–15; the envelope was deposited at ViU on 17 December 1963.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.